TY  - CHAP
A1  - Wedemeyer, Arnd
T1  - Pumping honey : Joseph Beuys at the documenta 6
T2  - De/constituting wholes : towards partiality without parts / edited by Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph F.E. Holzhey ; Cultural inquiry ; vol. 11
N2  - Arnd Wedemeyer's article focuses on the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who did not shy away from describing the social order with traditional organic metaphors, such as the notion of a 'central organ'. However, it is above all the - plastic - relationship between society and art that is at issue in Wedemeyer's article, entitled 'Pumping Honey: Joseph Beuys at the documenta 6'. Using the term 'Soziale Plastik', Beuys not only classified his own artistic practice as essentially sculptural but, more importantly, thematized its heterogeneous yet anything but passive relationship to art market, exhibition, museum, and various modes of reception, as well as staked its political claim. Wedemeyer looks at Beuys's contribution to the 1977 documenta, 'Honey Pump at the Workplace', in order to argue that the layered invocation of plasticity characteristic of Beuys's practice and theorizing ought not be historicized, as is commonly done, as an instantiation of the excessive, transgressive - and quite possibly disingenuous - zeal of the neo-avant-garde. Beuys's 'Plastik' should not be confused with anti-aesthetic formlessness, base materialism, a post-Duchampian ruination of the 'objet trouvé', and least of all a Neoromantic or Wagnerian projection or hypostatization of the autonomous work of art. The avant-gardes of the twentieth century have rendered the relationship of art and aesthetics tenuous at best, their artistic 'innovations' straining against the supratemporally or anthropologically defined characteristics of aesthetic valuation, play, or force. While many have sought to address this problem by tethering art to society in a shared 'contemporaneity', the article explores the implications of recasting this relation as one of plasticity, using the conceptual richness harvested by Catherine Malabou.
KW  - Beuys, Joseph
KW  - Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz
KW  - Plasticity
KW  - Sculpture
KW  - Art
KW  - Totality
KW  - Society
KW  - Plastizität
KW  - Plastik
KW  - Kunst
KW  - Totalität
KW  - Gesellschaft
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/55267
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-552676
UR  - https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-11/wedemeyer_pumping-honey.pdf
SN  - 978-3-85132-854-7
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 177
EP  - 213
PB  - Turia + Kant
CY  - Wien ; Berlin
ER  -