The Artistic Concept and a Cleansing (Revolution) of Terms
1.
In the most sublime conceptual image of humankind,
LIBERTY EQUALITY FRATERNITY
the principle of the DEMOCRACY is represented by its central element, EQUALITY.
DEMOCRACY is derived from the EQUALITY of all people before the law. The idea
of EQUALITY, the central element, does not mean that all people are the same,
but only that all have Equal Rights. Thus, EQUALITY refers to the legal structure
of society. The societal legal structure based on EQUALITY is called DEMOCRACY.
2.
Whence, then, is law derived? DEMOCRACY means that “all power stems from the people.”
In a DEMOCRACY, the people are the sovereign of the law. But all of us, each one of us, are
the people! Each with his or her own voice, and every voice weighs the same. However,
this equal weight of every voice is only ensured if each voice is also free, i.e. not preempted,
not dictated. Here, the first element of the three, LIBERTY, appears. LIBERTY is thus based
on the human being as an individual, as a self. It refers to the individual’s special features,
uniqueness, productivity, and creativity, to what he or she thinks, feels and wants, to the spirit.
“Every person is an artist,” Joseph Beuys said. He meant the Essence of LIBERTY as the
potential of every human being. That is the basis for everything.
Thus, the production and the design of Law, and at a higher level, the production and the
design of DEMOCRACY, in which law is based on the principle of the EQUALITY of all
before the law, is an individual act of creation by a free person . Rights cannot be created from
above, but only from below, i.e. out of the LIBERTY and self-determination of every single
human self.
Hence, EQUALITY does not abolish the LIBERTY of the individual, but rather lifts up that
LIBERTY to a higher form – the form of the structure of liberty of society.
3.
However, the highest form of the LIBERTY appears in the third element, FRATERNITY.
FRATERNITY (love) refers to the cooperation of all based on a division of labour in
production, circulation, fulfillment of needs and loving, hence careful management
of nature and resources. FRATERNITY (love) is the principle of economy implemented
by people. It refers to, and brings forth, the future form of a free world with an
ecological economy.
- Joseph Beuys: “The Social Sculpture”
For this future form, which is to overcome the present not yet free, not yet democratic,
not yet fraternal (but rather egotistical) form, the formation of the central element is the
decisive threshold step for the realization of real demo cracy at the end of the 20th century.
For new economic laws, new capital laws, new financial laws derived from the LIBERTY
of the human self and its creativity, can be realized only through legal agreements which
are democratic, which means based on equal rights.
Thus, the realization of EQUALITY (democracy) from LIBERTY (the creative power of the
human self) is the condition for the realization of a FRATERNITY (the Gesamtkunstwerk
“Social Sculpture,”) in which LIBERTY can fully emerge for the first time.
4.
For the recognition and strengthening of this intellectual, artistic constellation of
- LIBERTY EQUALITY FRATERNITY -
that it may finally descend from the heavens, where it appeared for the first time over
Paris 200 years ago, to the earth, the OMNIBUS for Direct Democracy in Germany
has for seven years been traveling through Germany as a vehicle of the “Extended
Definition of Art.” Exactly seven years after its first stop, in September 1987 at Documenta
8 in Kassel, it is to arrive in Paris on the occasion of the Joseph Beuys Exhibition at the
Centre Pompidou in September 1994.
Johannes Stüttgen, 1994
on the occasion of the journey of the Bus to Paris in 1994, at the invitation
of the Pompidou Museum Center
