We received the sad news of the death of Lieba Jappe on 22 January.
We will always remember her as the main organizer of the12th congress and the 29th general assembly of the AICA in Cologne in 1977, dedicated to ‘The Art of the 1970s‘. For the ca. 150 participating members she showed herself a patient, modest, generous and, above all, competent host. But she herself only became an AICA member in 1988, after she had published several articles about contemporary art. Her main field of interest was performance art, for which she recieved the basis during her studies in art history, theatre, production design and costume design. Born of Dutch parents in France in 1934, as Hermine Cornelia Elisabeth Kluytenaar, she studied first in Paris and later in Amsterdam, where, in 1961, she married the theatre historian, art critic and later professor for aesthetics and poet, Georg Jappe, whose speciality was optical and acoustic language. It was obvious that she had to create a connection between art and theatre - and there it was: performance art, which became her field as curator, project manager, programmer, translator and writer. She soon gained international recognition for this latest form of artistic expression. From as early as 1975 she succeeded in promoting performance art as a seperate genre at art fairs and theatre festivals, such as in Bremen, Germany, in 1978. This was by no means straightforward in those days, but soon she found a wider audience for her projects. It lead to the establishment, in 1981, of the Moltkerei Werkstatt in Cologne, as an avant-garde centre, mainly for performances and workshops by international artists. It still exists. At first, she ran it herself, as the director, but after a while Christan Merscheid took over from her. In 1994/95 they both published a survey of their activities, which included – after the fall of the Berlin Wall - performances by young artists from Eastern Germany. She and Georg Jappe also organized the travelling exhibition Ressource Kunst, which went to Berlin, Saarbrücken, Munich and Budapest. This ended up in 1989 as a publication with the same title, with the DuMont-Verlag, in Cologne. Prior to this, she had taken the decisive step towards introducing a wider, international public to performance art through the section she curated for documenta 8, in Kassel, in 1987. This work, in turn, culminated in abook appearing under he own name under the title of Performance – Ritual – Prozess, Handbuch der Aktionskunst in Europa (Performance – Ritual – Process: Handbook of Action Art in Europe, Munich, 1993), which has since become a standard work. What would performance art be wthout the tireless work of Lieba Jappe? After Georg Jappe’s death she retired from her professional life and stopped giving lectures. The extensive archive of Georg and Lieba Jappe – only dealing with performance art - was entrusted to the Archive of the Avantgarde, founded by Egidio Marzoni and donated to the Dresden State Art Collections, Germany, in 2016.
Antje von Graevenitz, Amsterdam.