First the Feet
By Roberto Ohrt. Excerpt from the book 'Kippenberger'
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Martin Kippenberger's "building pictures" could all be easily projected into the dismembered face of the Wall City, the Berlin of wasteland not built on, dead trees, lamp posts left standing where they were put, terraced houses sawn in half, and the shelled-out street corners, almost always without a soul on the canvas. They paint an apt portrait of the fading destruction, with tumbledown buildings and walls, too coarse and too heavy for habitability to have reestablished itself four decades later. This painting directs our eyes more intensively though to German post-war architecture, this world of new buildings, provincial centers and terminals. Nowhere does the state of an object confirm the coarse means of its depiction in such a lasting fashion. The dirty clays, the daubing with building materials, the clumsiness of the coarse construction, the uniformity of the painterly composition, the pre-fabricated assembly programs ... they find their echo directly in the social housing-estates, the highrise apartment blocks, industrial estates and factories, where standardization and rationalization fragment and diminish not only the architecture but also the world where people live. Here the pictures come across as the amplifiers of a wretchedness that only had to be stripped of the protection of being ignored.
Hit the gas, Peter
With a Little Help of a Friend also evinced slight traces of Francis Bacon once more, emptiness and horror captured in an iron framework, the paint dragged across the support like meat. But Martin Kippenberger does not speculate on the effect of this tension. The physical dimension of things, of architecture in this case, is brought nearer in the following project, more in the form of a materialist Dadaism. He himself introduced the term Psychobuildings for this purpose, and gave the objects at the center of the series the name, Peter. In other words, he looked on them as people, or more precisely, as old acquaintances he had run into unexpectedly following a chain of unfortunate circumstances that put them through a curious transformation, almost dispatched them into oblivion, before chance finally brought them back as his mirror image. In Peter (p. 147), the unhappy fate of the modern has transformed into a roomy piece of furniture. The failed implementation of the design must now be identified within its own four walls. Where the implementation of the plan had failed previously because of the material used for the architecture, it now failed in the material, "do it yourself", hardboard, cardboard, screws and paints. The shadow lingering behind every cheap offer in the big furniture stores has materialized in logic consistent with the save-money imperative, as a slappedtogether DIY object. It stands there now, captured as a crate with a flat cushion, no base, no frame, no seat and no trunk, a place for Peter, who himself only falls away as a scrap of printing-test paper and is preserved, in modern fashion, hovering between sitting and lying. His colleague, the Wen haben wir uns denn heute an den Tisch geholt (p. 147), has been knocked to the ground completely to be matched by the colors of autumn. This impression of garden furniture lacks not only its legs, it has been put together with over-large gaps and too many screws, is no longer a table and not yet a fence, has too little wood, too little paint, and the large line of writing, while accurately outlined, is not properly centered, Why?
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Martin Kippenberger's "building pictures" could all be easily projected into the dismembered face of the Wall City, the Berlin of wasteland not built on, dead trees, lamp posts left standing where they were put, terraced houses sawn in half, and the shelled-out street corners, almost always without a soul on the canvas. They paint an apt portrait of the fading destruction, with tumbledown buildings and walls, too coarse and too heavy for habitability to have reestablished itself four decades later. This painting directs our eyes more intensively though to German post-war architecture, this world of new buildings, provincial centers and terminals. Nowhere does the state of an object confirm the coarse means of its depiction in such a lasting fashion. The dirty clays, the daubing with building materials, the clumsiness of the coarse construction, the uniformity of the painterly composition, the pre-fabricated assembly programs ... they find their echo directly in the social housing-estates, the highrise apartment blocks, industrial estates and factories, where standardization and rationalization fragment and diminish not only the architecture but also the world where people live. Here the pictures come across as the amplifiers of a wretchedness that only had to be stripped of the protection of being ignored.
Hit the gas, Peter
With a Little Help of a Friend also evinced slight traces of Francis Bacon once more, emptiness and horror captured in an iron framework, the paint dragged across the support like meat. But Martin Kippenberger does not speculate on the effect of this tension. The physical dimension of things, of architecture in this case, is brought nearer in the following project, more in the form of a materialist Dadaism. He himself introduced the term Psychobuildings for this purpose, and gave the objects at the center of the series the name, Peter. In other words, he looked on them as people, or more precisely, as old acquaintances he had run into unexpectedly following a chain of unfortunate circumstances that put them through a curious transformation, almost dispatched them into oblivion, before chance finally brought them back as his mirror image. In Peter (p. 147), the unhappy fate of the modern has transformed into a roomy piece of furniture. The failed implementation of the design must now be identified within its own four walls. Where the implementation of the plan had failed previously because of the material used for the architecture, it now failed in the material, "do it yourself", hardboard, cardboard, screws and paints. The shadow lingering behind every cheap offer in the big furniture stores has materialized in logic consistent with the save-money imperative, as a slappedtogether DIY object. It stands there now, captured as a crate with a flat cushion, no base, no frame, no seat and no trunk, a place for Peter, who himself only falls away as a scrap of printing-test paper and is preserved, in modern fashion, hovering between sitting and lying. His colleague, the Wen haben wir uns denn heute an den Tisch geholt (p. 147), has been knocked to the ground completely to be matched by the colors of autumn. This impression of garden furniture lacks not only its legs, it has been put together with over-large gaps and too many screws, is no longer a table and not yet a fence, has too little wood, too little paint, and the large line of writing, while accurately outlined, is not properly centered, Why?
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Julia Dacic, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Max Hetzler with the Kippenberger/Oehlen multiple Durchgangslager Felix Kull, Erhard Klein Gallery, Bonn, 1984. Foto: Wilhelm Schürmann
