Beuys in America

Rating:
Summary: Healing the Western Mind
Review: The artworks and political ideas of German artist Joseph Beuys are deeply discussed into this interesting book. In the 1960's, Joseph Beuys was an underground name in the American artworld, but his reputation preceeded him.  Beuys had controversial feelings towards the US. His first art project in the United States, the action I Like America and America Likes Me, took place at Block's gallery in 1974. For this performance, Beuys traveled to Manhattan wrapped in felt, and then spent a week with a coyote, engaging it in a number of ritualistic encounters. For the 1987-88 exhibition at Dia Center for the Arts (New York), Lynne Cooke wrote... "as he consolidated a philosophy aimed at a revolution in both mind and body through an art devised to effect social and political transformation, he increasingly engaged in public pedagogy, language itself becoming for him an aesthetic medium. "