The topicality of the themes discussed in Beuys’s class attracted not only other students of the Art Academy – such as Sigmar Polke, for example – but also visitors from outside, with the result that Beuys’s class soon became a ‘Podium and Action Centre of the Extended Art Concept’. These discursive, introspective discussions were altogether in keeping with Beuys’s concept of the parallelism of theory and practice and, in 1966, led to the institutionalisation of the so-called ‘ring discussions’ which, in the final analysis, were to become the ‘nucleus’ of the political activities of Beuys’s students. The ‘ring discussions’ were concerned primarily with the concept of art and freedom, university and college education policies, the role of the state and democracy, and also with the ‘social system as a whole, based on Beuys’s art concept and Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Threefold Social Order’. It was also during these ‘ring discussions’ that Beuys would explain his ‘Theory of Sculpture’, the starting point of which he describes as a constellation of three basic driving forces: the ‘chaotic energies’, a ‘crystalline principle of form’ and a ‘communicating principle of movement’.
The new students in Beuys’s class first had to come to terms with the content of the ‘ring discussions’ and to develop an understanding of Beuys’s specific terminology, much of which was borrowed from Steiner’s doctrines. As Beuys adhered neither to the philosophical nor to the linguistic meaning of the terminology he used, it was often very difficult to decode what he was saying and to understand what he meant. Some of his students rejected the ‘ring discussions’ because they cultivated ‘the irrational’ or were too limited to the self-portrayal of a few. Imi Knoebel, Imi Giese and Norbert Tadeusz saw these endless discussions as undermining art, while the practical and artistic aspects of their art studies were being increasingly ousted by political ones. Indeed, these ‘ring discussions’ not only changed the content of the teaching curriculum but also affected the working atmosphere and entire organisation of the class. Compared with Beuys’s first years at the Art Academy, any concentrated artistic work in class was now virtually impossible. One of the consequences was that Imi Giese and Imi Knoebel took over a whole classroom for themselves, allowing none of the other students inside. Other students, such as Inge Mahn, for example, sought refuge in the Academy’s corridors. This situation was further aggravated by the fact that the once rigid organisation of the Academy’s art classes was now rapidly disintegrating, with the result that Beuys’s class and his ‘ring discussions’ became a place to go. These ‘ring discussions’ were frequently accompanied by actions and performances – something at that time quite revolutionary: ‘It wasn’t unusual,’ Erinna König recalls, ‘for one student to start a performance in one corner while another worked away quietly or talked to himself in another.’