Man As His Own Creator

Dürer and Beuys – or the affirmation of creativity

Peter Klaus Schuster

1. An expanded concept of art

The Joseph Beuys – or so it seemed – Albrecht Dürer was not a terribly important object of reflection or source of artistic productivity. The work produced during document five in 1972 is known though. This connects Dürer with felt slippers, thereby ironically making him the respect demanding patron of a museum culture Beuys with his expanded concept of art would very much like to radically open up to life. For Beuys the museum is an interdisciplinary place of learning for developing the foundations for establishment of a more humanly creative existence open to every individual. ‘Art must not be viewed as a luxury. Art is only what it should be when it receives expression in everything becomes a part of life.’
Four Beuys, ‘Leonardo da Vinci is the artist who characterises how one attains a bourgeois concept of science. That was the very concept of science with which the bourgeoisie made their revolution. It all started with Leonardo, who is the artist best representing that trend as Galilei is the most influential scientist.’
As Beuys saw it though, such self empowerment on the part of the natural sciences at the same time resulted in the decisive impoverishment of the man. Since then only what can be expressed in terms of mathematics, has been taken into account by the sciences. Beuys believed that man lost his sense of the unity of the whole is the positivistic sciences when their triumphant way.
In Beuys view, art must regain that function since he believes that only art can again reactivate all of man senses in the face of the exclusive addict at of rationality. All of Beuys’ artistic actions and provocations were thus directed towards regenerating man’s creativity, submerged beneath constant use of reason. Beuys hoped that the man whose creativity was thus revitalised would also develop a less reified relationship with nature. He would then no longer comprehend himself as an individual form of existence, disciplined and reduced by learned skills, but rather as a creative element within an all embracing organism or – viewed in terms of Renaissance ideas about nature – as a microcosm of a universal macrocosm
2. Twilight of the Renaissance

Beuys’ critical acknowledgement of the Renaissance is a splendid beginning of the sad end by no means stands alone. That is in fact a fairly familiar view among both bourgeois liberal and conservative historians
Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment thus contains declarations – which occurred in very similar form with Beuys just a little later – that rational thinking might have liberated man from myths but then, ever since Galilei at the latest, once again subjected him to the myth of rationality, robbing him of his humanity. Literary scholar Walter Rheim also wrote in 1947 of a man in the scientific and technological age having self-assuredly set himself at the centre of the cosmos since the Renaissance. Ever since the French Revolution man has paid for the heinous act such self advancement and for the hubris of his experimentum medietatis with corresponding melancholic burnings of his psyche. ‘In our state of existential need this science has nothing to say to us.’ (Husserl)
Beuys could also be called one of the first dropouts as someone who bailed out before reconstruction really got going. After turning away from the natural sciences, Beuys radically devoted himself from 1958 to saving man throughout instead of self-realisation and thus the threat of self deconstruction through science and technology.

3 everyone is an artist

Beuys there followed directly on from Renaissance self comprehension. Renaissance – as depicted by Dürer in his celebrated Munich self-portrait of 1500 – signifies the re-establishment of man’s original divine likeness by virtue of his creative talents. The Renaissance consciousness, presented by Dürer in the strikingly Christ-like figures of this self-portrait with the re-establishment of man in God’s image, did not involve any elements of wanton hubris for the humanists. In fact they had not the least doubt that it was everyone’s God-given task to use the talents with which they have been endowed in such a way that they once again became God’s image.
In Pico della Mirandola’s celebrated (and never delivered) 1486 speech ‘On Human Dignity’, this humanistic credo was unmistakably expressed in God’s words to Adam: ‘we have not given me any lasting domicile, any face of my own, any special talent, oh Adam, so that now might just be able to choose, in accordance with free will and discretion, the domicile, face, and talent are wishes to have an possess. With dye free will to which I have entrusted the, thou canst thyself determine than own nature as thou willst. Neither heavenly and earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, have we may be. As I known free and honourable creator and shaper thou shalt fashion thyself howsoever well pleasest. Thou canst descend to the animals or rise to the heights, transforming thyself back into the divine – as thou willst.’
The humanistic view is therefore that everyone is his or her own creator. Pico characterised man as being ‘plastes et fictor’, the shaper and make of himself. A few later humanistic tracks make use of even clearer artistic metaphors referring to every human being as sui optimus artifex. With his christomorphic Munich self-portrait, the start of the new century in the very centre point of the millennium, Dürer dear to such humanistic ideas of creative man founded on free will. In the pictures inscription, Dürer thus expressly stresses that he “created“ himself in lasting colours in his 28th year (Ipsum me propiis sic effingebam coloribus).
The alignment with Christ and the striving to attain God’s image with us will Dürer two, the outcome of the creative effort involving his entire person art does not merely entail the special talent of the gifted hand, which Dürer deliberately included in the picture. Even Fedora as a humanist, art rather signify that every human being has the possibility of making of himself or herself what he or she will. Everyone can and should grow closer to the divine wisdom in Christ to write use of his or her spirit. For Dürer then – and not just with Beuys – humanistic conviction viewed every person as an artist since man, as a creative being with freedom of will, can – as Dürer showed – once again become God’s image through deployment of his or her own powers.

4. Renaissance and revolution

Dürer’s idealised self-portrait in the Alte Pinakothek and Beuys’ affecting self depiction “la rivoluzione Noi“ are therefore by no means so different. “We are the revolution“ refers back to the celebrated 1968 slogan of “power to the imagination“, and with Beuys that is an affirmation of individual creativity as a transforming revolutionary power. Without affirmation Beuys confronts us in the stage photograph as a model in the role of artist is demanded of all of us the same is true of Dürer’s christmorphic self-portrait. There, too, the artist provides exemplary demonstration by way of himself that creative power over which we all dispose and which we should utilise following him. The creative powers extolled by Beuys as being revolutionary are thus also those which would Dürer, the humanist, make possible the Renaissance, the rebirth of any individual. Beuys’ slogan ‘everyone is an artist’ was thus radicalised as early as Dürer to provide the insight that a person is only a real human being if he or she is an artist. This appealed to human beings as artists, which unite to such dissimilar self-portrait by artists, was for both Beuys and Dürer the only possibility of ‘doing something for people’. Following the humanistic tradition Beuys pro claimed ‘make use of the power you have through the right to self-determination… The basic principle is that people should make use of their powers individuals is free creative human beings’. The degree to which such creativity was determined for Dürer by a mathematically orientated use of reason is shown in the Canon of ideal proportions underlying his Christ-like portrait. Dürer’s writings on art theory states: ‘the ability to create something good. We thereby come closer to the image of God which is capable of all things’. And yet Dürer went considerably further than Leonardo in conceding that not even mathematics is capable of providing ultimate certainties but is only a means in constant need of improvement. Since both God and his creation were infinite for Dürer, they, like the idea of beauty, elude any exact measurement. For Dürer such knowledge was the prerogative of God and a few chosen ones who had participated in divine inspiration to an exceptional extent. The conjunction of rationality and inspiration, which was Beuys’ great objective, was first represented in Renaissance art and the person of Dürer.
Dürer also reviewed his artistic activity in terms of Christ’s spreading faith on earth. ‘I wish to light a small fire so that a great blaze may in time develop giving light to the whole world’. We are the revolution. That is the quintessence of an astonishing theology of art and artists, aiming at the rebirth of every single human being and extending with surprising constancy from Dürer to Beuys.

Peter Klaus Schuster – In Memoriam Joseph Beuys
Man As His Own Creator
Dürer and Beuys – or the affirmation of creativity. Edited from original

(The juxtaposition of contemporary artists with great names from the past is a deliberate ploy of apologists and curators to make one think of the contemporary artist as part of art history. That decision will always lie in the decisions of future generations. Ed.)