Time & Perspective Quote by Joseph Beuys

Beuys makes the most Beuys move possible here: he frames art not as an object, but as an escape attempt from the room we all keep agreeing to stay in. “Go completely outside” is doing triple duty. It’s a literal refusal of the gallery-as-aquarium, a philosophical break from postwar Germany’s cramped moral architecture, and a theatrical gesture that treats departure itself as the work. He isn’t promising a new style; he’s announcing an exit from the terms of the conversation.

The phrase “symbolic start” tips you off that this is less manifesto than ritual. Beuys understood symbolism as social engineering by other means: a way to change what people think is possible by changing what they can imagine together. That’s why “enterprise” lands like an odd corporate word in an otherwise spiritual sentence. He’s blending shaman and organizer, myth and bureaucracy, suggesting that regeneration requires infrastructure as much as inspiration.

“Regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society” is classic Beuys body-talk: society as a wounded organism, in need of warmth, healing, circulation. Coming out of a Europe traumatized by fascism and war, his ambition reads as both grand and defensive. He’s allergic to “art for art’s sake” because it feels like a luxury of stable times; instead he pitches “social sculpture,” where everyone is a potential co-author of the future.

“Prepare a positive future” sounds almost naive, but in Beuys it’s a provocation: optimism as a form of pressure. He’s daring culture to stop treating politics, ecology, and education as someone else’s medium.