Excerpted from an interview in Difesa della Natura (Defense of Nature), compiled by Lucrezia De Domizio, (Il Quadrante Edizoni, Torino, Italy, 1988) p. 75.

 

Beuys states: Freedom means mostly the freedom of the other, it's not at all a question of one's own freedom, it's a question of the freedom of my brothers and my sisters or of my sisters or my brothers. So when I come out of my laboratory, or my workshop, or whatever I want to call the place where I am trying to produce something, or to get something done, or to effect a collaboration with other people as a whole community of workers, I can't simply declare that you have to believe in what I have done, or that what I have done is quality product simply because it happens to be my product; I can't even declare that it has any particular qualities at all. All I can do is to take advantage of the possibility or to accept the duty of showing people what I have done, and then I have to ask them whether or not it is useful.

And if we were to begin to make use of or to practice this kind of technique, we'd very soon find ourselves capable of being truly productive. , and in fact much more productive, hundreds and thousands of times more productive than anything we find now in the organized labor of capitalistic enterprise or in the state-organized labor of centralized communistic enterprise. When we have the awareness of cooperating together as free individuals, we are also much closer to the creation of a real and concrete democracy, because democratic structures have to be a result of free thought and of our equality as thinking individuals, which is the basis on which we can then construct a constitution. We can be much more productive than we are, and we can come to full consciousness of what creativity really means.

Creativity, moreover, can't be thought of as something single and monolithic; it's something that's highly diversified and that has to be studied from a variety of points of view and in terms of several realities. We begin to come a great deal closer to a well-diversified understanding of the human being as consisting of a number of extremely different elements of creativity, and we begin actually to approach these various strata of creativity. Creativity is a question of the possibility of thinking, or , we might say of thinking power, and it's also a question of the level of the creativity of the feelings.

When we talk about the powers of thought, we immediately make reference to our heads and to the brain, and when we talk about feeling, we're referring to the region of the heart and the parts of the body around it, and in this way we've already begun to talk about two parts of a complex organism. But it's also logical to continue and to talk about the driving power or general energies that sustain both these levels that I've already mentioned, and here we're closer to talking about the whole machinery of energy that consists of the creativity of the will, or of will power. What I am saying in terms of the way in which human beings are organized, leads us to acknowledge that there are three different levels of creativity and that we cannot avoid examining them all. Once we adopt this practice, we immediately feel like taking the first step and elaborating and considering phenomena in the context of an attempt to distinguish the organic entireties which they contain.

We can also see that a tree is crucially connected with these reflections as it too consists of different levels or strata of creativity. As we talk of tripartite human creativity, consisting of the power to think, feel and want, we can observe the existence of similar strata in a tree with its leaves as a crown, its trunk, and its roots. And at this point we are close to a clear understanding of the way in which these activities (all of which derive from a wide concept of art which subsequently extends to working in society and in nature) cannot be measured with the same yardstick applied to forms of action which are only symbolic: they are grappling instead with truths which are part of the very meaning of reality, and they enable us to see the way in which the culture of the past affects not only us, but also nature itself.

Cultures of the past drew closer, closer, and closer to a sort of critical point, a crisis point, at which the final part of their methodology for the development of the nature of the human species (in the aspect of our ability for concentrated thought) could only end in that collapse which leads into the straits of an entirely materialistic understanding of the world, in which there is no longer any application of the whole reality of what exists, as the central truth for every reality. It allows for only a single and highly specialized methodology for the utilization of the dead and physical aspect of the world, and its only object is the exploitation of the world and the possibility of digging out everything which can be extracted from it, and all to the exclusive benefit of what we might term a sort of selfish profit.

We might also realize that what leads to what we can be termed the final crisis - the simultaneous destruction of the human species and of nature, another result of this materialist vision of the world - is a social order which reflects this type of structuring which is no longer able to solve the problems existing within it. It follows therefore, and quite logically, that our task is to discover a new form of social order which would be able to put into effect a different use of human faculties, of human work and productive power, and which can go beyond the way in which these forces are organized and utilized both in private capitalism and in centralized and state-controlled communism... And we have to discover that we can be something other than pluralized, and split up into parts and factions. We have to find ways of sticking together and cooperating. We have to go beyond the way the world itself is all split and divided. We live with everything divided against itself. Politicians sometimes call this the plualized society, but pluralization is something that we have to overcome. We're aiming for freedom, and self-determination, and productivity for the social body, as well as for the individual.

 

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