Living with Pop - a demonstration for capitalist realism

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Living with Pop - A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism
Konrad Lueg, Gerhard Richter, 1963
Photograph by Reiner Ruthenbeck
Das Living Room
Link to the picture
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Living with Pop - A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism was an exhibition and demonstration organized by Konrad Lueg and Gerhard Richter on October 11, 1963 in the Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf , Flinger Strasse 11 . The exhibition established the term capitalist realism .

exhibition

In the run-up to the exhibition, the owner of the furniture store Berges placed two advertisements in the newspaper in the hope of advertising his own company, which pointed to the upcoming event. Before that, the two painters Lueg and Richter had shown the owner a photograph of the exhibition "New Realists" in the Sidney Janis gallery in New York , printed in the Swiss art magazine Art International , to make their project more clear . On October 5, 1963, a photograph illustrated an advertisement of the furniture store in the Düsseldorf local newspaper Der Mittag and the addition "This is roughly how the exhibition 'Leben mit Pop' will be at Berges." The office building at Berges was an essential part of the "demonstration" by Konrad Lueg and Gerhard Richter and not the reason why they exhibited under furniture, as many artistically professed do it again and again today. Lueg and Richter had each exhibited four of their pictures: by Lueg four fingers , praying hands , sausages on paper plates and hangers ; von Richter Mund , Pope , Hirsch and Schloss Neu-Schwanstein .

invitation card

The yellow invitation card read “Leben mit Pop” in large red letters and below, a little smaller, “a demonstration for capitalist realism”. Richter and Lueg had pulled a green balloon through the punched out “o” of the word “Pop”, and the following instructions could be read on the back of the card: “Instructions for use: 1. Inflate! Note the label! 2. Let it burst! Note the noise! Pop!"

Waiting room and living room

The visitors first had to take the elevator to the third floor of the furniture store before they gathered in a “waiting room”, a large staircase corridor. This was decorated on the walls with 14 roebuck antlers, "shot from 1938 to 1942 in Pomerania". Next to the elevator stood two life-size painted paper mache sculptures depicting President John F. Kennedy and Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Schmela . A Frankfurter Allgemeine from October 11, 1963 was on each of the 39 chairs. Then the guests were asked into an “average living room”, where a hat, a yellow shirt, blue trousers, socks and a pair on the wall next to the door Shoes hung. Nine notes with brown crosses were attached to this cloakroom, and underneath was a box with palmin and margarine with the inscription " Joseph Beuys is here!" Gerhard Richter sat on a couch and Konrad Lueg on an armchair, both raised on pedestals and dressed in a suit and tie. Also on a pedestal was a table with coffee and cake, as well as beer and grain, as well as sliced ​​marble and bowl cakes and poured coffee. A vase of flowers was placed on a tea cart, and Winston Churchill's memoirs and a copy of the magazine Schöner Wohnen lay in the intermediate compartment . The television that was switched on broadcasted a report on the “ Adenauer era ” after the Tagesschau , because Adenauer had handed Federal President Lübke his resignation that day.

demonstration

In front of the entrance on Flingerstrasse, two employees of the furniture store distributed programs from 8 p.m. that were given a serial number. Dance music played over loudspeakers throughout the house. When they arrived in the “waiting room”, the 122 counted visitors were greeted by a speaker and asked at intervals of three to five minutes and in groups of six to ten people to visit the “living room”. After half an hour, the artists Konrad Lueg and Gerhard Richter left their pedestal and led the guests through the individual furniture departments of the house, while, paired with texts from furniture catalogs, dance music continued from the loudspeakers. The tour went through the bedroom department on the second floor and down to the first floor, where the living room department was. Then it went further down to the basement to the kitchen department, and the visitors sat in the 41 kitchen facilities to drink the beer provided.

Socialist and capitalist realism

Gerhard Richter, who coined the term “ capitalist realism ”, had been a promising painter of “ socialist realism ” before he fled to the Federal Republic in 1961 . In a letter of April 29, 1963 to the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau, Richter spoke not only of an imperialist, but also of a capitalist realism - which, following the Anglo-American view of Pop Art , recognizes and processes the modern mass media as a real cultural phenomenon - and that he is planning a “demonstrative exhibition” on Kaiserstraße in Düsseldorf, together with Konrad Lueg , Sigmar Polke and Manfred Kuttner . He recognized this less as a reference than as an analogy resulting from certain "psychological, cultural and economic requirements that are the same here as in America ."

See also

literature

  • Eckhart Gillen (Ed.): Pictures of Germany. Art from a divided country . 47th Berliner Festwochen im Martin-Gropius-Bau , Dumont, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7701-4173-3
  • Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Hrsg.): The art of the exhibition. A documentation of thirty exemplary art exhibitions of this century . Insel Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. / Leipzig 1991, ISBN 3-458-16203-8

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Susanne Küper: Gerhard Richter, capitalist realism and its painting based on photographs from 1962–1966 . In: Eckhart Gillen (Ed.): Deutschlandbilder. Art from a divided country . Dumont, Cologne 1997, p. 266
  2. ^ A b c Hans Strelow: Living with Pop - A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism by Konrad Lueg and Gerhard Richter, Düsseldorf 1963 . In: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Hrsg.): The art of the exhibition. A documentation of thirty exemplary art exhibitions of this century . Insel Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. / Leipzig 1991, p. 166 f.
  3. ↑ Christine Mehring: The art of a miracle. A History of German Pop 1955–1972 . In: Stephanie Barron, Sabine Eckmann (Ed.): Art and Cold War. German positions 1945–89 , Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, Dumont, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8321-9145-0 , p. 58
  4. ↑ Susanne Küper: Gerhard Richter, capitalist realism and its painting based on photographs from 1962–1966 . In: Eckhart Gillen (Ed.), Cologne 1997, p. 267
  5. ↑ Hans Strelow, in: Bernd Klüser, Katharina Hegewisch (Ed.), P. 170 f.