Pop Art in German Cities, Part 1: What could Düsseldorf do apart from give birth to an avant-garde?
Art history is written in bars. Especially if the bars are in a city with a famous academy. And if people frequent them such as Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, or Sigmar Polke. And bright art critics such as Yvonne Friedrichs of the "Rheinische Post" or gallery owners such as Alfred Schmela. And if it is the early 1960s in West Germany, then the economic miracle generates money that can be invested in art. What could Düsseldorf do apart from give birth to an avant-garde?
In Düsseldorf, art history is not only written in bars, but for example in furniture stores and butcher shops. The avant-garde is too radical for it to be presented in mainstream exhibition institutions. In 1963, Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Manfred Kuttner organized the show "Grafik und Malerei Sonderausstellung" (Special Exhibition of Graphic Art and Painting) in a rented store in Kaiserstrasse. They met while studying at the Düsseldorf art academy. In a letter to the press, Richter announced that the exhibition would be presenting art from Germany for which terms like "Pop Art," "Imperialist or Capitalist Realism," or "German Pop" were characteristic. It is a crazy year: Joseph Beuys, George Maciunas, and Nam June Paik are also celebrating their "Fluxus Festival" in Düsseldorf.
Like their counterparts in Great Britain or the United States, Richter & Co. draw on the vibrant world of the mass media. They adapt photographs from magazines and newspapers, appropriate mundane things such as advertisements, call attention to middle-class Germany and a new landscape of affluence under which memories of the events of recent history are swept. In a work by Polke, a boy with a rigid smile on his face who has been rastered into pixels brushes his teeth. In another one by Richter, "unfocused," mundane young people amuse themselves in a motorboat. Konrad Klapheck produces portraits of devices such as typewriters or sewing machines, and objects like boots or car tires. His connections to New York are good; he met the Pop gallerist Leo Castelli there as early as 1960, who supports artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. German Pop goes the circuit.
Later, in 1963, Richter and Lueg transform the Berges furniture store into a Pop environment with the title "Leben mit Pop--eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus" (Life with Pop--A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism). The performance takes place in the middle of the furniture showroom. They hang roebuck antlers on the wall, and erect life-size papier mâché figures of John F. Kennedy and Alfred Schmela. They present a table on a raised platform set with freshly brewed coffee, marble cake, schnapps, and beer. They sit next to it, wearing suit and tie, on a couch and an armchair, also on a raised platform. A report about the Adenauer era is being broadcast on television. Lying around somewhere is a biography of Winston Churchill and an issue of the magazine "Schöner Wohnen" (Better Living). Dance music and recitations from furniture catalogues resound from speakers. Richter and Lueg later conduct a tour through the showroom, and beer is served in the kitchen department.
And yet another bar opens its doors, a cult bar. In 1967, Bim and Achim Reinert open the Creamcheese, frequented by artists and krautrockers, and where bands such as Kraftwerk or Can perform. As a regular guest from back then recalls in a radio broadcast on WDR: "Achim Reinert stood here with his cashbox and collected five marks. ... The art nail was there at the front. The television wall was here to the right, and behind that the disco, where all hell was let loose." It was ZERO artist Günther Uecker, of course, who contributed the "art nail"--a nail behind a wire rack--who along with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene was also active in Düsseldorf and made the nail the trademark of his art. Uecker collaborated with the filmmaker Lutz Mommartz and the artist Ferdinand Kriwet to design the interior of the bar. Slide and film projectors hang above the DJ console and fill the room with images and colors. Live images of people dancing being recorded by a camera installed above the dance floor are being shown on said television wall, an installation consisting of about twenty bulky television sets. Where ZERO, Fluxus, and Pop amuse themselves. And Düsseldorf is referred to as "Paris on the Rhine."