I have recently went to see a retrospective of the German artist Joseph Beuys. I have seen some works of Beuys in the past, here and there, but never paid a lot of attention to him, not really understanding from these few works what he was about. As happens often in retrospectives, the exposure to a large body of work can become a revelation, as it was for me in this case, in that one can all of a sudden grasps the entire IDEA or the project, that animates the particular works, that on their own in isolation from the other works, do not always give a very good indication of what an artist is about.

Beuys is often mentioned together with Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp as one of the three artists that most radically transformed in the 20th century the meaning of what art is, as well as, together with Warhol, as the artists that has understood the most the role of the media within the contemporary condition of art. A huge media and political celebrity in the 1970s and early 80s Beuys has nevertheless receded somewhat into the background after the mid 80s (though remaining quite popular with the public, and continuing to have strong presence in museums), coming under increasingly vehement attacks accusing the proximity of his thought to mythological fascistic thinking, and seeing him as a misguided, and misleading aesthete. In the last years it seems that again his work comes increasingly under scrutiny with several attempts at its rehabilitation.

I have not thought much about Beuys, as mentioned, and have only very recently after my visit to his retrospective became aware of the enormity of his project, but I must say that at the moment he strikes me as a completely fascinating artist, and perhaps more interesting and radical then either Duchamp or Warhol. Perhaps the general thrust of his project, which he himself articulated, is to destroy the divisions between art and life. Though this is perhaps an old romantic project it seems to me that he reconceives it in a very striking and new ways, opening up possibilities that we might only now start to figure out. First of all, if life and art are to be thought together, the question of course for Beuys arises as to what at all is life. To an extent his work seems to suggest that we have not really begun understanding this strange category that is life, and one of the first attempts of his project in rethinking life is to not limit its conception, when coming also to discuss its relation to art, to human life, but extending it to animal life and also to matter, matter to an extent understood as living, though we don't know what this exactly could mean. On one level perhaps, we can say that his project is about the reinvention of the animal. Everything becomes an animal for him (a striking work of his shows enormous, formless, pieces of clay which he calls stags. The point in relation to such thing is not to think it  as a sculpture understood in a classical way as somehow representing an animal, but in a completely new way, that this sculpture that he made REALLY IS an animal, or a new creature, a new formation of life. Life happens as the dissolution of traditional thinking of art as representation or as symbolic. Another fascinating experiment which Beuys made with animals happened in a new york gallery, where Beuys closed himself in a cage, exposed to visitors, together with a coyote for 7 days (an experiment which was filmed, and shown in the retrospective). At first the coyote is more aggressive, but slowly they somehow become used to each other, and something happens, in that it is clear that they are both transformed, somehow each becoming something completely different in relation to the other, and to an extent, again, a new form of life is born in between them. As such I think we can say that Beuys is an artist of METAMORPHOSIS, of inventing new forms of life out of withdrawing from the familiar forms of life and reaching to some more primordial beings - such as brute stones and clay - but seeing in their ancientness somehow a reserve of energy  (and energy is one of the most important concepts in Beuys's writing) which opens an unforseen future with possibilities for metamorphosis and invention of new forms of life. Life and art come together as an invention of new forms of life, for art happens AS this opening to an excess over current forms of life out of which something new can come about. As such, life now conceived is no longer understood as the mode of being of this or that creature, but as an excess that belongs to none of the forms that we know, but out of which something new arises. Beuys has famously said that every man is an artist, an utterance that has been misinterpreted often, but what this seems to mean, is that that which connects all of us, the every, and makes us human, is our sharing in a life that is not a specific way of living, but the way that each of us can become other, or can metamorphose.