Joseph Beuys and live scribing: A speculative timeline

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.