First the Feet
By Roberto Ohrt. Excerpt from the book 'Kippenberger'
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In one picture, a tape of Morse code dots and dashes ticked its way through twenty-seven letters and punctuation marks. The obvious intention was to thwart even those who had the access code in their heads. Otherwise, the solution was almost always placed right next to the abracadabra: Capri bei Nacht (p. 79), Ist Nicht Peinlich (p. 108) and Sibiria Hates You (p. 129). It was not therefore a question of setting or resolving the code. Coding, individual grammar, ambiguous formulae ... this language proclaims its structures and construction. It aims to spread the style of their availability. Then the player on the stage will know that the secret is best hidden when there are no secrets. In this way Martin Kippenberger succeeded in converting the threat or warning: "give up, before it's too late" into a wish or piece of advice; so, from the ultimatum he created his maxim: Never give up, before it's too late; that is, go on until the excess has been taken so far it's too late for any warning.
Please don't send home
A picture from as early as 1977 (p. 71) - a kind of towel motif with swimming duck - left no doubt about Martin Kippenberger's readiness to throw utterly inappropriate, even stupid motifs with the value of the luxury or cultural item (the picture on the wall) onto the scales. Well before the so-called "Junge Wilde" ["Young Wild"] - the third or fourth generation of artists since the Fauves to be so categorized - had improved opportunities for work by younger artists, Martin Kippenberger took the better-informed clientele to the extreme limit of their brave new openness - surely visual experience of the floating duck was available at the nearest department store, in the same format, in terry toweling, and at a much lower price.
The attempt to reinvent German Pop more than a decade after Polke and Richter, to understand the alien in the familiar and the great in the small, again, took place in the awareness that the object of the experiment had to be accepted by the public as a fact, as basically justified, recognized or accomplished. But the reference - the question of Pop - was not clear, not stamped, in other words, with the registered trade mark. Besides, Martin Kippenberger's regional, German version, along with the regrettable delay, also contained some major deviations. These were not recognized as updates. On the contrary, they were all the better suited to bring the laboriously rescued compromise with modern art into the present, and a certain innocence in the matter of internationalism - above all the consensus among the broader public - in other words, an entire series of stable values - crashing down. Up to then, a thin protective layer had preserved then current feelings on the parts of both broad masses and intellectuals for art and culture from the assaults of more recent modernity, in particular from the banalities it deployed. In everyday German cultural life, American Pop held the prospect of cosmopolitan character, of a New-York sensation the size of a Coca-Cola advertisement in Times Square. It was not by mere chance that Martin Kippenberger's version ended up as a result in the paddling pool or the nursery.
The element of water, the bathroom, or washed feet provided a material advantage. In a literal sense it was a question of rapid renewal, a flat, fluid painting technique that required directness, wind and a view into the open, smooth paints, thin application and fresh thoughts as its subjects. In following years - even when all other possible material signals had been brought in - Martin Kippenberger's painting still retained something of this succinct uncomplicatedness.
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In one picture, a tape of Morse code dots and dashes ticked its way through twenty-seven letters and punctuation marks. The obvious intention was to thwart even those who had the access code in their heads. Otherwise, the solution was almost always placed right next to the abracadabra: Capri bei Nacht (p. 79), Ist Nicht Peinlich (p. 108) and Sibiria Hates You (p. 129). It was not therefore a question of setting or resolving the code. Coding, individual grammar, ambiguous formulae ... this language proclaims its structures and construction. It aims to spread the style of their availability. Then the player on the stage will know that the secret is best hidden when there are no secrets. In this way Martin Kippenberger succeeded in converting the threat or warning: "give up, before it's too late" into a wish or piece of advice; so, from the ultimatum he created his maxim: Never give up, before it's too late; that is, go on until the excess has been taken so far it's too late for any warning.
Please don't send home
A picture from as early as 1977 (p. 71) - a kind of towel motif with swimming duck - left no doubt about Martin Kippenberger's readiness to throw utterly inappropriate, even stupid motifs with the value of the luxury or cultural item (the picture on the wall) onto the scales. Well before the so-called "Junge Wilde" ["Young Wild"] - the third or fourth generation of artists since the Fauves to be so categorized - had improved opportunities for work by younger artists, Martin Kippenberger took the better-informed clientele to the extreme limit of their brave new openness - surely visual experience of the floating duck was available at the nearest department store, in the same format, in terry toweling, and at a much lower price.
The attempt to reinvent German Pop more than a decade after Polke and Richter, to understand the alien in the familiar and the great in the small, again, took place in the awareness that the object of the experiment had to be accepted by the public as a fact, as basically justified, recognized or accomplished. But the reference - the question of Pop - was not clear, not stamped, in other words, with the registered trade mark. Besides, Martin Kippenberger's regional, German version, along with the regrettable delay, also contained some major deviations. These were not recognized as updates. On the contrary, they were all the better suited to bring the laboriously rescued compromise with modern art into the present, and a certain innocence in the matter of internationalism - above all the consensus among the broader public - in other words, an entire series of stable values - crashing down. Up to then, a thin protective layer had preserved then current feelings on the parts of both broad masses and intellectuals for art and culture from the assaults of more recent modernity, in particular from the banalities it deployed. In everyday German cultural life, American Pop held the prospect of cosmopolitan character, of a New-York sensation the size of a Coca-Cola advertisement in Times Square. It was not by mere chance that Martin Kippenberger's version ended up as a result in the paddling pool or the nursery.
The element of water, the bathroom, or washed feet provided a material advantage. In a literal sense it was a question of rapid renewal, a flat, fluid painting technique that required directness, wind and a view into the open, smooth paints, thin application and fresh thoughts as its subjects. In following years - even when all other possible material signals had been brought in - Martin Kippenberger's painting still retained something of this succinct uncomplicatedness.
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Martin Kippenberger with Marie-Puck Broodthaers, opening party of the exhibition Truth is work with the band Night and Day, Essen, 1984. Fotos: Wilhelm Schürmann
