“Professor Barks into Microphone” was the headline in one local newspaper the day in 1967 after Joseph Beuys raucously welcomed new students to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, as he perversely performed his role of Professor of Monumental Sculpture. Dubbing this act ÖÖ-Programm, Beuys delivered an amped-up greeting of inarticulate grunts while wielding an ax during the Kunstakademie’s orientation session. Over the course of ten minutes, Beuys leveraged his pedagogical authority past the threshold of social acceptability, while also undermining that authority by rejecting any semblance of rationality. Thus, Beuys enacted contradictions of the modern artist and modern pedagogue: He embodied aggressive charisma while also teasing an anarchistic breakdown of institutional hierarchies—especially the overbearing tendencies of late-modern disciplinary systems within arts education.
Five years after Beuys gave his barking address, the Kunstakademie dismissed him from his position for unruly behavior—which included letting hundreds of unregistered students attend his classes for free, and then occupying university offices to demand their enrollment. Beuys’s antagonism towards official modes of higher education did not mean he was uninterested in teaching. On the contrary, he explicitly equated his role as an artist with that of a teacher throughout his later career. Since the mid-1960s, his public creative work had increasingly incorporated pedagogical elements; extensive classroom-style lecturing and discussions were fundamental to his art-based performances. Beuys frequently sketched concepts and drawings on chalkboards, which were often left as physical talismans in his gallery-based installations. (These blackboard drawings were inspired in part by Theosophist and pedagogue Rudolf Steiner, whose work and thinking heavily influenced Beuys.)
Classrooms are vulnerable to dogma, especially in higher education, where certain logics are presented authoritatively and forcefully to partially formed and potentially malleable minds. We might muse on the hubris of any individual who assumes the role of telling the rest of us how to think. As the critic and cultural theorist Jan Vertwoert notes about Beuys’s 1964 work Der Chef (The Boss), “This performance offers no answers. But it articulates the unresolved crux of a question that deeply concerns both art and politics: by virtue of what authority is it possible to embody a voice in the public and for the public?”1 The blank looks that students sometimes give teachers—or the baffled responses that contemporary art often evokes in viewers—remind us of the discrepancy between any idea’s conception and its differing receptions.
In an earlier, infamous 1965 performance, Beuys locked himself in a small Düsseldorf gallery, allowing onlookers to observe only from outside while he prowled the interior carrying a large dead hare, to which he murmured indecipherably. With his face slathered in gold leaf and honey, Beuys debuted one iteration of the shaman figure that he repeatedly put forward over the next two decades of his career. The title of that work—How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare—signals pedagogic intent, a theme Beuys crystallized further in the following decade when he cofounded the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (FIU) in 1973. FIU was one among several larger organizations that Beuys launched and/or cofounded as instruments of his oft-stated goal of crafting “social sculpture,” such as the German Students Party (1967), Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum (1974), and the German Green Party (1980). In the twelve years after its founding, FIU gatherings took countless forms at multiple sites.
Beuys demonstrated FIU’s proof of concept with particular intensity in 1977 at documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, spearheading more than a dozen workshops along with discussions, lectures, film screenings, and other “actions” over a hundred-day period. Beuys invited scores of participants while also enlisting any others who showed up and wanted to engage. These gatherings involved teachers, trade unionists, actors, economists, politicians, sociologists, and community workers who arrived from locations as far away as Borneo and Chile. Sessions included “Nuclear Power and its Alternatives,” “Community Self-Determination,” “Human Rights,” “Corporate Media and its Alternatives,” and “Mass Migration.” These topics were discussed among chalkboards and folding chairs that Beuys had brought to the Museum Fredericianum.
At the base of a nearby stairwell, Beuys also installed two large ship motors that pumped several hundred pounds of margarine and a couple tons of honey up to the museum’s ground floor and back via several hallways, employing a network of plastic tubing. The pumps operated for the duration of the exhibition. As Daniel Spaulding details in Joseph Beuys and History, published earlier this year, this installation—Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey Pump at the Workplace)—served as an allegorical core for Beuys’s FIU workshops, a physical manifestation of the generation and circulation of ideas and imagination as value creation, implicitly comparing the production of honey in a giant beehive with the collective human activity nearby. The connection of this machinery and its metaphorical conceptualization to the realm of knowledge production was explicit in Beuys’s thinking. From Spaulding’s account:
When Beuys invoked the motif of the circulation of honey … blackboards, diagrams, and verbal explanations were rarely far behind. The beehive needed people … It needed the artist himself, though without an engaged audience, too, a work such as Honigpumpe would have been incomplete … Here we see the concrete labor of pedagogy that Beuys’s art necessitated, or that was his art, to a large and increasing extent in the years after 1968. His activities became a kind of endless seminar.2
Back to that earlier pedagogical example of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare: Beuys didn’t simply hold and carry the hare; he reanimated it through a series of gestures, such as prompting it to raise a forefoot towards a drawing they faced together, as if the animal was itself pointing out some detail. Getting down on all fours, Beuys both emulated and helped stimulate the hare’s movement as he propelled it across the gallery’s floorboards, holding its floppy ears in his mouth.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right—the hare couldn’t, and didn’t, agree to this treatment. That’s true. Regarding the hare’s forced service, I’m reminded of a chef I met at an artist-residency dinner years back who relayed having once spent the night with a goat in its pen, in order to explain to the goat its impending slaughter, the benefit it would do for others, and how its death and consumption would bring them all together. As with Beuys’s activation of the corpse of a hare long past any point of consent—and modern education’s insistence on coercive methods and incontrovertible knowledge—attempting to persuade an other to participate in one’s own ideologies fulfills certain philosophical and physiological human goals but leaves ethical and pedagogical questions unresolved.
But there were instances in which Beuys’s hare appeared to move of its own accord. While being walked around the gallery, the hare’s head wobbled at times, as if attending to a specific facet of a drawing, even if that wobble was a reaction to Beuys’s own movements. Beuys the puppeteer also acted as a kind of marionette himself, awkwardly cocking his leg up at one point, as he and the hare paused together in front of a drawing. In this, perhaps, Beuys was aligning himself with the hare as similarly manipulated by ineluctable forces. But these movements also underscored the inherently performative nature of his work, even though Beuys feigned unawareness of the crowd of humans outside the gallery, who were unable to hear the too-low sounds of the guided tour and craned their necks to witness and grin and wonder at Beuys’s dance with life and death and meaning.
When the hare’s body responded to the artist’s movements—such as when its head jerked, its gaze apparently captured by a particular drawing—it seemed that Beuys’s reanimation project had succeeded. In such moments the hare appeared to assume the role of co-teacher—or co-learner. As with Beuys’s macabre squiring of the hare, weird and awkward dynamics abounded in his classrooms, where he himself became a figure manipulated by the structuring of events he only partially initiated and even less controlled. Such dynamics are perhaps inherent to classrooms, where students and teachers, often strangers to each other, converge in startling intimacy, and much thinking out loud leads to unexpected conclusions. The hare’s surges of activity recall a couple of instances from my own teaching career—unexpected, unruly turns that nearly reached similarly uncanny, mutually surprising outcomes.
One summer years ago, when I was a graduate student, I had the opportunity to teach a seminar at Columbia University on a topic of my choosing—in this case, “Anthropologies of Sound”—with just two students. As I tried to discuss case studies and critical theory with them, the students, though seemingly good listeners, eventually took over large swathes of class time with their own lines of inquiry. They came alive in divergent ways I could not have imagined, not always drawing connections with course themes and often leaning on their own experiences of, for example, the supernatural animism of living spirits in Japan, or being brutalized by Albanian governmental authorities (as one student gleefully insisted on demonstrating, despite my repeated protests, by lifting his shirt to reveal his knife scars—without discernible relation to the themes of the seminar). The woolier aspects of the necessary and desirable give-and-take in college seminars is always in tension—a constantly renegotiated unsettlement that Beuys deliberately pursued both in the classroom and in art galleries, undermining his own power even while he exercised it.
I experienced a more frictional example of unpredictable animism in classrooms during a recent teaching stint at a California university. A graduate student from another department, assigned as my teaching assistant, initially declined to lead a class session himself. However, he resurrected that possibility after becoming incensed by “mystical” elements in an invited artist’s presentation. The TA asserted that such rhetoric could potentially lead to fascism (his field of study). So enlivened did he become by this idea that he lobbied throughout the semester to be permitted to warn students of the dangers of mysticism as a gateway to fascism—a logical fallacy from my reckoning, given not only the triviality of this particular instance of “mysticism,” but also given the larger course of history. Though an interest in mysticism has been part of fascist movements, most mystical dabbling throughout history has evinced no ambition toward mass political engagement.
Interestingly, the TA was unbothered by our class focus on Beuys—who has been accused by more than one critic of fascistic tendencies in positioning himself as a singular figure while promoting cult-like mythologies. At the peak of the disagreement between us—I feared that the TA’s interventions were more liable to confuse, rather than enlighten the group of mostly first-year art history students—I wondered aloud if perhaps all art is potentially fascistic, since the creation of myths to bend others’ thinking is foundational to the enterprise of artistic fabrication.
In both these cases, class participants were stirred by something that couldn’t be contained: a live current from their own histories, a conviction so strong it jolted them into action. These surges were not unlike that of the dead hare catching sight of a drawing it may have wished to discuss, triggered by the congeries of whatever a teacher-facilitator might have brought into play. That animacy is, perhaps, what classrooms are meant to catalyze—and what makes them unsettlingly ungovernable yet potentially generative.
Such classroom exchanges prompt questions about the content, goals, and methodologies of teaching. Where does “knowledge” come from? How does learning best happen? And what is knowledge even for? Beyond acquiring the most utilitarian vocational skills or certifications, how should students learn to think beyond the bells and dog whistles that control students’ movements from one classroom, one subject, one authority to the next, in an endless series?
Beuys’s Honigpumpe, the cornerstone of that early convening of the Free International University at documenta 6, staked a claim not simply by promoting an alternative model of knowledge production for its own sake but by proposing the remaking of society at large as a collective undertaking. This was one iteration of Beuys’s greater idea of social sculpture—that is, the formation of new models of society through the matériel of the social. With that hulking, noisy presence of the Honigpumpe mechanism, Beuys made palpable—even threatening, overwhelming—the apparatus of education. By installing an unavoidable physical contraption in the midst of so much human activity, Beuys revealed the uncertain basis of cultural exchange, caught up in obscure and occult human-designed systems, while also always allowing the alternatives of opting in—or out.
The coursing honey and margarine in Honigpumpe and the machinery of the pumping mechanism itself served as especially resonant materials in Beuys’s developing mythology. Despite their hermetic containment inside the artist’s elaborate tubing, they were also reportedly perceptible to attendees’ senses. Beuys put forward the cybernetic apparatus and its circulation of organic materials as a metaphor for the flows and exchange of knowledge. Honigpumpe was built to surround, inform, and rely on human cogitation and participation in order to charge its signifying circuits. In Beuys’s words: “The whole thing is only complete with people in the space round which the honey artery flows.”3
Despite Beuys’s long flirtation with charismatic authoritarianism, his elevation to the status of star artist, and the hurly-burly of many of his action events, he frequently challenged others to reshape the environments he outlined. If, as in Beuys’s idealized social-sculptural outcome, “everyone is an artist”—that is, the creativity latent in every human just needs the right prompts to reach fruition—perhaps everyone is a potential teacher too. Inherent in Beuys’s liberatory, unorthodox, utopian vision for alternative education outside existing sclerotic institutions is the notion that a hundred or a thousand free universities might bloom in different contexts and different times.
Indeed, Beuys fulfilled the FIU concept dozens of times before his death in 1986. In addition to a second documenta mobilization in 1982 (in the guise of his massive social ecology project 7000 Oaks), Beuys organized manifestations under the FIU banner at the London Battersea Arts Centre (1978), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1979), and multiple editions of the Edinburgh Festival (1974, 1976, 1980). Beuys’s students also initiated offshoots of the FIU and his social-sculpture concept, which the artist often provided material support for; scores of other events over the ensuing years were inspired explicitly or implicitly by Beuys’s FIU example.4 Eyal Weizman, the founder of the research group Forensic Architecture, referenced his interest in generating a “political plastic (after Joseph Beuys) … a kind of viscous medium in which forces and structures, global flows, forms, and trajectories create a world that undergoes a constant process of formation.”5
FIU’s ambitions for total social transformation may have been lofty, but its potent model of art’s potential did—if only occasionally—lift human encounters beyond the mundane into the realm of the extraordinary. It’s easy to downgrade Beuys’s attempts with critiques of superficiality, obsolete and overburdened symbolism, messianism, and cultish behavior. Nevertheless, FIU’s attempts to not only propose but enact alternatives to failed cultural systems speak louder than do multitudes of well-intentioned theoretical critiques from the sidelines.
In an era when even practical real-world outcomes of higher education are questionable (and ideological constrictions, administrative bloat, and tuition expenses have made the sunk costs of formalized education even more debatable), the cultishness of such enterprises seems more inclined toward a zero-sum death cult that is late-modern capitalism. If any classroom—or art gallery—becomes a venue for cultish behavior, the presentation of radical, if at times outlandish, alternatives (barking like a dog as an opening salvo against hyper-rationalism and pretension, murmuring to a dead animal, inviting hundreds or thousands of participants into the churning pumps of a metaphorical knowledge machine to reinvent society itself), then perhaps it’s just a matter of choosing sides—or the sidelines. Whose cult do you want to be part of, or not; which cult do you want to start? And what opens the obscure, mystical, and restrictive-seeming “cult” into the more inclusive “culture” that might suggest a collective way out of the darker traps of knowledge production?
Jan Verwoert, “The Boss: On the Unresolved Question of Authority in Joseph Beuys’ Oeuvre and Public Image,” e-flux journal, no. 1 (2008).
Daniel Spaulding, Beuys and History (Princeton University Press, 2026), 91, emphasis in original.
Quoted in Caroline Tisdall, “Station 24: Honey Pump,” in Joseph Beuys (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979), 254.
For links to numerous alternative schools past and present, initiated under the banner of Beuys’s hundredth birthday, see →.
Eyal Weizman in conversation with Lucy Lopez, “Political Plastic,” in Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh (MIT Press and BAK, 2017).
