Despite his liberal attitude towards the course of study and its content, Beuys always insisted that every student model a head in clay at least once before completing their course. But the actual objectives were never so clearly formulated or the decision criteria so narrowly defined as in the case of Beuys’s own former teacher, Ewald Mataré. However, whilst Mataré attached little importance to ‘individual artistic development’, Beuys considered the systematic, regimented teaching of sculptural skills to be far less important than the development of subjective creativity and sensitivity. Beuys’s interest was focused on a categorically subjective, largely autobiographical conception of modern art. He encouraged his students to discover their own individual selves. ‘Every single one of us,’ Bernd Lohaus recalls, ‘was expected to go his own way. Beuys always said: “You mustn’t look how the others draw, but must discover your own way of drawing.”’ If one or other of his students failed to make headway with a particular assignment, Beuys did not hesitate to suggest that they seek inspiration in works of art or literature. He would advise his students to ‘go into the museum and look at certain paintings, especially if paint application was the problem’ , or he would tell them to read a book or go back to drawing. Gerda Hühn recalls that Beuys said: ‘Then sit down and draw some more nudes. Or go out and draw the plaster figures or the kitchen sink. Or look at the window!’

Compared with the students of today, students in Germany at the beginning of the Sixties were given relatively little information about new developments in art – such as those in the USA, for example, where Pop artists had already been experimenting with new materials for the past several years. Unlike his colleague Karl Otto Götz, who was born in 1914 and taught at the Academy from 1959 till 1979), Beuys hardly touched upon any of the contemporary movements in art during his first years at the Academy, but referred them to Leonardo da Vinci, van Gogh, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Edvard Munch and Brancusi. ‘He was forever warning us,’ Klaus Beck remembers, ‘about adopting new fashions. He was always dead against them, and always treated them with a great deal of scepticism.’ However, from 1963 on, Beuys provoked a discourse on contemporary art by inviting Fluxus artists and by his own performance actions. The Fluxus artists’ anti-aesthetic approach was interpreted by many as a possible way of breaking with accepted aesthetic standards and conventions. The awareness of new movements and trends in art resulted in the utilisation of found objects and unconventional materials. This process of awareness was partially triggered by Beuys’s presentation of his ‘Fat Chair’ (1964) during the Academy’s Open Week at the end of the winter semester in 1964. One of Beuys’s students, Klaus Beck, recalls the occasion:

During the winter semester’s Open House Week, Beuys complained that the teachers themselves didn’t exhibit any of their own works. He then brought along a kitchen chair and a large quantity of margarine and patted the margarine on the seat of the chair with a wooden paddle so that it sloped like a wedge. We saw nothing unusual in this and none of us realized that we had before us an incunabulum of art. At that time Beuys had told us nothing about his “energy concept” or the like. We simply considered the making of this “fat chair” to be a rather unspectacular action. I was entrusted with the task of painting one of the walls white so that the chair could be hung up on it.