In 1974, Joseph Beuys locks himself in a New York gallery for three days with a wild coyote.
No audience, no performance in the spectacular sense… just a man, a felt blanket, a cane, copies of the Wall Street Journal delivered every morning, and an animal that doesn’t trust him. Gradually, over the hours, the coyote comes closer. Sniffs. Accepts. The action is called “I Like America and America Likes Me”. What happens in that gallery is not demonstrable, not reproducible, not really describable. It’s a negotiation. Between a civilization and what it has destroyed. Between a man and what he doesn’t yet understand.
Beuys is unclassifiable. Sculptor, performer, teacher, political agitator, self-proclaimed shaman… he refuses all categories and ends up inventing a new one: social sculpture. The idea is simple and radical at once. Society as a whole can become a work of art. Every collective decision, every conversation, every act of teaching is a sculptural material. Art doesn’t stop at the walls of a gallery… it begins where life begins.
His phrase, “Jeder Mensch ist ein Kunstler”, every human being is an artist, is often misunderstood. It’s interpreted as a naive declaration, a weak encouragement toward creativity for all. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s a demand. Beuys is not saying that everyone makes art… he’s saying that everyone is capable of it, and that not exercising this capacity is a form of renunciation. Of oneself. Of society. Of life.
He spent years teaching in Dusseldorf, in a classroom open to all, with no selection, no entrance exam. Hundreds of students, discussions lasting hours, a pedagogy of dialogue and provocation. He planted 7,000 oaks in Kassel for documenta in 1982, one oak for each basalt stone placed in front of the museum… a gesture that would last years, well beyond the exhibition. The work continues without him. That’s intentional.
What Beuys brings to OuViePo is fundamental. Not just his founding phrase, not just the formal inspiration of his actions… but an entire philosophy of creation as an act of life. The idea that creating is not reserved for those with talent, training or institutional legitimacy. That the ordinary gesture, performed with intention, with awareness, with a protocol however minimal… can become something.
Every OuViePo constraint is, in its own way, a practical application of Beuys’ social sculpture. Not in museums, not in galleries… in the streets, in apartments, in bodies, in relationships. Where life actually happens.
He died in 1986. The 7,000 oaks of Kassel are still growing.