Martin Kippenberger: The problem-maker

Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1994, mixed media, dimensions variable, © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

“Behold the good and just! Whom do they hate most?

Him who breaketh up their tables of values,

the breaker, the lawbreaker:

- he, however, is the creator.”

Federic Nietzche. Thus spoke Saratustra.

By Janet Batet

Martin Kippenberger is a controversial, uninhibited, eccentric figure with an impressive level of energy and synergy. Creator, project developer and social agitator, his work cannot be understood dissociated from his life, in which each gesture was loaded with meaning and resonance. In spite of his untimely death at the age of 44, Martin Kippenberger is one of the most controversial and influential artists of the end of the 20^th Century, as much in his native Germany as around the world. 

During his short artistic career, Kippenberger rapidly caught the keen eye of institutions, such as, Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt; Centre George Pompidou in Paris; Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam or the Museum of Contemporary Art in Geneva. The influence and study of his legacy have only grown since his death. His oeuvre has been the object of exhaustive retrospectives like the one organized in 2006 by the Tate Modern in England. Now, under the title “Martin Kippenberger: The problem perspective,” the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles presents the first major retrospective exhibition of this artist in the United States. The exhibition will travel to New York next year.

Organized by Ann Goldstein, the ambitious show assembles more than 250 works and achieves a meticulous examination of Kippenberger’s artistic practice. The show, true to this artist’s unorthodox output, includes its most dissimilar manifestations: paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, drawings, books, invitations, series and dissimilar objects recycled by the artist and controversially inserted into the world of art. Most of the show can be found in the building located on Grand Avenue, while the colossal installation “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” can be visited at the Geffen Contemporary Gallery in Little Tokyo.

Kippenberger was born on February 25, 1953 in Dortmund, and he died March 7, 1997 in Vienna, where he had been residing for a year. His prolific work and controversial artistic ability burst onto the scene in the mid-seventies rapidly becoming the driving force and uniter of the German artists of his generation; of note, Albert Oehlen, Georg Herold, Werner Büttner, Dieter Göls, and Günther Förg, among others.

In order to understand Kippenberger’s oeuvre one must first understand his talent for life and creation. The first thing we would have to admit is that the customary split between these domains did not exist for Kippenberger, whose meaningful output was situated precisely on the slippery, artificial boundary that maintains the status quo between the artistic system and the sacrosanct character of the artist.

Kippenberger’s oeuvre is based on Manichean antinomes, to which we have become so accustomed that we no longer even notice them. Thus, art-life, public-private, original-series are disarticulated and presented to the spectator in Kippenberger’s work, always exacting deconstruction and analysis.

Indicative of exploring the limits between the public and private domain were his public bouts of intoxication, the climax of which were his drunken digressions. His series of incongruent posts incapable of remaining upright are the most poetic version of this facet of Kippenberger’s creativity. Other recurring actions, such as, public nudity, or his moments of social pasta are another eloquent example of how his private life and everyday irrelevant elements permeated the artistic practice of this creator.

For Kippenberger the negative appeared as the central strategy of his ideological corpus. Thus, socially-repudiated aptitudes appear over and over again throughout his career; incongruent or apparently unfinished works are also common. Kippenberger seems to have been motivated by the ugly and shoddy work, by repetition ad nauseum, by the accumulation of everyday irrelevant objects and their inclusion in the artistic space.

“One of You, a German in Florence” (1976-1977) is symptomatic of this. The artist had moved to that city in order to take an acting class which he later abandoned. The installation is comprised of small monochrome oil paintings that reproduce snapshots taken by Kippenberger in Florence or taken from the newspaper. The influence of another German artist, Gerhard Richter, is felt. Kippenberger focused on common, anonymous subjects and everyday objects. Most of the time, the photos are irrelevant, incoherent, fragmented.

In spite of Kippenberger’s prolific work and his dissimilar areas of interest, some themes are often revisited by the artist. One of these themes is, without a doubt, the self-portrait. His interest in the self-portrait appeared at the beginning of the eighties with “Dear painter, paint for me” (1981). Comprised of twelve paintings in the photo-realist and pop style, some of the images come from photos of Kippenberger during stay in New York in 1979; others are snapshots taken here and there, such as the controversial photo-realist style detail of the suit pocket full of pens tied to each other. The images from this installation were revisited years later in his series of photographic self-portraits, “If you can’t handle freedom, try seeing how far you can get with a woman” (1984).

At the end of the eighties, the self-portrait recurs. In 1988, in the series realized in Spain, Kippenberger appears in underwear like Pablo Picasso. The style is now more expressionist with a taste for the incomplete image as a constant. Once in Los Angeles, Kippenberger began his series “Fred the Frog,” in which the crucified frog appears as a suitable metaphor for creative surrender and sacrifice. In his final years, the self-portrait reappeared in his series “The Raft of the Medusa” (1996).

Three colossal projects marked the final years of Martin Kippenberger’s artistic career. I refer to “The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” (1994), “The Raft of the Medusa” and “Jacqueline: The Paintings Pablo Picasso Couldn’t Paint Anymore” (both from 1996). In all three we perceive projects marked by the quote, history and auto-referentiality. In all of them, the concept of death -physical or spiritual-, the unfinished legacy and creative suffering prevail.

In “The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” Kippenberger was inspired by Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel: Amerika (1927). The enormous installation displays a decayed employment center in which bureaucratic machinery has devoured the human element. The installation includes the works of other artists, such as, Jason Rhoades, Tony Oursler and Donald Judd; furniture by designers, such as, Arne Jacobsen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Marcel Breuer; as well as Kippenberger’s own recycled pieces that coexist with all kinds of objects acquired at the flea market. The work constitutes a critique of human alienation in the midst of social structures that annihilate the individual, and, more importantly, becomes a criticism of the status quo of the artistic system at the end of the century.

Both “The Raft of the Medusa” and “Jacqueline: The Paintings Pablo Picasso Couldn’t Paint anymore” directly address death and artistic genius. In both of them the artist positions himself as the protagonist. In the first series, Kippenberger himself plays the part of each of the kidnapping survivors. In the second, Kippenberger impersonates Picasso, becoming an extension that carries on the work, thus overcoming death.

Kippenberger thus ended his career as enfant terrible -true to his irreverent and questioning concept of art. Insatiable creator, tireless producer, ironic and sensitive at the same time, his legacy is without a doubt an imponderable that sustains creators and lovers of art throughout the world.

“The problem perspective,” produced in 1986, emerges over time as the best epitaph of the creative agony of this artist: “You are not the problem. It’s the problem-maker in your head.”

Janet Batet: Independent curator and art critic. BA in Art History (University of Havana, Cuba); MA in Multimedia (University of Quebec, Montreal