Politicians From Germany

"The force of circumstances... is stronger than even the strongest government: the language and customs of the Latin people immediately shared (with Rome) its ascendancy in Italy, and already began to undermine the other Italian Nationalities."

"In Etruria.. the nation stagnated and decayed in political helplessness and indolent opulence, a theological monopoly in the hands of the nobility, stupid fatalism, wild and meaningless mysticism, the arts of soothsaying and mendicant priestcraft gradually developed themselves, till they reached the height at which we afterwards find them."

"The earliest achievement of this (of equality and the restriction on the powers of the constitutionally mandated magistrates), the most ancient opposition in Rome, consisted in the abolition of the life-tenure of the presidency of the community; in other words, in the abolition of the monarchy... Not only in Rome (but all over the Italian peninsula) ... we find the rulers for life of an earlier epoch superseded in after times by annual magistrates. In this light the reasons which led to the substitution of the consuls for kings in Rome need no explanation. The organism of the ancient Greek and Italian polity through its own action and by a sort of natural necessity produced the limitation of the life-presidency to a shortened, and for the most part an annual, term... Simple, however, as was the cause of the change, it might be brought about in various ways, resolution (of the community),.. or the rule might voluntarily abdicate; or the people might rise in rebellion against a tyrannical ruler, and expel him. It was in this latter way that the monarchy was terminated in Rome. For however much the history of the expulsion of the last Tarquinius, "the proud", may have been interwoven with anecdotes and spun out into a romance, it is not in its leading outlines to be called in question. Tradition credibly enough indicates as the causes of the revolt, that the king neglected to consult the senate and to complete its numbers; that he pronounced sentences of capital punishment and confiscation without advising with his counsellors(sic); that he accumulated immense stores of grain in his granaries, and exacted from the burgesses military labours and task-work beyond what was due... we are (in light of the ignorance of historical facts around the abolition of the monarchy) fortunately in possession of a clearer light as to the nature of the change which was made in the constitution (after the expulsion of the monarchy). The royal power was by no means abolished, as is shown by the fact that, when a vacancy occurred, a "temporary king" (Interrex) was nominated as before. The one life-king was simply replaced by two [one year] kings, who called themselves generals (praetores), or judges..., or merely colleagues (Consuls) [literally, "Those who leap or dance together"]. The collegiate principle, from which this last - and subsequently most current - name of the annual kings was derived, assumed in their case an altogether peculiar form. The supreme power was not entrusted to the two magistrates conjointly, but each consul possessed and exercised it for himself as fully and wholly as it had been possessed and exercised by the king; and, although a partition of functions doubtless took place from the first - the one consul for instance undertaking the command of the army, and the other the administration of justice - that partition was by no means binding, and each of the colleagues was legally at liberty to interfere at any time in the province of the other."

"After Rome had acquired the undisputed mastery of the world, the Greeks were wont to annoy their Roman masters by the assertion, that Rome was indebted for her greatness to the fever, of which Alexander of Macedon died at Babylon on the 11th of June, 323. As it was not very agreeable for them to reflect on the actual past, they were fond of allowing their thoughts to dwell on what might have happened, had the great king turned his arms towards the west, and contested the Carthaginian supremacy by sea with his fleet, and the Roman supremacy by land with his phalanxes. It is not impossible that Alexander may have cherished such thoughts; nor is it necessary to resort for such an explanation of their origin to the mere difficulty which an autocrat provided with soldiers and ships experiences in setting limits to his warlike career. It was an enterprise worthy of a great Greek king to protect the siceliots against Carthage and the Tarentines against Rome.. and the Italian embassies from the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Etruscans, that long with numerous others made their appearance at Babylon, afforded him sufficient opportunities of becoming acquainted with the circumstances of the peninsula, and of contracting relations with it. Carthage with is many connections in the east could not but attract the attention of the mighty monarch, and it was probably part of his design to convert the nominal sovereignty of the Persian king over the Tyrian colony into a real one: the apprehensions of the Carthaginians are shown by the Phoenician spy in the suite of Alexander. Whether, however, those ideas were dreams or actual projects, the king died without having interfered in the affairs of the west, and his ideas were buried with him. For a few brief years a Grecian ruler had held in his hands the whole intellectual vigour of the Hellenic race combined with the whole material resources of the east. On his death the work to which his life had been devoted - the establishment of a Hellenism in the east - was by no means undone; but his empire had barely been united when it was again dismembered, and, admidst the constant quarrels of the different states that were formed out of its ruins, the object of world-wide interest which they were destined to promote - the diffusion of Greek culture in the east - though not abandoned, was prosecuted on a feeble and stunted scale."

"..any revolution or any usurpation is justified before the bar of history by the exclusive ability govern, even its rigorous judgement must acknowledge that the corporation duly comprehended and worthily fulfilled its great task."

"The strict conception of the unity and omnipotence of the state in all matters pertaining to it, which was the central principle of the Italian constitutions, placed in the hands of the single president nominated for life a formidable power, which was felt doubtless by the enemies of the land, but was not less heavily felt by its citizens. Abuse and oppression could not fail to ensue, and, as a necessary consequence, efforts were made to lessen that power. It was, however, the grand distinction of the endeavours after reform and the revolutions in Rome, that there was no attempt either to impose limitations on the community as such or even to deprive it of corresponding organs of expression—that there never was any endeavour to assert the so-called natural rights of the individual in contradistinction to the community—that, on the contrary, the attack was wholly directed against the form in which the community was represented. From the times of the Tarquins down to those of the Gracchi the cry of the party of progress in Rome was not for limitation of the power of the state, but for limitation of the power of the magistrates: nor amidst that cry was the truth ever forgotten, that the people ought not to govern, but to be governed."

"Der ewige Friede ist ein Traum, und nicht einmal ein schöner, und der Krieg ist ein Glied in Gottes Weltordnung. In ihm entfalten sich die edelsten Tugenden des Menschen, Mut und Entsagung, Pflichttreue und Opferwilligkeit mit Einsetzung des Lebens. Ohne den Krieg würde die Welt im Materialismus versumpfen."

"Strategy is a system of expedients; it is more than a mere scholarly discipline. It is the translation of knowledge to practical life, the improvement of the original leading thought in accordance with continually changing situations."

"The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: "I have never had a plan of operations." Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."

"Helmuth von Moltke was born in 1800, technically the last year of the 18th century. [...] There's a wonderful irony here: Moltke's nickname was 'der große Schweiger' (the great silent one), because he had a reputation for speaking very little; and yet, of all the hundreds of millions of people born in the 18th century, his is the only voice we can hear today."

"Der euch gewappnet und gewehrt, Bedenkt, die ihr ihm naht: Es stuetzt der Friede sich auf`s Schwert, im Schweigen waechst die Tat."

"The Jews form a state, and, obeying their own laws, they evade those of their host country. The Jews always consider an oath regarding a Christian not binding. During the Campaign of 1812 the Jews were spies, they were paid by both sides, they betrayed both sides."

"We may add that the Poland of the fifteenth century was one of the most civilised states of Europe."

"He [the Dalai Lama] asked me for my participation and I rejected the plan to make a kind of sculpture there in this old way, to make in a kind of special place this special modern sculpture. I told him that my idea would be this time to plant seven thousand oaks in Kassel, seven thousand trees. And to mark every tree with a little stone, so that everybody after three, two, five or six hundred years can still see that in 1982 there was an activity. After the radical destruction of the forests here in Germany for all this technological nonsense, that there was an impulse that came in the same time, to plant seven thousand oaks. This is such a kind of activity during the Documenta [in Kassel] , that has to do with the 'Documenta', but is a real other thing in the conventional understanding of art."

"The Fluxus movement.. ..developed its 'anti-art', anti-commercial aesthetics under the leadership of George Maciunas. Fluxus staged a series of festivals in Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London and New York, with avantgarde performances often spilling out into the street. Most of the experimental artists of the period, including Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and w:Nam June PaikNam June Paik, took part in Fluxus events. The movement, which still continues, played an important role in the opening up of definitions of what art can be."

"Once again the lack of a convenient language makes for the creation of a series of separate versions or myths, and it is this difficulty of precise description or discussion that leads to the 'Beuys cult'. His actions do have the quality of myths, the same invisible logic as a myth and one must, I think, accept the performance as it stands rather than inquiry into its origins."

"Considering that Beuys was born in a small German town called Kleve and I was born in another small German town called Bad Oldesloe, I believe that even an airport can be an inspiring place for an artist."

"Unlike his European peers from the late 1950's — Piero Manzoni, Arnian, or even Yves Klein — Beuys does not change the state of the object with the discourse itself. Quite to the contrary, he dilutes and dissolves the conceptual precision of Marcel Duchamp's readymade by reintegrating the object into the most traditional context of literary and referential representation: this object stands for that idea, and that idea is represented in this object."

"Beuys complained that the [art] teachers didn't exhibit [during the winter semester's Open Week, 1964] any of their own works. He then brought along an old kitchen chair and a large quantity of margarine and patted the margarine on the seat of the chair with a wooden paddle so that it sloped like a wedge. We [students of Düsseldorf Art Academy, 1964] saw nothing unusual in this and none of us realized that we had before us a incunabulum of art. At that time Beuys had told us nothing about his 'energy-concept' or the like. We simply considered the making of this 'Fat Chair' to be a rather unspectacular action."

"The milieu in which creativity can be developed is principally the field of culture, and Beuys starts his sociopolitical program in the area of culture, in order to develop from this special angle the concept of equality as well as of democracy and socialism as a genetic process. The intellectual life, which education must should be structured, stands most definitely at the beginning of this evolutionary process of development. Next to it is equality as the democratic principle of law, meaning concrete socialism and fraternity in relation to the economic area. Within these three areas there is no qualitative ranking system. The primary necessity in Beuys' concept of direct democracy is freedom, meaning that every man should be able to completely realize his liberty, for example, his right to a free and equal unfolding of his personality, as is firmly established as a fundamental law in the organization's statutes."

"I mean artists like Joseph Beuys, who is really a tough, strong artist. B E U Y S. He's been working in Germany for years. He doesn't bother with the burden of ideas. What he desires to do is fill your house with margarine. Let you live encased in fat, die encased in fat. He would take three hundred pounds of margarine and put it exactly where Pat Kelly is now, and then leave it there. That's sort of the tenor of his work."

"People are very shortsighted when they argue that way, when they say: Beuys makes everything with felt, so he's trying to say something about the concentration camps [of the German Nazi regime]. Nobody bothers to ask whether I might not be more interested in evoking a very colorful world as an anti-image inside people with the help of this element, felt. So it's a matter of evoking a lucid world, a clear, lucid, perhaps transcendentally spiritual world through something which looks quite different, through an anti-image."

"He [ Marcel Duchamp ] entered this object [the 'Urinal' ready-made] into the museum and noticed that its transportation from one place to another made it into art. But he failed to draw the clear and simple conclusion that every man is an artist."

"This is precisely what the shaman does in order to bring about change and development: his nature is therapeutic."

"My intention: healthy chaos, healthy amorphousness in a known medium which consciously warmed a cold, torpid form from the past, a convention of society, and which makes possible future forms."

"I think he [ Andy Warhol ] would be very interested in the moment that the Dalai Lama appears, being involved in such a kind of idea. Andy has always difficulties with this kind of political activities, because he works in another kind of world, but he is always.. .Also when he was here [in Germany] last week, he is very interested to hear a lot of new information. He has a kind of observing sense in the back of his mind. So, he is always interested to follow the development, and there is really a kind of imaginative process going on, I think."

"Directly after the interviews his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet had given me [Louwrien Wijers] in Dharamsala, I enthusiastically informed Joseph Beuys how struck I was by the similarity in the viewpoint of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the ideas that he himself had been working towards in his 'Social Sculpture' for the last fifteen years. I was able to come to this conclusion because my questions in the first interview with his Holiness had for a large part been inspired by the subjects Joseph Beuys had put to discussion first through his 'Organisation for a Direct Democracy', and then through his 'Free international University,' the ecological 'Green movement' and the political party 'The Greens'. The immediate reply from Joseph Beuys to my remark was that 'he would very much want to set up a permanent co-operation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama'."

"But I saw the relationship between people, I saw their thoughts, I saw their kind of expressionistic behavior in every difficult situation. I saw all the time the unclearness in the psychological condition of the people. You know, that was the time called the 'Roaring Twenties' and I felt that this expressionistic behavior, this unformed quality of soul power and emotion of life.. .I saw it, that it would lead to a kind of catastrophe. That was my general feeling."

"I had the feeling that another kind of life -- perhaps in a transcendental area -- would give me a better possibility to influence, or to work, or to act within this contradiction. So, this was my general feeling: on the one side, this beautiful undamaged nature form which I took a lot and had a lot of possibilities for contemplation, meditation, research, collecting things, making a kind of system; and on the other side, this social debacle that I felt already as a coming dilemma."

"In discussing his work [the art of Marcel Duchamp, ] it is necessary to avoid overrating his silence. I hold him in a very high esteem, but I have to reject his silence. Duchamp was simply finished. He had run out of ideas; he was unable to come up with anything important.. .I would say that even the bourgeois tendencies in Duchamp's work – i.e., a form of provocative, bohemian behavior intended to 'épater le bourgeois'- follow the same path. Duchamp started out from here and wanted to shock the bourgeoisie, and because of that he destroyed his creative powers.. .The content of Duchamp's silence refers to the aim of leaving the subconscious passive, of developing it. This is the aspect of Duchamp, which is related to Surrealism. The surrealists asserted that they could live with their subconscious; they thought they were above reality, but instead they were beneath it. They thought they could fish in muddy waters.. ..but to my mind, the images which emerged have a repressive effect."

"The idea of creativity is for me the problem of the future. Since the creative power is not a simple thing. It has a rich structure. It is divided into a lot of different principles and represented by figures, and these figures you can also write down in a kind of symbolic mantra. It is important to work on every point of creativity and see how the human being stands in the energy that comes out from the surrounding world."

"This is why we believe that a well-ordered idea of ecology and professionalism can stem only from art – art in the sense of the sole, revolutionary force, capable of transforming the earth, humanity, the social order etc.. ..Art is, then, a genuinely human medium for revolutionary change in the sense of completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one. In my opinion only art is capable of doing it."

"Let's finally try to talk about a system that transforms all the social organism into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included, whether it's work by Francisco Goya or Kounellis or mine, as well as agriculture, the sciences, or education or technology, something in which the principle of production and consumption really takes on a form of quality. One must not only transform the creation of paintings or sculptures, but the entire social form. It's a gigantic program."

"I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet."

"I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness-raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting."

"I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of human kind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context... I can see such a use for the future as representing the really progressive character of the idea of understanding art when it is related to the life of humankind within the social body in the future."

"People who say: 'Ah, this Beuys will go back to the middle ages, or to the stone dwellers, cliff dwellers.' No, there is a misunderstanding. I have nothing against the materialistic methodology of analytics, but I think we have to enlarge this thing, not to get caught in a very restricted one-sidedness in our way of looking towards life. Because the problems of life, soul, humankind's spirit, the problems of intuition, imagination, and inspiration, the problems of birth and death, the problems of survival in a bigger shape, and to bring in the image of the meaning of man."

"I don't know what they call mysticism, it is in truth perhaps the interest of the spirit; that the work expresses the spirit, and not the formal aspect. While in the United States a lot of art production runs along the line of formalist art; what one could call the post-modernism, a kind of formalist intention like Don Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and these."

"My first concert - apart from Beethoven at School and Erik Satie at the opening of my exhibition in Kleve in 1960 - was at the gallery Parnass in Wuppertal in 1963. Dressed like a regular pianist in dark grey flannel, black tie and no hat, I played the piano all over – not just the keys – with many pairs of old shoes until it disintegrated. My intention was neither destructive nor nihilistic. 'Heal like with like' – similia similibus curantur – in the homeopathic sense. The main intention was to indicate a new beginning.. ..or simply a revolutionary act. This was my first public Fluxus appearance."

"The outward appearance of every object I make is the equivalent of some aspect of inner human life.. .My feelings then had this special kind of darkness – almost black like this mixture of rubber and tar. It is certainly an equivalent of the pathological state mentioned before, and expresses the need to create a space in the mind from which all disturbances were moved: an empty insulated space."

"Here my idea is to declare that art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist – an artist in the sense that he can develop his own capacity. And therefore it's necessary at first that society cares about the educational system, that equality of opportunity for self-realization is guaranteed."

"Art is the only power to free humankind from all repression."

"I was invited to come here to speak about my idea of art, which is to enlarge the effectivity of art beyond the idea of art as coming out of art history — an art idea which contains the well-known disciplines like sculpture, architecture, painting, music, dancing, poetry and so on. I would like to declare why I feel that it's now necessary to establish a new kind of art, able to show the problems of the whole society, of every living being — and how this new discipline — which I call social sculpture — can realize the future of humankind. It could be a guarantee for the evolution of the earth as a planet, establish conditions for other planetarians too, and you can control it with your own thinking."

"I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power, the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details."

"EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who -"

"Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history."

"This most modern art discipline - Social Sculpture / Social Architecture - will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism."

"Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death-line: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART'."

"No area of life will be free from this concept in the future. That means that people will recognize the social organism, and they must think within this context. They must not only think about schools but also about the legal system and economic structures. They must always think through the entire social organism..."

"I go to the typical state school and try to infiltrate it. Yes!.. .One can do something in the institutions in trying to infiltrate them, and outside one can do something to set a model in place.. .One must work with divers methods anyway. One must always carry on with what is possible."