Daniel Spaulding: Joseph Beuys in 1977

Date: June 24, 2026
Time: 6.15 pm
Venue: Lecture Hall, Kunsthochschule Kassel

In the fall of 1977, Joseph Beuys participated in both documenta 6 in Kassel and the first edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster. At documenta, he installed a “honey pump” (titled Honey Pump at the Workplace), which circulated honey through plastic tubes that ran through the halls of the Fridericianum, the 18th-century building that serves as the exhibition’s main venue. He also organized a series of panel discussions and seminars as part of his Free International University (FIU). For the Skulptur Projekte, Beuys contributed a large-scale sculpture titled Unschlitt/Tallow, consisting of six massive blocks of a waxy substance and installed in the atrium of the Westfälisches Landesmuseum (today the LWL Museum of Art and Culture).

These two works were among the largest and conceptually most complex that the artist had attempted to realize up to that point, and marked a decisive transition into the public sphere, occurring precisely at a moment of significant crisis in the political history of the Federal Republic.

The lecture explores the multifaceted metaphors of biological, economic, and social systems embedded in these two works, with a particular focus on the motif of circulation in Honigpumpe. Going beyond a mere repetition of the iconographic meanings that Beuys himself suggested for these artworks, Daniel Spaulding will attempt to analyze Beuys’s metaphorical structure both as a symptom of the contradictions of this historical moment and as a proposal for its transformation.

Daniel Spaulding is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a co-founder and editor of the art history journal Selva.

The lecture will be held in German.