Wahrheit ist Arbeit - Buttner, Kippenberger, Oehlen und ein Werk von Herold

Catalog on the occasion of the exhibition at Villa Schöningen, Potsdam, July 3 to October 31, 2010 (German)

Charles Jencks opened his 1977 treatise The Language of Post-Modern Architecture with the verdict "Death to Modernism! It was a reckoning. The great political and artistic designs of the 20th century to create a new society, indeed a new humanity, as Che Guevara had proclaimed with the figure of the "Hombre Nuevo" of the 1968 generation, had failed. The period that followed has gone down in history as postmodernism, as a time without binding systems and guidelines. Architecture and art anticipated what was to happen politically a good ten years later with reunification and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In 2010, the Villa Schöningen on the Potsdam bank of the Glienicke Bridge, a place of encounter and exchange between East and West, presented 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 at the Folkwang Museum in Essen in 1984. They claimed the right to intervene and comment on every cultural aberration and to seal almost every remarkable event with art so that nothing would be lost of the beautiful imposition of life.

One could almost speak of a foolish claim to sole representation, and the glue that bound this group together for a time was their laughter against everything. The intention was much more to undermine the prevailing system of order and culture with caustic mockery and to point out at best rudimentary utopias and romanticisms that were doomed to failure. "Everyone is an artist" was Joseph Beuys' credo in the early 1970s. "Every artist is a human being" was Kippenberger's laconic response barely ten years later. (