Abstract

Beginning with the meeting between Joseph Beuys and representatives of the American Women’s Liberation Movement, the article compares their respective political and aesthetic practices. Against the backdrop of an increased appeal to the politicity of art and the celebration of Joseph Beuys as one of its great pioneers, the text argues that Beuys’s notion of democracy and his attempts to form a social movement were far less radical and plastic (in his own sense) than those of the feminists and highlights various areas in which the feminist movement was politically and aesthetically effective and innovative. Beuys’s social sculpture, the thesis goes, unfolds its stronger political effect where it does not act politically, but artistically.