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Lot Essay
'I’m a member of the Lord Jim Loge, and I’ve adopted its motto, 'Nobody helps Nobody ’, as a law for myself. Be nice to people on the way up - you’ll meet them again on the way down. Life is easier if you don’t set your standards too high. Art is the highest of the emotions’ (M. Kippenberger, quoted in P. Hill, ‘The Pubescent Shelves of Martin Kippenberger’ in Art + Text, no. 44, January 1993, p. 21).
‘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).
‘The precise origin of the concept does not need to be discovered in order to recognize how in-jokes could dwell at the edges of more public expressions of humour. None of the phrases is laugh-out-loud funny, but all of them are at least awkward and absurd enough to be recognized as having been produced in a fit of laughter on the part of the artists… That we might somehow still find our way back to the original context of [his] amusement is a more doubtful prospect’ (G. Williams, ‘Jokes Interrupted: Martin Kippenberger’s Receding Punch Line’, in D. Krystof and J. Morgan (eds.), Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., London, Tate Modern, 2006, p. 47).
Rendered in thick points of impasto, with brilliant primary colours and pop bumper stickers adorning a giant spider’s web, Falsches Zeichen der Lord Jim Loge (The Wrong Sign of the Lord Jim Loge) unites two of Martin Kippenberger’s enduring motifs. Dating from the height of his powers in the 1980s, the work is imbued with Kippenberger’s own iconoclastic wit as he invokes the ‘Sonne Busen Hammer’ (sun, breasts, hammer) logo of the Lord Jim Loge and adorns his canvas with inside-joke bumper stickers in the format ‘I Love…’. The mid 1980s were a moment of intense collaboration between Kippenberger and his friends Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen; a time in which a single exchange between the three men could turn into days of laughter and transform into a series of great art works. The ‘I Love…’ bumper stickers the three artists first developed in 1985 in Vienna were inspired by the then trendy decals and produced a wide-range of themes from ‘I Love Mad Max’, ‘I Love Larry Flint’ and ‘I Love Betty Ford Klinik’ to the affectionately mocking, ‘I Love Polke + Baselitz’. As Gregory Williams has elaborated, ‘the precise origin of the concept does not need to be discovered in order to recognize how in-jokes could dwell at the edges of more public expressions of humour. None of the phrases is laugh-out-loud funny, but all of them are at least awkward and absurd enough to be recognized as having been produced in a fit of laughter on the part of the artists… That we might somehow still find our way back to the original context of [his] amusement is a more doubtful prospect’ (G. Williams, ‘Jokes Interrupted: Martin Kippenberger’s Receding Punch Line’, in D. Krystof and J. Morgan (eds.), Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., London, Tate Modern, 2006, p. 47).
Striking down at the centre of a giant coloured spider’s web is a hammer playfully aping and subverting the hammer and sickle of the Eastern bloc. With this motif, Kippenberger was celebrating the ‘Sonne Busen Hammer’ (sun, breasts, hammer) logo of the Lord Jim Loge; a group which Kippenberger and Oehlen founded alongside Jörg Schlock and Wolfgang Bauer. The Lord Jim Loge was an unconventional secret society with the motto ‘Keiner hilft Keinem’, or ‘Nobody helps nobody’. The quixotic, media-savvy yet knowingly impossible quest of this society was to make its own logo more famous than Coca Cola. Within a short period of time, the ‘Sonne Busen Hammer’ symbol would appear in the works of several of the artists, and it reappears through Kippenberger’s subsequent paintings and plastic work alike including his 1988 Untitled Self-Portrait from the Picasso series. In addition to its presence in some of his pictures, in 1991, Kippenberger created two standing sculptures displaying this motif which served as markers for an entrance to the Lord Jim Loge in an installation in the offices of Benedikt Taschen. Meanwhile, the doors to the fictitious underground railway network, the METRO-Net, which Kippenberger created, uniting various key points of interest and occurrence in his own life, also emblazoned with the Sun and Hammer. This link to Kippenberger’s secret and invisible underground railway introduces a key concept that underpinned much of his work: the exploration and exposure of the flaws of utopian visions. Having grown up in a divided Germany, Kippenberger was deeply suspicious of the promises of progress that were made either by political bodies or indeed by artists such as Joseph Beuys. Instead, Kippenberger introduced his own irreverent iconography as an emblem hinting at some promise of a better future in its own right.
‘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).
‘The precise origin of the concept does not need to be discovered in order to recognize how in-jokes could dwell at the edges of more public expressions of humour. None of the phrases is laugh-out-loud funny, but all of them are at least awkward and absurd enough to be recognized as having been produced in a fit of laughter on the part of the artists… That we might somehow still find our way back to the original context of [his] amusement is a more doubtful prospect’ (G. Williams, ‘Jokes Interrupted: Martin Kippenberger’s Receding Punch Line’, in D. Krystof and J. Morgan (eds.), Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., London, Tate Modern, 2006, p. 47).
Rendered in thick points of impasto, with brilliant primary colours and pop bumper stickers adorning a giant spider’s web, Falsches Zeichen der Lord Jim Loge (The Wrong Sign of the Lord Jim Loge) unites two of Martin Kippenberger’s enduring motifs. Dating from the height of his powers in the 1980s, the work is imbued with Kippenberger’s own iconoclastic wit as he invokes the ‘Sonne Busen Hammer’ (sun, breasts, hammer) logo of the Lord Jim Loge and adorns his canvas with inside-joke bumper stickers in the format ‘I Love…’. The mid 1980s were a moment of intense collaboration between Kippenberger and his friends Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen; a time in which a single exchange between the three men could turn into days of laughter and transform into a series of great art works. The ‘I Love…’ bumper stickers the three artists first developed in 1985 in Vienna were inspired by the then trendy decals and produced a wide-range of themes from ‘I Love Mad Max’, ‘I Love Larry Flint’ and ‘I Love Betty Ford Klinik’ to the affectionately mocking, ‘I Love Polke + Baselitz’. As Gregory Williams has elaborated, ‘the precise origin of the concept does not need to be discovered in order to recognize how in-jokes could dwell at the edges of more public expressions of humour. None of the phrases is laugh-out-loud funny, but all of them are at least awkward and absurd enough to be recognized as having been produced in a fit of laughter on the part of the artists… That we might somehow still find our way back to the original context of [his] amusement is a more doubtful prospect’ (G. Williams, ‘Jokes Interrupted: Martin Kippenberger’s Receding Punch Line’, in D. Krystof and J. Morgan (eds.), Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., London, Tate Modern, 2006, p. 47).
Striking down at the centre of a giant coloured spider’s web is a hammer playfully aping and subverting the hammer and sickle of the Eastern bloc. With this motif, Kippenberger was celebrating the ‘Sonne Busen Hammer’ (sun, breasts, hammer) logo of the Lord Jim Loge; a group which Kippenberger and Oehlen founded alongside Jörg Schlock and Wolfgang Bauer. The Lord Jim Loge was an unconventional secret society with the motto ‘Keiner hilft Keinem’, or ‘Nobody helps nobody’. The quixotic, media-savvy yet knowingly impossible quest of this society was to make its own logo more famous than Coca Cola. Within a short period of time, the ‘Sonne Busen Hammer’ symbol would appear in the works of several of the artists, and it reappears through Kippenberger’s subsequent paintings and plastic work alike including his 1988 Untitled Self-Portrait from the Picasso series. In addition to its presence in some of his pictures, in 1991, Kippenberger created two standing sculptures displaying this motif which served as markers for an entrance to the Lord Jim Loge in an installation in the offices of Benedikt Taschen. Meanwhile, the doors to the fictitious underground railway network, the METRO-Net, which Kippenberger created, uniting various key points of interest and occurrence in his own life, also emblazoned with the Sun and Hammer. This link to Kippenberger’s secret and invisible underground railway introduces a key concept that underpinned much of his work: the exploration and exposure of the flaws of utopian visions. Having grown up in a divided Germany, Kippenberger was deeply suspicious of the promises of progress that were made either by political bodies or indeed by artists such as Joseph Beuys. Instead, Kippenberger introduced his own irreverent iconography as an emblem hinting at some promise of a better future in its own right.