Executed in 1982, Is It About a Bicycle? III comes from a group of fifteen blackboards collects ively titled Is It About a Bicycle?, which were created simultaneously through the action-based practice of performance art which Beuys championed throughout his ambitious career. A founder of the provocative art movement known as Fluxus and a key figure in the development of Happenings, Beuys’s diverse oeuvre ranges from the traditional mediums of drawings, paintings, and sculpture to process-oriented and t.mes -based “action” art. After becoming increasingly concerned with social and intellectual reform in the 1970s, Beuys forged into new artistic territory in which drawings, both diagrammatic and emblematic, became crucially illustrative of thought processes. Forever tied to that unique act through which it was created, Is It About a Bicycle? III remembers the active hand by which it was defined, the owner of which was one of the most influential artistic minds of the Twentieth Century.

Taking as their support a surface so visually infused with the academic and the intellectual, the blackboards of Is It About a Bicycle? imply an environment – both in the active space wherein their surfaces were articulated and the subsequent space wherein they are viewed – conducive to the creation, production, and the evolution of ideas. In dusty lines of chalk, the viewer’s eyes begin to identify the outlines of Beuys’s mind. In other words, creative thought process has been translated into visual form. Belonging to the period of his career in which he developed his concept of “social sculpture”, it was at this point that Beuys began using the materials and objects which had constituted parts of his Happenings in his own lectures and debates to encourage social change through democratic discussion. As in the present work, the blackboards stemming from this moment were the result, not just a of singular hand, but of a collaboration of minds, intuitions, and perspectives.

In a 1985 interview concerning the Is It a Bicycle? blackboards, Beuys’s commentary on their creation and meaning was succinct. He explains that the extended title of the work, “Is it about a bicycle? Aus: VEHICLE ART” denotes that “the vehicle, the work itself, represents the history of the Free International University, signifying an action to enlarge artistic vision and its possibilities. The FIU [was] always conceived as a vehicle. The effect of a nocturnal starry sky was produced by my last performance on these boards, in order to give a certain unity to the ensemble… the paint spattered and fell in a fine mist to form the starry sky. The effect was definitely intended and calculated in advance… Many individuals contributed to the definition of the work by using colored chalks and I did the same.” Referencing Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle ready-made, Beuys stated: “Duchamp was interested in vehicle-art, since he conceived of an object integrating a bicycle wheel in motion, turning on itself. That is an appropriate symbol of Duchamp’s work, that of a man who always encounters himself at the same point… Our, bicycle, however, deals with problems as diverse as those of the Third World, the structure of society, spiritual existence, justice, democracy and the economy.” (Joseph Beuys quoted in: Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Joseph Beuys: is it about a bicycle?, Paris 1985, p. 135)

Through performance art, Beuys demonstrated how art which originates from personal experience may also address universal artistic, political, and social ideas. Encapsulating Beuys’s transformation from performer to political activist and social reformer, Is It About a Bicycle? III epitomizes the artist’s most innovative and pioneering concepts regarding art and life. Capturing an outpouring of unrestrained creativity, Is It About a Bicycle? manifests one of the most pioneering artistic minds of a generation.