Joseph Beuys

take-home final exam
The requirement for this course is EITHER this take-home exam OR a 5-10 page paper
on a related topic of your choice OR (if you wish, but only if you wish), both, in which
case your grade for the course will be the higher of the two grades. FINALS AND/OR
PAPERS ARE DUE BY 6 P.M. ON TUESDAY, APRIL 26TH.
Instructions for the take-home final: Write in response to ANY THREE QUESTIONS
(NOT ALL OF THEM!) devoting approximately equal space to each. Avoid vague
assertions and generalizations. Your exam as a whole should not exceed 3000 words.
Note that if you choose #12, you will be judged on the quality of your question as well.
If you are intending to submit a paper also, kindly include a note to that effect.
1. In what sense, if any, does Beuys ‘extend’ art?
2. What should be the role of art in politics, and how effective was Beuys as a political
activist?
3. Discuss Beuys as a shaman / alchemist / magician (any combination). Is this side of
his work progressive, regressive, or just confused and confusing?
4. What is the point of claiming that “art = capital”? If Beuys is right, what changes? If
he’s wrong, why?
5. Does Beuys fit into one or more established art-historical categories (Dada, Fluxus,
Minimalism, etc.), or is he sui generis [one-of-a-kind]?
6. Discuss Beuys as an ‘eco-artist.’
7. What is Beuys’s ‘theory of sculpture,’ in what sense is it a ‘theory,’ and what (if
anything) is its value?
8. Discuss Beuys as the heir of German Romanticism and Idealism. (For the purposes of
this exam, we will declare Rudolf Steiner to be a Romantic and an Idealist.)
9. Is Beuys’s biography integral to his work, or incidental?
10. Discuss the film Queen of the Sun as a Beuysian eco-Action.
11. Write a 500-word introduction to Joseph Beuys for inclusion in an imaginary
textbook on modern art OR a history of postwar Germany.
12. Pose your own question regarding Beuys, and then answer it.
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