For making stuff like this:
Now I'm going to the big birch wood, my pills will soon start doing me good, 1990Ingredients: 29 birch trees (rolls of cardboard and plastic and black-and-white offset prints), metal stands, and wooden pills. Installed at MoMA. (
via)
What is going on here? We have trees made of art materials and pills made of wood. We have the maudlin romantic symbols of melancholy and the practical modern-day solution to one's existential crisis, if swollen and a bit hard to swallow. I think Holland Cotter hits the nail on the head in his
NYT review when he asks, quite seriously, is this "a sendup or a nostalgic sigh?"
Most critics, Cotter included, tend to weave together Kippenberger's personal afflictions/ insurgencies with questions of "history" or "culture," our quote-unquote Modern Condition:
Right from the start he understood that as an artist he was appearing on the scene at the end of a drama rather than at the beginning. By the time he arrived, the defining impulses of late-20th-century art — Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Neo-Expressionism — were old. So were the political ideologies like Socialism and Communism, and the utopianism of the 1960s, which, for better and worse, had shaped the world he knew.
Seemingly all that remained were leftover styles and ideas; bit parts and walk-ons. Kippenberger didn’t buy this. He knew that there are no small parts, only timid actors, and that with the right spices scraps make a great meal. In other words, he knew he had to take what was there, including the diminished role of the artist, and make something different, and large, and loud from it, and he did.
Of course, the review is also called, "Live Hard, Create Compulsively, Die Young." So, I throw the question back to you, HC: was
that a sendup or a nostalgic sigh?
A more personal and nuanced (though still unabashedly sympathetic) view of Kippenberger's life is
here, in the online version of Ronald Jones's article in
Artforum. Jones similarly mixes the personal and the historical:
As much as art history fantasizes Kippenberger as the spunky art-world sophomore, his position is too phenomenally complex to leave it at that. He appeared to us when powerful enclaves of contemporary German culture were sponsoring a full-scale excavation of Expressionism. It is an understatement to say that Martin was at odds with all that. ... From the Paris Bar in Berlin to New York's Odeon, to the Anchor, he carried on, untamed - like the neo-Expressionists he held in contempt - but these passages were performances Martin always kept in quotes. He never mistook having fun [for] ideology. True, he possesses an entertaining appreciation of his culture; but more significant, he recognized what it was about to become. He enjoyed a second sight in this way, a formidable perception that modern nationalism was at last giving way to the dominion of the next culture, a culture staggering in its unity. We never really talked about this seriously (it required a sobriety he would rarely permit), but it was on his mind, and I can say that he did more than casually ponder it. Simply said, his pessimistic insight into what the culture would bring forth was one of his most remarkable gifts. (Emphasis added to highlight strange contradiction, which we could explore if I could figure out the even stranger grammar. My best guess is in the square brackets.)
And perhaps this is the right approach, after all. (If we ignore, for a moment, the looming, hovering, mouthbreathing - stop reading my goddamned blog post over my shoulder!!! - question of "the myth of the tragic male hero, whose life is over before it really began because his/our over-aggressive fathers ruined it for the rest of us by acting like such f-ing a-holes." Yea, let's hold on to that one for a minute.)
How could I say that this is the right approach? Well, because art is not a truth-and-reconciliation commission. It can speak
to history, it can become part
of history, but it never really drew a clear line between the artist as a guy with a drug problem and larger questions, which one guy can never really address or rectify on his own. What I'm saying is, art history has a problem with biography, because art has a problem with biography. It has one foot in the piddling, pitiable messes of lived experience
On the right: Yuri Leiderman, Silent Pity (Dinner Is Served), 1988
and the other in the quicksand into which we are all sinking and which will continue long after we have left this mortal coil. In questions of history, so to speak. Call it a problem with boundaries. Call it competence. Call it the question of painting. But it's been around for at least two centuries, and it doesn't seem to be going away.
So, why do I hate Martin Kippenberger? I suppose because he makes such a great story out of it. And he makes it so easy to tell - so productive! so compulsive! so witty! so tragic! Look how he plays with materials - the pills made of wood, the trees made of art's raw materials. A spoonful of sarcasm really does make the medicine go down. And all that.
Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End of Kafka's "Amerika," 1994; installation at MoMA
A nice story it all makes. But let's not forget that it's not just a story, at least not while we're still around.
Sigmar Polke, Higher Beings Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969
Sigmar Polke, Liebespaar, 1967
Sigmar Polke, Palm Trees, 1964
Sigmar Polke, Untitled, 2001-2006 (resin on polyester)
Sigmar Polke, Untitled, 2001-2006 (resin on polyester)
Sigmar Polke, I Live in My Own World But It's OK, They Know Me Here, 2002
