Sonne Busen Hammer 17 … monochrom #25

„Die Ölzweignummer“

(Was nichts wird, wird Affirmation)

In 1985 a number of Austrian and German artists (Jörg Schlick, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Wolfgang Bauer) had an idea over late-night schnapps to found an „art lodge“. They birthed it as „Lord Jim Lodge“ and created a slogan (Nobody Helps Nobody) and a logo (Sun Breasts Hammer), with the intention that the logo should become more well-known than that of Coca-Cola. This, we might say, was a somewhat classic way of being stuck in the powerlessness of 1980ies-antiart-art. The members of the lodge used the logo on many of their artworks and tried to distribute it that way. Martin Kippenberger — who became one of the bestselling German artists of the 20th century only after his death in 1997 — used it on his installations and self-portraits. The Lodge was quite active, at one moment even publishing a low-circulation magazine, but after Kippenberger‘s death a growing disinterest of the other members the Lodge seemed to predominate. It seems the project had been charged with high symbolic capital, but low in effort. So in 2005 Jörg Schlick invited members of the group monochrom to a talk and informed them about a severe sickness then overtaking him – essentially indicating that he can‘t take care of the Lodge any longer. He asked monochrom to use it and to do more projects, to „let it rock“. monochrom thought about the concept of „rocking“ and had the idea of a „hostile take-over“, of „restarting the Lodge“, creating „franchises“, „profit-maximizing“ the prestitious brand that nobody cared about in a long time…