Pop, Irony and Seriousness
Albert Oehlen in conversation with Thomas Groetz about Martin Kippenberger
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TG: Can you describe this significance more exactly? Did you also see art as something existential, as a way to penetrate both individuals and society in a way that would change them?
AO: I'm sure we didn't. The messages always got on my nerves -- or, rather, they would have done but never got through to me. After everything, they came across for the most part only as comical and fragmented. I admired that. I think Martin thought the same. We looked at it from the formal aspect.
TG: Presumably, Braver Junge, immer brav is concerned with the mixing and relativization of Eastern and Western insignia and clichés - something artists such as Milan Kunc also of course concerned themselves with in the early 1980s. Is this association valid?
AO: You used to see T-shirts where Cola was combined with the Hammer and Sickle. But that was a quite different tone. I don't think Martin was concerned with the contrast. It would've been stupid, too. Hilariously, it's a fact that, with or without the Wall, there's a Wild West cult, particularly in the East, like we experienced as 10 year olds. Maybe he'd seen that.
TG: Another important work is the Blaue Lagune, probably a high point of the Capri complex which Kippenberger, almost obsessively, turned into art for awhile. He sawed up a blue Ford Capri into individual pictures and presented them in a deliberately casual hang. Can we see that as an allusion to, or pastiche of, the minimalist concepts or monochrome series of Günther Förg or Blinky Palermo? After all, they both painted on steel plate, didn't they?
AO: Quite definitely. Turn the banal into art and vice versa. Later he turned a painting by Gerhard Richter into a table-top.
TG: But that is probably just one element of the whole. At the same time, he was concerned with the destruction of a post-war holiday dream and a dynamic means of transport, which he turned into a meaningless surface.
AO: I don't think he was interested in the destruction of a post-war holiday dream. Rather, what he wanted was to make what he had already thematized more dynamic by dealing with it time and again.
TG: What else did the Capri stand for?
AO: I don't know. Maybe even for nothing at all. I would have been perfectly happy if the Capri had only been a pretext, an alleged symbol.
TG: At the same time it was a self-destructive act. After all, Kippenberger later had works created and then destroyed, didn't he?
AO: I don't think that was a self-destructive act. There were others.
TG: Don't you think that destruction plays a role in Kippenberger's work generally?
AO: Not necessarily. His approach was neither destructive, nor aggressive. If a Ford Capri turns into a work of art, that's not destructive; nor is turning a Gerhard Richter into a table-top. There is a bit of malice in it though. It was certainly not meant as a friendly gesture. In the case of the skip filled with brokenup pictures by him, he was thematizing a certain studio misery - in other words, what happens to failed pictures? Baselitz has just said that he throws all his canvases away straightaway; no more overpainting.
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TG: Can you describe this significance more exactly? Did you also see art as something existential, as a way to penetrate both individuals and society in a way that would change them?
AO: I'm sure we didn't. The messages always got on my nerves -- or, rather, they would have done but never got through to me. After everything, they came across for the most part only as comical and fragmented. I admired that. I think Martin thought the same. We looked at it from the formal aspect.
TG: Presumably, Braver Junge, immer brav is concerned with the mixing and relativization of Eastern and Western insignia and clichés - something artists such as Milan Kunc also of course concerned themselves with in the early 1980s. Is this association valid?
AO: You used to see T-shirts where Cola was combined with the Hammer and Sickle. But that was a quite different tone. I don't think Martin was concerned with the contrast. It would've been stupid, too. Hilariously, it's a fact that, with or without the Wall, there's a Wild West cult, particularly in the East, like we experienced as 10 year olds. Maybe he'd seen that.
TG: Another important work is the Blaue Lagune, probably a high point of the Capri complex which Kippenberger, almost obsessively, turned into art for awhile. He sawed up a blue Ford Capri into individual pictures and presented them in a deliberately casual hang. Can we see that as an allusion to, or pastiche of, the minimalist concepts or monochrome series of Günther Förg or Blinky Palermo? After all, they both painted on steel plate, didn't they?
AO: Quite definitely. Turn the banal into art and vice versa. Later he turned a painting by Gerhard Richter into a table-top.
TG: But that is probably just one element of the whole. At the same time, he was concerned with the destruction of a post-war holiday dream and a dynamic means of transport, which he turned into a meaningless surface.
AO: I don't think he was interested in the destruction of a post-war holiday dream. Rather, what he wanted was to make what he had already thematized more dynamic by dealing with it time and again.
TG: What else did the Capri stand for?
AO: I don't know. Maybe even for nothing at all. I would have been perfectly happy if the Capri had only been a pretext, an alleged symbol.
TG: At the same time it was a self-destructive act. After all, Kippenberger later had works created and then destroyed, didn't he?
AO: I don't think that was a self-destructive act. There were others.
TG: Don't you think that destruction plays a role in Kippenberger's work generally?
AO: Not necessarily. His approach was neither destructive, nor aggressive. If a Ford Capri turns into a work of art, that's not destructive; nor is turning a Gerhard Richter into a table-top. There is a bit of malice in it though. It was certainly not meant as a friendly gesture. In the case of the skip filled with brokenup pictures by him, he was thematizing a certain studio misery - in other words, what happens to failed pictures? Baselitz has just said that he throws all his canvases away straightaway; no more overpainting.
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