Against elites, against authority: With the LIDL Project Jörg Immendorff called for politicized Dada actions.
Jörg Immendorff ties a block of wood to his leg -- painted in the German national colors of black, red and gold and bearing the word "LIDL" -- and then proceeds to walk up and down outside the German parliament. It's 1968 and Germany is quite literally hampering Immendorff's progress.
"LIDL" denoted not the discount food retailer with the colorful logo. No, LIDL was nonsense, was Dada, was onomatopoeia. It was the sound that the block of wood makes that Immendorff dragged along behind him. Or the sound of a baby's rattle. At any rate, it was free of meaning, open for associations and speculations, and thus the ideal title for the actions that Immendorff performed with female colleague Chris Reinecke between 1968 and 1969. The two wanted to achieve no less than bring about a change in political thought and to extract art from the elitist categories in which it was addressed. And that was a tall order.
After the first protest action (which the artist, incidentally, had to explain to the German internal secret service) Immendorff and Reinecke rented premises in Düsseldorf's old town. In the LIDL Space Chris Reinecke offered crochet courses for men, local civic initiatives and students looking for digs met. Until the LIDL actions Immendorff had primarily painted, albeit adding appeals or neologisms to his images, and had taken on board Joseph Beuys' conviction that art could serve to expand people's awareness. He realized that the idea of the collective could offer an avenue for lending direct expression to his socio-critical messages. In his 1966 action "Reigen", he gathered Beuys and other close associates such as Franz Erhard Walther, Sigmar Polke and Reinecke around him in a ring of roses. Their holding hands symbolized Immendorff's self-declared aim "of collaborating with everyone interested and making an impact on society," something he later tried to realize with the LIDL Academy.
In the winter of 1968 the LIDL Academy was founded and convened in Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf. In the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where both Reinecke and Immendorff were students, various professors had already complained about their colleague, Joseph Beuys. Ostensibly, the latter was using the German Students Party, which he had himself founded, in order to corrupt teaching. In fact students had started holding lessons alone and for the public, irrespective of the curriculum and the professors. Immendorff responded immediately to that short moment of anarchy. In the form of the LIDL Academy he held his own events and experimented with alternative means of imparting knowledge: He placed mirrors at the students' desk tops so that they could observe their own habits and assess them. In the LIDL Academy working week in the following spring, the idea was to convert the academy into a hostel. The plan was to convene, eat and sleep (on air mattresses) in the corridors and in the cafeteria. Students, teachers, researchers and other interested parties were invited to discuss the function art education and teaching institutions. Once the police had twice appeared to evict the participants and Joseph Beuys had appeared in person clad in a bearskin, Director Eduard Trier instructed that the institute be temporarily closed. The weekly "Die Zeit" commented on May 16, 1969: "The Lidl Academy can consider its working week as having been successfully concluded: The different topics were covered by consistently abolishing the same. And because everything went so smoothly, Jörg Immendorff intends to prolong the action. As we have seen, there are plenty of people wanting to take part on both sides."
Kassel, 1968: The documenta took place for the fourth time. With Arnold Bode still director, the idea that year was above all to present representatives of the younger avant-garde. Evidently, Jörg Immendorff was not considered among their ranks. He nevertheless appeared at the opening event, with a variation of his "Ego Rod", a "Polar Bear Rod" in his one hand, and a pot of honey in the other, on his back a create with the LIDL Ambassador, a tortoise. "I'm liberating the documenta," the artist proclaimed. Liberating it from what?
Having followed his mentor and prophet Joseph Beuys for many years, convinced that the latter was the aesthetic liberator of Germany, with his LIDL actions Immendorff himself then assumed the role of the prophet acting politically. He sought to liberate the art institutions from the authoritarian doctrines that prevailed in them, to wake Germany's petit-bourgeoisie from its slumbers, and banish hierarchical thought from the world of art. In other words, LIDL was nothing less than the attempt not only to bring life, art and politics together in theory, but to undermine the real lines dividing them. And no less than that.