Beuys’s Legacy in Artist-led University Projects

Joseph Beuys’s Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (FIU), established in the early 1970s, stands at the beginning of a proliferation of artist-initiated university projects that continues to this day. This article contextualises what Beuys did and what he valued in counter-educational initiatives, both behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, and traces the characteristics of the FIU in some of the diverse projects that have followed. It shows how these projects adopt the FIU’s networking dynamic and ‘jump scale’, existing in both the social and the artistic realm.