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Lot Essay
'The fulcrum of his artistic ideas was his own persona. It was always the person Martin Kippenberger that faced up to everyday reality. He described himself as 'one of you' and declared that 'every artist is also a human being', turning Beuys's famous dictum the other way. His own individuality, with all its vulnerability and particular life circumstances served as a source of inspiration for his art'
(E. Meyer-Hermann, 'Yes, I am also a woman. Tragedies of the Flesh', Kippenberger Meets Picasso, exh. cat., Museo Picasso, Málaga, 2011, p. 63).
'Everybody knows that I'm the one who covered the eighties. It's the same as with Polke. Everybody knew that he was the man of the seventies'
(M. Kippenberger, quoted in 'One has to be able to take it! Interview with Martin Kippenberger, November 1990 - May, 1991', in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1991, p. 19).
'With Hetzler, we made asses of ourselves and made everyone hate us. We climbed on the tables and pulled down our pants-extreme artist-behavior. It was also extremely exhausting'
(A.Oehlen, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: the Artist and his Families, New York 2011, p.246).
'I just happen to be a living vehicle, and a very clear one at that. Others might be better styled and more focused on the project at hand. In my case, role-play wouldn't work because I don't have a style. Until I realized that my style happens where the person is, and there is conveyed through actions, individual things and deeds, and decisions, and this is what makes a story. Art is always viewed in retrospect anyway, from the outside, hardly ever in the moment when it is created. I would say the period is twenty years. After that you can see what kind of effect the work, or the artist, really had. The decisive thing is what people will SAY about me then. Did I inspire a good mood or not. That's what I'm working on, so people can say, Kippenberger was a good mood'
(M. Kippenberger, B - Gespräche mit Martin Kippenberger, Ostfildern 1994, p. 14).
One of two much celebrated large-scale diptychs with similar compositions, Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie (Down with the Bourgeoisie) and Nieder mit der Inflation (Down with Inflation) together create one of Martin Kippenberger's most apt statements on class systems and his placement within them. Executed in 1983 and 1984 respectively, the works are wry self-portraits of the artist that take as their cue his outlandish behaviour at the Reinhard Mucha opening at the Max Hetzler Gallery, Cologne, in October 1983. Intentionally subverting the practice of self-portraiture, Kippenberger depicts himself deliberately cropped from the neck down standing on a chair: Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie with his trousers slightly undone, acts as a dramatic precursor to his 'un-trousered' finale in Nieder mit der Inflation. The artist juxtaposes his figures against an hour-glass filled with coins in Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie and a 'curious chair' in Nieder mit der Inflation, layering the works with a host of visual and linguistic puns. Scrawled across the canvas, Kippenberger has written the title slogans; phrases in perfect keeping with his one-man assault against the art world's status quo. Written in transparent silicon onto the surface of the canvas, the artist succeeds in making the text and image one in the same. The words rise up from his freely applied brushstrokes in midnight blues and silvery greys, emerging as though from within the canvas, a healed scar on its skin. Created in the months leading up to the artist's important I.N.P.-Bilder (The is-not-embarrassing) exhibition in 1984, to which Nieder mit der Inflation belongs, Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie can be seen as an immediate pre-cursor to the series. With its closely correlated formal handling of paint and imagery, the work represents an exploration of notions of embarrassment, hubris and self-reflection through the hypocrisies and contradictions of his culture. This series took up German cultural clichés, stereotypes, banalities, and bad jokes as its themes, all of which are masterfully captured in Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie. Of this period, fellow artist and frequent collaborator Albert Oehlen said, 'with Hetzler, we made asses of ourselves and made everyone hate us. We climbed on the tables and pulled down our pants-extreme artist-behavior. It was also extremely exhausting' (A. Oehlen, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: the Artist and his Families, New York 2011, p.246).
Reminiscent of the billboard-scale of his landmark Dear Painter Paint Me series of the early 1980s, Kippenberger's Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie (Down with the Bourgeoisie) was created at a critical time in his career. 1983 marked Kippenberger's 30th birthday, his move to Cologne, the centre of the European art world, and what Susanne Kippenberger notes as his 'coronation' at Rudolf Zwirner Gallery. Not only did Susanne Kippenberger note that her brother's works from 1983 are some of his best, but the artist himself noted in an interview in 1991 that 'everybody knows that I'm the one who covered the eighties. It's the same as with Polke. Everybody knew that he was the man of the seventies' (M. Kippenberger, quoted in 'One has to be able to take it! Interview with Martin Kippenberger, November 1990 - May, 1991', in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1991, p. 19). Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie was included in Kippenberger's great retrospectives, staged by the artist as an iconoclastic and wry jostle of the artistic institution, in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1993 and in Basel at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1997. Uniting Kippenberger's oeuvre is the genre of self-portraiture, which he used to express his personal experience and surrounding environment. But the biographical element is only one part of 'the joke' that the artist offers up to his viewers. Many of the works from Kippenberger's practice at this time, including Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie dealt with such topics in the artist's characteristic witty, performative and trickster style. In Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie, Kippenberger captures some of the movement of the performative act at Hetzler's in the figure's shadow, which almost appears to presage the moment when he is about to pull down his trousers. He is on the cusp of being caught 'with his trousers down' as it were, an embarrassing act, laying out the truth for all to see. In addition, Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie develops a number of continuities with 'the chair' and 'the hand', two such recurring motifs in Kippenberger's practice alongside the Capri, the lamp post, the egg and the frog. On the left-hand side, Kippenberger depicts his figure standing on a chair, an object that interested him throughout his practice and which dominated his 1994 exhibition The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika, where he presented more than 100 chairs from different periods. The significance its presence in Kippenberger's practice of no surprise considering his interest in the 'myth of the artist' as explored in his Hand-Painted Pictures series of 1992. The meditation on the hands as a symbol independent from the body that Kippenberger presents in Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie brings about a juxtaposition between 'idle hands' and the coins, operating as a visual marker of the Biblical proverb 'idle hands make one poor', taking on additional resonance when placed alongside mention of the bourgeoisie. The coins in the hourglass coupled with the undone trousers are a wry commentary on what Ann Goldstein notes as a Freudian driver of male libido: money (A. Goldstein, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 59).
The punch line is Kippenberger's figure at the neck. Engaging in a critical dialogue of self-portraiture where the face has traditionally been a metonym for the self, Kippenberger's cropping of the head can be seen as an invitation to focus elsewhere - in Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie's case, on the hands. Writing in the 1980s about the lack of relevance of joking in an era when most taboos had already been broken, this ultimate subversion of the portrait is best understood through the lens of literary theorist Otto F. Best who said: 'In a world without faces, the joke also has no face' (O.F. Best, Der Witz als Erkenntniskraft und Formenprinzip, Darmstadt 1989, p. 141).
A full unpacking of Kippenberger's imagery, blends his biography, sense of humour, interests and the 'German existence'. Kippenberger grew up in the 1950s and 60s, a period in post-War Germany defined by economic prosperity and historical whitewashing. The shackles of their post-War history were still felt in Germany in the 1980s. Recurring topics in Kippenberger's practice aside from self-portraiture included criticisms of Germany's uneasy relationship with its recent past, the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, kitsch, culture and the art world. Indeed Susanne Kippenberger noted of her brother's practice around the period of Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie's conception that he 'was more radical, tackling taboo subjects like the Nazi legacy, but [he wasn't] a crusading do-gooder...[he was] just interested in showing social and political life as it was' (S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: the Artist and his Families, New York 2011, p.264).
Kippenberger reveled in the innuendos possible in the playing off of text and image. Kippenberger's conflation of the slogan 'down with the bourgeoisie' with the imagery of the work itself transcended the formal limitations of text and imagery. This notion was proliferating in the 1980s and Kippenberger's strategy was not unrelated to that of a number of his American peers who were examining issues of representation, originality, and authorship, including Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman. During the 1980s Cologne was not only the centre of the German art world, but also of the European art community, and many Americans had their first exhibitions in Cologne at Kippenberger's dealer, Galerie Max Hetzler, including Robert Gober, Jon Kessler, and Christopher Wool. At the same time, Kippenberger and his peers were starting to show in the United States; Kippenberger's first exhibition was a group show with Albert and Markus Oehlen and Werner Büttner at Metro Pictures in New York 1984. By incorporating a methodology that comes from a U.S. movement that sits outside of a bourgeois context, Kippenberger's linguistic turn takes on a double play on an American/European platform. Of this Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen noted of Kippenberger and his contemporaries that showed with him in New York that, 'the early oeuvres of these three artists can hardly be understood without the petite bourgeoisie. Their ideological critique took aim at the people who got their truths from Bild, drove Ford Capri, and fell asleep in front of the telly at night. It's not that Kippenberger or Oehlen made fun of these people; they saw themselves as members of that class. At least they constructed petit-bourgeois identities for themselves as a resource for their artistic production. The whole thing was pop art in a double sense: it represented a more radical extension of the formalist experimentation in the pop-art vein of American realism...But the whole thing was popular art also because it took this popular culture seriously as an aesthetic model' (S. Schmidt-Wulffen, quoted in 'Interview with Josephine von Perfall, 16 October 2012', in J. von Perfall (ed.), Kippenberger & Friends, Berlin 2013, pp. 135-136).
(E. Meyer-Hermann, 'Yes, I am also a woman. Tragedies of the Flesh', Kippenberger Meets Picasso, exh. cat., Museo Picasso, Málaga, 2011, p. 63).
'Everybody knows that I'm the one who covered the eighties. It's the same as with Polke. Everybody knew that he was the man of the seventies'
(M. Kippenberger, quoted in 'One has to be able to take it! Interview with Martin Kippenberger, November 1990 - May, 1991', in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1991, p. 19).
'With Hetzler, we made asses of ourselves and made everyone hate us. We climbed on the tables and pulled down our pants-extreme artist-behavior. It was also extremely exhausting'
(A.Oehlen, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: the Artist and his Families, New York 2011, p.246).
'I just happen to be a living vehicle, and a very clear one at that. Others might be better styled and more focused on the project at hand. In my case, role-play wouldn't work because I don't have a style. Until I realized that my style happens where the person is, and there is conveyed through actions, individual things and deeds, and decisions, and this is what makes a story. Art is always viewed in retrospect anyway, from the outside, hardly ever in the moment when it is created. I would say the period is twenty years. After that you can see what kind of effect the work, or the artist, really had. The decisive thing is what people will SAY about me then. Did I inspire a good mood or not. That's what I'm working on, so people can say, Kippenberger was a good mood'
(M. Kippenberger, B - Gespräche mit Martin Kippenberger, Ostfildern 1994, p. 14).
One of two much celebrated large-scale diptychs with similar compositions, Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie (Down with the Bourgeoisie) and Nieder mit der Inflation (Down with Inflation) together create one of Martin Kippenberger's most apt statements on class systems and his placement within them. Executed in 1983 and 1984 respectively, the works are wry self-portraits of the artist that take as their cue his outlandish behaviour at the Reinhard Mucha opening at the Max Hetzler Gallery, Cologne, in October 1983. Intentionally subverting the practice of self-portraiture, Kippenberger depicts himself deliberately cropped from the neck down standing on a chair: Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie with his trousers slightly undone, acts as a dramatic precursor to his 'un-trousered' finale in Nieder mit der Inflation. The artist juxtaposes his figures against an hour-glass filled with coins in Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie and a 'curious chair' in Nieder mit der Inflation, layering the works with a host of visual and linguistic puns. Scrawled across the canvas, Kippenberger has written the title slogans; phrases in perfect keeping with his one-man assault against the art world's status quo. Written in transparent silicon onto the surface of the canvas, the artist succeeds in making the text and image one in the same. The words rise up from his freely applied brushstrokes in midnight blues and silvery greys, emerging as though from within the canvas, a healed scar on its skin. Created in the months leading up to the artist's important I.N.P.-Bilder (The is-not-embarrassing) exhibition in 1984, to which Nieder mit der Inflation belongs, Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie can be seen as an immediate pre-cursor to the series. With its closely correlated formal handling of paint and imagery, the work represents an exploration of notions of embarrassment, hubris and self-reflection through the hypocrisies and contradictions of his culture. This series took up German cultural clichés, stereotypes, banalities, and bad jokes as its themes, all of which are masterfully captured in Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie. Of this period, fellow artist and frequent collaborator Albert Oehlen said, 'with Hetzler, we made asses of ourselves and made everyone hate us. We climbed on the tables and pulled down our pants-extreme artist-behavior. It was also extremely exhausting' (A. Oehlen, quoted in S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: the Artist and his Families, New York 2011, p.246).
Reminiscent of the billboard-scale of his landmark Dear Painter Paint Me series of the early 1980s, Kippenberger's Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie (Down with the Bourgeoisie) was created at a critical time in his career. 1983 marked Kippenberger's 30th birthday, his move to Cologne, the centre of the European art world, and what Susanne Kippenberger notes as his 'coronation' at Rudolf Zwirner Gallery. Not only did Susanne Kippenberger note that her brother's works from 1983 are some of his best, but the artist himself noted in an interview in 1991 that 'everybody knows that I'm the one who covered the eighties. It's the same as with Polke. Everybody knew that he was the man of the seventies' (M. Kippenberger, quoted in 'One has to be able to take it! Interview with Martin Kippenberger, November 1990 - May, 1991', in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1991, p. 19). Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie was included in Kippenberger's great retrospectives, staged by the artist as an iconoclastic and wry jostle of the artistic institution, in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1993 and in Basel at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1997. Uniting Kippenberger's oeuvre is the genre of self-portraiture, which he used to express his personal experience and surrounding environment. But the biographical element is only one part of 'the joke' that the artist offers up to his viewers. Many of the works from Kippenberger's practice at this time, including Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie dealt with such topics in the artist's characteristic witty, performative and trickster style. In Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie, Kippenberger captures some of the movement of the performative act at Hetzler's in the figure's shadow, which almost appears to presage the moment when he is about to pull down his trousers. He is on the cusp of being caught 'with his trousers down' as it were, an embarrassing act, laying out the truth for all to see. In addition, Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie develops a number of continuities with 'the chair' and 'the hand', two such recurring motifs in Kippenberger's practice alongside the Capri, the lamp post, the egg and the frog. On the left-hand side, Kippenberger depicts his figure standing on a chair, an object that interested him throughout his practice and which dominated his 1994 exhibition The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika, where he presented more than 100 chairs from different periods. The significance its presence in Kippenberger's practice of no surprise considering his interest in the 'myth of the artist' as explored in his Hand-Painted Pictures series of 1992. The meditation on the hands as a symbol independent from the body that Kippenberger presents in Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie brings about a juxtaposition between 'idle hands' and the coins, operating as a visual marker of the Biblical proverb 'idle hands make one poor', taking on additional resonance when placed alongside mention of the bourgeoisie. The coins in the hourglass coupled with the undone trousers are a wry commentary on what Ann Goldstein notes as a Freudian driver of male libido: money (A. Goldstein, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 59).
The punch line is Kippenberger's figure at the neck. Engaging in a critical dialogue of self-portraiture where the face has traditionally been a metonym for the self, Kippenberger's cropping of the head can be seen as an invitation to focus elsewhere - in Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie's case, on the hands. Writing in the 1980s about the lack of relevance of joking in an era when most taboos had already been broken, this ultimate subversion of the portrait is best understood through the lens of literary theorist Otto F. Best who said: 'In a world without faces, the joke also has no face' (O.F. Best, Der Witz als Erkenntniskraft und Formenprinzip, Darmstadt 1989, p. 141).
A full unpacking of Kippenberger's imagery, blends his biography, sense of humour, interests and the 'German existence'. Kippenberger grew up in the 1950s and 60s, a period in post-War Germany defined by economic prosperity and historical whitewashing. The shackles of their post-War history were still felt in Germany in the 1980s. Recurring topics in Kippenberger's practice aside from self-portraiture included criticisms of Germany's uneasy relationship with its recent past, the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, kitsch, culture and the art world. Indeed Susanne Kippenberger noted of her brother's practice around the period of Nieder mit der Bourgeoisie's conception that he 'was more radical, tackling taboo subjects like the Nazi legacy, but [he wasn't] a crusading do-gooder...[he was] just interested in showing social and political life as it was' (S. Kippenberger, Kippenberger: the Artist and his Families, New York 2011, p.264).
Kippenberger reveled in the innuendos possible in the playing off of text and image. Kippenberger's conflation of the slogan 'down with the bourgeoisie' with the imagery of the work itself transcended the formal limitations of text and imagery. This notion was proliferating in the 1980s and Kippenberger's strategy was not unrelated to that of a number of his American peers who were examining issues of representation, originality, and authorship, including Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman. During the 1980s Cologne was not only the centre of the German art world, but also of the European art community, and many Americans had their first exhibitions in Cologne at Kippenberger's dealer, Galerie Max Hetzler, including Robert Gober, Jon Kessler, and Christopher Wool. At the same time, Kippenberger and his peers were starting to show in the United States; Kippenberger's first exhibition was a group show with Albert and Markus Oehlen and Werner Büttner at Metro Pictures in New York 1984. By incorporating a methodology that comes from a U.S. movement that sits outside of a bourgeois context, Kippenberger's linguistic turn takes on a double play on an American/European platform. Of this Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen noted of Kippenberger and his contemporaries that showed with him in New York that, 'the early oeuvres of these three artists can hardly be understood without the petite bourgeoisie. Their ideological critique took aim at the people who got their truths from Bild, drove Ford Capri, and fell asleep in front of the telly at night. It's not that Kippenberger or Oehlen made fun of these people; they saw themselves as members of that class. At least they constructed petit-bourgeois identities for themselves as a resource for their artistic production. The whole thing was pop art in a double sense: it represented a more radical extension of the formalist experimentation in the pop-art vein of American realism...But the whole thing was popular art also because it took this popular culture seriously as an aesthetic model' (S. Schmidt-Wulffen, quoted in 'Interview with Josephine von Perfall, 16 October 2012', in J. von Perfall (ed.), Kippenberger & Friends, Berlin 2013, pp. 135-136).