Beuys revelled in the concepts but took them further, positing that art was political, that everyone was essentially an artist and that we all had to work together to create a more just, humane and ecologically sustainable future. His vision was sorely needed. In West Germany, the impact of heavy postwar industrialisation was becoming all too clear. Beuys founded the Free International University, embedding at its heart the concept of social sculpture or art as communal interventions. Between June 24 and 1 October 1977, during an art event titled 100 Days of Free International University, Beuys demonstrated the university’s workings and potential through a series of workshops, panels, artistic performances and installations, centred around global issues and challenges.Pictures from the event show Beuys’s small figure, in his trademark felt hat, sitting among a group of rapt faces.
The Free International University continued as an organisation for several years, and has been influential. And yet, for all that, 7,000 Eichen (7,000 Oaks) was probably the project’s most vital expression. Of the artwork, Beuys told Scottish gallery owner Richard Demarco: “I wish to go more and more outside to be among the problems of nature and problems of human beings in their working places. This will be therapy for all of the problems we are standing before.” After all, what inspires a reconnection with – and a love for – the natural world, more than asking a traumatised people to put their hands in the earth, around the roots of a young tree? Pieter Heijnen, a former student of Beuys, recalls being present with Beuys during a planting. “Once the tree grows tall, the planter will be long gone,” he reports hearing the artist say, wistfully. “Imagine how many birds will flock to Kassel, once these trees are here. The planting of these 7,000 trees is all about sculpture. It is the absence of originality. Once the tree has established itself, it’s just nature. A tree full of chirping birds with the wind blowing through it… music! This is Sculpture that reaches far into the future.”
Tree of life
The artist’s love for the trees is palpable. Now, Beuys’s concept of nature as regenerative and as trans-generational appears currently in London, in the form of Beuys’ Acorns, a project which features 100 young saplings, grown from acorns collected from the German city by Ackroyd & Harvey, aka the British art duo Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. They are known for work that – Beuys-like – sits at the intersections between art and activism, biology and ecology, architecture and history.