Mystical experience and hallucination in the work of Joseph Beuys

Abstract

This essay aims to present mystical and dissident aspects of the subjectivity of the artist Joseph Beuys, as well as the influence of these aspects on his work. Alongside the description of actions such as the Siberian Symphony and The Chief, the article will examine the relationship between Beuys's expressions and Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, Jakob Böhme's theology, and Emanuel Swedenborg's mystical experiences. Beuys's first actions emerged linked to the anti-art and counterculture demonstrations of the Fluxus group, but from the beginning, they were strongly different from these, both due to the artist's own conceptions of anti-art and counterculture, and due to his inspiration in key personal experiences and mystical theories. After describing Beuys's actions, the artist's relationship with the theory of the threefold division of the social organism and Steiner's collateral meditative exercises will be analyzed. Next, we observe the correspondence between Beuys' ecological thought and the concept of nature in German Romanticism and in Böhme's theology. A comparative analysis between the mystical experiences of Beuys and Swedenborg concludes this study. This will enable us to understand Beuys' confrontations with scientific rationalism and cultural materialism, as well as the possible psychoanalytic hypotheses of his mysticism. The image of the artist's personality, articulated with his mystical conceptions, his psychic hallucinations and his artistic expression, shows, in this case, a mode of relationship between dissident subjectivity and counterculture in the field of art history in the second half of the 20th century.