BÜTTNER,

Truth is work

The Villa Schöningen on the Potsdam bank of the Glienicke Bridge, a place of encounter and exchange between East and West, is showing the exhibition Truth is Work with works by Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen from the Falckenberg Collection.

The title goes back to an exhibition of the three artists curated by Zdenek Felix in the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 1984. They claimed the right to interfere in commenting on every cultural mistake and to seal almost every remarkable event with art, so that nothing would be lost from the beautiful impertinence of life.

One could almost speak of a foolish claim to sole representation, and the paste that linked this group for the time being was their laugh against everything. The intention was to undermine the prevailing regulatory and cultural system with caustic ridicule. "Everyone is an artist" was Joseph Beuys' credo in the early 1970s. “Every artist is a person” was Kippenberger's laconic answer barely ten years later.