Patrick Healy

La Difesa della Natura

He always talked because he saw discussion as the most worthy goal for art.
 Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

Redestellen ist auch eine Kunstform.
Joseph Beuys, Documenta V

I have devoted my entire existence to spreading his Voice in the world.
Lucrezia De Domizio Durini

Arbor est secundum Heraclitum natura nostra quae se obducere atque abscondere.
(According to Heraclitus the tree is akin to us in nature; it likes to hide and cover itself over)
Philo of Alexandria

In her essay ‘Beuys’s Voice’, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini gathers and presents her concentrated thinking on the life of Joseph Beuys, on his work, on their collaboration and its consequences.¹ The essay covers a period of over thirty years, a time period during which she has expressed herself as engaged in ‘militant cultural activity.’² The essay ‘Beuys’s Voice’ is an indispensable document, setting down as it does a crucial and consistent interpretation of Beuys, an interpretation which involves deeds as much as words and commentary.
The issue of interpretation was also critical for Beuys, and his comments quoted in the essay lead inexorably to the reflection as to whether or not one can say that, with the life work of Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Beuys had found the legitimate keeper of his teaching and works:

I say what I have to say, and then the public has a thousand ways of interpreting and understanding it, but only one interpretation is the right one and time will show what it is. ³

The elaboration that ‘only one interpretation is the right one’ has been the fundamental concern of Lucrezia De Domizio Durini. It has been a vocation, a calling, to which she has dedicated her adult life, inspired by a compelling belief that human life needs communication and love, free from the constraints of politics and churches.⁴
With reverence, intelligence, feisty and ferocious energy, and with immense dedication, she has found the path where one chooses only freedom; a path that tracks the sacred, and as a journey in faith remains kindred to human experience, in all its wanderings and errancy. The path has been shared with others, notably Joseph Beuys, Harald Szeemann, ‘Buby’ Durini, and Pierre Restany.⁵
Her various publications attest to the significance of all these ‘spirit guides ’in her own journey, with its implacable attestation to the power of love, the gift of memory to the other, the absolute necessity of creativity. To Harald Szeemann she dedicated the eventi collaterali of the 52^nd Venice Biennale, the continuing of the permanent conference first initiated by Beuys at Documenta.⁶ Her core commitment helps one understand the beautiful phrase of the philosopher Boethius: ‘He will never go to heaven who is content to go alone’.
The Difesa della Natura of the 52^nd Venice Biennale has its long origins in her meetings with Beuys, and Beuys’s meeting with her husband Buby Durini. The essential characteristic of the Defence of Nature is that of an operation concerned with ‘safeguarding the environment and providing anthropological protection for humanity’.⁷
Her insistent interpretation stems directly from what she calls the transmission of Beuys’s Voice; of hearing what is called for in his words, which for her is not simply the speech of persuasive rhetoric; rather, the word of Beuys contains the ‘magic of transcendence’, acting in its contradictions and enunciations on the ‘level of utopia and that of reality’. It is thought in action, the word of Beuys sculpts the flesh of the world:

           Beuys’s Word is Living Sculpture. Vital Word.⁸

What is essential is to analyse what the call to a fuller humanity entails, and in her steadfast listening to Beuys what Domizio De Durini hears is the steady and imperturbable claim, the claim of his legacy also, namely the requirement for mankind of the unity between art and life, and she remarks:

This is the anthropological protection of humanity which animates the Defence of Nature as the work and project initiated by Beuys in Italy.⁹

In the essay it is argued that the fundamental orientation of Beuys’s life was found through a crisis he underwent five years after graduating from the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, a crisis in which he questioned everything, and during which he laid down the essential lines of an expanded, broader, theory of art which involved the structure of society as a whole. This involved a resolute breach with tradition and the aim to find ‘the right level for the revolution and the evolution of the whole human development’.¹⁰
Beuys understood for himself that in his own development he was constantly investigating the idea of man’s work. However, this was not only about the ‘work’ of so-called specialists, ‘but a reflection on the anthropological idea of human creativity’.¹¹ In re-organising his own physical existence Beuys had initiated ‘una vita nuova’. This he characterised as a therapeutic process. It was in this process he realised that the role of the artist can pre-eminently be that of pointing out the trauma of the time in which he or she lives, and ‘in initiating a healing process’
It is from within this therapeutic that he derived a theory of sculpture. He grasped directly in his illness and crisis the analogy between the chaos he had experienced and the work of sculpture. For Lucrezia De Domizio Durini it is this aspect of Beuys’s thinking, the therapeutic-anthropological that sets him apart from the art of Duchamp, or minimalism. This is an analysis she advances in her account of the work Olivestone.¹²
This major work of his last creative period can be distinguished from the work of 7,000 Oaks, where Beuys brought two independent systems together, and thus making that work essentially performative, demonstrating in real time the effect of his thinking on reality.¹³ In Olivestone, rather than two systems being brought together, there is a fusion of the mineral and the vegetable. What the work enfolds is the intensities of process, and not a fusion at the level of extensional thinking. Nature is here physis in the Greek sense of eventing, genesis, emergence, indicated through the seeping of oil, which is still a vital facticity in penetrating the stone.¹⁴ In that sense Olivestone is an open event, and not just a performative symbolic system, which Stüttgen has suggested with his comment that ‘Es ist also das Planzen von 7,000 Eichen nur ein symbolischer Anfang’ -- that the planting of the 7,000 oaks was just a symbolic beginning.¹⁵

As the author of the critique maintains, Beuys’s method is ‘to improve existing methods’, a view also expressed by Pierre Restany in an interview with Durini, going so far as to say that Beuys didn’t create new formal inventions, but was rather an engineer of the organic.¹⁶ The sandstone basins already carved as tubs from the quarries of Lettomanoppello, a town in the province of Pescara in the Abruzzo, which had been used to let olive oil settle, objects then of agricultural use, marked by time, could be spoken of in a certain sense, as ‘ready-mades’. However, Domizio-Durini insists that they are inspired by a different method to Duchamp.
Beuys had already in the work started out from the sphere of sculpture. In Duchamp one finds a heightening of the tension between the work and its reception, its receptors, while with Beuys there is a direct attempt to improve the sphere of production, ‘adapting to the needs of thought and expression.’¹⁷
This is the therapeutic essence of his method. The therapeutic aspect can be seen as theurgic. Beuys, unlike Duchamp, is not re-contextualising ascription and meaning of the object; rather, he envelops meaning and gesture by a supervenience which allows the real of the work to intensify reality. One can see that gesture of the therapeutic very dramatically in the work Tallow of 1977, commissioned by the City of Münster for an open-air exhibition of sculpture, which is taken by Domizio Durini as Beuys’s pointing to the wound, to make the decay visible, in order to be able to act therapeutically. ¹⁸
In Olivestone the oil speaks for a fragile relationship of life and death; the sandstone of sedimentary origin is read as a necrotic extrusion nourished by the yellow trickle of oil, which nourishes and lubricates:

… the oil that nourishes, that lubricates, that protects with its mantle of truth…¹⁹

And further:
So the oil is not just the future, but also the guarantee of its progress. It is truth understood as seal of natural phenomenon and of anthropological creativity.²⁰

Beuys shared the theurgic desire to untie and intertwine realms separated through the inauthenticity of everyday oblivion. He grasps the secretion of life living its death and death dying to itself in the chiasmic structure of everything that is animate, not as polarities but as folding emergences.²¹
This question of the therapeutic is also of significance to understanding The End of the 20th Century. U We Claus reports in detail that when working on the basalt columns with Walter (a.k.a. Carl) Giskes, they had been guided as stonemasons by a word Beuys had written on a drawing in Kassel, where according to the publication of Veit Loers and Pia Witzmann.

It was the last days of the autumn tree planting in Kassel, December 16, 1982, that during a conversation the drawing CONSOLIDA- SYMPTHUM was made by Beuys. On the basis of this drawing he explained his idea of The End of the 20^th Century, which he then created the following year.²²
It was the word Sympthum which guided the masons. Indeed, in his finely observed account, U We Claus stresses the medical-therapeutic aspect that governed the creation of the work. It was Sympthum which was the working title of the sculpture for both Giskes and Claus. U We Claus had disclosed these thoughts during the Beuys Symposium in Kranenburg in 1995, and the recent publication on The End of the 20^th Century repeats his original contribution.²³
For Domizio Durini, the interconnections between the works in the early to mid 1980’s must be seen in the context of the significance of Italy for Beuys in the last 15 years of his life, and the Difesa Della Natura, his last great masterpiece, is not to be understood solely in an ecological sense, but to be interpreted principally in an anthropological sense: the defence of humanity, or human values of creativity.²⁴ It is this statement which is the essence of her ‘one right interpretation’. What she sees in the work of this latter date is the full ricorso in the work of Beuys, a resumption of the work which began with the archetypal drawings of his early years.²⁵
Throughout this account there are many overlapping strands. Principally one has to recall that not only did Italy become for Beuys a significant site of work and exploration, it was also there that he had presented F.I.U in 1978, which he refers to as a ‘phenomenologically open and tolerant alternative which sees a creative being in every man’.²⁶ The date for this first presentation is established in the literature as the 12^th of February 1978, in Pescara. This debate, which was the official presentation of the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (FIUCIR), was organised by Lucrezia de Domizio Durini and held in the stock market of the Chamber of Commerce in Pescara.

Part of Beuys’s revolutionary programme proceeded from his idea that it was necessary to free concepts from their ideological wrapping, and get ‘to their phenomenological nucleus’. He was convinced that an anthropological conception of art could not be developed in traditional institutions. His expanded conception of art required as its central idea that creativity is a fundamental spiritual principle. Property, ownership and wage dependency as the dominant ideology of production constitutes for Beuys the absolute ‘negative factor’ of work. He saw clearly that money which organises work has to undergo a transformation. In his terms he spoke of money becoming a juridical figure in such a way that it would be the elementary expression of democracy, and as a consequence the whole banking system would be transformed into a democratic legal figure.
Money would not then be the real ‘creator’ of economy; instead, true capital would be art, which for Beuys means man’s creativity. Such a concrete capital is accompanied and not created by a juridical document. There can be little doubt about the Steinerian provenance of much of this thinking, certainly in its core analysis.
During the lectures which Steiner gave at the age of 60, in 1919 and 1920, which were frankly presented as propaganda for the work of the anthroposophists, he insisted that the social problem was ultimately a spiritual one. A spiritual life could not flourish under the State, and a new associative system of economics needed, he contended, to be created. Money as an abstraction had and continued to divert people from the reality of economic life, by creating ‘unnecessary work’ driven by consumption and class interests. In the concreteness of Spiritual Science, Steiner wanted to create an economy based in an ‘honest way on human will’
The relation of the economic life and the spiritual life was that of nut to nutshell. Steiner's analysis was: ‘so we are in an age of abstract thinking, of life remoteness, unreal conjunctions and such things’. In the ‘threefold order of the body social’ there was the need for the setting of a new spiritual life that manifested the really real. A central requirement, and this surely is enormously significant for Beuys, is to show where the centres of injury lie. The first ‘centre of injury’ Steiner refers to is the bank system.²⁷
Beuys extended his views into a sharp critique of agriculture and industrialisation in the biological field, in a critique which is very close indeed to Heidegger’s reflection in his ‘The Question concerning Technology’, and other talks and papers of the 1950’s, especially in his work entitled Besinnung.²⁸
Beuys also spoke with mantic precision. Speaking of the evident mineralisation and sterilisation of the earth which was a result of scientific-technological manipulation, he asked for a new energy where animals, plants and earth were not observed in mechanical terms, but ‘in the energy fields in which they live’, and what was required was instead an ‘implosive principle’ which takes account of all the energies, even those around the plant in cosmic extension.
It is surely the latter implosive principle which was being variously explored by Beuys in the 7000 Oaks project, the sculpture The End of the 20^th Century, and fully recuperated in the Paradise Plantation project, with which the life and work of Lucrezia de Domizio Durini will be forever associated.
It was, after all, in Bolognano at the home of Buby Durini and Lucrezia that Beuys created the plantation called Paradise. It was to involve the planting of 7000 different endangered species of trees, which continues to this day. Beuys himself summed up the project eloquently on the 13^th of May 1984, offering inter alia an account of his life in his second home:

My first meetings with people who live in this part of the world -and I am referring to Lucrezia de Domizio and Buby Durini- took place more than twelve years ago, and since those people were already very close to these kinds of thinking, ideas and practices, they began to collaborate ever more extensively with the organisation that I had founded under the name of the ‘Free International University’ (…) The project that has brought me here bears the title defence of Nature, and these words represent much more than a mere slogan. It is a concrete project that will lead us to plant 7000 trees, each of a different species, here in Bolognano. In Kassel I worked with ‘Oaks’, while here we will be creating a sort of Paradise.²⁹

The Italian critic, and one of the principal commentators on the work of Beuys in Italy, Antonio d’Avosso saw the place of paradise as the plantation itself. Paradise is present in this place of plantation. Heaven, like Hell, is on earth. D’Avosso writes with lyrical feeling that Bolognano is the navel of paradise, the excavation of a basin which contains the flux of time and the measure of space, and which surmounts the axis of the world from its roots to its summit.³⁰
Such a conception of the axis mundi is essential to the implosive principle and cosmic extension of which Beuys had spoken; creating a genuine cosmography of nature. In an esoteric interpretation of this paradise, it is indeed the place which is the one right interpretation. From the story in the medieval compilation the Zohar, the word for paradise in Hebrew, pardes, was also taken as an acronym which represented the different reading available for the texts of the tradition, and thus Paradise was the sum of creative interpretations. The devotion of Lucrezia de Domizio Durini to this project is indeed the life of ‘the one right interpretation’, and from being the didaschos of Beuys, she is the protectress of Paradise.

In an article in the Indo-Iranian Journal, Bruce Lincoln has some fascinating reflections on the etymology of the Avestan term pairi.daēza, from which the Greek paradeisos, and the English ‘paradise’ ultimately derive. In its singular occurrence in the Avestan corpus it signifies and has the sense of a dwelling place, earthen enclosure, of those intimately associated with death. The word used for that enclosure is pairi.daēza, and etymologically this term is itself a compound formed from the preposition pairi, (in Sanskrit. pįri, in Greek peri, etc, with the meaning of ‘around’, and daēza, heap, pile, the latter stemming from the verbal root daez, which is cognate with the Sanskrit dih.- ‘to anoint, smear, plaster’). Thus, Lincoln concludes, that the Indo-Iranian verb dhaiźh meant to construct out of earth, and the noun ‘that which has been built from earth’.³¹
It is also coherent to understand this in a less esoteric and more pragmatic sense.  Beuys had understood that the role of the F.I.U. was to gather and stimulate creative energies. He saw these works as paradigmatic, giving an example to the majority of minorities that one could develop models for the future of mankind.
For Beuys the alternative was clear, it was a question of structuring life with something that is intrinsic, of transforming life into a work of art, into the expanded, broadened, conception of art, that looks ‘to each person and to his or her concept of work’. The fundamental issue was simply, could people come together in a democratic way to achieve self-determination for each one?
The axioms for such a social life had already been brought forward in the French Revolution, namely, liberty, equality and fraternity. For Beuys these concepts are fundamental to the social organism. Beuys clearly understood his work as consequent on these ideals, even as refracted in the elaborate prism of Rudolph Steiner’s late theoretical work, and his own mission as clearing the way for the true path of socialism, creating a ‘third way’, other than in capitalist or communist systems.³²
What Beuys had first outlined in Pescara in 1978, he would greatly expand in his contribution to Defence of Nature, Difesa della Natura, in 1984, during his third visit to the Abruzzo, when he was awarded the honorary citizenship of this town , with a population then of 300 persons. He drew attention to the 7000 Oaks project in Kassel, and made the trenchant observation:
… we should remember that planting an oak in Kassel means more than simply sponsoring a tree, it means having a different conception of life.

For Beuys there is a plea for solidarity, a solidarity not restricted to human life alone, but extended to the entire natural world, vegetable, animal, mineral, ‘that is to say the total habitat of the planet.’ ³³

In a simple analogy, one that is consequent with the first analogy between his own chaos and the work of sculpture he made during his ‘crisis’ in the 1950’s, Beuys draws attention to the tripartite human creativity that involves feeling, willing, thinking, and projects this analogically to the strata in the plant, of leaves, trunk, root. Essentially then in the planting of Paradise the process of the Defence of Nature would exhibit the epistemological and the anthropological, and also relations to the biosphere, ecology and society. Indeed the process of the planting would also exhibit how by the support it would engender the forms in which ‘social credit’ takes place, and through the imagination released in working the confrontation with a new reality takes place in the process.

Such a reality is both visible and invisible. There is on his account no need for traditional religion; we are in the area of spirit itself:

… this for me is the meaning of planting the trees.³⁴

It is more than a mere question of working in the field of biology, or of taking care of living things, or, even of putting oneself at the service of life. Beuys states it starkly; it is a question of the saving of our souls. This was the goal he envisioned when we go to work planting trees. The objective for Beuys is freedom and self-determination as the general productivity of both the social and individual body.
Beuys again is quite explicit about this urgency for our actions, namely, that we have ‘to come to nature’s assistance in a therapeutic way’. The planting in Bolognano was also to be a model, to illustrate the possibilities for a new kind of enterprise. This model helps us to understand co-operation, peaceful co-existence, and in order to achieve this to understand the necessity of a permanent conference, he then adds:
… this was the whole idea of founding the Free International University.³⁵

Lucrezia De Domizio Durini had understood, understands, Beuys and guides us in the right interpretation. She had heard what he said, and continues in her noble mission, now in her sprightly seventh decade, and alive, creative, human and generous to all and for all, the words of Beuys can be vividly heard, his own relation to the voice and words:

My direction was the Word; however strange it may seem, it did not come from so-called artistic talent. When I realised that this was the only way (…) I opted for art, or rather, for a form of art that led me to a concept of sculpture that starts out in words and thoughts that learns to construct ideas in words, which can and will transfer feelings and desires into form.  If I manage to accomplish this, if I continue undeterred, images of the future will appear to me and ideas will take shape.³⁶

¹ Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Joseph Beuys, Difesa Della Natura, The Living Sculpture, Kassel 1977 Venice 2007, A Tribute to Harald Szeemann, Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2007. The First Reading within the publication is entitled ‘Beuys’s Voice’, and is by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, pp. 24-60; all further reference to ‘Beuys’s Voice’ refers to this and will be cited by essay title and page number. The event hosted by the Spazio Thetis in Venice was conceived and curated by Baroness Lucrezia De Domizio Durini. The event was conceived as a comparative analysis 30 years on from Beuys’s 100 days at Documenta VI in Kassel, in the context of the organisation of the F.I.U. (Free international University), and took place during the 52^nd Biennale, Venice. The antecedent creation of the Free College with Heinrich Böll in 1974, and Beuys’s discussion in Ireland to found the F.I.U., are reported in Götz Adriani, Winifried Konnertz, Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works, at pp. 270-274; see note 11 below. Under the date of 1974 June 24-October 2, they give ‘Establishment of the “Free International College for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, Inc’. Note the use of the word ‘College’ in this title. In Pescara the acronym F.I.U. becomes publicly established.

² This self description is best understood in the publication, Joseph Beuys, Sculptor of Souls, Olivestone, Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2001; which tells of the extraordinary sequence of events connected with the destiny of the work Olivestone, especially the account from pp.171-183, given in the first person by Lucrezia De Domizio Durini. The work was published on the 80^th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Beuys. A note in ‘Beuys’s Voice’ states that the work Olivestone was created for the F.i.a.c. Paris, 1984, October. On the occasion of the exhibition Ouverture inaugurated at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, December 18^th 1984; Lucrezia De Domizio Durini lent the work, reworked by the artist in five tubs. After a legal dispute that lasted eight years, the bona fide owner, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, donated Olivestone to the Kunsthaus in Zürich on July 12, 1992. Olivestone was exhibited as the centrepiece of the 2001 Venice Biennale, by the director of the Biennale, Professor Harald Szeemann. Further information can be found in Lucrezia De Domizio Durini’s, Libro Bianco Olivestone, Carte Segrete, Rome and Kunsthaus, Zürich, 1992.

³ See note 1 above, ‘Beuys’s Voice’, p. 26.

⁴ ‘I have freed myself from the two great powers that exert undue influence on all human minds, Politicians and Churches. I have tried to be free outside the system’, ‘Beuys’s Voice’, p.27.

⁵ For Harald Szeemann, see, Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Harald Szeemann, Il Pensatore Selvaggio, Silvana Editoriale, 2005. For Pierre Restany see her account in Pierre Restany, l’Eco del Futuro, Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2005. Her biography and some of her more than 56 publications are given in the publication Joseph Beuys, Difesa Della Natura, see note 1 above, pp. 286-287.

⁶ See note 1 above, and her account of Harald Szeemann Il Pensatore Selvaggio, Silvana Editoriale, 2005. There Szeemann is described as a ‘visionary’ who exhibited the real force of intuitive energy and creativity in his capacity to ‘riunire uomini e donne per un obiettivo commune’, p. 22, 23.

⁷ ‘Beuys’s Voice’, p.26.

⁸ ibid., p.27

⁹ ibid., p.28

¹⁰ ibid., p.28

¹¹ Some of this is directly derived from Götz Adriani, Winifried Konnertz, Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys, Life and Works, (translated Patricia Lech), Barron’s, New York, 1979; the original edition appeared in German in the DuMont Verlag, Cologne, 1973.

¹² The separate publication, Joseph Beuys. Sculptor of Souls, Olivestone, Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2001, contains her fullest account, and should be read in conjunction with the extra comments in Beuys’s Voice, pp. 28-34. This was the most sustained reading of any individual sculptural work of Beuys, until the recent appearance of the study on The End of the 20^th Century, see note 21 below.

¹³ This is the interpretation of Lucrezia De Domizio Durini.

¹⁴ This can be followed in the working paper published by Johannes Stüttgen, on the 7,000 Eichen, see Johannes Stüttgen, Joseph Beuys 7000 Eichen, Ein Arbeitpapier der FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY (fiu), Bielefeld, 1982. Stüttgen reproduces extracts from the Joseph Beuys/Bernhard Blume, ‘Gesprach über Bäume’, from 24^th of April 1982, held in Magers gallery, Bonn, from the transcription made by Johannes Stüttgen, who acted as Beuys’s factotum.

In the conversation one can note how Beuys wanted to demystify the recent Nazi usage of the tree for symbolic purpose, and referred to its symbolic meaning as indicating the difference between North and South Europe, effectively barbarism/culture, noting in passing that the word Druid meant oak: ‘Das Wort Druide heißt Eiche’. The specific choice of oak is precisely for its symbolic significance, Beuys remarking that he wouldn’t for example choose ‘robina pseudoaccacia’ whatever its age, as it lacked referent for his project.

The symbolic replanting of the earth was in Beuys’s sense destined for Kassel. In the course of the conversation Beuys provided the slogan ‘Die Reine Vernunft ist grün’ (‘Pure Reason is Green’).

Beuys’s equivalence of Druid and oak can be indicated from the etymology of the word Druid. Xavier Delamarre, in his Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise, offers important arguments. Pliny first proposed the sense of Druids as those with knowledge of trees, eichenkundig. He made the term druids cognate with drus for oak. This view of the ancients that there was a tree cult among the Druids supports the etymology of the word being derived from dru = ‘arbre, chêne’. The overwhelming linguistic evidence according to Delamarre is that dru-wids means ‘le connaiseur de l’arbre’. Delamarre wants to add that for such an important sacerdotal class, akin to the Indian Brahmins, the ‘knowers of the world tree’, Yggdrasill of the Scandinavians, skambha, pillar of the Vedas, should be considered. This suggestion is studied by W. Meid in, Festschrift Helmut Birkhan, Peter Lang, New York, Frankfurt, 1998. Also valuable is Emilia Masson, Le combat pour l’immortalité, Paris 1991.

¹⁵ Johannes Stüttgen, op cit., p.i.

¹⁶ This can be found in Lucrezia De Domizio Durini, Pierre Restany, l’Eco del Futuro, p.43: ‘Ma Beuys non ha inventata nessun sistema di linguaggio, nessun riferimento formale. Piu che un alchimista, piu che un profeta ispirato, va visto come un ingegnere del-l’organico’. (‘Beuys hasn’t invented a new linguistic system, or formal reference. More than an alchemist, more than an inspired prophet, he should be seen as an engineer of the organic’).

¹⁷ ‘Beuys’s Voice’, p.30

¹⁸ ibid., p.87

¹⁹ ibid., p.32.

²⁰ ibid., p.32

²¹ The most detailed study of theurgy can be found in the writings of Iamblichus.

²² This reference is cited in the recent publication, Joseph Beuys Das Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, Doerner Institut, Munich, 2007, p.65.

²³ ibid., pp.121-137. U We Claus in his personal testimony provided invaluable insight into the thinking and making of the work.

The link with Stonehenge and the Druids awaits exploration. The Friedrich painting of the geomorphological as a ruin might suggest that Beuys has installed the ruin of a ruin, a fallen Stonehenge. It also possibly commemorates the fallen of various wars, and belongs to the Ruinanz of German and therefore world history in the 20^th century.

²⁴ ‘Beuys’s Voice’, passim.

²⁵ For the early drawings of Beuys one should consult, Joseph Beuys, Kleine Zeichnungen, Museum Schloß Moyland, 1995.

²⁶ This phrase can be found in the transcription of Beuys’s contribution in Lucrezia De Domizio Durini’s second reading, in the publication Joseph Beuys, Difesa Della Natura, see note 1 above, during his presentation of the F.I.U. in Italy, pp.62-89.

²⁷ The addresses and articles by Rudolf Steiner from which I take these points were translated into English by E. Bowen Wedgwood, and distributed to members of the Anthroposophical Society by permission of Mme. Marie Steiner, under the title The Threefold Order of the Body Social, as a three part Study Series, with no date or place of publication.

²⁸ Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1997.

²⁹ ‘Beuys’s Voice’, p.54.

³⁰ D’Avosso’s writings have been the principal critical reception of the work of Beuys in Italian.

³¹ For this discussion see Bruce Lincoln, ‘The House of Clay’, Indo-Iranian Journal, vol. 24, no 1, January 1982, pp.1-12.

³² The text on the ‘third way’ has been reprinted as part of the Eventi Collaterali of the 52^nd Venice Biennale.

³³ ‘Beuys’s Voice’, p.73.

³⁴ ibid, p.78.

³⁵ ibid, p.98

³⁶ As quoted in Joseph Beuys, p. 98, see note 1 above.