I have always tried to show why art has to do with life. Only from art can a new concept of economics be formed, in terms of human need, not in the sense of use and consumption, politics and property, but above all in terms of the production of spiritual goods.1

Among the items made of or containing organic material in this exhibition are twenty-four of Beuys’s Wirtschafts-werte (Economic Values), arranged on two shelving units in a way that parallels but does not reproduce the artist’s original installation. The Wirtschaftswerte are food products—once new but now crumbling, aged, hardened, or crusted over—from the former East and West Germanies. Beuys reclassified them as artworks between 1977 and 1982, first exhibiting them in this form at the Museum of Modern Art in Ghent, Belgium, in 1980.

Beuys’s “Economic Value” is a unit of economic exchange. It has two components: the worker’s productive power and the product itself. According to Beuys’s definition, the object becomes a symbol for the investment of creativity in it. Honey, for example, stands for the productive frenzy and joint effort of a hive of bees rather than the resultant characteristic sweetness.

Beuys first inscribed sculptures as “1 Wirtschaftswert” at the Documenta 6 exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in 1977. There he also organized public discussions of economic, environmental, and social issues as part of his “Free International University of Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research,” a school he founded in 1972 with the aim of providing free education for all. (He had recently been dismissed from his teaching position at the Düsseldorf Art Academy for opening his classes to students not officially admitted to the school.) For one hundred days at Documenta 6, students and teachers talked about ways to change the social and economic order. They wanted to democratize creativity and the sharing of ideas, a process that Beuys called “the expanded concept of art” and, more specifically, a form of sculpture. Sculpture was not a historical category of art, Beuys asserted, but the way in which ideas were made visible and audible: sculpture was everything, he believed. Consequently, the largest and most encompassing sculptural project was that of shaping society itself, its institutions and values.

At Documenta 6, Beuys’s grand metaphor for this process of developing social awareness was a seminal installation called Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey Pump in the Workplace). Consisting of a motor that ground up fat and pipes that carried honey throughout the exhibition building, Honey Pump was a metaphorical thinking machine, a symbol of the movement of ideas through institutions. Beuys also made smaller sculptures as multiples (editioned works) to illustrate and disperse his thoughts in concrete form. These were mementos—products of, rather than fuel for, the engine of the grand machine. ...from the Machine Room (1978) consists of a canning jar of fat and a tin can of honey, and Give Me Honey (1979), produced in an edition of twelve, is a larger tin container of honey. These Honey Pump mementos, along with Economic Value Strained Honey (1979), also produced in a edition of twelve, are displayed on the exhibition shelves.

Economic Value Strained Honey can be seen as the microcosm of a Beuysian utopian social system. Honey is the product of a cooperative of bees, a small, well-ordered society working together to create life-giving nutrients. The activity of production itself creates warmth within the hive, helping to sustain life. This was a model for Beuys of how human society should function.

Beuys saw Western society as sick: though he was fascinated by the straightforwardness of East German goods, he regarded both communism and capitalism as one-way streets leading away from individual and communal creative expression. Many of his ideas were loosely based on those of the Austrian-born anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925)—including the belief that the social healing process had to start with each individual, that liberating each person’s creative power would eventually free all of society. He wanted his art to reconnect human beings to the natural world and to the life of the spirit, to reawaken individuals to their own intuitive powers. In this exhibition, Economic Value Sage Tea (c. 1979) and Economic Value Chest Tea (c. 1977–80; an herbal decongestant) are reminders of the need for this healing process through nature’s inherent powers.

A more complex work on the shelves is the multiple Economic Value APOLLO (1977), which consists of two parts: a margarine container with the brand name romi, and a postcard with the slogan “Wer nicht denken will, liegt raus—sich selbst” (He who does not want to think is expelled from himself). Margarine stands for creative power because it is a natural material that has been transformed. Like the animal fat in ...from the Machine Room, it is associated with warmth and energy, and, like honey, it derives its value from the effort invested in it rather than the money someone might pay for it. The postcard spells out the necessity of the intellect—in a form that was easily distributed in signed and unsigned versions.

Influenced by the dadaists and by the readymades of Duchamp, Beuys found the intrinsic power of objects intriguing, and he sought to display items whose value derived from their unadulterated existence. The symbolism he attached to them was related to his ideas about politics, society, and the individual, and some of it is believed to have emanated from his own life story, or at least from the myth he built around it. According to this myth, when the plane he piloted in World War II was shot down over the Crimea, he was rescued by nomadic Tartars, who wrapped him in felt and fat to keep him alive. The chain of meanings that Beuys subsequently gave to objects, particularly organic materials, has been traced back to the association of felt and fat with warmth. Fat and margarine, because of their high caloric content, are good sources of energy, and felt is a great insulator. In Beuys’s allegorical chain, then, warmth and energy are identified with the highest goods: life and creativity.