Joseph Beuys — Periphery Workshop: documenta 6, 24–30 June 1977

A book on the Periphery Workshop that Joseph Beuys held at documenta 6 in Kassel from 24 to 30 June 1977.

On 27 April 1973 Beuys had founded the Free International University, an anti-establishment school meant to draw out anyone's creative abilities, whatever their background. As part of it he staged thirteen workshops over a hundred days at documenta 6, among them a Migrant Workshop, one on violence and behaviour, and one on nuclear energy and its alternatives.

The Periphery Workshop took up themes Beuys summed up as Europe's peripheral regions, the enlargement of the EEC, the Franco-German axis, and shared approaches for those regions and the Mediterranean. Visitors from all over the world were invited to put their questions to him on these subjects. He answered not only in words but on dozens of blackboards, covered with drawings, diagrams and notes that stand as works in their own right. Those boards are the core of the book, which Klaus Staeck and Gerhard Steidl edited. It is also one of the four volumes in Steidl's Four Books in a Box.

Steidl, 2022. 136 pages, 55 black-and-white images, clothbound hardback, 21 x 29.7 cm. In English.