The LIDL Academy advocated a change in the art market, which should ideally be less elitist and authoritarian. In 1968, Jörg Immendorff and Chris Reinecke called for Dada actions to initiate a change in thinking. Between 1968 and 1970, various art and protest actions took place within the framework of the LIDL Academy. After Immendorff had to answer to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Reinecke and he rented a room in Düsseldorf's old town. Meetings of citizens' initiatives and students (including crochet classes for men) were held in the »LIDL room«. Students, teachers, researchers and other guests were invited to discuss educational institutions and art education. The actions dissolved the relationship between the work and the viewer. For Immendorff, art should always have a social function. During its existence, Joseph Beuys, Franz Erhard Walter, Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman and others were invited. The precursor of the LIDL activities was the action evening »Freshness«, which Immendorff and Reinecke organised in their private rooms.

The aim of the foundation and actions was to free the art institutions from their entrenched hierarchical structures. LIDL was an attempt to bring life, art and politics together not only in theory. Immendorff, who had previously mainly painted, added appeals to his pictures and adopted from Beuys the conviction that art could have a consciousness-expanding effect, recognised in the idea of the collective a way of giving direct expression to his socially critical messages. With his actions, he took on the role of a politically acting prophet.

After the police came to evict them twice and Joseph Beuys himself appeared in a polar bear skin, the director Eduard Trier arranged for the temporary closure of the teaching institution. "Die Zeit" commented on 16 May 1969: "The Lidl Academy, however, can consider its working week to have ended successfully: The various issues were settled by consistently doing away with them. And because everything went so well, Jörg Immendorff wants to extend the action. As you could see, there are enough people on both sides who are willing to play along. (Cf. Die Zeit, 1969, see below)

Jörg Immendorff, Chris Reinecke