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.