Creativity Quote by Joseph Beuys

Beuys makes a tree do double duty: it is not just a living thing but a clock you can touch. In his hands, “regeneration” isn’t a feel-good nature slogan; it’s a claim about how time actually appears in the world. A tree records duration in growth rings, scars, seasons, and slow accumulation. It turns the abstract into evidence. Saying regeneration is “a concept of time” smuggles in Beuys’s bigger thesis: the future isn’t a clean break, it’s repair work carried out in public.

The line lands harder in Beuys’s postwar German context, where “regeneration” was a loaded civic fantasy: economic rebuilding, political rebranding, cultural amnesia. Beuys refuses the instant makeover. A tree regenerates by insisting on patience, vulnerability, and maintenance; it also regenerates ecosystems by altering soil, water, and air. That’s a sly model for social change: not heroic revolution, but a distributed, biological kind of politics.

It also fits Beuys’s “social sculpture” idea, where art isn’t an object but a shaping force. The most direct backdrop is 7000 Oaks, his project to plant thousands of trees paired with basalt stones in Kassel. The stone stands there like a frozen time marker; the tree keeps moving. The subtext is a dare: if you want a different society, stop treating time as something you spend and start treating it as something you cultivate.