Instructions for the take-home final:  Write in response to ANY THREE QUESTIONS (NOT ALL OF THEM!) devoting approximately equal space to each.  Avoid vague assertions and generalizations.  Your exam as a whole should not exceed 3000 words.  Note that if you choose #12, you will be judged on the quality of your question as well.

1.  In what sense, if any, does Beuys ‘extend’ art?

2.  What should be the role of art in politics, and how effective was Beuys as a political activist?

3.  Discuss Beuys as a shaman / alchemist / magician (any combination).  Is this side of his work progressive, regressive, or just confused and confusing?

4.  What is the point of claiming that “art = capital”?  If Beuys is right, what changes?  If he’s wrong, why?

5.  Does Beuys fit into one or more established art-historical categories (Dada, Fluxus, Minimalism, etc.), or is he sui generis [one-of-a-kind]?

6.  Discuss Beuys as an ‘eco-artist.’

7.  What is Beuys’s ‘theory of sculpture,’ in what sense is it a ‘theory,’ and what (if anything) is its value?

8.  Discuss Beuys as the heir of German Romanticism and Idealism.  (For the purposes of this exam, we will declare Rudolf Steiner to be a Romantic and an Idealist.)

9.  Is Beuys’s biography integral to his work, or incidental?

10.  Discuss the film Queen of the Sun as a Beuysian eco-Action.

11.  Write a 500-word introduction to Joseph Beuys for inclusion in an imaginary textbook on modern art OR a history of postwar Germany.

12.  Pose your own question regarding Beuys, and then answer it.