Post-war art from Germany has produced several spectacular artists — Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Anslem Kiefer, to name a few. All of them are well known, even quite loved, in India. Less so a successor artist, the extraordinary Martin Kippenberger. We just haven’t seen that much work by him —unsurprisingly, since he died at 44, in 1997. Besides, he showed much less as well. A retrospective at the MoMA in New York, The Problem Perspective, however, goes beyond the expansive oeuvre of the artist. In these days of financial recession and a plunging art market, it reframes ideas about art and artists.
Kippenberger has always been known for mocking the idea of the iconic artwork (and by extension, the heroic artist). A Capri car is painted in the rusty repair colour with oatmeal mixed in, mirroring Kiefer’s straw and natural materials on giant leaden works. But he’s picked up a car, an object of luxury, not created by the artist, not manufactured by him, not even painted by him. It’s an industrial object, mass produced. Yet, alluding to a German giant via an almost mundane object maps something of an entanglement on the art history map.
This is precisely what Kippenberger seeks, offering himself as the keeper of our collective artistic memory. He extends the idea in another work that recalls a furniture store like Delhi’s semi-outdoor Amar Colony — an assemblage of works created to look like objects — cupboards, tables and so on — cluttered in a cramped space. The idea is derived from the tradition of showing art all clustered on walls, without the kind of space between works we are used to seeing in a modern white cube space.
Here, he uses a Gerhard Richter painting as a table top, and consciously devaluates it by pricing (originally) the assemblage for less than the value of the painting itself. This cannibalistic act begets a contentious question — is the Richter work Kippenberger’s now, assimilated? What are the kinds of exchanges and collaborations between contemporary art practitioners in the climate of (a once) soaring art market? Such dis-junctures — between markets and agency over a work — for example, are easily one of the most exciting challenges he throws out, egging us — his audience — to push the envelope harder.
In this same show, we see Kippenberger leaning back, deep into the tradition he has inherited — that of Western painting. He hires a sign painter to create large canvases in 1981 from photographs taken when he visited New York in that period. With this, he borrows, once more, from an earlier history of painting, where even the most skilled painters — such as Rembrandt — ran full-fledged studios populated with dextrous assistants. Unresolved, this question wanders around the show, asking repeatedly: What is an original work of art?
This series includes a painting, one of Kippenberger himself, sitting nonchalantly on a giant leather sofa, discarded on the kerbside, amidst bags of trash. He has the air of someone who has transcended the mundane, a beatific creature. The work is only a blink away from another wire sculpture, where the masked artist is kneeling on his haunches, like Superman.
Who is this, one might have asked? Just a year ago, it would have been any of the blockbuster artists who also inhabit the world’s glossies. Now, that idea is strung through with a sombre tint. Just a few days ago, Sotheby’s failed to sell even Picasso and Giacometti in New York, close by to where Kippenberger is showing. A lot of heros seem to be falling from at least one of their many pedestals. Kippenberger’s big idea was never to let them on those pedestals in the first place. Ironically, his own positioning and his constant documenting his own work ensures he has, if nothing else, a place of his own in the sun.