In the autumn of 1977, Joseph Beuys took part in both documenta 6 in Kassel and the first edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster. At documenta, he installed a ‘honey pump’ (entitled *Honey Pump at the Workplace*), which circulated honey through plastic tubes running through the halls of the Fridericianum, the 18th-century building that forms the main venue of the exhibition. He also organised a series of panel discussions and seminars as part of his Free International University (FIU). For the Skulptur Projekte, Beuys contributed a large-scale sculpture entitled Unschlitt/Tallow, consisting of six enormous blocks of a waxy substance and installed in the atrium of the Westfälisches Landesmuseum (now the LWL Museum of Art and Culture).
These two works were among the largest and conceptually most complex that the artist had attempted to realise up to that point, and marked a decisive transition into the public sphere, precisely at a moment of significant crisis in the political history of the Federal Republic.
The lecture explores the multi-layered metaphors of biological, economic and social systems embedded in these two works, with particular attention to the motif of circulation in *Honigpumpe*. Moving beyond a mere repetition of the iconographic meanings that Beuys himself suggested for these artworks, Daniel Spaulding will attempt to analyse Beuys’s metaphorical structure both as a symptom of the contradictions of this historical moment and as a proposal for its transformation.
Daniel Spaulding is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is co-founder and editor of the art history journal Selva.
The lecture will be held in German.
Date & Venue
24 June 2026, 6.15 pm
Lecture Hall, Kassel Art Academy