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1981
Transitus: Illustration as Material Crossing Ground
  • ISSN: 2052-0204
  • E-ISSN: 2052-0212

Abstract

This article utilizes similarities and overlaps between the work of Joseph Beuys and the increasingly prominent illustrative and performative practices of live scribing or graphic recording as a springboard into a further discourse regarding management theory and creative practice. The idea of the graphic recorder or graphic facilitator originated from interactions between management theory, architecture and the new-age counterculture of the 1970s. In recent times, embodied as the live scribe, such practice may now be considered within a seemingly incongruous overlap of management theory and contemporary illustration. Joseph Beuys in his own way was also a ‘live scribe’. Designated under his all-encompassing concept of ‘social sculpture’, his was a performative art; constructed with the ambitious aim of healing social ills and reuniting elements of the primitive and modern. This article – delivered in part as an illustrated timeline – will act as a speculative survey of equivalences, links and historical foreshadows resonating between the work of Joseph Beuys and contemporary practices of live scribing or graphic recording.

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2023-03-07
2026-04-23

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/content/journals/10.1386/jill_00056_1
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Joseph Beuys and live scribing: A speculative timeline
Journal of Illustration 10, 33 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/jill_00056_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jill_00056_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jill_00056_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): anthroposophy; chalk talk; graphic facilitation; graphic recording; illustration; scientific management; vaudeville

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