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KIPPENBERGIANA  

Alison M. Gingeras

Avant-Garde Sign Value in Contemporary Painting

‘Kippenberger polluted the idea of the grand gesture; his production revealed a motivation designed to extinguish reverence rather than compound it. He took responsibility for the contexutalization and dissemination of his ideas and did not wait for the museums to catch up. Kippenberger was political, but that was not his central thesis; it was just another set of rules to exploit.’ (1)

Lucy McKenzie on Martin Kippenberger

The Museum has finally caught up with Martin Kippenberger. So have scores of younger artists. Eight years after his (premature) death, his legacy has finally begun to infiltrate a ‘mainstream’ narrative of art history. The recent, widespread acknowledgement of Kippenberger’s significance is not all that surprising given that many artists are often celebrated posthumously. Lack of recognition can be attributed to numerous factors – in some cases the meaning of an artist’s work would be out of sync with the social or political climate of their lifetime. Sometimes an artist’s practice is too underground, radical or “advanced” for its time. None of these more conventional scenarios adequately explains the late recognition of Martin Kippenberger’s significance. Read the entire article.

Albert Oehlen Speaks about Martin Kippenberger

"The important thing about Kippenberger is that his attentions are two lines, parallel lines. The one thing is that he is trying to entertain people and trying to shock people, all his work is that. He wants to really invent and with every piece to make something new and to be real avant-garde. All day long and with all of his heart he really does believe in nothing else but in art. He doesn't define it, his father was an artist, he is an artist and his friends are artists. I think he never asked himself why because he has no choice, he is an artist. He's very, I wouldn't say naive, but it's absolutely clear, there's no question about it. Other artists maybe ask themselves if art is finished or they are finished. He never asks himself that. As a motive for modem art he thought that social life could be motive enough. And this can show up as banality or however we find it. And if you look at the subjects he uses you start asking yourself what's behind it, how does he choose this thing, how does he select this subject then you find behind that a moral attitude a judgment."

"He doesn't think that life is art and everything he puts out is good. He really works on it but he works so extremely much that it looks like everything is art. His selection process is 100 times greater than other people's. He can do it because that's what he's doing all day long, he's collecting all day long."
Read the entire article (Source http://www.postmedia.net)

Joking apart.

He was accused of nazism, sexism, buffoonery, alcoholism... but Martin Kippenberger's greatest enemy was himself. Adrian Searle looks back on a deadly serious jester.

Tuesday December 2, 2003 The Guardian

Martin Kippenberger always went too far. Going too far was what the German artist did, in art and in life. It was said he once bought a dilapidated petrol station in Brazil and renamed it Gas Station Martin Boormann, after the Nazi war criminal. It was also rumoured that he installed a telephone line, with the greeting "Boormann... Gaz" on the answerphone. He certainly had a photograph taken of the service station, which he blew up to wall size for an installation.

He painted a grim portrait of Joseph Beuys's mother, and of himself as Christ crucified. He opened an art museum in an unused abbatoir on a Greek island, and built entrances to fake subway stations in the Yukon, in Leipzig and in a Greek field. He made "architectural models" out of stacks of wooden transport pallets, as designs for fictitious administration blocks for Rest Centres for Recuperating Mothers. His own mother, sick with incurable cancer, had been killed in a traffic accident when a truck loaded with pallets shed its load on the car in which she was travelling.
Read the entire article (Source http://www.guardian.co.uk)

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Other artists in Abstract America: New Painting And Sculpture Kristin Baker | John Bauer | Mark Bradford | Joe Bradley | Tom Burr | Jedediah Caesar | Carter | Eric and Heather ChanSchatz | Peter Coffin | Guerra de la Paz | Francesca DiMattio | Bart Exposito | Mark Grotjahn | Jacob Hashimoto | Rachel Harrison | Patrick Hill | Matt Johnson | Ryan Johnson | Paul Lee | Chris Martin | Elizabeth Neel | Baker Overstreet | Stephen G. Rhodes | Amanda Ross-Ho | Sterling Ruby | Gedi Sibony | Amy Sillman | Agathe Snow | Kirsten Stoltmann | Dan Walsh | Jonas Wood | Aaron Young

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