“Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective”
Museum of Modern Art
-May 11
"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. ... 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. ... 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 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 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. ... 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." -Holland Cotter/NYTimes
"Martin Kippenberger cultivated failure. The German artist’s life was littered with half-baked or misconceived projects soaked in self-indulgent irony. An unfinished series of black-and-white paintings marks the beginning of a career that would follow many paths towards a series of dead ends. Talented as he was, Kippenberger, who was 44 when he died in 1997, had little discipline and no follow-through. The retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art left me agog at all this squandered potential. ... To appreciate his work requires a high level of you-had-to-be-there tolerance, since so much of it consists of inside jokes about the German art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. These attacks might have come clearer if MoMA had included some of his victims in the show; without that context, Kippenberger’s art devolves into a scattering of childish jabs. ... I came away not shocked, not shaken or enlightened, but merely dismayed by a sensibility so pickled in acid. Much is made in the show of his puckish humour but in truth his grandest statements were acts of petty enmity – saturnine comments on artists more talented than he." -Ariella Budick/FT
"The curators, Ann Goldstein and Ann Temkin, were shutting down the awful academic echo chamber that has tried to turn Kippenberger into one cutout caricature or another: cagey gamesman, aesthetic tinkerer, fun drunk, anti-hero. They let his insurrectionary freedom and radicalism come out. ... the curators give us Kippenberger the bacchanalian art-making machine, hanging several hundred works, some in dim nooks or high on walls. A lamppost sculpture with a Santa hat occupies the space usually held by Rodin’s Balzac. This is the most alive the new MoMA has looked, and it puts the overriding content of Kippenberger’s work into sharp focus: inner necessity, a frenzy against control, the need to pulverize clichés, and desperation built upon the fear of a short life. Most important, he was comfortable holding seemingly contradictory positions at once. Kippenberger instinctively grasped that ideologies and hierarchies were moribund, that formalism and technique are flexible, and that one can be idealistic without being utopian." -Jerry Saltz/NY Mag. (And don't miss Jerry's video about the show.)
"The ideal show from Kippy would consist of nothing but self-portraits, and these are included in a needlessly exhaustive retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. These kind of comprehensive trunk shows, vomiting forth every piece and expert on a particular artist, have become a regular irritant at the new MoMA, bludgeoning the public with too much information. ... His self-portrait paintings are worthy of Ingres. Kippenberger is a massive, brooding, sly, mildly dyspeptic yet mirthful beast, both shamus and shaman. To look at his hirsute mug is to imagine a thousand others like him; to me, for example, he resembles Rod Steiger, Saddam Hussein and Bill Arning." -Charlie Finch/ArtNet
"Kippenberger died of liver cancer in 1997, at the age of forty-four, but by that time he had created enough paintings, sculpture, drawings, installations, photographs, posters, books, and whatnot to furnish several ordinary lifetime careers, and enough distraction, as a globe-trotting carouser, to make it marvellous that he produced anything at all. ... He was extrodinarily intelligent as well as gifted, especially in drawing. But nothing he made has the inevitable feeling of satifying art. The hundreds of pictures and objects at MOMA seem undermotivated or supererogatory, leaning on tortured concepts, obscure inside-jokes, and random impulses. Why, then, does the show...exude a distinct, hard-to-deny majesty? I think that it's because Kippenberger’s career, as a whole, was consciously his one actual work: it both epitomizes and burlesques the art game’s pell-mell institutional, commercial, and academic expansion in the biennial-bedizened nineteen-eighties and nineties. ... Toward the end of his life, he planned a network of ostensibly, fully-outfitted subway station entrances at seven points on the globe -- suggesting the existance of a planatary underground system -- with motorized airvents at sites in between. He finished three, in Leipzig, Germany; Syros, Greece; and Dawson City in the Yukon. That project's forced wit and laborious execution are echt Kippenberger: faintly amusing and patently obvious. His best critic, the German Diedrich Diederichsen, nails the effect--or is it syndrome?--in the show's excellent catelog, as that of artists whose aim is to 'make art a deeply embarassing affair.' It sometimes seems that for an idea to be viable to Kippenberger it has to reek of hapless mediocrity. ... There are few other artists so richly deserved by their times." -Peter Schjeldahl/New Yorker
"Kippenberger's practice--art about making art but also always about Kippenberger--was forever changing shape, and the exhibition aims to show its every mutation. There are paintings executed in scores of styles, many painted by others and many that beg to be sculptures, out-and-out sculptures, and sculptural installation. The exhibition is punctuated with tall walls littered with dozens of drawings that occasionally begin to tickle as ephemera, and numberless examples of the artist's publications, show invitations and posters that could qualify, in the artist's estimation, as 'a good Kippenberger.' ... The work is by turns loose, macho, funny and obnoxious, usually messy, and rarely beautiful in any conventional sense. Expressionistic is the closest art-historical term that suits it, visually. Theoretical definitions are wobblier still. The work has proven adaptable and unbound by any pre-existing rules. Put simply, he fit, and continues to fit, anywhere." -Bones/Village Voice
"He set the stage for many of the artists included in last year’s Whitney Biennial and the New Museum’s 'Unmonumental' exhibitions. While these shows featured plenty of found objects and non- art materials made to look like art, they missed the urgency and rebelliousness that makes Kippenberger still cutting-edge and relevant 12 years after his death." -Katya Kazakina/Bloomberg
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