Heiner Stachelhaus

JOSEPH BEUYS Heiner Stachelhaus (Abbeville Press, $24.95) Joseph Beuys, the utopian German artist who died in 1986, was known for shamanic performances that included sweeping out a forest and explaining art to a dead hare but also for his political activism. He founded Dusseldorf's Free University in 1974 and ran as a Green party candidate for the European parliament in 1979. Joseph Beuys is the first English-language biography of this controversial folk hero. Handsomely designed and lovingly detailed, it offers only limited insight into the elusive conceptualist one critic called ''half-way between clown and gangster.'' C- -Margot Mifflin