The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993
Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)
The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993
Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)
Art & Text No 44, 1992
Archetypal bad boy, bricoleur, don of the ‘Cologne Mafia’ with
shows in New York, Graz, Tenerife, Trieste and Seville – to quote Jutta
Koether’s 1989 review in Artscribe, ‘Who is Martin Kippenberger
and why are they saying such terrible things about him?’
I wasn’t sure myself the first time I met him, but my friends all assured
me he wouldn’t do an interview. And they were right. It was the first
Frankfurt Art Fair in April
1989 and Kippenberger was still bruised from the bad publicity he had
received in the German press, which had deliberately set out to construct some
kind of neo-Nazi playboy intent on cynically shafting the collective art world.
I had to leave my tape recorder in the hotel but we cruised the city in taxis
with his adopted Spanish friend Luis Claramunt and ended up at a party for
the German artist Meuser (a disciple of Beuys – as they say), whose major
exhibition had opened that evening.
There is a camaraderie among German and particularly Cologne based artists
that is equalled only by the rivalry and hostility felt between competing clans.
Certain neo-expressionists will make certain bars, nightclubs and brothels
their own while, say, the young ‘scatter’ artists will similarly
mark out their own territory. Kippenberger has taken this form of mateship
into a global arena, more or less adopting certain artists/drinking companions
along the way. Luis Claramunt is one example of this, but the ethos itself
has its roots in jet travel.
Kippenberger is the bad boy of German art. Like Jeff Koons he sets
his own agenda, and just as we all think we have learned the rules he rewrites
them and then, like the true enfant terrible he pretends to be, rips
them up and is sent to stand in the corner, which is how we see him represented
in the installation Sozialkistentransporter included in the Max Hetzler
exhibition which opened during the 1989 Cologne Art Fair.
To enter the installation one had to pull aside an airline-style blue curtain
hanging on rings above the door. Suggestive of the internationalism of jet
travel, the swish of the cloth curtain opens on to any landscape or cityscape
you might choose to visit. Today it is the Biennale of Sydney (Kippenberger
is on the guest list this year), tomorrow Venice, or back to Cologne.
Kippenberger has apartments in Los Angeles, Cologne, and Spain – close
to three major art fairs and never far away from the sun. This is important
for tourism is a major part of the Kippenberger oeuvre. At the Frankfurt Art
Fair the bad boy turned into an excited youth with the arrival at the Parkett booth
of the new straight-off-the-press issue devoted in equal part to Jeff Koons
and Martin Kippenberger. One memorable image of the artist on a typical working
holiday presents him as overweight, broiling from white into pink, in a dusty
village street that cold have equally been in Andalusia or Chile.
Kippenberger, who has created his own jive talk, deliberately gets himself
into fights with the recklessness of a latter-day Caravaggio out on the town,
then gives formal lectures to audiences that understand not a word of what
is being said. All of these facets of his splintered ambition and serious work
ethic must contribute to the story of how he once asked a Spanish farmer to
bring him one live chicken at twelve o’ clock and was eventually presented
with 12 dead chickens at one o’ clock.
The night Kippenberger’s exhibition opened at the Max Hetzler Gallery
he stood at the door elegantly dressed and as suavely sure of himself as any
head waiter overseeing an important function. Next to him, a little more nervously,
Max Hetzler greeted the art buying guests newly arrived from the art fair.
This was hi new gallery, freshly opened, designed by the architect Ungers,
and Kippenberger had labelled it Huhnerdisco(Chicken Disco). No one,
not even his dealer, escapes Kippenberger’s teasing sarcasm or adolescent
game playing. It has always been this way with the man who used to be known
simply as ‘Kip.’
Back in 1979, in his own personal romper room that was Cold War Berlin, he
organized ‘The First Extraordinary Event in Image and Sound on the Theme
of the Age: Misery.’ The second, similarly prefixed event was titled ‘Pisscrutch
Action (Spying on your Neighbour)’ and happened the next year. Between
them the two events launched a generation of young German artists that would
dominate painting in the 1980s.
From his I Love Nicaragua stickers, through his Sophie Calle-esque
projects like 1984 – how it really was, from the example of Knokke (in
1984 Kippenberger commissioned Annette Grotkasten to drive to Knokke and spend
five days as he would have spent them and then write up the result), up to
his recent publication Psychobuildings (a new work by Walter Konig
Books using the appropriated style of left-wing publishing house Merve), Kippenberger
has avoided classification. He has deliberately put himself under scrutiny
but with the knowledge that he is a chameleon at heart and can always assume
a new identity.
Jutta Koether has kept him in her sights longer and more critically than most.
She traces his development from the foundation of ‘Kippenberger’s
Office’ in Berlin in 1978 (before shifting venues for his concerts and
happenings to the legendary Kreuzberg hangout SO36) through to his art world
mafia don status today.
“You can’t deliberately set about to understand Kippenberger’s
art,” she says, “in the sense of breaking it down into component
parts, as you could with that of the new American artists…He is not
a superannuated troublemaker like Oehlen or Penck; he works a great deal more
hectically and hyperactively with a special kind of humour, simply in order
to demand what should have been the artist’s right throughout the centuries
not to be treated too lightly.”
Koether instances Kippenberger’s “crooked red streetlamp, a distorted
object, like the ones cartoon drunks lean against on the way home, or the one
he uses to hold himself up. If you set out to ‘understand’ Kippenberger,
which is actually impossible, you must become sufficiently involved with him
not to be either the streetlamp or the drunk.”
Art critic Diedrich Diederichson, in an essay on the sculpture Wittgenstein’s
Misunderstandings, has referred to what he calls Kippenberger’s “corrections
through double negatives…This was the method of construction for a Spanish
park keeper’s box which he built for himself and his dog, also for a
refrigerator, a genuine Gerhard Richter, or the ideal shelves that his assistant
had as a teenager and which he single-handedly rebuilt with all the elements
that can make the shelves pubescent, before Kippenberger’s masterly touch
completed them.”
Diederichson goes on to describe this logic of negation as following “neither
the laws of free association nor other techniques known as Dadaist or Surrealist.” Rather,
Kippenberger’s taxonomic constructions would be a form of “Not-Thinking”,
akin to Borge’s story about a Chinese encyclopaedia called Heavenly
Treasure of Beneficent Realizations which in turn inspired Foucault’s The
Order of Things.
When he paints, Kippenberger is at his weakest. Except when he draws – his
drawings are truly weak. They are even worse than the police identikit pictures
that failed to catch the Russian serial killer recently sentenced to death
by firing squad. Some would say that such a fate is too good for Kippenberger,
but he just laughs and reflects that he was the one who said “I want
to be the best of the second-raters.”
While Kippenberger has been fêted by the international art press in Flash
Art, Parkett, and the late lamented Artscribe, he has
with the exception of a favourable review in a 1991 issue of Texte
zur Kunst, received a lot of flack from mainstream critics like Joachim
Lottmann and Wolfgang Max Faust. The was reports by the latter about the antics
of the Förg, Oehlin, Herold and Kippenberger “boy’s brigade” and
their alleged outbursts against Jews, women and homosexuals that caused Kippenberger
to stop giving interviews, a rule he broke in agreeing to talk to Berlin critic
Marius Babias for the very last issue of Artscribe.
In the Babias interview he says: “I’m a member of the Lord Jim
Lodge, and I’ve adopted its motto, ‘Nobody helps Anybody,’ as
a law for myself. Be nice to the people you meet on the way up – you’ll
meet them again on the way down. Life is easier if you don’t set your
standards too high. Art is the highest of the emotions.”
(the Lord Jim Lodge is a mafia-like organization founded in 1984 by Wolfgang
Bauer and counts among its members “only” adventurers and anarchists,
supposedly including Niki Lauda, Arnulf Rainer, and posthumously Friedrich
Dürrenmatt. Its emblem is a woman’s breast with a hammer.)
For a long time Kippenberger has been hopelessly smitten by the dialogue in
William Holden films and this has led to his formation of the “William
Holden Company,” a triumvirate linking Kippenberger, Holden, and the
artist’s current pupil Matthias Schaufler. On Kippenberger’s instructions
Schaufler walked 3,000 km across Africa, posting “prepared” postcards
as he went as part of the Company’s activities.
Kippenberger is characteristically enigmatic about his political or moral affiliations.
On Gunther Forg’s alleged Hitler salute during a private view at the
Stuttgarter Kunstverein: “I wasn’t there. I’ve got all the
evidence to prove that Förg didn’t give a Hitler salute. It’s
Albert Oehlen’s dog that knows how to go ‘Heil Hitler.’ If
you get hold of him in a particular way he puts out his arm and salutes.
Pressed further by Babias to explain himself, he admits, “OK, aggression
should not happen. I find aggression in public unpleasant…Besides, Förg
never did shout ‘Heil Hitler’…let me tell you how the whole
thing started. At the time it was pure provocation. Sigmar Polke and Anselm
Kiefer marched into the bar we hang out in shouting ‘Heil Hitler.’ Sigmar
was wearing an SS leather coat and even had a German shepherd dog with him.
It was a joke.”
At the back of a catalogue for Luis Claramunt, Martin Kippenberger and Albert
Oehlen have written a rambling poem that alludes to the lyrics of their mutual
hero Don van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart. Not surprisingly it
tells us more about its authors than it does about its subject.
In part, it reads:
Luis doesn’t have a problem with shoeshine boys, because they have his
brain.
Luis doesn’t have problems with people who look exactly like him because
they share his pain.
Luis drinks, gets drunk, falls down, no problem. He has no problem with alcohol.
“Fein rubberkommen is doch kein problem,” because he doesn’t
care, he isn’t there.
You are not the problem. It’s the problem-maker in your head.
