Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective
At Museum of Contemporary Art – Grand Avenue
September 21, 2008 – January 5, 2009
“…In this country, History happens at your Front Door…”
b. 1953 d. 1997
Martin Kippenberger wrote the following words onto a painting, “Verfallund Ende des offentlichen Lebens”, I stopped dead in my tracks. I recognized something big here. I understood enough German to understand the jist of what it meant. I knew it wasn’t a quote from his own mouth and that he must be referring to another written work, here I find Richard Sennet to close this gap.
Richard Sennet explains his theory of the “tyranny of intimacy” in his work of 1977 “The Fall of Public Man” by saying, “The reigning belief today is that closeness between persons is a moral good. The reigning aspiration today is to develop individual personality through experiences of closeness and warmth with others. The reigning myth today is that the evils of society can all be understood as evils of impersonality, alienation, and coldness. The sum of these three is an ideology of intimacy: social relationships of all kinds are real, believable, and authentic the closer they approach the inner psychological concerns of each person. This ideology transmutes political categories into psychological categories. This ideology of intimacy defines the humanitarian spirit of a society without gods: warmth is our god. The history of the rise and fall of public culture at the very least calls this humanitarian spirit into question.”
There is a struggle in the career and works of Kippenberger, to say it is a feeling of “coming to terms” with some unknown thing is a misunderstanding not just an understatement. One might say that it is some kind of guilt of growing up post WWII in Germany not understanding the weight he felt in the air and on the faces of his neighbors. This same idea of closeness or intimacy or in Kippenberger’s case, the lack thereof, from the fact of being born a bit too late was one that he couldn’t achieve with his neighbors and their shared history of what just happened here.
Its not guilt that I think Kippenberger was after idealogically, he saw that his fellow Germans were not so full of guilt but even worse, he saw them as being ashamed. Full of shame for a previous generation’s misstep in the path of history. That they would carry this shame and look down when the glances of the rest of the world came over them. That they would only wish for its erasure, it shouldn’t have happened and we feel awful about it, heads down forever feeling. I am not saying that Kippenberger would trade this shame for pride, but to him admitting and understanding is far better than regretting and revoking history.
Kippenberger writes about his piece, “Put Your Freedom in the Corner, Save It for a Rainy Day” of 1990, and explains further by saying, “The Wall is a part of German History. Now that all that’s left of it is a bit on Potsdamer Platz, it no longer feels like you’re walking through a wall. History is something you need to feel. First they weren’t Nazis, then they weren’t Communists. So what were they? They pulled down the wall without asking us and smartly wiped out some German history. The wall ought to have been preserved. We don’t need excavations, like in Greece—in this country history happens at your front door. Joseph Beuys thought the wall should have been seven centimeters higher---on purely aesthetic grounds. Everybody cheered when the wall was pulled down. That’s the wrong way to handle history.”
So now what? The Wall is on a world tour, we can see it, we can touch it, get our pictures taken next to it. We can be proud that we have an image of ourselves standing next to a bit of the Wall, is that it? Is that a different type of pride that we can have that Kippenberger didn’t want for his neighbors? I have one of those pictures of myself and I’m proud of it but I know it’s not what he meant. Does this mean that this retrospective is overdue and should’ve happened while he was alive? I think so.
"Kippenberger was an overrated painter and an underrated artist. In the end he turned everyone against him. His attitude is continued on today not in painting but in Vice Magazine and contemporary youth." paraphrased from Daniel Richter.
Dennis Matthews
November 7th, 2008
