JOSEPH BEUYS - FILZ TV 1970 Fluxus, happening and performance art

eph Beuys
«Felt TV: Shown in TV broadcast 'Identifications'»
As a contribution to Gerry Schum's 'Identifications', Beuys adapted for television the 'Felt TV' action previously staged for a live audience at a Happening festival in Copenhagen in 1966. It was the only Beuys action executed specifically for the camera. It opens with Beuys seated in front of a TV set showing a programme which is invisible because the screen is covered by felt. The boxing-gloves used later in the action lie at the ready beneath his chair.

Beuys turns up the bottom left corner of the felt, revealing a glimpse of the faulty TV picture. The voice of a TV reporter, who is talking about current milk and meat prices, is still audible. Beuys declares he has 'undertaken a gradual elimination' by 'filtering away' the picture first while leaving the sound, 'but when the picture has gone, the sound becomes absurd.'

Joseph Beuys (German: 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue.

His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate and only rarely acrimonious open public debates on a very wide range of subjects including political, environmental, social and long term cultural trends. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century.