Joseph Beuys’s Game-Changing Art Plants Seeds for Change in Two Vast LA Projects

“If you have all my multiples,” Joseph Beuys once said, “then you have me completely.” The polymathic German sculptor was referring to the editioned objects that bore the intellectual and emotional freight of his artistic project. Ranging from blackboard erasers to carved blocks of copper-infused beeswax, these objects were small in scale and large in edition size. Because of that, Beuys believed they could disseminate his radical notions of art as a transformational social force far and wide—even when he wasn’t present to facilitate that process. 

Of the nearly 600 multiples he produced, some 400 are included in the Broad’s forthcoming exhibition, “Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature,” opening November 16. Assembled in this show are found objects, sculptures, paintings, oil sketches, photographs, posters, films, and materials related to his political actions, like fliers and office supplies—a massive grouping of artworks that amount to “the whole Beuys,” as the artist himself once called his multiples.

“For him, all manner of things mattered,” said Beuys scholar Andrea Gyorody, who organized the show along with Sarah Loyer, curator and exhibition manager of the Broad. “He put great effort into enshrining simple base materials with value, preserving their longevity as art objects.”

Despite the diversity of material forms, the multiples share a conceptual concern for restoring individual wellness and transforming the conditions of social reality. Beuys once said art was “the only genuinely human medium for revolutionary change … completing the transformation from a sick world to a healthy one.” These ideas were borne out in his editions, as well as his large-scale sculptures, performances, and political actions.

Capri-Batterie (1985), one of his best-known editions, features a yellow light bulb plugged into a socket stuck in a freshly picked lemon. The work requires continuous replenishment—the lemon gradually rots, which means the fruit needs to be replaced regularly. Replacing the lemon elicits a form of social participation, something Beuys actively encouraged, and suggests a kind of regeneration that the artist embraced. Moreover, the piece marries the artificial and the organic, implying a reconciliation between humanity and nature.

“Beuys understood objects as holding a kind of stored meaning, an eternal potential that could be resurrected or recognized as a cue for action,” Gyorody said. “He hoped they could function as prompts or reminders of his political actions in a future when they were no longer talked about, and once referred to them as ‘memory props.’” 

Though not featured in this exhibition or anywhere in LA, Beuys’s monumental works also continue to loom large. His 1982 piece 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), the most well-known of his environmental interventions, involved planting oak trees alongside basalt stone steles in Kassel, Germany. Still today, those trees provide the city’s citizens with ample shade, clean air, and an encounter with nature’s vitality.

Beuys, who died in 1986, not long after 7000 Eichen debuted at Documenta 7, hoped that future ecological initiatives would arise in the work’s wake. Indeed, they have, at institutions ranging from Tate Modern in London to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. And now, finally, the West Coast is getting its first-ever Beuys-like tree planting initiative at Los Angeles’s Elysian Park.

“But hopefully, not the last,” Loyer said. “Beuys said to never stop planting, and we’ve taken our inspiration from that prompt because, unfortunately, his concerns about the environment are just as relevant today as they were four decades ago.”

Installation view of “Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature,” 2024, at the Broad, Los Angeles.

Coinciding with “In Defense of Nature,” the Broad partnered with community-based environmental justice nonprofit North East Trees and Tongva (Gabrielino) archaeologist Desireé Reneé Martinez and artist Lazaro Arvizu Jr. Together, they are reimagining Beuys’s social sculpture for current-day Tovaangar, the Tongva term for their homeland, which includes what is now termed Los Angeles County.

“Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar,” the Broad’s first permanent off-site project, will see 100 Quercus agrifolia, or coast live oaks, planted alongside sandstone boulders in Elysian Park’s Chávez Ridge. Five more will be planted in Kuruvungna Village Springs, a sacred Tongva (Gabrielino) site. The project will also include a robust series of public programs, including lectures, performances, and workshops dedicated to sharing Indigenous knowledge. 

“Social Forest is about environmental activism and ecological repair, of course, but there’s also a social aspect: a collective reckoning and reconciliation that needs to happen here in L.A.,” Loyer said. Like Beuys’s 1982 intervention, which sought to redress enduring trauma in postwar Germany, “Social Forest” intends to recognize and repair the lasting effects of colonialism on the Indigenous population in the United States, including the forced displacement of Native communities and the ruination of seized land. 

Beuys himself once wrote that he “lived through a large number of catastrophes” and that the sum of those catastrophes had not yet concluded. Martinez, the Tongva (Gabrielino) archaeologist who partnered on “Social Forest,” feels the tragedies her people have abided are similarly ongoing.

“We still do not have free and open access to our homeland, and as a result, we cannot eat our traditional foods, gather our medicinal plants, or gain knowledge by practicing maxaax, the reciprocal act of giving, gifting, and swapping with nature,” Martinez said. “Like with Beuys’s project, it starts with recognizing the horrible history, then looking at how to heal, how to repair a decimated peoples and land, and then how to revitalize and restore vibrancy to communities, so that we, the Tongva (Gabrielino) peoples and everyone who now calls this land home, can live with nature and not only survive but thrive.” 

Joseph Beuys, Rettet den Wald, 1972.

Martinez said that “Social Forest” fulfills “what Tongva educator Craig Torres calls the Three R’s: we recognize the long, deep history of the Indigenous peoples who cared for the land before us, we respect our relatives, the animals, plants, rocks, air, and water, who we live alongside and do not dominate, and we uphold our responsibility to protect them, to protect all of nature.”

The “Social Forest” oak tree planting allows the Tongva (Gabrielino) to restore a connection to acorns, a vital historical food source. Some of the boulders placed at the base of the coast live oaks will house mortars used for processing, crushing, and grinding acorn meat during harvest.

“We didn’t want the stone marker to be some symbolic monolith, but something that both preserved the way the Tongva (Gabrielino) people lived in the world, their traditional food gathering and processing practices, and something that can be used by future generations,” Martinez said. “This is a promise to care for the trees into maturity but also to carry our practices into the future so that in 20 or 30 years, when the tree is ready for harvest, the stone and this traditional way of processing will be right there too.” 

Joseph Beuys, Difesa della natura, 1984.

According to the director of urban forestry at North East Trees, Aaron Thomas, no part of the reforesting initiative is primarily symbolic. “We can calculate for every one of these oaks what the real and important environmental benefit will be, like how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses like methane and ozone will be sequestered or the volume of rainwater that will be absorbed through their roots, trunks, and canopies,” Thomas explained. The decision to replace Beuys’s basalt markers with naturally shaped sandstone had a similarly significant meaning: “The coast live oaks are native to Southern California, so they’re a byproduct of this soil, and the sandstone is native, and when the boulders erode they’ll become a part of the soil that nourishes the tree.”

While the stone markers, sourced from existing erosion sites in the park, have been placed, the saplings won’t go in the ground until late winter or early spring. In the meantime, Thomas and his team are concentrating on outreach and education, both within the Parks and Recreation Department and in the surrounding communities. Although oaks are native and naturally occurring in the area, the young trees will require some human care and attention, especially during their early growing seasons.

“As a forester, I’ve planted thousands of trees, and I know people don’t understand it this way, but for me, there’s artistry,” Thomas said. “With this project, the placement of the rock helps others to see what I see by creating a frame, a Baudelairian sense of context.”

Joseph Beuys, Die Wärmezeitmaschine, 1975.

The sentiment echoes Beuys’s seminal conception of “social sculpture,” in which everyday activities are understood as acts of artmaking. By consciously performing those activities, everyone’s creative and intellectual potential was activated, making everyone an artist and thus capable of positively shaping society.

“He really lived out his belief that everything we do is sacred, that every action, every decision is shaping and reshaping the world around us,” Gyorody said. “It’s like the butterfly effect where the flap of the wing changes the weather halfway around the world.”

Martinez similarly cast the new “Social Forest” in terms that recalled the butterfly effect. “If everyone plants a single flower for a butterfly, what happens next?” she asked. “The revolution can begin with the little things. Everything is connected—you’ll see how quickly it will spread, from you to me to the oak trees.”