“He [the Dalai Lama] asked me for my participation and I rejected the plan to make a kind of sculpture there in this old way, to make in a kind of special place this special modern sculpture. I told him that my idea would be this time to plant seven thousand oaks in Kassel, seven thousand trees. And to mark every tree with a little stone, so that everybody after three, two, five or six hundred years can still see that in 1982 there was an activity. After the radical destruction of the forests here in Germany for all this technological nonsense, that there was an impulse that came in the same time, to plant seven thousand oaks. This is such a kind of activity during the Documenta [in Kassel], that has to do with the 'Documenta', but is a real other thing in the conventional understanding of art.”

— Joseph Beuys

Source: 1980's, Interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1981, p. 185 - Beuys' statement on planting seven thousand oaks in Kassel, in 'Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama'

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Joseph Beuys 50

German visual artist 1921–1986

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