7000 oaks

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“Stadtverwaldung”, Kassel, first oak planted in front of the Fridericianum Museum at night

7000 oaks - urban deforestation instead of city administration is a landscape work of art by the artist Joseph Beuys , which was presented to the public at documenta 7 in 1982 .

With the help of volunteers, Beuys planted 7000 trees together with an accompanying basalt stone at different locations in Kassel over the course of several years .

With regard to general urbanization, the project was an extensive artistic and ecological intervention with the aim of permanently changing the urban living space. Beuys himself described the project as a social sculpture . The initially controversial project has developed into an integral part of the cityscape of Kassel.

In 1987 the extensive documenta 8 project was completed.

Emergence

For documenta 7 the basalt steles were on Friedrichsplatz

As part of the Free International University (FIU), Beuys set up a coordination office in Kassel, the main task of which was financing (purchases and donations), working with the city of Kassel (approval process for tree locations) and planning and carrying out the plantings.

"I wanted to go completely outside and make a symbolic start for a company to regenerate the life of humanity within the body of human society and to prepare a positive future in this context."

- Joseph Beuys in Fernando Groener, Rose-Maria Kandler : 7000 oaks .

At the start of documenta 7 in 1982, Beuys had 7000 basalt steles piled up as a wedge-shaped triangle on Friedrichsplatz in front of the Fridericianum in Kassel under the title “7000 oaks - city deforestation instead of city administration” . At the top he planted the first oak next to the basalt stele belonging to it in March 1982. According to Beuys, the field with the basalt steles should act as an indicator of progress. The more trees are planted in Kassel, the smaller the plastic becomes. "Not construction, not dismantling, but both at the same time in dependence".

Everyone who donated 500 DM was allowed to remove a basalt block and plant an oak tree elsewhere , to which the respective stone block was then added. For Beuys, it was important to

"... that every single monument consists of a living part, namely the tree, which is constantly changing in time, and a part that is crystalline and thus maintains a shape, mass, size, weight"

- Armin Second : Joseph Beuys: Nature, Matter, Form.

Beuys saw 7000 oaks as a “return to the old organizational structure.” During this time, continuous strips of trees were cut down in many cities to enable roads and sidewalks to be widened. Now the trees should take this place again.

Beuys viewed trees as essential subjects who lack rights : “They are disenfranchised. They know very well that they are disenfranchised. Animals, trees, everything is disenfranchised. I want to make these trees and these animals legal. "

financing

The New York Dia Art Foundation, now the Dia Center for the Arts , contributed to getting the project off the ground. The remaining amount should be financed by donations from private individuals, companies and institutions. A tree cost 500 marks (255 euros). The call for donations was mainly made through posters calling for participation in Beuys' project.

Despite the artist's international popularity, the donations were insufficient to finance the project, so Beuys was forced to raise a large part of the money himself. In 1982 Beuys dismantled a copy of Tsar Ivan's crown in front of an audience and melted it down. From this he poured The Peace Bunny and accessories (consisting of an approximately 30 centimeter large rabbit figure and a sun), which was sold to the Stuttgart collector Joseph W. Fröhlich for 777,000 DM (397,000 euros). In addition, in 1984 Beuys made a whiskey - advertising for the brand Nikka on Japanese television in favor of action, including eingeblendetem Note: "Joseph Beuys has occurred here to promote his environmental companies." The phrase, "I have satisfied myself of whiskey was really good. ”earned him 400,000 DM. Beuys commented on this mission with the remark: “I have advertised all my life, but one should be interested in what I advertised.” Beuys also marketed oak posters.

Beuys received further support of around one million marks through the sale of works of art in April 1985 in Tübingen and Bielefeld, which 34 artists, including Sandro Chia , Walter Dahn , Jannis Kounellis and Andy Warhol , had donated.

The work 7000 Eichen is the largest and most momentous campaign of his career and is one of the most expensive art campaigns of its time with a total of around 4.3 million marks (2.2 million euros).

implementation

7000 oaks - as oaks in Wahlerhäuser Straße, year of planting: from 1982 (2019)
7000 oaks - as ash trees in Dörnbergstraße, year of planting: 1987 (2019)
7000 oaks - as plane trees in Landgraf-Karl-Strasse (2019)
7000 oaks - as linden trees in Rothenditmolder Straße, planted in 1987 (2019)
7000 oaks - as ash trees in Hafenstraße, year of planting: from 1986 (2019)

It took five years until 1987 the last basalt stele, which was set with every tree planted, was transported from the pile on Friedrichsplatz to its destination. Beuys did not live to see the end of his planting campaign, he died on January 23, 1986. In 1987, during documenta 8 , his widow Eva Beuys and their son Wenzel Beuys were present among others to complete the work. On June 12, 1987, Wenzel Beuys planted the last tree next to the first oak planted in 1982 in front of the Fridericianum.

The trees

Only about half of the trees in the work of art are oaks, mainly English oaks ( Quercus robur ), numerous other deciduous tree species are represented. Ash ( Fraxinus excelsior ), linden ( Tilia ), horse chestnut ( Aesculus ), maple and maple- leaved plane tree ( Platanus × acerifolia ) are particularly common .

Most of the trees were planted as roadside green on urban areas. Many can be found on the properties of schools and kindergartens. A large number of Beuys trees are on the properties of housing associations, only a very small number in the gardens of private individuals.

The steles

Originally, Beuys had planned slender and geometric basalt steles for the 7,000 oaks, as he knew them from hikes in the Eifel . Due to the cost and long transport routes, stones from northern Hesse were used, with a few exceptions. These came from the Landsburg quarry , south of Kassel, north of Schwalmstadt . Beuys is said to have initially been less than enthusiastic about these less geometrically exact, even misshapen steles, but ultimately to have reconciled with this choice. From 1982 onwards he also used the steles from this quarry for his sculpture DasEndedes20th Century , a work that can be seen parallel and at the same time complementary to the 7000 oaks .

  • geometric stele (2015)

  • little geometric stele (2015)

  • Dismantling wall in the Landsburg quarry (2016)

  • Basalt steles in the Landsburg quarry (2016)

Expansion of the plant

The Dia Center for the Arts , which Beuys had financially supported in his project in 1986, planted five trees in 1988, each with a basalt stone, at 548 West 22nd Street in New York. In May 1996, the plant was expanded to include 18 new trees in collaboration with the New York City Park Administration, the New York Tree Trust , the Arthur Ross Foundation , local galleries and private participants. In addition to swamp and red oaks, u. a. also planted linden trees and ginkgos.

In the presence of Joseph Beuys, an oak with a basalt column was planted on November 23, 1983 in the green area in front of the Ministry of Economics, Medium-Sized Enterprises and Transport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia at Haroldstrasse 4 in the Düsseldorf government district . The chairman of the Westdeutsche Landesbank , Friedel Neuber , had given it to the North Rhine-Westphalian Minister for Economic Affairs, Reimut Jochimsen, on his 50th birthday on June 8, 1983.

Public perception

Especially at the beginning, Beuys' project met with incomprehension, displeasure and resistance. The pile of stones was doused with pink paint in 1982. Instead of a city beautification, many citizens expected more “leaves and bird shit.” When a driver drove himself to his death on a basalt stone, the protest grew even bigger. However, with trees increasingly planted in the cityscape, acceptance increased.

The public's impact of the work is still high. Rhea Thönges-Stringaris (Kassel) writes:

“There is hardly anyone in Kassel who does not come across Beuys trees almost every day, whether in rows of avenues or in squares: a tree, a stone. We got used to them. They are part of our everyday life and at the same time part of an unusual, because ultimately invisible sculpture. Nobody can ever see them as a whole. It is well known that 'sculpture' in the traditional sense is inconceivable without its outlines. But the outlines of 7000 oaks are not even tangible on paper, on the city map. "

reception

The 7000 oaks campaign - city deforestation instead of city administration combined two documenta exhibitions and is therefore unique in the history of documenta. The work was awarded by the Hessian Ministry of the Interior in 1987/1988 as part of the landscape competition Ecological Renewal of our Cities and Towns and as a result also accepted by the population in Kassel. Meanwhile, the trees with basalt steles are part of the Kassel townscape and testify to the "expanded concept of art" developed by Joseph Beuys. The work of art, known as “social sculpture”, has a lasting impact on the topographical and social structure of the city, it also obliges to active care and thus remains lively.

The "7000 Eichen" association was founded in Kassel in 1993, with the task of protecting and caring for trees.

The number of trees distributed over the entire area of ​​the city is not constant. Dead trees are not always replanted immediately, some have to give way to construction measures, and replacement sites are not always immediately available. According to the land register , exactly 6959 trees were counted in autumn 2002. The landscape architect Johannes Steiner from Stuttgart collected the fruits of the oaks, put them in flower pots and since then has been passing on the plants growing from them to tree sponsors (Eichenfeld project - first generation of younger generations).

Olaf-Axel Burow and the Future Moderation project group at the University of Kassel initiated a project in the context of Kassel 's application for European Capital of Culture in 2002 under the motto 7000 characters , which, in relation to Beuys Social Sculpture and the 7000 Eichen campaign, create an aesthetic deep structure for the city of Kassel and its citizens should make visible. The creative potential of the citizens should be highlighted by future workshops taking place at the same time .

Based on the 7000 Oaks project, the Trees for Human Rights project was started in Nuremberg in 2007 . Here , ginkgo trees are planted all over the city and each one of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is assigned.

On March 16, 2012, the 30th anniversary of the 7000 oaks was celebrated and a Joseph-Beuys-Strasse in Kassel was inaugurated in honor of the artist. This was the reason to put another unity of tree and stone there.

literature

  • Joseph Beuys, Bernhard Blume, Rainer Rappmann: Conversations about trees. FIU-Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-928780-11-5 .
  • Albert Vinzens, Bernhard Rüffert, Joachim J. Kühmstedt: Beuys plane trees and basalts. 7000 oak project. AQUINarte Literature & Art Press, 2013, ISBN 978-3-933332-74-5 .
  • Foundation 7000 Eichen (Ed.): 30 years of Joseph Beuys 7000 Eichen , Cologne

Web links

Commons : 7000 oak trees  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fernando Groener, Rose-Maria Kandler (Ed.): 7000 oaks . König, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-88375-068-9 , p. 15th f .
  2. ↑ Zimmermann, Reinhard: Art and Ecology in Christianity - The "7000 oaks" by Joseph Beuys. Wiesbaden 1994. p. 13.
  3. ↑ Armin Second (Ed.): Joseph Beuys: Natur, Materie, Form . Schirmer-Mosel, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-88814-453-1 (quoted from kunst.uni-stuttgart.de: Joseph Beuys - Energie ( memento from May 19, 2001 in the Internet Archive ) , accessed on June 27, 2010).
  4. ↑ Groener, Fernando / Kandler, Rose-Marie (ed.): 7000 oaks - Joseph Beuys. Cologne 1987, p. 11.
  5. ↑ Friedhelm Mennekes: Beuys to Christ. A position in conversation. Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk GmbH, Stuttgart, 1989. ISBN 978-3460328617
  6. ↑ Joseph Beuys. 7000 oaks. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on October 4, 2006 ; Retrieved February 22, 2007 .
  7. ↑ Portrait of an art performance. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 6, 2007 ; Retrieved February 22, 2007 .
  8. ↑ Groener, Fernando / Kandler, Rose-Marie (ed.): 7000 oaks - Joseph Beuys. Cologne 1987, p. 208.
  9. ↑ Ermen, Reinhard: Joseph Beuys. Hamburg 2007, p. 114 ff.
  10. ↑ quoted from: Reinhard Ermen: Joseph Beuys. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2007, p. 114ff.
  11. ↑ Bastian, Heiner: 7000 oaks. Tübingen 1985, p. 8.
  12. ↑ Paragraph according to Rhea Thönges-Stringaris: "Something healthy next to the tree" The stones of the 7000 oaks , in: Foundation 7000 oaks (Ed.): 30 years of Joseph Beuys 7000 oaks , Cologne, p. 70
  13. ↑ Rolf Purpar: art city Dusseldorf. Objects and monuments in the cityscape. 2nd Edition. Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 2009, ISBN 3-89978-044-2 , p. 65.
  14. ↑ DOCUMENTA: 7000 oaks , kassel.de (accessed on March 16, 2012)
  15. ↑ Beuys, Joseph / Blume, Bernhard / Rappmann, Rainer: Conversations about trees. Wangen 1994. p. 8.
  16. ↑ The project on baeume-fuer-die-menschenrechte.nuernberg.de, accessed on November 22, 2019
  17. ↑ Joseph-Beuys-Straße in Kassel inaugurated. ( Memento from August 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) stadt-kassel.de, accessed on March 16, 2012