sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 4

Daniel Spaulding: Joseph Beuys and History

Numerous institutions and publications celebrated Joseph Beuys's 100th anniversary in 2021. Given Beuys's polarizing legacy, art historical writing on his œuvre is sharply divided into 'followers' versus fierce critics, filling library shelves. In this difficult context, Daniel Spaulding's monograph Joseph Beuys and History invites new approaches. Based on the observation that the artist's "anticapitalism" was "persistently mediated through an aesthetic figuring of capitalism" (6), Spaulding reappropriates Jacques Derrida's term 'Economimesis' to chart Beuys's path, which diverged from satire or subversion of capitalism, as exemplified by Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol. Instead, Beuys undertook a "mimetic appropriation" of the "value form" (6). Approaching the value form not as a thing but as a relation, the author renders this "mode of commodity's being in which it is exchangeable for anything else" into an instrument to grasp the logic of the artist's œuvre (6). Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey Pump at the Workplace), 1977, is the central object in this study, introduced at length in the introduction. Throughout, Honigpumpe is interpreted as exemplary for Beuys's concept of an "expanded art" being "more and more riven by capital's violence" (14).

Beuys's mimesis of capitalist principles of radical fungibility and totalization is parsed in three chapters. The first, The Matter of Myth lays the theoretical groundwork: Based on Hans Blumenberg's 'metaphorology', it grapples with the "distinction between the material and the conceptual" in Beuys's praxis (42). Looking at Zeige deine Wunde (Show Your Wound), 1974-5, and Unschlitt/Tallow (Wärmeskulptur auf Zeit hin angelegt), 1977, Spaulding notices how the sculptures' claim to "heal" relies on a kind of "myth creation" (61), whereby beeswax as well as fats of all kinds and in various mixtures interchangeably signal healing. At play here is not only Beuys's personal mythmaking via the erratic Crimea legend, but the broader point that economic determinants have decided on the materials used in large-scale sculpture (61). Arguing against Benjamin Buchloh's criticism that Beuys's œuvre does not properly reflect on its social conditions, Spaulding argues that independently of how conscious Beuys was of it, the "condensation of metaphors" in his work indeed "tells us something about the structure of [...] society" (52), with myth surfacing in contexts shaped by irresolvable contradictions. As Beuys's œuvre mimics the non-identity of the commodity form and a commodity's exchange value as detached from its substances (76-77), semiosis in Beuys's œuvre mimetically points to an arbitrariness equivalent to value generation in capitalism.

In the second chapter, Circulatory Systems, Spaulding revisits Beuys's concept of 'expanded art', focusing on how the artist's art- and mythmaking mediated economic realities and societal aspirations as well as the contradictions of his own time. More specifically, Honigpumpe as "an image of the total circuit of money's transit through society" and uncannily equated to 'blood' and 'creativity', is set in relation to Beuys's thinking about money and societal self-management (100). Going well beyond established critiques of the artist reviving fascist ideologies or prefiguring neoliberalism, Spaulding proposes a historically-specific interpretation by parsing the proximity of 'social plasticity' to German post-war discourse around 'formierte Gesellschaft' ('formed society') - after Ludwig Erhard. The latter was aimed at creating cohesion and alleviating the contradictions in capitalism through a welfare-state based on capital accumulation. Within the context of the tightening capital-state nexus that promised (but failed) to avoid crisis while it weakened labor movements, Beuys's Honigpumpe is presented as "a proposal to fix" the German economy, while keeping with the very "social form that stands in the way of liberation" (136). On this basis, Spaulding argues that the artist's praxis did not lean to a 'romantic anti-capitalism', but to a conceptualization of society, nature and capital as exchangeable entries in a cybernetic system. Unlike Spaulding's reflections on economic theory, his approach to ecology and especially eco-systemic homeostasis warrants further interrogation and historical context.

Chapter 3, The Shape of History, shifts to the broader political contexts of 'New Left activism' and the formation of 'Erinnerungskultur' ('memory culture'), in the 1960s. Examining Beuys's vitrine works and multiples, Spaulding analyses the piling up of objects produced on the basis of the artist's prior work (interpreted here as 'dead labor') and comments on the fluctuating valorization of elements of abjection and disgust as both 'trash' and 'treasure'. At this point, the book enters into the most difficult terrain, as the author identifies the capitalist principle of "making equivalent of unlike things" as one that also characterizes Beuys's grappling with the atrocities of National Socialism (18). For Spaulding, Honigpumpe references Beuys's postwar socialist democratic approach, "a ratification of Germany's real postwar economy", as well as "a literal consumption of human bodies in an economy of death" - that is, the Holocaust (186). Furthermore, in its totalizing logic, the artist's œuvre more broadly invokes the roots of the postwar economic miracle in National-Socialist era capital accumulation, which, Spaulding argues, in turn gave way to the violence of the Red Army Faction at a time of the failure of emancipatory Leftist politics (187).

In the final part of the book, Coda. Terror and Its Double, Spaulding's detached writing style shifts to an unsettling register that addresses more directly both the art's viewership and the book's readership. Beuys's posturing as a revolutionary mythical persona leading the revolution without struggle via the phototype La rivoluzione siamo Noi, 1972, is interpreted as a "mirror" that points to the Left's political failure, symbolized by an indissoluble collapse of "action, image, and celebrity" (197). The overall closed 'loop' character in Beuys's work - as exemplified best by Honigpumpe - exceeds, according to Spaulding, even the 'darkness' of Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975, as he argues in a psychoanalytic reading of both works. He concludes that Beuys "makes properly unbearable" problems that "have mostly been abandoned rather than worked through in the decades since his passing" (206). Indeed, his work - Spaulding claims, despite Beuys's own affirmative rhetoric - rejects the reconciliation that later "social practice" art would promise (183-184). Finally, Spaulding argues against any historicization in the sense of closure and advocates for 'holding the wound open', to which the artist's practice constantly points to (206).

Joseph Beuys and the Shape of History holds great potential to engender readings of (contemporary) art that move beyond current tendencies of either celebration or critical 'debunking'. It avoids paranoid discussions around the 'toxicity' of (aesthetic) thought as such, in favor of historical contextualization. The author draws on a wide range of theoretical approaches and intellectual traditions and bypasses well-trodden questions of intentionality and moralism. Instead, Spaulding revisits and indeed refines traditions of social art history in a way that combines close observations of the formal aspects of art with a complex consideration of historical and intellectual contexts - without an attempt at reconciliation or closure of interpretations.