First the Feet
By Roberto Ohrt. Excerpt from the book 'Kippenberger'
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The third picture, more or less square, also depicts too many files stuck into a border of greasy sealant. Apart from this, there are also a few examples of the traps and errors of illusion - the spatially impossible triangle, the idea of a cube in the folding map, and the photo inset with the doll's face, which has a particularly lively gaze because the left eye no longer functions and thus seems to be giving us a provocative wink. Accordingly, the ensemble of three canvases gradually becomes a panorama that encloses the beauty of a former diva, the end of a great star, whose dressing table is gathering cobwebs in a box-room.
Another picture, also dating from 1983 (p. 152), whose frame is going to pieces in just the same way, and whose canvas is stitched together in equally pointless fashion, is no longer played out in the caravan of a forgotten celebrity, but in the "social crate" - in other words, in the ideas conveyed with utopian remnants of welfare-state promises. The background is taken from graffiti or bar-room walls. It depicts a moonlit evening as concrete; then the shimmering idyll is added. A little bit of "art for all" is there in the style, but that old image of yearning for southern climes, gondola with gondolier, is painted in a cheap, unimaginative, standard fashion; orange blue red black orange, one stroke next to another. In this light it is difficult to distinguish whether the holiday or the whole of life down south is supposed to be the fulfillment of a dream or the last journey, the leap into the crate. If gondolas convey "social pasta", where is there left to go? Bread for the poor, social sculpture ... "Monkey Business" was written on the gondola later carved out of wood as a social hammock (p. 153 -155). The breakthrough into the realm of uncertainty cannot protect even the most beautiful art transport from the possibility that there may not be anything to be won on the further shore, nothing for the masses, and nothing without them, no utopia, and even less without illusions.
Too bad that Wols cannot even experience that with us
Up to now, one of the most important exhibitions of the 1980s was also the greatest manifestation of the circle of friends in which Martin Kippenberger moved at that time. It was the 1984 group exhibition in Essen, Wahrheit ist Arbeit [Truth is Work] with Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner. In 1986 when he himself was able to install the only solo exhibition any German institution allowed him during the whole of the decade, in a certain sense he continued the program of that group exhibition. At the Darmstadt Landesmuseum there was of course the suggestion, possibly a little too close for comfort, of comparisons with the Beuys block installed there. Since 1984 there had been the monumental portrait Die Mutter von Joseph Beuys (p. 105), a somewhat largerthan- life-size icon in the style of Russian Modernism, viz., the late work of Kasimir Malevich; in other words, in conformity with the subject: utopian and rustic at the same time, including the offer of a radical simplification of the artistic vocabulary, as a message to the workers and ordinary people to take their future into their own hands in just the same way, and start all over again, together with art, from the beginning. In some basic sense, Die Mutter von Joseph Beuys provided an exhaustive answer to the most important question that could be addressed to the artist, the figure, Joseph Beuys, namely, the question of his origin. There was no need for yet more maintenance of the myth of the by then already legendary German sculptor. Still, on the occasion one or another message was transmitted across to the block. In Darmstadt Martin Kippenberger was negotiating Miete, Strom, Gas [Rent, Electricity, Gas] , the basic "economic elements" the artist needs to secure by selling his art. His eye for realism was directed however not just at the balance sheet in his own household, but much more comprehensively at social and constructed reality in the country.
Página 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 > >>
Página 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 > >>
The third picture, more or less square, also depicts too many files stuck into a border of greasy sealant. Apart from this, there are also a few examples of the traps and errors of illusion - the spatially impossible triangle, the idea of a cube in the folding map, and the photo inset with the doll's face, which has a particularly lively gaze because the left eye no longer functions and thus seems to be giving us a provocative wink. Accordingly, the ensemble of three canvases gradually becomes a panorama that encloses the beauty of a former diva, the end of a great star, whose dressing table is gathering cobwebs in a box-room.
Another picture, also dating from 1983 (p. 152), whose frame is going to pieces in just the same way, and whose canvas is stitched together in equally pointless fashion, is no longer played out in the caravan of a forgotten celebrity, but in the "social crate" - in other words, in the ideas conveyed with utopian remnants of welfare-state promises. The background is taken from graffiti or bar-room walls. It depicts a moonlit evening as concrete; then the shimmering idyll is added. A little bit of "art for all" is there in the style, but that old image of yearning for southern climes, gondola with gondolier, is painted in a cheap, unimaginative, standard fashion; orange blue red black orange, one stroke next to another. In this light it is difficult to distinguish whether the holiday or the whole of life down south is supposed to be the fulfillment of a dream or the last journey, the leap into the crate. If gondolas convey "social pasta", where is there left to go? Bread for the poor, social sculpture ... "Monkey Business" was written on the gondola later carved out of wood as a social hammock (p. 153 -155). The breakthrough into the realm of uncertainty cannot protect even the most beautiful art transport from the possibility that there may not be anything to be won on the further shore, nothing for the masses, and nothing without them, no utopia, and even less without illusions.
Too bad that Wols cannot even experience that with us
Up to now, one of the most important exhibitions of the 1980s was also the greatest manifestation of the circle of friends in which Martin Kippenberger moved at that time. It was the 1984 group exhibition in Essen, Wahrheit ist Arbeit [Truth is Work] with Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner. In 1986 when he himself was able to install the only solo exhibition any German institution allowed him during the whole of the decade, in a certain sense he continued the program of that group exhibition. At the Darmstadt Landesmuseum there was of course the suggestion, possibly a little too close for comfort, of comparisons with the Beuys block installed there. Since 1984 there had been the monumental portrait Die Mutter von Joseph Beuys (p. 105), a somewhat largerthan- life-size icon in the style of Russian Modernism, viz., the late work of Kasimir Malevich; in other words, in conformity with the subject: utopian and rustic at the same time, including the offer of a radical simplification of the artistic vocabulary, as a message to the workers and ordinary people to take their future into their own hands in just the same way, and start all over again, together with art, from the beginning. In some basic sense, Die Mutter von Joseph Beuys provided an exhaustive answer to the most important question that could be addressed to the artist, the figure, Joseph Beuys, namely, the question of his origin. There was no need for yet more maintenance of the myth of the by then already legendary German sculptor. Still, on the occasion one or another message was transmitted across to the block. In Darmstadt Martin Kippenberger was negotiating Miete, Strom, Gas [Rent, Electricity, Gas] , the basic "economic elements" the artist needs to secure by selling his art. His eye for realism was directed however not just at the balance sheet in his own household, but much more comprehensively at social and constructed reality in the country.
Página 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 > >>
