Live Hard, Create Compulsively, Die Young

Live Hard, Create Compulsively, Die Young
Patrick Andrade for The New York Times
Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective “Spider-Man Studio” is part of this wide-ranging retrospective opening at MoMA on Sunday. More Photos >

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LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy HOLLAND COTTER
Published: February 26, 2009
The career of the German artist Martin Kippenberger, who died in 1997 at 44, was a brief, bold, foot-to-the-floor episode of driving under the influence. What was he high on? Alcohol, ambition, disobedience, motion, compulsive sociability, history and art in its many forms.

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Patrick Andrade for The New York Times
“The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika,’ ” a 1994 Kippenberger installation in the MoMA atrium. More Photos »
Art in its many forms was what he made — specifically paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, prints, posters, books — all in madly prolific quantities. In every sense he took up a lot of space. And he continues to do so at the Museum of Modern Art, where his first — and excellent — American retrospective, “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,” is spilling out of top-floor galleries and down into the atrium.

Kippenberger was born in 1953 in Dortmund. His father was a businessman; his mother, who died in a car accident in 1976, a doctor. He dropped out of school in his early teens, hit the road and never stopped. He lived in communes, did drugs, did therapy, studied window display, attended then quit art school.

He wanted to be an actor. (He said he looked like “Helmut Berger on a good day.”) Only after failing to break into films did he focus on art. And as an artist he was a performer, an entertainer, a provoker, as he was in life. At punk bars and biennials he was the juiced-up guy who made scintillating speeches, picked stupid fights and periodically dropped his pants. He was the same person in his art.

He produced many self-portraits, and several are in the MoMA show, which has been organized by Ann Goldstein of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture.

In a 1981 photorealist painting he’s a matinee idol lounging on a discarded sofa beside a Manhattan street. (The picture is actually a self-portrait once removed: he hired an artist to paint it.) We see him a few years later in a photograph as a kind of sissy frontier scout wearing a fuzzy sweater and riding a too-small horse in what looks like the American Southwest.

With a series of 1988 paintings comes a change: no more young and svelte. Instead he’s a paunchy, pugnacious middle-aged Picasso in boxer shorts. And from this point on the line between self-depiction and self-debasement blurs. It’s hard to know what to make of a sculptural portrait of the artist as a crucified cartoon frog, a tiny beer stein dangling from his hand. (Pope Benedict XVI called a version of the piece in an Italian collection blasphemous.)

The artist as Spider-Man trying to bust out of his studio would seem more upbeat — if the superhero weren’t a skeletal, see-through being with a mask for a face. Finally, in 1996, Kippenberger drew himself posed as the doomed figures in Géricault’s painting “Raft of the Medusa.” Many artists have done old-man self-portraits. Kippenberger was doing dead-man self-portraits.

And, characteristically, he was doing them with a rash verve that marked his whole career. 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.

He turned his work into a late-modernist clearinghouse in which familiar styles, careers and ideas could be re-evaluated, pulled apart, rejected or recombined. He made his painting a database of art and ideas that he loved and despised: Socialist Realism, Picasso, Picabia, Nazi propaganda, punk, Pop, Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke and consumer culture, as well as concepts like progress, originality, consistency, success and failure.

He customized Neo-Expressionism, hot in Germany in the 1980s, into a klutzy, jokey style, all flat-footed brushwork and snide asides. He made figure painting, popular for its accessibility, hard to read. Was the image of the smiling fräulein in his “Likeable Communist Woman” a sendup or a nostalgic sigh?
Live Hard, Create Compulsively, Die Young
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He hammered away at abstraction. He gave an ostensibly nonpolitical geometric composition of black, red and yellow bars a bomb of a title: “With the Best Will in the World I Can’t See a Swastika.” He questioned the notion of abstraction as a transcendent medium by offering an all-white painting that sprouted a pair of latex feet.

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Redefining Art He suggested that painting as a form, while useful, was overrated. To test the response he bought a small gray 1972 monochrome painting by Gerhard Richter, fitted it with metal legs and turned it into a coffee table, which became by default a sculpture and original Kippenberger. The response was strong.

He went further in an exploratory direction with sculpture, his breakthrough coming in 1987 with the debut of the “Peter” sculptures, “peter” being his term for objects that fit no known descriptive category.

The two dozen such sculptures clustered in the show are made from pieces of found furniture or industrial hardware to which additions or tweaks have been made. Shipping pallets become playpens (his mother died when pallets slid off a truck and hit her car), a steel loading cart is equipped with briefcases; a designer chair is elevated on a pedestal; a set of shelves on wheels hold bananas preserved in resin. It’s fun to scan them for references to artists like Richard Artschwager and Reinhard Mucha, or to think of them as a reproach to Donald Judd’s self-importantly pristine carpentry. And it’s nice to know that many “peters” were actually made by a longtime Kippenberger assistant, Michael Krebber, who now has a substantial career of his own.

Most important, though, is to see how a complex, theatrical, and new-feeling art can be made from ideas and materials already there. The grand demonstration of this phenomenon is the installation called “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika,’ ” which fills the MoMA atrium.

Kafka’s novel was unfinished when he died, the narrative breaking off after its protagonist has arrived in the United States from Germany and has been taken for an interview at what purports to be a job agency for immigrants. In Kippenberger’s directorial hands the agency becomes a combination office, casino and sports arena, with dozens of sculpturally reconfigured tables and chairs on a sheet of green cloth the size of a basketball court.

It’s an exhilarating spectacle, as tough and daft as Kakfa’s book. (Don’t miss the overhead view from the sixth floor.) Like much of Kippenberger’s art it looks at first haphazard and slapdash, but isn’t. Every element has been carefully shaped and placed.

To see how fanatically detail minded Kippenberger could be, you need only look at drawings he did on hotel stationery picked up on his ceaseless trips and relocations. Some sheets hold diagrammatic plans for projects, others highly polished images in watercolor and ink: self-portraits, sexual fantasies, landscapes, cartoon vignettes. They could be by a dozen hands and brains, and that was just the look Kippenberger wanted: multitasking, data gathering, beyond the bogus authority of genre, taste and style.

Drawings for “The Raft of the Medusa” were among the last things he did. In a photograph of him posing as one of Géricault’s figures, he flings arms beseechingly, operatically open, as if to hit a high note, or catch a tossed bouquet. This is Martin the actor, the unembarrassable clown.

Physically, though, he looks awful; bloated and haggard, a big sick baby, a wreck. He had been self-destructing for years, but rather than pull back he kept stepping on the gas. Soon after the photo was taken he died of liver cancer, or cirrhosis, depending on who you read.

If messy and raucous aren’t your thing, and tidy objects are, Kippenberger is not for you. Sometimes when I come up against his drunk-and-disorderly divahood I think he’s not for me. But he is, absolutely, or the idea of him is, meaning the model he sets for what an artist can be and do. His multitudinous recyclings, insubordinate temperament and generosity seem unexpectedly right for a non-party-time time. With the MoMA respective a new generation of artists will get to know him. I can imagine more than a few hitching themselves to his manic star.