Since Beuys had, from the very beginning, consistently kept his work as an artist separate from his work as a teacher, it was not until 1967, at the exhibition Parallel Process in Mönchengladbach, that his students were first confronted with a comprehensive display of his drawings, sculptures and objects. His use of unusual and often perishable materials, such as food residues, animal carcases, bones, blood, hair and fingernail clippings triggered in many students a process that was to lead to a completely new feeling for materials. It was at this exhibition in Mönchengladbach that they suddenly became aware of Beuys’s way of working, his approach to materials, his notion of sculpture and artistic concept, his ‘Theory of Sculpture’. By using theses materials Beuys intended to trigger processes of change and consciousness and, at the same time, to elucidate his ‘Warmth Theory’ and to show how energies relate.
Whilst these semantic references were recognised by some of Beuys’s students, though more through intuition than through comprehension, they were little understood by most of them, especially as Beuys never explained his work, actions or materials during his classes. Beuys’s theories were better understood by those students who took an active part in the ‘ring discussions’ or kept track of Beuys’s public interviews, which were taking place with increasing frequency. By the same token, Beuys’s reference to the holistic thinking of the anthroposophists was better understood by those students who were familiar with the spiritualist doctrine of Rudolf Steiner. As a result of this gradual familiarisation with the Beuys iconography and the simultaneous confrontation with his works towards the end of the Sixties, more and more students in Beuys’s class began to work with a diversity of found materials and objects.
This phenomenon was, for conceptual reasons, rejected by such students as Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo and Imi Giese, whilst others regarded it as a challenge or encouragement to explore the use of new materials. As for Imi Knoebel, it confirmed and strengthened his interest in the purism and formal reduction of the Minimal art of the Sixties and in the ‘pure art’ of Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935).