linguistic:voice_change
Artworks and performances

In 1962, Beuys befriended his Düsseldorf colleague Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus movement. This began what was to be a brief formal involvement with Fluxus, a loose international group of artists who championed radical erosion of artistic boundaries, bringing aspects of creative practice outside of the institution and into the everyday. Although Beuys participated in a number of Fluxus events, it soon became clear that he viewed the implications of art's economic and institutional framework differently. Indeed, whereas Fluxus was directly inspired by the radical Dada activities emerging during the First World War, Beuys in a 1964 broadcast (from the Second German Television Studio) a different message: Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet ('The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated'). Beuys's relationship with the legacy of Duchamp and the readymade is a central (if often unacknowledged) aspect of the controversy surrounding his practice.

On 12 January 1985, Beuys, together with Andy Warhol and Kaii Higashiyama, became involved in the "Global-Art-Fusion" project. This was a fax art project, initiated by the conceptual artist Ueli Fuchser, in which faxes with drawings of all three artists were sent within 32 minutes around the world – from Düsseldorf (Germany) via New York (USA) to Tokyo (Japan), and received at Vienna's Palais-Liechtenstein Museum of Modern Art. This fax event was a sign of peace during the Cold War in the 1980s.