First the Feet
By Roberto Ohrt. Excerpt from the book 'Kippenberger'
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The little lapdog (p. 73) is still a star today, and jumps quickly into one's hand; an hysterical object - or subject - for attacks of smoochiness and for exaggerated, emotional scenery, a flash from the ends of its hairs to the tip of its wet little nose, the twinkle in the eye momentarily hot, then quickly cold. In the picture it is comprehensible outside to in how sensitively it reacts to every touch, getting a painful electric shock through more intimate feelings, a quirk that begins as a funny idea, an easy improvisation. Soon it takes command of second nature. Even the fact that in the dull spray-and-brush technique it would come across as an utterly immaterial material soft-toy will have moved Martin Kippenberger to have this motif from the period of Uno di voi (1978) painted again as a black-and-white photo and very much larger. Two further pictures are also edited in the manner of a film. One, the subjective camera-pan down to his jacket, a close-up of the ball-point pens (p. 54/55): a take with a sense for that hint of the decisive detail; the other, the Self-portrait as Celebrity, or Tourist That Came In From the Cold (p. 64/65) . The "souvenir" with the Berlin Wall is reminiscent of new films of the 1970s in which Martin Kippenberger hoped for a while to build a career; he actually did land a few minor roles. Typical of these film-makers' taste was their weakness for subsidiary theater or other stylistic elements, for example those of the dominant class in the Eastern bloc. The Wall comes across here as a unitary widescreen format and the backside of harsh German reality, a counterweight to the Bronx. With the face of an attractive young man, the decisiveness of a newcomer from Hollywood, the symbol of power is possessed then turned into the uncertainty of the everyday world. The man stands there, on his 30th birthday perhaps, lonely and, in his totally personal crisis, facing the moment of decision. This corresponds exactly to how the picture stood in The Cold War of the Pictures, between the task of renewing Western propaganda films on the one hand, and sabotaging them on the other.
The program Bekannt [Well-known] was also the source of the two Eiermänner of 1981 (p. 85). Like all public figures, they are not sitting quite right in their picture. In the case of the Eiermann aus Amsterdam it's the suggestion of rimless spectacles, which, hidden in the paint, disturb the integrity of the original, even though they somehow enhance his seriousness. Presumably, they are designed to help the classically absent-minded professor looking for the glasses he has on to find his way around the dark room of the picture. As is well-known, in the meantime art scholarship has taken a closer look at this Rembrandt, the greatest legend of the German museum scene in Berlin Dahlem at the time. Along with the dark varnish, a number of sentimental ideas also had to be scraped off: the Man in the Golden Helmet has since been deleted from the list of the master's works. Martin Kippenberger was right then: in the brown smears of this oh-so-popular attraction the gold already shines faintly in the light of the flashbulbs. Something had been overlooked. The second egghead and clown doubtless did not put on his glasses out of pure friendship. Unlike his neighbor, he is not a naturalized item of German entertainment culture. He stands guard in the service of national humor, and, in this country, laughing is still something "where the nose is left in the village" [translator's note: cf. Mark Twain's bon mot "German humor is no laughing matter"].
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The little lapdog (p. 73) is still a star today, and jumps quickly into one's hand; an hysterical object - or subject - for attacks of smoochiness and for exaggerated, emotional scenery, a flash from the ends of its hairs to the tip of its wet little nose, the twinkle in the eye momentarily hot, then quickly cold. In the picture it is comprehensible outside to in how sensitively it reacts to every touch, getting a painful electric shock through more intimate feelings, a quirk that begins as a funny idea, an easy improvisation. Soon it takes command of second nature. Even the fact that in the dull spray-and-brush technique it would come across as an utterly immaterial material soft-toy will have moved Martin Kippenberger to have this motif from the period of Uno di voi (1978) painted again as a black-and-white photo and very much larger. Two further pictures are also edited in the manner of a film. One, the subjective camera-pan down to his jacket, a close-up of the ball-point pens (p. 54/55): a take with a sense for that hint of the decisive detail; the other, the Self-portrait as Celebrity, or Tourist That Came In From the Cold (p. 64/65) . The "souvenir" with the Berlin Wall is reminiscent of new films of the 1970s in which Martin Kippenberger hoped for a while to build a career; he actually did land a few minor roles. Typical of these film-makers' taste was their weakness for subsidiary theater or other stylistic elements, for example those of the dominant class in the Eastern bloc. The Wall comes across here as a unitary widescreen format and the backside of harsh German reality, a counterweight to the Bronx. With the face of an attractive young man, the decisiveness of a newcomer from Hollywood, the symbol of power is possessed then turned into the uncertainty of the everyday world. The man stands there, on his 30th birthday perhaps, lonely and, in his totally personal crisis, facing the moment of decision. This corresponds exactly to how the picture stood in The Cold War of the Pictures, between the task of renewing Western propaganda films on the one hand, and sabotaging them on the other.
The program Bekannt [Well-known] was also the source of the two Eiermänner of 1981 (p. 85). Like all public figures, they are not sitting quite right in their picture. In the case of the Eiermann aus Amsterdam it's the suggestion of rimless spectacles, which, hidden in the paint, disturb the integrity of the original, even though they somehow enhance his seriousness. Presumably, they are designed to help the classically absent-minded professor looking for the glasses he has on to find his way around the dark room of the picture. As is well-known, in the meantime art scholarship has taken a closer look at this Rembrandt, the greatest legend of the German museum scene in Berlin Dahlem at the time. Along with the dark varnish, a number of sentimental ideas also had to be scraped off: the Man in the Golden Helmet has since been deleted from the list of the master's works. Martin Kippenberger was right then: in the brown smears of this oh-so-popular attraction the gold already shines faintly in the light of the flashbulbs. Something had been overlooked. The second egghead and clown doubtless did not put on his glasses out of pure friendship. Unlike his neighbor, he is not a naturalized item of German entertainment culture. He stands guard in the service of national humor, and, in this country, laughing is still something "where the nose is left in the village" [translator's note: cf. Mark Twain's bon mot "German humor is no laughing matter"].
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