AKA

After Kippenberger's Amerika: 'The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika' (Archive)

Essays: All essays taken from catalogue to exhibition - Martin Kippenberger 'The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika' -Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 12th Feb. - 25th April 1999

From Kafka to Kippenberger by Zdenek Felix

The Unfinished Happy End by Rudolf Schmitz

Do not alight while train is in motion by Veit Loers

Images of Kippenberger's installation

Do not alight while train is in motion

Veit Loers

The incredible roundabout ways - Kippenberger's specialty - also have to do with caricaturing the absolute will to pioneer, though the artist did not allow his right to this will to be disputed. Franz Kafka is said to have had a great time when he read his stories, which posterity considers black and dark, to his friends. Martin Kippenberger's own verbal contribution to the great interview shows that he seems to have been bothered by the idea that he might not have made his history of modern art, which he had brushed the wrong way, absolutely

clear: "That means, the story, the book has not been finished. Yet this is what I want to do, to write a happy end. I think Kafka is my life's work."'

Such scruples actually only bother the best, i.e. those whose artistic ethic is to do their utmost to contribute to the "entertainment value of mankind."

8 Ibid., p. 150

"I am for the good- mood-world. I'm just on the goodmood-side, though it is actually not true that I'm not constantly afflicted by tragic happenings." (Martin Kippenberger)

No, the title is not a quotation from Martin Kippenberger. It is from Karl Valentin and was read in 1946 during a broadcast of the Bayerischer Rundfunk. Yet Kippenberger's last edition (thank heavens, unlimited) was the label for a bottle of Prosecco. The message on the label, which was directed to the beverage, i.e. to the inside and therefore was only clearly visible when the bottle was empty, read: "No Natursekt = Danke! Martin Kippenberger" (No Natural Champagne = Thanks! Martin Kippenberger). For structurcilists who juggle with the significant and with significance, the messages both by Valentin and by Kippenberger would have been clear statements, had it not been for a certain malice between the lines slipped by both authors into their statements cis artistic affirmation. The one, Karl Valentin, used the inscriptions of two signs formerly found in three languages on trains - "do not lean out of the window while train is in motion" and "do not alight before train comes to a standstill" - and mixed them into a paradoxical truth. The other, Martin Kippenberger, expressed his thanks for not having to drink what the red-light district calls natural champagne. Kippenberger's steadfastness was enormous, yet also complicated as one can conclude from the representations of feet in his work. As for his stand-point, he walked a thin line, because many of his parodying statements seemed to be tautological. "If you need one, you have to bring one" (Martin Luther King) was the title of an exhibition at Grdsslin Gallery in 1985 which was associated with Kippenberger's 32nd anniversary. On the poster for this exhibition one saw the artist fumbling in the pocket of his jeans. Whether the reader was asked to bring a bomb, a bible, a cigarette, a pill, a drug, a bottle of wine, or a woman was so unclear that the meaning of the request collapsed. The effect of commercials, characteristic of almost all his exhibition titles, is so direct or familiar that for the moment one neglects their subversiveness. Yet the decisive thing about them is the subversive.

Let us take another example: "Fiffen, Faufen und Ferfciufen." We instantaneously try to decode the words. Does Kippenberger mean "Ficken, Saufen und Verkaufen" (Fuck, Booze and Sell) or does he mean "Kiffen, Kaufen und Versaufen" (Smoke Pot, Buy and Get Drunk)? There are other variants. In the end the many silly f's mean that someone who is drunk or exhales forcefully would be precisely as unable to name the vulgar troika of the slogan as Heinrich Boll's Schischiphus had been. Actually the sentences are no humorous or ironic statements which parodically refer to commercials, but rather grotesque linguistic creations behind whose poignant and deliberately flat wit the author himself is lurking. They are dominated by the imperative or the statement "coram

publico as the maker of a tabloid Martin Kippenberger dictates and demands ("If you don't like this catalogue, you have to see the doctor immediately"), as a copywriter, he composes ("Recently prolonged originals"). He gives official orders ("Please do not sit on the paintings"), of'fers possible titles for autobiographies ("Breaking with the Bonus of Youth") or subtitles for non-fiction books

'From Party-room Painting to Saloon Art"), presents ma works ("The 2nd Being") or invents film titles ("Peter the Russian Position"). Yet these slogans are only original and apt when one also sees their connections to the contents (of the exhibitions) or to the art scene of which Kippenberger was a member. Hence the title of an exhibition or a painting is no propaganda medium, but a tautological model of a strategy. Its pickup includes ci subtle play with official institutional verbalisms whose linguistic effect does not rely on banality, but rather on the fact that these titles are ready-mades of their models. They start a dialogue between "producer and recipient," which advances via invitation card and poster into the area of pictures, until it finally reaches the artworks. In the accompanying catalogues the artist's life is always present. It began with his drawings and sketches on the writing paper of hotels which gave the impression that one was accompanying his daily life as a traveler. When these drawings were reproduced, they gained a bewilderingly autobiographical character ("Black, Bread, Gold," 1990). Also known are his drawings of ground plans on the bills of the Bahia Othon Palace Hotel, which were inscribed with stamped letters and which referred to spaces and moves in which he was involved ("InputOutput," exhibition catalogue, Gisela Capitain Gallery, 1989); or the photographs of the series entitled " 16 Jahre Betten" (16 Years of Beds), which were juxtaposed to the exhibits in his show at Villa Merkel (Esslingen) thus drawing the objective character of the exhibition into the subjective vortex of Kippenberger's overnight stays ("Vergessene Einrichtungsprobleme in der Villa Htigel"/ Forgotten Furnishing Problems in the Villa Hiigel, exhibition catalogue). Kippenberger wants to take part as an artist and cis a human being. He wants the world to take notice of him, though he hides behind his paintings, invitation cards, posters, demands and statements, yet attentively stands behind his slogans in order to hear as Dionysos'ear - how the audience reacts to him. He is sender and receiver like Beuys and yet in a completely different way. He is the global soul which is tangible in each of his artistic statements. Now we could say about all artists that they take on concrete form in their works. Yet in Martin Kippenberger's case things are a bit different. First he created innumerable self-portraits throughout his career: drawings, sculptures and photographs. In 1992 the Max Hetzler Gallery in Cologne presented an exhibition of self-portraits, in which Kippenberger's variations, inscribed with Greek letters and sometimes with dismembered limbs, represented a kind of dramatic birth "ab ovo" In constantly new reincarnations the artist climbed out of the kinder surprise egg and like the little plastic figures had to collect and assemble his limbs. He is the chicken and the eggman. Another alter ego, discernible in sketched outlines, is the little HB-man (the cartoon figure in commercials for the cigarette brand HB) whose mishaps and happy ends were once watched on TV by ci whole nation. In "Spiderman" and "The Raft of the Medusa" the subject found its sparkling continuation which then turned out to be ci fateful end. There are also iconographic indicators connected to him which, so to speak, appear as representatives or leit In addition to the crucified frog (Fred the Frog) whose ritualistic sacrifice was described by Aleister Crowley, one of these representatives and alter egos is Santa Claus who in moral indignation calls war an evil, yet with his warning finger is an authoritarian moralist himself. In 1994 this figure took shape as a sculpture cast in aluminum and bearing autobiographical features: big Uncle Martin, "shepherd," clown, policeman, and streetlight at the same time. Note the execution of the hand which holds the fool's wand. It turns out to be a battering ram or a vice which in a preliminary drawing holds nail clippers. Kippenberger once told me that these clippers accompanied him on many journeys. These pinching instruments with their monstrous form appear in collages, and one of them in a painting hovering in the sky like a sword of Damocles. Other accessories of his appearances are the net and the noodle which appear in various forms and - as Roberto Ohrt credibly writes - according to Kippenberger allude to the fettering of the artwork. In the form of liquorice-like silicon ropes they run through many ci collage from the eighties embracing or framing the motif with a tinge of disgust. The spaghetti noodle is the eatable variant of the net. Already in an early work from 1982 it snakes out of a 11 pasta asciutta" and forms a charming fetter for a woman's hands. In addition to this as a secondary motif appears what is called broken glass caused by impact, i.e. the netlike structure of a broken windshield or a windowpane - and in Kippenberger's work part of the logo of the Lord Jim lodge. Yet this structure also resembles a spider's web. Spiderman arrives on the scene, and after Kippenberger learned that under the influence of drugs spiders spin different webs than usual, he depicted himself as Spiderman ready to jump - true to the comic book - in an attic room which may have served as a symbol for his studio (1996). The paintings on the wall announce that they were painted under the influence of "sleeping pills," "alcohol," "coffee," and "drugs." The washbasin is Duchamp's urinal, its outlet leading outwards into the drainpipe. Outside the room we see plastic bags with half a pound of butter and a bottle of Vodka as food. The structure of the outside, the wellarranged modern world between constructivism and Burlington is known from many of his pictures.

In one of his late works, Martin Kippenberger, who as a young man traveled to Mexico to look for mescal buttons, did not declare himself for drugs, but rather for the madness of the artist. The stirring last great series of works, "The Raft of the Medusa," inspired by his recollection of the tragic shipwreck and the odyssey on a raft in 1816 depicted in Gericault's famous painting and expressing the artist's despair, also includes a net-like structure: a lattice of ship planks, known from a contemporary etching, which Kippenberger copied as a carpet.

No, one does not have to create everything oneself. "Art is no longer made, but only viewed," Kippenberger said in an interview with jutta Koether.

In this hopeless world, in which spaghetti are found in Japan and Beuys's mother has risen from the dead though with Martin Kippenberger's features and he himself at the same time an incarnation of Mother Theresa, as he once remarked in an interview - there is only one hope: to wake up from this nightmare of everday life again and again. Franz Kafka's "America" as a happy end. At the age of eleven, little Martin wrote in a letter: "Last week something dreadful happened. A house burnt down and fortunately no one was dead. Shall I tell you this sad story? - This is what happened: an old man had been in hospital for a long time and had just been discharged. By the way, the old man couldn't hear well and didn't hear that his house was burning. The firemen came quickly. Suddenly a man remembered that the old man was still in the house. The men from the fire department quickly dragged him out. Now the old man had to go back to the hospital and never saw his house again. Fortunately he had only burnt his hand and broken a wrist. How glad we are. That our house hasn't burnt down yet and that we can still lead a happy life."

In the chapter "The Open-Air Theater of Oklahoma" of his novel "America" Franz Kafka makes his figure Karl Rossmann ruminate: "'Everybody is welcome,'they said. Everybody, so Karl too. Everything he had done up to now was forgotten, nobody wanted to blame him for it. He could apply for work which was no disgrace and to which one could invite applicants publicly. And in the same public way he was given the promise that he would be accepted." Finally Karl Rossmann crushed and humiliated by one authoritarian situation after the other, can draw hope again. In Martin Kippenberger's vast installation in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (1994) these "interviews" turn into a grotesque reality. Pairs of chairs are placed face to face on the simulated green of a stadium. These chairs come from all epochs of 20th century design, from the Bauhaus to Donald Judd, from Charles Eames to fleci market historicism and to a reproduction of the desk at which Robert Musil wrote his novel "The Man Without Qualities." The artifacts are representative of authoritarian conditions and turn out to be an absurd theater of the avant-garde in the stadium. The ready-made takes on anthropomorphic features: Heavy Burschis (Guys) and Heavy Madels (Girls), authorities and supplicants are facing one another. Yet one is allowed to speak, and from the electronic scoreboard over the grandstand comes music. Kippenberger is not only Spiderman, eggman, Fred the Frog and streetlight-Santa Claus, he now also plays "little piece of furniture" and slips into the artificial individuailities of interiors.

In his book "Speech and Silence" Nikolaus Luhmann reports on such facts: "Logic observes itself as paradoxicalness and tautology. As warning marks for the delimitation of an area of communication which can be controlled by logic. At both borders logic can see its boundary marks only from within, i.e. not as forms. Consequently logic and paradox cannot be recognized at the same time." Luhmann can conclude that the western understanding of paradoxicalness is more fundamental than that of logic.

If we try accordingly to understand the paradoxes, tautologies and double affirmations in Martin Kippenberger's pictorial systems of communication as boundary marks which say more about art and life than the usual rules promise, then the tenth award is as important as the first, and the design for a recreation center for mothers constructed of pallets from the Deutsche Bank could gain topical importance in regard to the invitation for entries for new government buildings in Berlin.

Martin Kippenberger did not "alight while train is in motion." If we think today about what might constitute his importance as an artist, then this was the main thing.