Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys dit : « Chaque individu doit devenir un co-acteur en prenant conscience qu’il est le souverain et qu’il doit accorder ses suffrages aux conceptions justes des justes lois économiques qui devront gouverner a l’avenir, alors par la je dis très clairement que chaque homme est un artiste dans ce domaine de la création de formes sociales. »

Quest-ce que l'Argent? What is money?

Debate held in Ulm on November 29^th 1984 in “La Maison de la Rencontre”.
Participants:

Rainer WILLERT:
Economic studies, organizer of this published debate.

Joseph BEUYS:
German Artist, professor of monumental sculptures at the Beaux-Arts Academy of Düsseldorf. Beuys elaborated an enlarged concept of art, the artistic discipline of ‘social structure’, which invites everyone to explore laws of social organism and to participate in the becoming of its form.

“Social Sculpture refers to a conception of art, framed in the 1970s by Beuys, as an interdisciplinary and participatory process in which thought, speech and discussion are core 'materials'. With this perception, all human beings are seen as 'artists' responsible for the shaping of a democratic, sustainable social order. Social Sculpture lifts the aesthetic from its confines within a specific sphere or media, relocating it within a collective, imaginative work-space in which we can see, re-think and reshape our lives in tune with our creative potential.”
More information on Social Sculpture Research Unit:
http://www.social-sculpture.org/
More information on Joseph Beuys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beuys

Johann Philipp Von BETHMANN:
Co-owner of Bethmann Bank and author of essays on business administration.

Hans Christoph BINSWANGER:
Professor in national economy and director of the research center for national economy of the superior school of St. Gall, laureate of the federal prize in the protection of the environment (1980). Also published essays such as “Money and Magic- An economic interpretation of Goethe’s Faust.”

Werner EHRLICHER:
Professor in finance sciences at the University of Fribourg, director of the institute for credit, author of many publications on federal savings.

Introduction-

In 1978, Willert attended an exposition in the Kunsthalle of Düsseldorf entitled ‘Musee de l’Argent’ where Beuys’ work was displayed. In 1984, Beuys exposes his work in Venice during the Quartetto exposition and Willert recognizes an economic discourse but it seemed to contain something meaningful without being able to explain what.

The main question was on exactly what foundation was Beuys talking about economics?

One of the perspectives of art is that it is potentially incapable of comprehending social dimensions, and therefore needs to remain at a level at which it only is influenced and influences: culture. Rainer Willert initiated this debate hoping to make economists, bankers and researchers, describe the activity as well as the role, the body, of money in comparison to art and the artist Beuys; to clarify maybe the distance between both sides and also elaborate Beuys’ ideas.

3 Perspectives

(a) Performance knowledge: described as knowledge intended for domination, to dominate the world, and often describing political economy, a realist tradition in economic theory. Money as power.
(b) Formation knowledge: describing any preconceived ideas about money in the psychic structures and social relations, in reality and values, how money influences attitudes and its enchainment to destiny.
(c) Redemption knowledge: which attempts to establish value, interrogates on fixation of norms, and would ask: In what way has Capitalism been harmful to human soul? In what way would it be profitable to create another form of money, or to abolish money?
(Max Scheler).

The Debate
“Money is that which has the value of money”
Aristotle

Most people conceptualize money, consciously or unconsciously, as ‘nothing’ yet it participates in certain aspects of our lives with much more meaning than we tend to believe. It is a cultural phenomenon as much as it is valued merchandise and an instrument of control.

Money was created to facilitate operations of payments and exchange as an intermediary good. Gold or silver were of ‘proper nature’, sort of speak, and were traded for their natural properties and values. In 1931, with a shortage of gold, paper money became the next intermediary value and prices were subject to change. Inflation, due to the vast number of paper money being printed, resulted in loosing the only tangible aspect of money and contributed to the mutation of the sacredness of money, a sort of finality, into a form of interest (1). (Bethmann).

Interestingly, commerce and cultures were significantly changed by the arrival of coins during the VII Century B.C., going from a system of exchange ‘in nature’ to an accessible equivalence of value. Coins were able to promote trade through the Mediterranean economy from the Greek lands to Asia Minor. Since medieval time, money was appreciated as an object of trade but most importantly substance, that which modern economy has de-substantial-ized with paper, checks and plastic (Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money).

Pittakos, one of the seven wise men of Antiquity around the year 650, had mentioned something that still is true today: The Gain is Insatiable. Binswanger makes it a point that it is not humans that are insatiable, it is not the one who gains either, but what is insatiable is inside, a human aspect channeling through money and colliding with a finite environment.
The human ‘spirit’ has been looked at unimportantly in our culture as opposed to how it influenced Antiquity, Egypt, and Greece, and society has become dependent to economic life in many ways. Humanity, the creator of forms, needs to understand that the creative force for each person to be an artist, a social architect, is in an enlarged perspective of Art in three aspects of life: life of the spirit, life of rights, and life of economics. Each person is a sovereign in an economic system where money, by nature, is a judicial document as opposed to a merchandize. (Beuys). But money refers essentially to an institution, the mean for global exchange, that is, in the economy, a unit of account, as well as an instrument of conservation of value, not a judicial document. (Ehrlicher). ‘Geld’ (money) shares a similar etymological origin with ‘gold’, which is related to ‘geltung’ (value) which equally implies ‘natural right’. Social forms (Soziale Gestaltung) are social sculptures in which everyone is a co-actor, an artist, an economist, and especially in the place of work, uniting the economy, judicially, for the purpose of nature and peace. (Beuys).
The passage to Capitalism was due to the radical division of human labor provoked by industrialization and the Bourgeoisie’s revolution. A shift in society, initiated by Ricardo and Smith and continued with Capitalism, was the shift into monetary exchange, unrelated to value but money and re-enforced the gaps in ownership and capital. The proletariat was attempting to be recognized for its creativity, its labor, in dignity (Beuys). In this sense capitalism needs to be understood as an economy of monetary exchange that is only a small part of the broader picture for now. Everyone working is the Proletariat, independently and freely disposing of the work place and leading towards an economy of capacity. (Beuys).

More scientifically money always involves two parties and when a debt is generated, money is created. It is important to consider that in modern economy, more money is created every time a private group has added some kind of monetary value. An Arabic Sheik adds three times the value of petroleum on a bill and the creation of money is absurd. Equally, bankruptcy is a destroyer of money and capital. (Bethmann). A rise in value is also a rise in price, and less power to dispose of money, and is therefore subject to monetary politics, the impossibility for money to be created after all. (Ehrlicher).

Principally money is neither good, nor bad; it is amoral and needs to be managed properly in order to be used as instrument of value. Most of the misery today is based on not knowing what money is and how it functions, its mechanisms. The main problem being that we are not capable of controlling money and it needs to become a single human aspect since it originates from human spirit and social interaction, as opposed to continually being demonized. (Bethmann).
Importantly, much of nature has been an open concept that is seen as what it offers. Money is exactly the same in the sense that money is not only money but offers what institutions, individuals, want to make of it.

To conclude this debate, money, a substance, an intermediary good, has been revolutionized as an instrument of interest as a creator of more money. We notice that historically Money, the working force of nations, has not contributed to the artistic potential of society in labor. We notice that the proletariat has not benefited from the value money has in terms of judicial document of rights. We notice that the grand oeuvre of money has been to set value on the artistic forms of cultures. At last we remain in a society which offers a potential, a multitude of ways to prescribe power, justice, and equality and that money can be the instrument of change.

(1) “L’Argent Sacree/ Sacred Money” by Laum.
Sacredness of money refers to the uses of metals, precious stones, gold, and silver. Finality implies that once exchanged the traded good (gold, silver etc) was the last value.

Ricardo

PART ONE

Imagination manifests continuously
Bridging the beyond into flesh
Magnetic channeling of light
Our reality goes
Beyond fiction

RICARDO

Over the course of his life he had developed a way of living which consisted of three rules. One, not lie, two not steal and three not tell others his business.

“1+1+1=2” he said.
That was the model.

To lie and to steal are the same things, meaning that you can steal objects as well as steal the truth from others. Ricardo lived by those rules which aimed for Truth.

In today’s world it seems as though it has become difficult for people to express themselves. I say this thinking that the multitude of strategies to evoke truth have been associated with psychological warfare. The media, the polls, elections, work, have consumed individuals to duplicate ideas made by the few to direct a cohesive and massive integration of ideologies which are directed towards control. This is not some kind of conspiracy, instead I speak of hypnosis and global homogeneity which have for two thousand years contributed to the extermination of cultures and replaced them with a unitary and elegant disguise of beauty as a human.

What is the problem with that?

We talked for a while about ownership and other aspects of comfort level, but to him it wasn’t necessarily about what type of compromises people had to make, it was more about what he had to do to get his comfort. He also felt in a state of paralysis because of the array of choices, overly vulgar, unsustainable, unsubstantial. Ricardo had a strong sense of what materialism meant and spoke of it in terms of novelty. Meaning that each thing in life is most important but are not attractive because they ultimately “lose their novelty” he said.

I had assumed differently because he had little possessions

he knew very well that money was not a source of his level of happiness and would solely give him things, some stuff. But here is what he confirmed to me. that if you don’t have much then you are less likely to get more. It’s important to keep that in mind because this aspect of society is part of the war that is going on in the sense that the richest people had access to all the wealth while the people with very little had access to what the richest people do not want, hence why it is accessible.

Ricardo is profound and I learn form him the behavior of survival, of someone that did what they wanted when they wanted and took the consequences equally. When I asked him about his perspective of jail and life outside of jail, he told me he saw no differences. I would think that this feeling made him almost beyond society having learned to just accept the fact that he was where he was and nothing else could separate him from this feeling. How in tune is this man with himself to never be so disturbed by his surrounding?

There is such a strong dedication to explain his experience in life as opposed to his experience with life and as he had seriously said to me “life is not a game”. I sat amazed by the vigor of his speech and by the tone of his voice because for the first time in my life I was listening to a man who knew about the fact that happiness does not come from a material point of view and could tell me about the absurdity of thinking of it as a field of roses. This is important I feel because I feel as though I am speaking to a person who is one of the last of his kind. His realness, his tact, his actions, his persistence and precision are becoming rare elements of humanity. What we see today is a melodramatic emphasis on how you act and what you wear and what you do and what you eat and where you go out all to describe who you are.

This almost Buddhist whose temple is the street and all its culture, with African roots and feet in the U.S. is the remains of a human aspect which is disappearing and being replaced by soft individuals, willing to put up with just about anything and never analyzing the multitudes of perspectives that are being imposed upon them.

He had showed me some of his bullet wounds produced by shotgun, pistols and his body was as solid as a stone. Ricardo again had little to do with sports on his everyday life and his habits made him first of all a criminal but most importantly healthy as a rock. His distance of age, this living phenomenon was capable of insuring that his mind stayed as sharp as his body.

After thinking about it the image was clear, yes “life is not a game” and for that matter you could not let yourself lie to yourself. This is the perspective that Ricardo gave me, he was teaching me to take care of my mind because as bullets, ideas and actions could devastate and leave you weak and subject to the environment, subject to stupid actions and subject to mistakes lowering the integrity you had of your life. This is more than profound and more than essential, this is vital, and looking back at the numerous people that stood for justice we can see that Ricardo contained those ideas. He lived not quite for his life but for the continuation of those ideas.

El Matador

I felt winter arriving under my skin
And exhale its fresh breath
Over my heart

The beat stopped
My blood turned blue
And my eyes turned into stones
I saw blackness in light
The dense thickness of blood
Spreading across my veins
Continued to turn the color of my skin
Into memory of life

I feared loosing love

I feared loosing

Inhabitants nearby
Said they heard a chant come out of the woods
And innumerable flowers grew
As if insects had planted them

Perplexed they were
To see a bull
Black as night
With golden eyes
Enter the village as if the moon
Had sent a messenger

Setting fire with each step
Water evaporated at its touch
People turned dead dropping among trees
Falling into the dirt
Each body disappeared

A child approached the bull
And convinced it to stop

‘I will die and live
Both equally’ said the child to the bull
‘Matter is where you belong’

The Matador
Accompanied by trumpets
Gave death to the bull
Cut its ears and set them over his
And as he heard the ocean
An infinite landscape
Grew in his imagination
A gentle light was glowing through his eyes
And his body was uplifted
A cloud came close to touch the matador
Envious
But nothing could disturb him

I tried to tell him that I could not breathe
But the matador stood
I tried to tell him I was dying
Matador was still

He then looked over me and said:
‘you are not dead,
and I am not a matador.’

Exit

I have seen Bombs without targets in the immensity of wars, in the effervescence of hate, and hats of blame in hope of justice and games of remembered ideals that never were, only existed in a fake story, as blues became another aspect of commerce that inhales happiness and constantly looks for the future of sound and stars.

I looked for the past in what I could not seem to understand, as my teacher had always told me to forget what I had previously thought of the USSR.

I felt obliged to stare at the present
I felt the staring present walled by them, the army of unwanted kings who travel the night in search of land and space to conquer.

There is no time to exit, nor any exist in any forms,

L' Inconnue

Les jours ou les tranchées de guerre
Et les violences
Sont et seront
Comme hier
Et Aujourd’hui

Impossible à dire
A hurler
Ou faire d’elles
Mensonges
Ou vérités

Rien
Pas un mot, ni un nom,
Ne pourra à jamais dévoiler
La force que le corps
A lui seul
Peu dégager

Nous nous disons tout
Avec nos corps malades
Pensant les guérir par la parole
Alors que ces mots ne font qu’ennivrer

Dans des champs de magnétisme
J’observe le soleil
Partageant son amour
Et sa force de vie

Les étoiles se parlent
Dans un dialogue sans alphabet
La lune
Avec la Terre
Ne disent rien
Les planètes jouissent de leur relation symbiotique

Si nous pensons aux choses belles
Qu’on se souvient de ces moments
Pas un mot n’eut été vraiment dit
Mais si un mot revient
Cela veut peu être dire
Que les murs
Qui soit disant abritent nos pensées
Ne font que rendre
L’écho d’un bruit
Que nous mêmes avions inventé

La vérité étant de participer
A la guérison
D’une société blessée par un discours aveugle
Démembré, hurlante de douleur
Emotionellement asséchée
Qui ne demande qu’une chose :

Que l’on veuille bien cesser de lui dire qu’elle est belle
Mais qu’on la traite comme telle.

OHM

I am
Absorbed in the moments
Into a glimpse of flesh
A stage of reincarnation
Through leaves of thoughts

Us,
mind dwellers making nomadic moves
in a matrix of novelty
Settling for the middle
Entering the many gaps
As standing statues of societies

We are
The remain of great tribes
genetic codes able to change not only one but the many
Turning bread into a baker
Making gold with minds

Some
in disguise
Mimic the man
Who stands to the right
Wanting to be the one from the left
There is no sense in compromising

Because
We are the treasure
Each and everyone
Individually made and born to express uniqueness
To express your conscious breath
And to enfold the great you

I think that many times I felt secluded
And I know that I was wrong because
All of you can relate to this statement
And if you would have thought about telling someone
Those very words would have meant nothing
Here you are standing next to someone
Telling that person
“I feel secluded”
There are no boundaries
We are the treasure

In the morning of my birth
My mother held me on her chest
I remember that moment because I looked for it
Just as we look forward to happiness
It’s not a secret
Both of which happened already
and will happen again if you look for them

How many times have you been able to change the course of things
I say that none of us have ever stopped being masters
Masters of our lives and masters among others
Profoundly affecting the paths that we share

The temple has one rule
Everything echoes
This means that every step we make
And every actions or thoughts or desires or whatever we perceive
Has resonance
Everything has resonance
There are no boundaries
We are the treasure

Why am I repeating myself?
Is this guy trying to hypnotize us?
I say that there are many that walk among this earth
And already so deeply cursed
Disembodied souls that look without seeing
All programs set to default
Waiting… watching…
Today, tomorrow, and again… again…..again…..again…..again….again…..again
If I say that word enough times do you think it means that those lives are simply on repeat.
We have rules to be polite and other ones to be harmful
Smile to the lady but beat her ass if she doesn’t believe in god.
Statistically you are three standard deviations away from sanity
And the normal curve is looking pretty sick from here
I think that normalness must be on drugs
Maybe some sort of pharmaceutical treatment
And I don’t mention names
Cause I don’t like publicity.

Haaaaaa
Breathe,

It’s easy to get carried away and start buying the NYTimes
Receive USAToday in the mail box and get trashed that same night
You see unconsciously there is a reason as to why we get absolutely trashed
Primarily because one part of your brain wants to be happy and the other is screaming
“Oh shit this is gonna hurt”
And if you are one of those people that don’t feel anything
It probably means that you are the one on drugs
Coping, unconsciously,
Trying to forget…
And that’s cool with me
But don’t pollute my water
Don’t make my lady afraid
Don’t try to sell me anything
Deal your cards to no one
Because the second we share ideas
The second we start making change

We do change the world
Everything has resonance
There are no boundaries
We are the gold