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The Pedagogical Meaning in Joseph Beuys’s ‘Social Sculpture’: Mainly Through ‘Blackboard’ in the 1970

Song Hai Young 1

1영남대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Joseph Beuys’s ‘social sculpture’ unfolds in the way that it emphasizes the manifestation of collective creativities of all participants and endorses the notion of ‘extended art’, which subverts the conventional way of plastic art and sees art as a part of ordinary human life. Based on Steiner’s theory of cognitive thought, Beuys’s works are intended to show the cognitive process that combines the emotion made by the texture of material and the rational thought generated by the linguistic concept. The subject of this study, the 1970s blackboard, addresses the issue of rational thought. While working as a professor, Beuys often discussed social and political issues with students, and such experiences induced him to get involved in various organizational activities. After he resigned from the professor position in 1972, he promulgated his own ideas on social reform by utilizing blackboard as an educational tool through lectures in Germany and abroad. That way, he reemerged as a prominent social reformer and teacher who delivers truth. As he grew famous, his blackboards were settled and displayed in museums in various ways, but they were characteristically featured as part of installation art in which other objects were also involved. Beuys proposed a new role of art museum as the site where ‘ongoing forum’ in which mutual communication is always enabled takes place, and a self-complete school in which interdisciplinary studies are conducted takes shape. In this non-conventional notion of art museum, the blackboard functions as a pedagogical medium that induces open thought on the part of audiences. Beuys’s installation work <Direction of Energies to a new Society>(1974-1977) points to a pedagogical function of ‘social sculpture’ by stressing human creativity enacted toward a new society. Such intention materializes in 100 blackboards, an educational tool to facilitate the viewers’ thoughts. However, to the Londoners who saw <Direction of Energies to a new Society> in 1974, as well as contemporary viewers who have to see it from a great distance, Beuys’s blackboards are not an open medium that enabled the unrestrained imagination and thought, so much as an educational instrument that served to implant Beuys’s subjective world view and his authorial voice into the viewer’s mind

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.