Abstract

In this dissertation I examine the work of Wolf Vostell and Joseph Beuys, two artists working in West Germany after 1960, and consider the ways in which each artist deployed performance art to explore the dynamics of individual and collective memory. In a departure from the practices of John Cage, Fluxus, and the concerns of Concrete Art in the Rheinland in the early 1960s, Vostell and Beuys developed a particularly embodied and synesthetic experience of performance. These strategies were to retrieve collective experience and the capacity to remember as a means of resisting the atomizing coordination of desire by the mass media in Reconstruction Germany. I outline the Frankfurt School's revision and critique of Henri Bergson's theory of memory within the model of an emancipatory notion of remembrance developed by Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas. This understanding of memory comprised the intellectual context for the development of performance in West Germany in the 1960s. ;I describe Vostell's performances in public space of the 1960s, in which the German postwar city becomes an allegorical "mnemotechnic" space for remembering technological destruction. I then argue that two major impulses characterize Beuys' action-performances. In the '60s, Beuys enacted autobiographical memory as a means of accessing collective memory of the recent past, and as a link to his theory of art as social sculpture. Beuys later institutionalized his theory of social sculpture in the organizations of the Office for Direct Democracy and the Free International University in realizing a public sphere within an existing art institution in his Documenta installations of the '70s. I examine how Beuys' work of the '70s engages and expands the institutional strategies of conceptual art. Finally I discuss Beuys' most ambitious enactment of social sculpture in his activities within the eco-activist Grunen and in his candidacy for the German parliament. While Beuys' infiltration of party politics ended with his withdrawal from conventional politics in 1983, his engagement with the Greens, which absorbed other spheres of life into the realm of art, almost realized his totalizing and mnemonic notion of art