KP Brehmer
Ideale Landschaft

The artist’s book Ideale Landschaft (Ideal Landscape), which is produced in an edition of 750 as a “public edition” and eight exemplars of a “museum edition” for Edition Block, is part of a “product series” of the same name, which is presented by KP Brehmer in the exhibition Drei Tage Ideale Landschaft (Three Days of Ideal Landscape) at Galerie Block in February 1969. At the heart of this product series is the Druckfarbenmuster Ideale Landschaft (printing color sample), a large-format cliché print on plastic, with a reproduced landscape motif in the form of a print sample book with eight screen and color gradations from yellow to dark green, around which Brehmer develops further sales and display elements with an aesthetic design. In addition to the Druckfarbenmuster Ideale Landschaft, the invitation card mentions the Druckmuster I, the text Ideale Landschaft by Jürgen Becker as a “permanent performance of the text read by Becker during the exhibition”, a three-dimensional Modell der Idealen Landschaft as well as the advertising displays Aufsteller I (with three scent bottles) and Aufsteller II (with six earth samples), the Drei-Minuten-Film as well as the Museumsausgabe des Buches (museum edition of the book) and the color sample book with text by Becker (the aforementioned Volksausgabe). Brehmer himself explains the context of this series as “a demonstration of the possibilities” of appealing to a wide audience: “ Firstly, the museum object that hangs there, in the appropriate format, beautifully representative; then the collector’s edition with the facsimile print of Jürgen Becker’s text in an acrylic glass cassette; then the popular edition, nice and cheap, handy for the coat pocket. These are different ways, distribution channels in the media complex that I see the whole art business as.”¹ Various elements and stages of the production, distribution and reception of this media complex, which also includes the edition Ideale Landschaft, are shown in parallel in Brehmer’s exhibition.
While only a prototype of the museum edition of the edition – a large-format book with six cliché prints on art paper in a cassette – has been produced due to a lack of demand, the smaller-format public edition in spiral binding is being published in the planned edition of 750. Both versions follow the concept of a color sample book, in each of which six cliché prints reproduce the motif of a landscape in various shades of green with a tonal scale. The pages of the bound edition are trimmed in such a way that the color grid scales on the right-hand edge can be viewed like a register.
How is the ideal landscape composed? Brehmer does not approach this question in the medium of romanticized landscape painting, which synthesizes such an image from idealized notions of nature. Rather, he takes the opposite approach and uses a found landscape reproduction to unfold the technological possibilities of contemporary reproduction processes by analyzing the color and tonal values in order to demonstrate the functions and modes of action of the “media complex”. The ironic ambivalence of the phrase Ideale Landschaft, which in no way conjures up a beautiful ideal, but rather reveals the construction of images under media conditions and logics of exploitation, is also made clear by the text written by Jürgen Becker at the invitation of Brehmer’s edition, which brings the examination of land and landscape into the political present of the 1960s.
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte

¹ KP Brehmer, in: KP Brehmer. Produktion 1962-1971, exhib. cat. Kunstverein Hamburg, 1971, n.p.