Joseph Beuys is a fascinating and complex artist rapidly receding into the mist of obscurity. With it's soft coherence and lack of focus this documentary will sadly do little to help. Beuys is an artist revered by past generations of artists - he's given glowing mention in the recent autobiography of Marina Abramovic for instance. And, from the little that is shown of his work in this film like his powerful performance piece 'I Like America and America Likes Me', it is easy to see why. It's sad then that little of his art gets the same kind of treatment and that a seemingly endless passage is devoted to his political life, which we are invited to view as a failure despite because the party of which he was one of the co-founders did not ultimately select him to stand for election. How can this be viewed as a failure in a country which has probably the most powerful green lobby anywhere in the world? The way his war myth is treated is deeply unsatisfying and leaves so many questions.
Ultimately I regret that the makers of this documentary missed the opportunity to focus on Beuys the artist the way so many contemporary documentaries (Burden, Gerhardt Richter Painting, Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry) are.
Review of Beuys
