![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Spaulding_Joseph-Beuys-and-History_Cover.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tBeuys never apologized, took responsibility, or even accounted for his role in the Nazi annihilation. Several artworks he made around the topic are marked by discomfiting ambiguity. His only public war monument, Memorial for the Dead of the World<\/em>Wars <\/em>(1958\u201359), is a troubling shape\u2014a crucifix\u2014and its title is glaringly vague. And though he was evasive about the Holocaust, when it came to cheerier topics, he was downright blunt, prone to hippie-dippy sloganeering. \u201cEveryone is an artist\u201d was his most famous line. For bright-eyed Beuys, this meant that everything could be art and, by extension, society could be remade.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn hindsight, his utopianism clearly failed\u2014at least if we take him at his word. But a convincing new book by the art historian Daniel Spaulding\u2014Joseph Beuys and History,<\/em> the first monographic study in English\u2014suggests we shouldn\u2019t, and instead proposes reading him as having acted in bad faith.<\/p>\n FOR SPAULDING, \u201cTHE PROBLEMS <\/strong>Beuys makes properly unbearable\u201d are worth confronting head-on; his life and art emerge as synecdoche for the failures of modernism and the grappling that ensued. And \u201cthough sometimes taken for one,\u201d Spaulding writes, \u201cBeuys was not a fool.\u201d His sculptures, like his persona, stage multiple, contradictory meanings. Flow and stasis coincide in sculptures Beuys called \u201cbatteries,\u201d like Dia Beacon\u2019s Fond III\/3<\/em> (1979)\u2014sheets of copper resting on stacks of felt. Copper conducts energy, and felt produces warmth through insulation, but it also blocks currents. This work is insistently material, but also metaphorically charged\u2014Beuys\u2019s signature. That trauma and healing recur in the form of lard can be traced back to Beuys\u2019s self-mythologizing at its finest: After a wartime plane crash in Crimea, as his fable went, Tartar nomadswrapped him in fat and felt to keep him alive. Here, care is born from wreckage, even the wreckage of war, and his life is sustained by fat from bodies, presumably animal, now dead and dismembered.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSome of Beuys\u2019s dialectics are more disturbing still. Utopia meets dystopia, Germany\u2019s past (the Holocaust) colliding with its idealized future\u2014which Beuys envisioned as \u201cfree democratic socialism.\u201d He thought it was both impossible and necessary for artists to speak to the horrors of modernity that the Holocaust epitomized. But since Auschwitz, as Beuys put it, could \u201cnever be represented in an image,\u201d he offered positive counter-images instead.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tA prime example is his 1979 Guggenheim retrospective, which he described as an image of contemporary capitalism and a vision of a world yet to come. He says Utopia, but we see Holocaust, at least near the end of the show, where he exhibited a pile of felt suits followed by a rusted rail, Tram Stop<\/em> (1961\u201376), and then a giant slab of fat, like remnants of a pile of bodies at the end of a train line. \u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHere, Spaulding offers an interpretation he says \u201cought <\/em>to be repellent\u201d: Beuys\u2019s doubling lays the Holocaust bare as a logical extension of capitalist modernity\u2014the West\u2019s attempt to organize the world into a hierarchical system, with accumulation sparing nothing, piling up even human bodies.If this sounds like a violent equivocation, it should: Spaulding calls it perhaps Beuys\u2019s most outrageous proposition.And if it sounds like a metaphor, it is also material: the Wirtschaftswunder <\/em>(\u201ceconomic miracle\u201d) of the 1950s grew, quite literally, out of genocide.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n ALL THE DOUBLING MAKES <\/strong>Beuys a trickyfigure. And it\u2019s not clear how intentional it all was: Was his healer persona a clever conceptual act, or proof of his repression and self\u2011delusion? Probably both; and Spaulding does not\u2014and presumably cannot\u2014parse this out. Instead, he focuses on what the doubling does.<\/em> Taken in good faith, Beuys\u2019s evasive equivocating risked obstructing rather than enabling an honest reckoning with the past, Germany\u2019s or his own. But it did something else too. Spaulding\u2019s book centers around Beuys\u2019s \u201ceconomimeses,\u201d a term borrowed from Derrida to describe how his work mimicked capital in order to critique it. Capital, after all, is an abstraction that mediates all social relations; Beuys wagered that art could also do this, and do it better. He made work attempting to prove this point.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhere his contemporaries, like Andy Warhol, turned to commodities and readymades as capitalism\u2019s metonyms, Beuys focused on capitalism as a system and on money as a mediator, signing bank notes and writing \u201cKunst = Kapital\u201d (\u201cArt = Capital\u201d) on them. The postmodernism coming out of Warhol\u2019s Factory was nihilistic, but Beuys\u2019s PoMo held hope and horror simultaneously, distinguishing irreconcilable, contradictory meanings from total meaninglessness.<\/p>\n \n\tBut why money? Society had been remade through economic intervention several times within Beuys\u2019s lifetime. The Nazis exploited economic crisis to further fascism. Soon, Germany split along capitalist and communist lines. Then, a new currency\u2014the deutsche mark\u2014upended life once again, wiping out personal savings while also flooding shops with new goods. By the early \u201970s, Nixon put an end to the system that backed global currencies with gold, reimagining money\u2019s meaning and materials\u2014sounds a bit like sculpture, no? Beuys thought so. Turning banknotes into artworks increased their value and proved his pithy point.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhere both capital and art assign meaning to material things, according to Karl Marx, capitalism\u2019s meaning-making is always doubled or split. Objects have use value as well as immaterial value, material reality mingling with affective attachments and symbolic charge. Beuys\u2019s meanings, Spaulding argues, are similarly split; think of his battery, his fat, his Guggenheim installation.\u00a0<\/p>\n BEUYS WAS FASCINATED <\/strong>by totalizing systems\u2014not just art and capital, but also nature. Spaulding deems him \u201cthe first artist \u2026 to make environmentalist concerns an integral part of his practice\u201d and describes I Like America and America Likes Me<\/em> (1974) as a small\u2011scale ecosystem: For three days, two species, a human (Beuys) and a coyote, lived in a closed loop of a room, augmented by inputs like straw, felt, food, and water, and outputs like feces and symbolism.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSpaulding spends most of his book on Beuys\u2019s ecological installation Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey Pump at the Workplace)<\/em>, 1977, which proposed a model society inspired by bees. It was installed only once, for documenta 6; later, at the Guggenheim, its components were decommissioned and displayed on the ground. In Kassel, a pump circulated honey through plastic tubes that snaked around the Museum Fridericianum. Beuys likened this honey to blood, but also to money: a substance whose circulation keeps a body or an economy alive.<\/p>\n \n\tBeuys\u2014who had survived a heart attack two years earlier\u2014described the pump as both a heart and a central bank. He said that money once functioned as a universal means of exchange, but now it flowed through central institutions that issued it in immaterial forms, like credit and debt. Honey promised something better: sweet sustenance produced by and for a collective.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tSpaulding critiques Honigpumpe<\/em>\u2019s utopianism, comparing it unfavorably to Pasolini\u2019s sadomasochistic anti\u2011fascist film Sal\u00f3 <\/em>(1975). Pasolini\u2019s infamous coprophagia, Spaulding argues, disrupts the normal flow of biological systems, which stand in for social systems. Eating shit, in other words, swaps automatism for autonomy and offers a way out; Honigpumpe<\/em> offers only a closed loop.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBut given its sticky, viscous quality, isn\u2019t honey more likely to clog the system? It\u2019s unclear from photos whether this happened at documenta 6, and few critics commented on Beuys\u2019s installation at the time. But try sipping honey through a straw; it isn\u2019t easy. Beuys may have said, \u201cHoney is flowing,\u201d but aren\u2019t we to take his words in bad faith? After all, he also claimed his felt-and-copper works were batteries conducting spiritual energy.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAbjection is, per its main theorist Julia Kristeva, anything that disturbs borders, systems, or rules\u2014which is why for Spaulding, via Derrida, it is a form of freedom. In Beuys\u2019s world, this freedom is essential: Where the Holocaust epitomized modernism\u2019s abject failure to systematize humanity, art was proof that we could shape the world and act freely. Sticky substances are famously hard to contain neatly, to systematize. And while Spaulding notes that honey is bee regurgitation, he misses yet another of its more disturbing qualities: Honey is a natural antibiotic, death and healing rolled into one.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd what about the queen bee? Spaulding does not consider her; but Beuys did, at least cursorily, making wax reliefs in her image as early as 1952. The queen raises the question: Is a hive a worker\u2019s utopia, or an authoritarian society?The doubling matters: Beuys\u2019s criticsnote echoes of Nazism, pointing to his words rather than his work. The charge hinges on Beuys\u2019s language of \u201csocial sculpture,\u201d which bears an unsettling resemblance to a claim by Hitler\u2019s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: \u201cA statesman is also an artist. For him, the people is merely what stone is for a sculptor.\u201d But the comparison is flimsy\u2014one version is fascist (the F\u00fchrer sculpts the people), the other communal (the people sculpt themselves). Which is it for the bees? Probably neither, since both \u201cqueen\u201d and \u201chive-mind\u201d are human metaphors.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd it\u2019s metaphors that Spaulding relies on for apiary analogies, borrowing heavily from textual sources from the likes of Marx and Warhol. The move privileges language over materials\u2014a familiar academic habit, though a surprising choice given the book\u2019s brilliant account of the dissonance between metaphor and material under capitalism, and given its charge to compare Beuys\u2019s work with his words. This, of course, is harder to do with a work the author could not have possibly seen installed, but still it\u2019s worth considering that, with Honigpumpe<\/em>, Beuys is smarter than he seems; Spaulding, after all, convincingly argues that we read him that way, that we \u201ctake [his] metaphors literally.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tStill, Spaulding is right to conclude that Beuys laid bare agonizing existential and political problems as the first step toward resolving them. And he is right to lament that since Beuys\u2019s death, this thorny territory has \u201cmostly been abandoned rather than worked through.\u201d Social practice and relational aesthetics, he writes, offer neat and sanitized versions of Beuys\u2019s legacy, focusing earnestly on solutions in an attempt to avoid his failures and complications.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAny art history book that defends a morally compromised dead white man, never mind a former Nazi, is bound to be unfashionable. And yet, the timing of Joseph Beuys and History<\/em> is sadly apt, because it forces readers who scoff at Beuys to look at themselves: What are you <\/em>doing now, as fascism resurges and the climate collapses? Beuys flailed, but his blend of impotence and righteousness\u2014as extreme and cringeworthy as it was\u2014is also relatable. One only wishes that the contrast between his time and ours felt starker. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/joseph-beuys-daniel-spaulding-honigpumpe-1234776979\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/ART371533-1.jpg?w=1024″] Joseph Beuys was full of contradictions\u2014in his art and in his life. Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1921, he enlisted in the Hitler Youth months before membership was mandatory. At 18, he worked in a circus, and two years later, he volunteered for the Nazi Air Force. After serving on the front […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1834174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1834174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1834174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1834174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1834174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Dia-beu-shot-7-cropped-for-web.jpg?w=400\")
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<\/div>\n<\/div>![Joseph Beuys in his installation \"Grease pump and honey machine\" at the documenta \"d6\" in Kassel, Germany, 1977. Photo: Abisag T\u00fcllmann. Inv. T\u00fc F77.06.02-02A. \u00a9 MUST BE CLEARED PRIOR TO RELEASE OF THE IMAGE!](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/ART371533-1.jpg?w=400\")
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