The man who spoke to hares: Joseph beuys and the fluxus scandal
Imagine an art gallery in 1965, in Düsseldorf. The white walls are bare, save for twenty drawings hung too high to be seen clearly. At the center of the room, a man sits on a chair, his face covered in gold leaf and honey. In his arms, he cradles a dead hare. For three hours, he whispers secrets into its ear while the visitors, perplexed, watch this silent scene as if witnessing a forgotten ritual. No one understands. Some laugh. Others are outraged. Yet that evening, Joseph Beuys had just invented a new form of art—or perhaps resurrected a very ancient one.
By Artedusa
••9 min readIt was no accident that Fluxus, the movement that shattered the boundaries of art in the 1960s, was born in the shadow of postwar Europe’s ruins. Between the still-cracked walls of German cities and the rebellious ferment of New York, a handful of artists decided to question everything: the art market, museums, even the very notion of a work of art. And among them, Beuys—with his felt suits and enigmatic performances—became a figure both revered and controversial, a modern-day shaman who turned the gallery into a temple and the spectator into an accomplice.
01The day art stopped being an object
Fluxus did not emerge from nothing. It was the product of an era when art was suffocating within the gilded frames of museums. In the 1950s, as Europe rebuilt itself and America sank into Cold War paranoia, a few rebellious minds began to wonder: what if art wasn’t a commodity, but an experience? What if the true masterpiece wasn’t hung on the wall, but lived, shared, even thrown in the trash?
It was in this context that an eccentric Lithuanian, George Maciunas, launched a manifesto in 1961 that read like a declaration of war. "Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, of cultural, professional, and commercialized art!" he wrote, before proposing a radical alternative: ephemeral "actions," worthless objects, concerts where only silences were played. A trained architect, Maciunas dreamed of an art accessible to all, made from poor materials—paper, cardboard, tin cans. He called it "Fluxus," a Latin word evoking movement, change, impermanence.
But Fluxus was not just a theory. It was a practice, a way of life. In 1962, at the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik in Wiesbaden, audiences discovered a new kind of spectacle: one man (Nam June Paik) cutting another’s tie (John Cage), a woman (Yoko Ono) inviting the public to climb a ladder to read a word written on the ceiling, and another artist (Wolf Vostell) projecting images of war onto broken televisions. Art was no longer something to contemplate, but something to do. Or to endure.
02Felt, fat, and mystery: the alchemy of Beuys
Among all the artists associated with Fluxus, Joseph Beuys was undoubtedly the one who pushed furthest the idea of art as an act of transformation. But unlike Maciunas, whose approach was often ironic and carefree, Beuys brought to it an almost religious gravity. For him, art was not a game, but a matter of life and death.
His obsession with felt and fat, two materials that recur constantly in his work, stems from a personal myth he helped forge. In 1944, while serving as a pilot in the Luftwaffe, his plane crashed in Crimea. Nomadic Tatars allegedly saved him by wrapping him in felt and covering him in fat to keep him warm. Whether true or not, this story became the cornerstone of his artistic mythology. Felt, for Beuys, symbolized protection, survival, insulation. Fat represented energy, transformation, life persisting in the most extreme conditions.
Consider The Fat Chair (1964), a work as simple as it is unsettling: a corner of animal fat oozes from the angle of a wooden chair, as if the living matter had decided to escape its frame. Or The Sled (1969), an installation of twenty-four wooden sleds, each equipped with a felt blanket, a flashlight, and a piece of fat. Beuys presented them as "survival kits," essential objects for a world in crisis. "Fat is warm, felt insulates," he explained. "They are materials that resist cold, death."
But what fascinated—and irritated—most about Beuys was his refusal to provide clear answers. His performances were riddles. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), why the hare? Why the honey and gold on his face? Some saw a reference to shamanic rituals, others a metaphor for the impossible communication between artist and audience. Beuys merely smiled. "If I had to explain everything, it wouldn’t be art anymore."
03Scandal as a work of art
Fluxus never sought to please. On the contrary, its members seemed to take a perverse delight in provoking, shocking, pushing the limits of what the public was willing to accept as art. In 1964, at a Fluxus festival in New York, Nam June Paik smashed a violin to the ground before kneeling in tears before the audience. That same year, Yoko Ono presented Cut Piece, a performance in which she invited spectators to cut away her clothing with scissors. Some cut delicately. Others with violence. Ono, motionless, let them. "It was a way of giving something to the audience," she later explained. "But also of showing them how cruel they could be."
Beuys took provocation even further. In 1972, at documenta 5 in Kassel, he set up an Office for Direct Democracy, a space where he discussed politics with visitors for a hundred days. Some found him brilliant. Others called him a charlatan. One day, a man threw an egg at him. Beuys picked it up, cracked it open, and ate the yolk in front of everyone. "That’s art too," he said.
But his most famous—and most mysterious—performance remains I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). For three days, Beuys locked himself in a New York gallery with a wild coyote. He arrived by ambulance, wrapped in a felt blanket, and never set foot on American soil. For seventy-two hours, he lived with the animal, spoke to it, slept beside it, urinated on copies of the Wall Street Journal that the coyote tore apart with its teeth. At the end, he left as he had come, without a word.
What did this performance mean? Beuys refused to explain. "The coyote is more American than I am," was all he would say. Some saw a metaphor for the relationship between Europe and the United States. Others a critique of capitalism’s destruction of nature. Still others a simple joke. But whatever the interpretation, one thing was certain: Beuys had succeeded in turning an art gallery into a ritual space, and a coyote into an artistic partner.
04When art becomes political
Fluxus was not just an aesthetic movement. It was also—and above all—a political stance. In a Europe still scarred by the horrors of World War II and an America mired in the Vietnam War, these artists refused to remain neutral. For them, art could not be a mere decorative object. It had to be a tool for change.
Beuys, more than anyone, embodied this militant dimension. In 1980, he co-founded the German Green Party, convinced that ecology and art had to go hand in hand. "The revolution we must make is an inner revolution," he said. "Every man is an artist, and every artist is a political man." His most ambitious project, 7000 Oaks (1982–1987), proved it. For five years, he planted seven thousand oak trees in Kassel, each accompanied by a basalt column. The idea? To create a "social forest," a place where nature and culture would meet. Today, those trees still grow in Germany, silent witnesses to an era when art dared to dream of a better world.
But Beuys was not alone in wanting to change society. Yoko Ono, with her Instructions for Paintings (1964), proposed participatory works that invited the public to imagine a more poetic world. "Draw a dream you’d like to see come true," she wrote. George Maciunas, for his part, dreamed of a "cultural revolution" that would erase the boundaries between art and life. "Fluxus is not a style," he said. "It’s a way of living."
05The invisible legacy of Fluxus
Today, Fluxus is everywhere—and nowhere. Its works are no longer found in galleries, at least not as objects for sale. Its performances have vanished, leaving behind only yellowed photographs, grainy films, fragmented accounts. And yet, its influence is immense.
Take social media. When an artist like Banksy creates an ephemeral work that disappears within hours, or when an influencer turns their daily life into a performance, they are unknowingly channeling the spirit of Fluxus. The same goes for NFTs, those digital works that exist only as code: their value lies in the idea, not the object, just as Maciunas and Beuys intended.
And then there is the notion that art is not confined to museums, but can emerge anywhere: in the street, in a kitchen, in a casual gesture. In 2005, Marina Abramović recreated seven historic performances at the Guggenheim in New York, including How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. For three hours, she held a hare in her arms, repeating Beuys’s gesture from forty years earlier. The audience, moved to tears, understood that some works never truly die. They are reborn, transformed, returning in new forms.
Fluxus taught us something essential: art is not something you own, but an experience you live. And perhaps Beuys’s greatest work is not The Fat Chair or I Like America, but the words he once spoke: "Everyone is an artist." Not in the sense that everyone can paint or sculpt, but in the sense that everyone can transform their life into something greater, more beautiful, freer.
So the next time you see an absurd gesture—a stranger dancing in the street, a child drawing on a wall, a friend giving you a box filled with nothing—remember: it might be art. And it might be Fluxus.