First the Feet
By Roberto Ohrt. Excerpt from the book 'Kippenberger'
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Miete, Strom, Gas presented a series of pictures which examine the stock-in-trade of painting with the tools of accountancy: statistics and tables - Ertragsgebirge [Mountains of Yield] and Meinungsbilder. One of these Meinungsbilder added a classic from the golden storehouse of German wisdom, where people spoke in particular about "Stunde Null" ["Zero Hour", i.e. the immediate post-war new start]. There one heard: Ich hab ganz unten angefangen (p. 132/133). Many a leader of opinion had used this legend in his life; the good and just distinction between "We" [i.e. the Germans] and "I" was extremely popular well into the 1980s. It has since disappeared. Correspondingly, the picture was painted in clear contrast black-and-white; a basic work; in a sense, a foundation for ganz unten - maybe also a mummy or a brief word relating to Beuys' granite blocks. Like No Pro (p. 134) it is intended to be seen as a picture of "complicated associations", a picture of a schema, or as an explanatory picture, and in this way it also portrays Set Theory - that pedagogic innovation that left its mark on ideas so thoroughly, and at such an early stage, that its patterns shine through in every sphere. Even today, these reflexes from primary school make themselves felt in art discourse. Arguments are dominated by the pleasure in assignment and elimination. People still draw variously colored pie-charts, add terms, and sift out the intersections. Meinungsbild 'Das besondere Nichts' (p. 135) is particularly instructive in this habitus of modern problem analysis and overcoming. Again it comes with a gray cloud, a metaphor for unexplained processes in the gray matter, and the functioning of an abstraction with a sociological dimension ... or as a symbol of the haze and fog which exudes from that gesturing which accompanies theoretically complex explanations. This time though - and this much seems certain - the incomprehensible order of painting itself stands on the easel. The columns of the picture, three in number, support their heavenly kingdom of art, and to match, there is a triangle in the gray of the clouds - the "supernatural" and its laws - therefore in silicone; in other words, added immaterially or transparently. The painting of the columns forms a variation on the nice exception to color theory, green, the emotional slip, pink, and black-and-white in ist complete but inverted scale, from light at the bottom to dark at the top. Gray as a non-color is part of the medium of photography, and is therefore painted into the idea-construction as a flat, two-dimensional support.
The landscape of this world of explanation is as transparent and onedimensional as possible, the draughtsmanship artless and coarse. As a demonstrated symbol of the structure of color and painting, this particular void in a world of purely commercial values, Das besondere Nichts confronts the mission and opinion of art, as Francis Picabia did between 1945 and 1952 with the taste of his era. He saw painting, above all abstract painting, not as a neutral carrier, and used coarse simplification to make its conventions and laws visible. This other "reprint" in his hand adds something indefinable - in other words, das besondere Nichts once more - to the legibility of a punch line and robs it of ist function in a casual way.
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Miete, Strom, Gas presented a series of pictures which examine the stock-in-trade of painting with the tools of accountancy: statistics and tables - Ertragsgebirge [Mountains of Yield] and Meinungsbilder. One of these Meinungsbilder added a classic from the golden storehouse of German wisdom, where people spoke in particular about "Stunde Null" ["Zero Hour", i.e. the immediate post-war new start]. There one heard: Ich hab ganz unten angefangen (p. 132/133). Many a leader of opinion had used this legend in his life; the good and just distinction between "We" [i.e. the Germans] and "I" was extremely popular well into the 1980s. It has since disappeared. Correspondingly, the picture was painted in clear contrast black-and-white; a basic work; in a sense, a foundation for ganz unten - maybe also a mummy or a brief word relating to Beuys' granite blocks. Like No Pro (p. 134) it is intended to be seen as a picture of "complicated associations", a picture of a schema, or as an explanatory picture, and in this way it also portrays Set Theory - that pedagogic innovation that left its mark on ideas so thoroughly, and at such an early stage, that its patterns shine through in every sphere. Even today, these reflexes from primary school make themselves felt in art discourse. Arguments are dominated by the pleasure in assignment and elimination. People still draw variously colored pie-charts, add terms, and sift out the intersections. Meinungsbild 'Das besondere Nichts' (p. 135) is particularly instructive in this habitus of modern problem analysis and overcoming. Again it comes with a gray cloud, a metaphor for unexplained processes in the gray matter, and the functioning of an abstraction with a sociological dimension ... or as a symbol of the haze and fog which exudes from that gesturing which accompanies theoretically complex explanations. This time though - and this much seems certain - the incomprehensible order of painting itself stands on the easel. The columns of the picture, three in number, support their heavenly kingdom of art, and to match, there is a triangle in the gray of the clouds - the "supernatural" and its laws - therefore in silicone; in other words, added immaterially or transparently. The painting of the columns forms a variation on the nice exception to color theory, green, the emotional slip, pink, and black-and-white in ist complete but inverted scale, from light at the bottom to dark at the top. Gray as a non-color is part of the medium of photography, and is therefore painted into the idea-construction as a flat, two-dimensional support.
The landscape of this world of explanation is as transparent and onedimensional as possible, the draughtsmanship artless and coarse. As a demonstrated symbol of the structure of color and painting, this particular void in a world of purely commercial values, Das besondere Nichts confronts the mission and opinion of art, as Francis Picabia did between 1945 and 1952 with the taste of his era. He saw painting, above all abstract painting, not as a neutral carrier, and used coarse simplification to make its conventions and laws visible. This other "reprint" in his hand adds something indefinable - in other words, das besondere Nichts once more - to the legibility of a punch line and robs it of ist function in a casual way.
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