Press all images to enlarge

Martin Kippenberger, The Problem Perspective
MOMA, New York

I can't cut off an ear every day…" once said Martin Kippenberger, the mythological bad boy of the art world who lived fast and died young at the age of 44. Both in art and in life, often leaking into each other he was a rude entertainer repeatedly kicking and pulling at the boundaries of artistic good taste and social acceptability. This first retrospective of his work in the United States, which made its initial appearance at MOCA in Los Angeles and currently occupies the MOMA's 6ths floor galleries, sheds some light on a prolific and exuberant career that has gotten relatively little exposure in the Unite States.

Installation view of Martin Kippenberger's Spiderman Studio (Spiderman-Atelier), 1996, at The Museum of Modern Art, 2009 Wood, metal, plastic, Plexiglas, mirrors, bronze, Styrofoam, painted canvases, vodka bottle, and balsa

Kippenberger's practice traverses different mediums and ultimately amounts to a labyrinthine tangle of activities gestures and cues. The show starts with a smattering of sculptures and paintings including works from his 1981 solo debut in Berlin. In Dear Painter Paint Me, a series of paintings that form a kind of conceptual memoir, scenes from the artist's visit to New York the previous year are depicted in a photorealist style by a sign painter, hired by Kippenberger to execute the job. Dry indifferent renderings portray vignettes from the experience of a young German man walking about in a foreign city that ignores him. In these images that feel a bit like Cin?ma v?rit? frozen in paint. The impression is of an aspiring actor lost in a crowd as you see him impeccably dressed, lounging on an abandoned couch amidst a pile of garbage bags on a New York City street corner. Indeed, Kippenberger before turning to art tried his hand at acting for a little while and spent some time in Florence pursuing this vocation unsuccessfully.

Untitled (Ohne Titel), 1988 Oil on canvas, 94 1/2 x 78 3/4 in

While in Italy, One of you, A German In Florence, a large series of small canvases came together and exudes similar sentiments housed within a simple and systemic mode of operation: Two paintings a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The result is a grid formation of black and white canvases that when stacked on top of each other reach the height of the artist/actor. The field of gridded images, painted in an offhand unsentimental style, gives a pulsating, filmic rhythm as one image is always already perceived in relation to its neighboring canvases. A city is portrayed in a style that is both indifferent and seemingly dry and yet unequivocally points back to an individual eye and experience that capture and record this mosaic of incongruent scenes. Nooks and crannies of a daily urban inventory; neon lights of a bar, a picture in a news paper, a man in the toilet, pigeons resting on a sculpture, a cropped image from a Botticelli portrait, another of the maimed fingers of a stone statue, hinting at the piazza it is standing in, the dim lighting fixture in an empty caf?. Right nearby, a woman's hand holding a cigarette, as it is reflected in a mirrored wall.

Kippenberger who had a solid reputation as a professional troublemaker was shunned by many museums during his lifetime. After his death from liver disease steady streams of recognition and embrace began flowing around Europe and beyond. On his resume were a slew of bar brawls, rude pranks and unruly drunken episodes that both fed into his public image of an unbridled enfant terrible and increasingly made him a quite unpopular figure. These misadventures crop back up into his work, most obviously in Dialogue With Youth, featuring his heavily bandaged and swollen face after he had been viciously beat up in a Berlin nightclub he was managing by a group of punk rockers. This endless clashing with the world, whether it was his rowdy drunken performance at an opening, or antagonizing his peers through his work seems to be at the center of his practice, a leitmotif running through a complex and heterogeneous body of work.

A meeting point that marries perfectly his relentless and unabashed exhibitionism and a generous and fluent touch for all things graphic, forms in the large body of posters, invitations and books that he produced throughout his career. The exhibition offers a large selection of framed announcements and posters that crackle on the walls with energy and visual punch, sharing a sense of easy playfulness less apparent in some of his more ambitious projects. Naturally, many of them feature Kippenberger himself since his earliest days as an artist. One sports the title Selling America Buying El Salvador; tacked on is a photo of Kippenberger voraciously chewing over a plate of pasta. In another his bloated belly takes center stage as he faces the camera with a steady eye. His love of word play and his knack for waltzing words with images nowhere comes together so effortlessly as in these lively, quick gestures of the hand and the eye.

Untitled from the series Dear Painter, Paint for Me (Ohne title aus der serie Lieber Maler, male mir), 1981 Acrylic on canvas, 8’ 2 ½ in. x 9’ 10 1/2 in.

Another series of work, to my mind the most persuasive and poetic, are the Hotel Drawings, in which the viewer becomes privy once again to the world of Kippenberger the solitary traveler, this time a jet setting artist, globe trotting from one hotel to another, and draws through many instances and images an indirect and multifaceted self-portrait. The rules of the game are simple and therefore allow for gentle subtleties and tonalities of thought to peak through. Always on hotel stationary from all over the world these pages of a diary in space are covered in pencil, watercolor and marker drawings that bring to mind endless solitary hours spent in lonely rooms all over the world. Doodles, cartoony scenes, collage formations and more fleshed out color drawings sit atop the readymade landscape of the logos and stationary fonts and make for a quite but generous overture to draw the viewer into a humorous yet pensive world. Indeed Kippenberger himself visited many of those hotels, but the project bleeds into the realm of fiction and myth-making as he started asking friends and acquaintances to bring him paper mementos from their adventures and travels and used them as his own.

Installation view of the exhibition Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective at The Museum of Modern Art, 2009

Kippenberger continually grappled with the myth of the artist not only in manipulating his own image through his art and much-publicized life style but also by confronting in his work art titans such as Joseph Beuys and Picasso, both very accomplished and tireless promoters of their own public persona. Beuys the shamanistic artist/social healer, a giant figure whose humorless dictums no doubt Kippenberger riled against, is referred to in a number of works including Mother of Joseph Beuys, executed in a lively and energetic "bad painting" style it shows a morose and monochromatic woman. Kippenberger painted in a world where there is no more room for grandiose gestures, ideologies and utopian statements such as the ones Beuys was famous for. In response he adopts the features of the flawed and the grotesque and touts a certain vulgarity and excess as the building blocks for his myth making endeavor. Picasso weaves in and out of his work until the very end. Kippenberger muses over this proclaimed Genius in his self-portraits from the 90s, in which he is no longer a youthful and svelte figure, and exposes a body whose heft cannot conceal anymore the years of metabolic conspicuous consumption and substance abuse. Heavily bearded and puffy, a middle-aged Kippenberger dons a pair of familiarly Picassoesque underwear, summing up the problem in disarming shorthand. In one painting a balloon wafts into the frame, comically hovering in front of his face, hiding it, in tandem with the iconic undergarment, ballooning over a pair of ample thighs. It seems the very act of self-portraiture is brought into question; a genre firmly entrenched in centuries of image making, and here, reconsidered time and again through the lens of modern media and contemporary art.

Installation view of Martin Kippenberger’s The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”, 1994, in The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium at The Museum of Modern Art, 2009 Mixed media, furniture, slide projectors, video projectors, TV monitors, green flooring with white lines, and bleachers

On the way to and from the main exhibition galleries you can visit The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika, a sprawling installation that unleashes the Kippenbergian spirit to great effect. Part warehouse part basketball court, part office space, it evokes Kafka's novel, left unfinished at the time of this death. It is a tableau of jovial bustle, volume and activity. A pageant of altered objects such as office furniture lifeguard posts, coffee tables and chairs given a swift sculptural twist. In their midst giant fried eggs lounge next to African sculptures, and desks that have been artfully converted into mini storage facilities for paintings and art. A certain kind of inventory seems to be taking place of both an outer and inner world, that collapse into each other in a gridded state of hilarity and mayhem.

The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1994