The LIDL Akademie was a counter-academy founded by Jörg Immendorff in Düsseldorf in 1968. The name came from the sound of a child’s rattle — LIDL — and was later identified with the supermarket chain of the same name. The Akademie was not a school in any conventional sense; it was a period of protest, street action, and deliberate anti-aesthetic provocation that lasted from 1968 to 1970.
Immendorff’s LIDL actions ridiculed the cult of creative genius and the precious aesthetic object. He assembled pretentious iconographic motifs drawn from children’s make-believe — turtles, goldfish, polar bears, playhouses — and transformed them into the “working material” of a hoped-for new functional art form. In January 1968 he appeared before the West German Parliament in Bonn with a wood block labeled “LIDL” tethered to his ankle and painted in the colors of the German flag. He was arrested for defaming the flag.
Other participants in LIDL actions included James Lee Byars, Marcel Broodthaers, Nam June Paik, and Joseph Beuys. The LIDL period is the hinge in Immendorff’s career: from anti-art provocation to the monumental political allegory of Café Deutschland, without ever losing the provocation.
The concept of the counter-academy — an anti-institution that adopts institutional forms in order to dismantle them — was inherited from Beuys’s erweiterter Kunstbegriff but pushed into direct political confrontation. Where Beuys was shamanic and pedagogical, Immendorff was agitprop and theatrical.
See also
- Jörg Immendorff — the founder
- cafe-deutschland — the later series that carries LIDL’s political imperative into painting
- Joseph Beuys — the teacher and theoretical predecessor
- lidl-akademie — self-link; this page is the concept