Joseph Beuys — Honey is flowing in all directions

A photographic record of Joseph Beuys's Honey Pump at the Workplace, the installation he first set up at documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977.

For the hundred days of documenta the pump was the centre of Beuys's Free International University. Two motors drove honey up a pipe 17 metres tall and round a circuit of tubes and hoses, some 173 metres in all, laid through the galleries of the Museum Fridericianum. Next to the work Beuys talked with visitors about social sculpture, direct democracy and his widened notion of art, and the piece came to stand for his conviction that art could change society.

On 28 June 1977 Beuys asked Gerhard Steidl and Klaus Staeck along while he tended and serviced the pump. The book's 86 photographs record the installation in close detail. Edited by Staeck and Steidl, it first came out in 1997 and has been revised for the centenary of Beuys's birth.

Steidl, 2022. 104 pages, clothbound hardcover, 21 x 29.7 cm. English and German.