Pop, Irony and Seriousness
Albert Oehlen in conversation with Thomas Groetz about Martin Kippenberger
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TG: What strict conditions did he lay down?
AO: He demanded attention, and often made people witnesses to his selfadvertisement without asking himself whether they wanted that.
TG: A little-known work is the 1987 Business Class. Here too, we are concerned with hiding, withdrawing, looking away, but also with social aloofness. What do you find special about this work?
AO: The problem is maybe related to the thing with the matchboxes. Here, the thing is that the one sitting in front of the curtain is paying four times the price and getting an orange-juice while the one behind isn't. The curtain however can be moved continuously backward and forward. Maybe for him that was a model of society.
TG: In other words society seen as an arbitrary structure or playful enjoyment of power?
AO: Yes, he imagined how, according to her whim, the stewardess might pull the thing backward or forward.
TG: If only on account of its size, another important and mysterious picture by Martin Kippenberger is Die Mutter von Joseph Beuys. Certainly, somehow, this painful, suffering look on Beuys' part has been well captured. But why are we here concerned with the mother, in other words the "origin" of Beuys?
AO: Because it really does depict her. We, in other words Büttner, Kippenberger and I, having dealt with the house-and-garden theme, went on to that of "mother". And then Martin found the photo of Joseph Beuys' mother. That is really something, that look! - an incredible picture. "Mother" was a theme that was treated with the highest reverence, but which somehow had something banal about it. We still had the song Mama in our ears, and the film title: Deutschland - bleiche Mutter [Pale Mother Germany] grabbed everyone, I suppose. For Martin, the theme had a similar function as the theme "egg". The most demanding roads intersect with the most stupid.
TG: In the picture Rückkehr der toten Mutter mit neuen Problemen, the woman, who looks not unlike Kippenberger's own mother, also wears a floppy hat, like Beuys. Does "mother" refer here to tradition, for example the tradition of painting, and the stones to the burden of this tradition according to which artists have to wear black if they want to bring some life back into what, until the end of the 1970s, had been pronounced dead?
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
TG: What strict conditions did he lay down?
AO: He demanded attention, and often made people witnesses to his selfadvertisement without asking himself whether they wanted that.
TG: A little-known work is the 1987 Business Class. Here too, we are concerned with hiding, withdrawing, looking away, but also with social aloofness. What do you find special about this work?
AO: The problem is maybe related to the thing with the matchboxes. Here, the thing is that the one sitting in front of the curtain is paying four times the price and getting an orange-juice while the one behind isn't. The curtain however can be moved continuously backward and forward. Maybe for him that was a model of society.
TG: In other words society seen as an arbitrary structure or playful enjoyment of power?
AO: Yes, he imagined how, according to her whim, the stewardess might pull the thing backward or forward.
TG: If only on account of its size, another important and mysterious picture by Martin Kippenberger is Die Mutter von Joseph Beuys. Certainly, somehow, this painful, suffering look on Beuys' part has been well captured. But why are we here concerned with the mother, in other words the "origin" of Beuys?
AO: Because it really does depict her. We, in other words Büttner, Kippenberger and I, having dealt with the house-and-garden theme, went on to that of "mother". And then Martin found the photo of Joseph Beuys' mother. That is really something, that look! - an incredible picture. "Mother" was a theme that was treated with the highest reverence, but which somehow had something banal about it. We still had the song Mama in our ears, and the film title: Deutschland - bleiche Mutter [Pale Mother Germany] grabbed everyone, I suppose. For Martin, the theme had a similar function as the theme "egg". The most demanding roads intersect with the most stupid.
TG: In the picture Rückkehr der toten Mutter mit neuen Problemen, the woman, who looks not unlike Kippenberger's own mother, also wears a floppy hat, like Beuys. Does "mother" refer here to tradition, for example the tradition of painting, and the stones to the burden of this tradition according to which artists have to wear black if they want to bring some life back into what, until the end of the 1970s, had been pronounced dead?
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Photograph for Martin Kippenberger's painting Bathing russian after the successful flight, 1984. Foto: Bernhard Schaub