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

From Kafka to Kippenberger

Zdenek Felix

A single exhibition in the Deichtorhallen of the work of Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) was long overdue. In recent years his works have been important parts of several projects. He participated in the theme show "Post Human" (1993) with a group of "Self-portraits" and a work called "Martin, ab in die Ecke und schdme dich" (Martin, stand in the corner and be ashamed of yourself). In the exhibition "temporary translation(s) - Sammlung Scharmann" which took place in the following year, he was given a whole room for his work. Other important works by Kippenberger were presented in Hamburg in the shows "Das Jahrhundert des Multiple" (The Century of the Multiple, 1994) and "Home Sweet Home" (1997).

With the first comprehensive posthumous exhibition in Germany, the Deichtorhallen intend to comply with the increasing interest in Martin Kippenberger's work. A retrospective was not at issue. Instead the idea was to combine several groups of work which had never been shown together, in order to create a productive confrontation. Another point was to clarify the overlapping of different "media" such as painting, photography, drawing, sculpture and installation, whose boundaries Kippenberger intend to blur and to "deconstruct" and therefore did not use the media in a hierarchical but in a discursive manner.

The center of the current Hamburg exhibition are the two extensive complexes of work "Self-portraits" (1991-1996) and "The Happy End of Franz Kafka's'Amerika"' (1994). They are complemented by further thematic ensembles and individual works with autobiographic references which, so to speak, mirror Kippenherger's different, sometimes opposing artistic approaches: "Heavy Burschi" (1986-1996), " Sozia Iki stentran sport" (Transport of Social Affairs, 1989), Photographs (1983-1986), Hotel Drawings (1986-1996), Lanterns (1990-1991) etc. The spacious northern hall of the Deichtorhallen, which was built in 1911, i.e. in Kafka's time, is an adequate place for the exhibition in which the huge installation, which deals with the subject of Kafka's novel "America" and which has not yet been shown in Germany, serves a pivotal function. In Kafka's novel the "interview" takes place on a massive scale on the race track in Clayton. In contrast to this, Kippenberger represents this event on a modern roofed "sports field." Through this scenic representation the industrial architecture of the northern Deichtorhalle is almost "symbolically" elevated: it becomes the perfect scenery for the imagined mise en scene.

With this presentation in Hamburg, the work of Martin Kippenberger, so to speak, returns to the first scenes of the artist's career. He was born in 1953 in Dortmund, grew up in Essen and in 1971 went to Hamburg where he studied at the Hochschule for Bildende Kiinste from 1972 to 1976. Here he met Werner Biittner and Albert Oehlen. First in Hamburg and later in Berlin, they developed a program for the "hard core" of an artists' group which was provocative and at the same time had great

public appeal. With the beginning of the so-called "wild painting" around 1981, Martin Kippenberger became one of the initiators of this new pictorial iconoclasm. Early on he used his irony and his bias for a permanent deconstruction of fixed positions with regard to content and style in order to counteract some of his contemporaries'naive belief in the meaningfulness of the spontaneous action of painting.

Following Francis Picabia's example Kippenberger deliberately included "unacceptable" subjects into his repertoire which were often sparked off by the banalities of life, by politics, media and advertising. The programmatic "stylelessness" of his works depends on the different contexts which he introduced into his art. For Kippenberger there was no subject which could not be turned into art. Yet there was also no art which could make sense without a context. This cis well as his readiness to include mistakes and corrections as instruments in his own work and constantly to check the clich6s, even those of the subjects chosen by himself, made Kippenberger's work exemplary for the art of the 90s.

Kippenberger's large installation "The Happy End of Franz Kafka's'Amerika"' is a key work for the understanding of his artistic intentions. It is, so to speak, his "Opus magnum," his central work, the completion of which occupied him for more than three years. Photographs taken in his studio in St. Georgen give evidence of the gradual creation of the different elements for the future installation. Kippenberger said: "I had a table reconstructed at which (Robert) Musil wrote his novel 'Man Without Qualities,'an endless story. Just as in the cycle of paintings 'The Raft of the Medusa,''The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "Amerika"' is a motion, a move into something else, a transition. In'The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "Amerika"' it is the different decades; everybody certainly remembers one of the chairs, which embodies for you this or that, and you are back in that time, it's like a visual reference book. By means of the tables and the eight books which were published in Rotterdam on the occasion of the exhibition, people can make up their own conversations or interviews which cross their minds. Suddenly you have different ideas and can tell yourself story."

In the Deichtorhallen, visitors are invited to have a first look at the installation through a window in the wall of the first exhibition hall, quasi a suggestion and promise of the later inspection in the central hall. The idea is that viewers take in the image of the installation, then necessarily leave it in order to occupy themselves with other works, and finally from a different perspective experience anew as a unit. Here the gondola (Transport of Social Affairs, 1989) placed in the first room plays an important role: it "carries" the viewers symbolically through the exhibition to the exit where "Santa Claus" gives them a present and says good-bye to them. The ensuing way through the exhibition leads them to "Heavy Burschi" and a gallery with early paintings ("Gibt es mich wirklich?" - Do I really exist?, 1991) and then back to the central hall.

The size of the installation is amazing. An area of 20 x 30 m, covered with green carpeting and marked with white lines and a circle in the center suggests a soccer field. The two grand stands erected at the two long sides of the rectangle additionally emphasize the impression of a sports field. Moreover they allude to the stands of the race track in Kafka's novel, which Kafka's protagonist, Karl Rossmann, will climb up after the end of his "interview." Rossmann himself does not appear in the installation, nor do any other figures or events from Kafka's fragment of a novel. Kippenberger, who according to his own statement only knew Kafka's novel from the report of a friend, obviously was not interested in translating a literary model into a visual form, but in evoking the atmosphere of permanent "interviews."

In Kafka's novel these meetings take place in small separate "offices" according to the different professions. Analogously, yet without specifying, Kippenherger creates general "conversational situations" by means of about 50 tables and twice cis many chairs, though the character of the furniture evokes applications for artistic commissions or jobs. For this we can quote the decisive passage from the last chapter of "America": "The great theater of Oklahoma calls for you! It only calls today, only once! Whoever misses this opportunity, misses it forever! Whoever thinks of his future, belongs to us! Everybody is welcome! Whoever wants to become an artist should sign up!" If we regard the activities of artists as permanent "interviews" by which they intend to arouse the audience's attention, Kippenberger's installation can be read in an additional way: as a metaphor of the peripeteias in every artist's career.

The complexity of the ensemble is due to the fact that Kippenherger uses the whole range of possible "furniture" for conversational situations and shows an amazing inventiveness. Yet at the same time he undermines almost all traditional patterns and transforms his open-plan office" with its dozens of tables and chairs into a deconstructed history of 20th century design and also into an image of a deformed mass society. The omnipotence of bureaucracy is aimed at in the same way as the omnipresence of control mechanisms which society makes use of. The "interviews" take place in front of the grand stands, as it were "in public," i.e. the participants are "under supervision." Whoever wants to become an artist has to resist those mechanisms, even if this means subversion.

Yet only if one considers the connections between the single groups of furniture and earlier three-dimensional works by Kippenberger, the multilayered structure of the installation becomes visible. Several pieces such as "Hausbar Simone de," "Indiscret" or "LTU - Lord Jim Patience" are taken from the exhibitions "Peter" and "Petra" from the late 80s. The "Barbie-Table," an enlarged version of a Barbie toy bathtub commissioned by Kippenberger, was already part of the exhibition "Peter II" (Vienna, 1987). The two figures with holes in their bellies, whose forms clearly refer to Henry Moore's sculptures, originate from the installation "Familie Hunger," presented in Frankfurt in 1985.

Of no less importance is the origin of the single objects. Many of the pieces of furniture were designed by Kippenberger and executed by carpenters, for instance the "silvery" desk with 11 drawers which can quasi "store" the images as patterns. Other elements were given to him by artist friends, such as Jason Rhoades, Johannes Wohnseifer, Ulrich Strotjohann, Tony Oursler or Donald Judd. In many cases Kippenberger used the furniture by renowned designers such as Arne Jacobsen, Charles & Ray Eames, Marcel Breuer, Achile Castiglioni and Aldo Rossi, yet always combined them "wrongly" with simple, anonymous and often with used furniture. Nothing is left to chance, all combinations bear witness of the certainty with which forms, styles, epochs and different individual characteristics are interrelated. Kippenherger subjected his material to a metamorphosis: pieces of furniture or their parts are combined with other objects and become sculptures which develop an unmistakable play of forms. Covering a table with dense, brown paint creates a paraphrase of John Miller's sculptures covered with acrylic acid "shitty-brown." Ensembles of chairs placed one on top of the other in a delicate equilibrium and combined with plexiglass recall the objects by Reinhard Mucha. Objects which belong to another typology are those furniture-like pieces which are themselves highly individual sculptures, such as the table with broken lamps which was made with a chopping board according to a photograph of the meat market in Athens. Another functionless furniture -sculpture was constructed according to the model of a chest of drawers with a mechanic lift for a TV-set and is an expression of a tasteless style of home decor and of so-called "Gelsenkirchen Baroque. 11

A specific characteristic of all these objects/pieces of furniture is their tendency to create multilayered frames of references or to change from one frame of reference to another. This is what Kippenherger's practice refers to. As Diedrich Diedrichsen puts it: "To a high degree he made social conditions, the immediate surroundings, the art market, art history and other metasubjects the subjects of art, yet he always considered in his works the specific quality of the respective levels. However his concern was not just these two, i.e. art and everyday life, but the redefinition of hybrid forms and different degrees of actuality and importance." This is exactly why Kippenberger's art will survive - in most cases it has preserved this openness.