Martin Kippenberger

Martin Kippenberger claimed that he had never read Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika despite dedicating his largest and last installation to its final chapter. Like much of his work, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” 1994, was apparently conceived over drinks when a friend summarized the novel for him. A massive accumulation of store-bought and custom-made tables and chairs, arranged for one-on-one job interviews, Amerika was installed in the Museum of Modern Art’s atrium for “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective.” Riffing on the image of an expansive job recruitment event of endless bureaucratic processes in Kafka’s unfinished novel, Kippenberger’s installation introduced the artist’s humour to visitors making their way to the main exhibition galleries on the museum’s sixth floor. Travelling from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where the exhibition was curated by Ann Goldstein, “The Problem Perspective” was the German artist’s first retrospective in the United States. Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture Ann Temkin organized the MOMA exhibition.

Filling the walls and floors of the sixth-floor galleries, the exhibition addressed the difficulties of curating a retrospective of the notoriously excessive artist. Suggested in their title, “The Problem Perspective,” borrowed from Kippenberger’s painting You are Not the Problem, It’s the Problem-Maker in Your Head, 1986, the curators present Kippenberger as an art-historical puzzle, an artist of the recent past who challenged notions of originality and art-world hierarchy, making his own place in it uncertain.

Born in Dortmund, Germany, in 1953, Martin Kippenberger produced work compulsively in a broad range of media during his 20-year career, which was ended by his premature death in 1997. Works dotted the walls leading up to MOMA’s special exhibition galleries as if to suggest the sheer quantity of Kippenberger’s creations could not have been contained in the museum space. Spiderman-Atelier, a sculpture-model of an artist’s studio resembling a stage set, greeted visitors just outside the exhibition entrance. Imagining the studio, complete with half-finished stretched canvases propped against the wall and a bottle of vodka hanging from a window, Kippenberger cast the artist as the Marvel Comics superhero Spider-Man. Depicted as a skeletal wire model, kneeling on one knee with brushes in both hands, Spider-Man is the manifestation of the inflated myth of the artist, his parody of the mythologized modern artist. Relying on a manic calendar of gallery exhibitions to propel his furious production, Kippenberger created paintings, sculptures, installations, posters and printed matter that were site and time specific. The cleverness of Spiderman-Atelier lies in the story of its conception: Kippenberger created the sculpture for an exhibition at L’Atelier Soardi in Nice, France, where Matisse had a studio in the early 1930s.

“The Problem Perspective” was organized around the notion that enforcing a curatorial logic on Kippenberger’s vast production would be misleading. Ann Goldstein explains the reasoning in her catalogue essay: “He left an exhaustive and challenging oeuvre, a few lifetimes of work in just 20 years, with numerous trails of associations that will take many years and many exhibitions to unfold.” Goldstein and Temkin chose to mute their presence, providing few wall texts and audio-tour selections. They arranged the work largely chronologically, beginning with a wall of the small canvases from Kippenberger’s series Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze (One of You, a German in Florence) painted while living in Florence in the mid-1970s and ending with the self-portrait series from 1996 in which he imagined himself as each of the survivors floating in Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa.

As widely noted, Kippenberger’s greatest work was himself. His larger-than-life persona, developed while growing up in West Germany and launched upon settling in West Berlin in 1978, is the subject of its own mythology, born from the artist’s work. In the painting Berlin bei Nacht (Berlin at Night), 1981–82, he portrays himself bandaged after a fight with a gang of punks. Kippenberger’s Büro, the artist’s studio and meeting place for friends and collaborators, set Kippenberger down at the epicentre of the radical community of West Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. He managed SO36, a punk and new wave nightclub located on Oranienstraße, blocks from the Berlin Wall. The works included in “The Problem Perspective” tease the visitor with such hints of the artist and his life. Deeply entangled in the lives of friends and his various locales, Kippenberger’s difficult oeuvre can be illuminated by the context of the work’s creation and exhibition. Making their way through the exhibition, studying dozens of drawings made on hotel stationary and hiking through Jetzt geh ich in den Birkenwald, denn meine Pillen wirken bald (Now I Am Going into the Big Birch Wood, My Pills Will Soon Start Doing Me Good), 1990, Kippenberger’s forest of artificial trees with comically enlarged pharmaceuticals carved out of wood, visitors must wonder about this man Kippenberger. Introduced to the range of his work at the Museum of Modern Art’s installation of “The Problem Perspective,” they now await a future exhibition that seats them at the table, sharing the drinks and conversation that spurred Kippenberger’s production of beguiling works like The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika.” ❚

“Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,” curated by Ann Goldstein, was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from March 1 to May 11, 2009.

Alexander B Kauffman has worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and Harper’s Magazine. He contributed a catalogue essay for Patrick Lundeen’s “Blue Yodeler” exhibition at Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm.