Thinking is sculpture (a plastic, forming process), everything is sculpture: This radical way in which Joseph Beuys' presented the principle of sculpture, provoking a focus on concrete social and political conditions, is without any doubt unique.

It is nevertheless important to see this in the context of the thinking about ‘sculpture' at the beginning of the 20th century. Piet Mondrian, for example, wrote in his programmatic essay about ‘Neoplasticism' that "sculpture is a synonym for what happens in the evolutionary process. It is art as a plastic process that makes manifest the evolution of life."

Behind these words one can sense the desire for indivisible being;  a desire for being freed from the disillusionment of our ephemeral life that also motivated artists such as Malevitch, Scriabin, Kandinsky and Yves Klein.

In this sense ‘social sculpture' stands for both the connection of things in their evolutionary relationships to each other and refers at the same time to parallel-processes in the material and non-material world that we are challenged to decode and synthesize.

Text: Walter Kugler   Translation: Shelley Sacks