Joseph Beuys

If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren’t very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it.

This quote by Joseph Beuys resonated with me a lot in terms of summing up his whole career. As a performance artist he strove to bring art to people in its primal stages and have them explore it for themselves .

 I particularly liked his decontextualization of this where we can sort of lend interpretation to a couple different things. First we can say that a bad source can contaminate an idea. Second we can say that lemon is a lemon... so if your idea is a lemon its not going to be a good idea.
 Beuys seemed to be a pretty deep guy, saying that being a teacher was one of the best things he had done as an individual. Beuys also seemed to have an Andy Warhol esque likeness but to me I think Beuys was a little deeper than Warhol. That took a lot for me to admit because I am a HUGE fan of Warhol's pop art, owning 3 bags about Warhol's art.