Joseph Beuys–Manresa – A Spiritual Geography

The first performances by Joseph Beuys were a radical turning point for twentieth-century art. Beuys saw art as a transformative action that is both personal and communal, and his expanded artistic practice engaged spirituality, personal mythology, political structures, and symbolic materials. For Manresa, one of his legendary performance actions, which took place on December 15, 1966 in Düsseldorf, he collaborated with the Danish artists Henning Christiansen and Björn Nörgaard. In 1994, those two artists performed a new version of the piece as Manresa Hauptbahnhof. The performance was carried out in Manresa, the city that both gave the name to the original action and also was where Saint Ignatius Loyola had the revelations that led him to write his Spiritual Exercises, which Beuys considered essential reading.

This book, marking the centenary of the artist’s birth, presents never-before-seen materials from the two performances, including texts, images, scripts, and preparatory drawings, and contributions from scholars and critics offer further insight. Friedhelm Mennekes, an art critic and Jesuit priest, analyses the Ignatian imprint in Beuys’s work while explaining its spiritual complexity, looking beyond the popular vision of the artist as shaman.

Pilar Parcerisas examines Beuys’s spiritual geography, explaining the importance of the town of Manresa within it while also laying out the physical and mystical coordinates of Eurasia, a site that was always present in Beuys’s work. While reviewing the features of Manresa, Klaus-D. Pohl also addresses the paradoxical union between Beuys’s mysticism and the neo-Dadaists of Fluxus. Beuys’s collaborator Björn Nörgaard recalls his time working with the German artist and reflects on the paths he opened up. Finally, art historian Harald Szeemann considers the possibility of liberating politics through spirituality.