Beuysian Legacies in Ireland and Beyond: Art, Culture and Politics

This book project began as the proceedings of the world-wide only conference on Beuys that took place on the 20th anniversary of the artist's death. It had attracted excellent international speakers and discussants.The proposition was to bring together English-speaking and German-speaking scholars and discuss the differences in reception. The keynote was Gene Ray, who had, at the same time as developed similar insights in my Doctoral dissertation, also concluded that Beuys had engaged in more substantial ways with Germany's recent past than had been acknowledged. In assumptions about his attitude towards his past as German soldier lay many of the differences in reception.Ireland seemed to be an idea vanatage point from which to address these questions, particularly as the University of Ulster's Interface Research Centre (Contested spaces)helped to fund the conference and the book functioned as an output of the FP6 network of excellence SUS.DIV on sustainability and diversity. However, while the Celtic Tiger roared, the book's right moment had not come. Only with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain and with some pertinent additions to the presented papers did the book become a rounded project, now co-editec by Victoria Walters. It investigates Beuys' importance for the self-organized infrastructure in art in Northern IReland, for oppositional artists in central Europe before 1989, brings in anthropological considerations and provides a historical background to concepts such as "relational aesthetics" and Christoph Schlingensief's "over-identification".Beuys' name may not be mentioned at every turn, but his thinking is alive and effective.