Beuys' actions and installations were intended to arouse in other people "counter images" to provoke a spiritual response, to release an "energy impulse." Beuys believed that images and counter images would release mental and physical powers long buried by habit.

In an interview from 1970 with Jörg Schellmann and Bernd Klüser, Beuys emphasizes that his use of such drab-colored materials such as felt has in part to do with this notion of the after-image. Referring to the phenomenon of complementary colors, Beuys explains that by looking at the drab-grey color of felt it could evoke a brightly-colored anti-image in one's mind: "...it's a matter of evoking a lucid world, a clear, lucid, perhaps transcendental spiritual world through something which looks quite different, through an anti-image. One can only create after-images or anti-images by not doing something which is already there by doing something which exists as an anti-image--always in an anti-image process."[17]

Johannes Mathiessen explained that Beuys often spoke of a related concept of signification in relation to the process of the perception of an artwork--that of "information" and "exformation." In the first of a three-part process, an unformed thought or idea exists, it is then "informed" or given form by the artist, for example, in the medium of language, or plastic sculpture. The third stage is that of "exformation" when the viewer must "exform" or interpret ("bring our imagination to") the word or object.
-Johannes Mathiessen, Opening-day Dialogue for the exhibition Joseph Beuys Multiples at the Walker Art Center, September 21, 1997.