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Lot Essay
‘[Kippenberger] takes a dig at German artists like Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz, who denied that their militaristic motifs (boots, helmets, guns, eagles) were meant to be read as anything other than empty formal supports for the practice of painting … In doing so, Kippenberger conveys an unmistakable sense of comedic timing’
–Gregory H. Williams
Bold, colourful and irreverent, Ohne Titel aus der Serie Krieg Böse (Untitled from the Series War Wicked) is a monumental canvas from one of Martin Kippenberger’s most celebrated series, vividly encapsulating the artist’s maverick approach to style, symbolism and significance in painting. Against a background divided into quadrants of blue, yellow, green and pinkish-red, a black military tank or gunship dominates the composition. Looming up from the green lower-left corner, it is naïvely painted in broad, sketchy strokes, disrupted by patches of raw white canvas and slapdash drips of yellow. Its gun barrel, bent comically into an inverted U-shape, is overlaid with a vast canary, wings outstretched and seemingly rotated 90 degrees to the right. The bird is painted with comparatively careful realism, as if cut and collaged from a field guide; astride it sits a gnome-like Santa Claus figure brandishing a feather duster, who returns us decisively to the absurdly crude and childlike idiom of the tank. At the forefront of the ‘bad painting’ movement in 1980s Germany, Kippenberger was among the most provocative, iconoclastic and charismatic figures of his day. Painted in the years both before and after Reunification, his ‘War Wicked’ (Krieg Böse) series formed an ongoing conceptual riposte to the high seriousness of Neo- Expressionists like Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz, who dealt with themes of war and division in their paintings of the 1970s and 80s. The motif of the canary was a particular jab at Baselitz, who had famously inverted the eagle, a symbol of deep historical and cultural significance for Germany. Rejecting such solemn and loaded icons, Kippenberger deployed colourful birds, exuberant paintwork and trite Santa Claus characters in paintings that seemed deliberately void of meaning. His caustic irony extended to the series’ title, which, with its dumb lack of verb, mocks what he saw as his forebears’ tendency to simplify the divide between good and evil. Breaking away from his country’s postwar captivation with crises of national and personal identity, Kippenberger’s riotous, wickedly exuberant works force us not only to look anew at received ideas about the burden of history, but also to reconsider painting’s claim to mean anything at all.
‘Why does an artist have to be political in such apolitical times?’ asked Kippenberger in 1991. ‘If there is movement, like 1000 years ago – but today there is more peace, egg cake and democratic shit going on’ (M. Kippenberger, 1991, quoted in H. C. Dany (ed.), Stellen Sie sich vor, ein Mond scheint am Himmel – Gespräch Mit Martin Kippenberger, Berlin, 2010, p. 23). Despite his flippant dismissal of politics, Kippenberger’s reaction to the work of his predecessors was of course a political statement in itself. Georg Baselitz had claimed that by painting his figurative works upside-down, he could ‘empty’ them of meaning entirely. In inverting the freighted symbol of the eagle, however, he could hardly avoid the reading of his works as symbolic of a culture in freefall, national identity plunging to disgrace from the skies. Markus Lüpertz had similarly painted ‘German motifs’ in the 1980s with a supposedly neutral and objective eye, which served only to underscore the impossibility of detaching such imagery from its heavy associations. In his Krieg Böse works, Kippenberger mocks these painters by opting instead for hilariously puerile motifs; his own gaudy, clashing colour schemes also oppose their works’ typically dark and earthy palettes. As Gregory H. Williams has written, he ‘takes a dig at German artists like Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz, who denied that their militaristic motifs (boots, helmets, guns, eagles) were meant to be read as anything other than empty formal supports for the practice of painting. Kippenberger responds indirectly to the dubious claim by Baselitz that he sought to “create no anecdotal, descriptive pictures.” In doing so, Kippenberger conveys an unmistakable sense of comedic timing’ (G. H. Williams, ‘Jokes Interrupted: Martin Kippenberger’s Receding Punch Line’ in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2006, p. 46).
The canary remains one of the most enduring icons of Kippenberger’s practice. Brazenly opposed to the grave cultural significance of Baselitz’s eagle, the bird is delicate, unimposing, even saccharine, challenging the viewer to read anything into it whatsoever. In an ironic effort to elevate the canary into the same sphere of importance as the eagle – and playing on Baselitz’s 1975 published book of Adler (Eagles) – Kippenberger published two books each containing 186 scribbled drawings of canaries, Die Welt des gruenen Kanerienvogels (The World of the Green Canary), 1988, and The Canary searching for a port in the Storm, 1991. The canary motif, however, and works like the present that make use of it, display more than an exercise in barbed wit. In Ohne Titel aus der Serie Krieg Böse, with its disconcerting cacophony of styles and symbols, Kippenberger also makes a serious point about how images can change over the passage of time, and accrue or be given different meanings in different contexts. Can we take a picture’s stability for granted? Is it art’s responsibility to deal with history, and the gravity of war? How far is it artist or viewer who dictates what something means? As Ann Goldstein has written, ‘To encounter a work by Kippenberger is to experience the discomfort and embarrassment of getting too close, of knowing more than one would wish to know or admit, of confronting something that is banal and annoying, that dismisses received notions of right or wrong. His work is not simply about getting to the truth or unearthing dirty secrets, but about uncovering the mechanisms that produce meaning and the ways in which they define the role and position of the artist’ (A. Goldstein, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 40).
–Gregory H. Williams
Bold, colourful and irreverent, Ohne Titel aus der Serie Krieg Böse (Untitled from the Series War Wicked) is a monumental canvas from one of Martin Kippenberger’s most celebrated series, vividly encapsulating the artist’s maverick approach to style, symbolism and significance in painting. Against a background divided into quadrants of blue, yellow, green and pinkish-red, a black military tank or gunship dominates the composition. Looming up from the green lower-left corner, it is naïvely painted in broad, sketchy strokes, disrupted by patches of raw white canvas and slapdash drips of yellow. Its gun barrel, bent comically into an inverted U-shape, is overlaid with a vast canary, wings outstretched and seemingly rotated 90 degrees to the right. The bird is painted with comparatively careful realism, as if cut and collaged from a field guide; astride it sits a gnome-like Santa Claus figure brandishing a feather duster, who returns us decisively to the absurdly crude and childlike idiom of the tank. At the forefront of the ‘bad painting’ movement in 1980s Germany, Kippenberger was among the most provocative, iconoclastic and charismatic figures of his day. Painted in the years both before and after Reunification, his ‘War Wicked’ (Krieg Böse) series formed an ongoing conceptual riposte to the high seriousness of Neo- Expressionists like Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz, who dealt with themes of war and division in their paintings of the 1970s and 80s. The motif of the canary was a particular jab at Baselitz, who had famously inverted the eagle, a symbol of deep historical and cultural significance for Germany. Rejecting such solemn and loaded icons, Kippenberger deployed colourful birds, exuberant paintwork and trite Santa Claus characters in paintings that seemed deliberately void of meaning. His caustic irony extended to the series’ title, which, with its dumb lack of verb, mocks what he saw as his forebears’ tendency to simplify the divide between good and evil. Breaking away from his country’s postwar captivation with crises of national and personal identity, Kippenberger’s riotous, wickedly exuberant works force us not only to look anew at received ideas about the burden of history, but also to reconsider painting’s claim to mean anything at all.
‘Why does an artist have to be political in such apolitical times?’ asked Kippenberger in 1991. ‘If there is movement, like 1000 years ago – but today there is more peace, egg cake and democratic shit going on’ (M. Kippenberger, 1991, quoted in H. C. Dany (ed.), Stellen Sie sich vor, ein Mond scheint am Himmel – Gespräch Mit Martin Kippenberger, Berlin, 2010, p. 23). Despite his flippant dismissal of politics, Kippenberger’s reaction to the work of his predecessors was of course a political statement in itself. Georg Baselitz had claimed that by painting his figurative works upside-down, he could ‘empty’ them of meaning entirely. In inverting the freighted symbol of the eagle, however, he could hardly avoid the reading of his works as symbolic of a culture in freefall, national identity plunging to disgrace from the skies. Markus Lüpertz had similarly painted ‘German motifs’ in the 1980s with a supposedly neutral and objective eye, which served only to underscore the impossibility of detaching such imagery from its heavy associations. In his Krieg Böse works, Kippenberger mocks these painters by opting instead for hilariously puerile motifs; his own gaudy, clashing colour schemes also oppose their works’ typically dark and earthy palettes. As Gregory H. Williams has written, he ‘takes a dig at German artists like Markus Lüpertz and Georg Baselitz, who denied that their militaristic motifs (boots, helmets, guns, eagles) were meant to be read as anything other than empty formal supports for the practice of painting. Kippenberger responds indirectly to the dubious claim by Baselitz that he sought to “create no anecdotal, descriptive pictures.” In doing so, Kippenberger conveys an unmistakable sense of comedic timing’ (G. H. Williams, ‘Jokes Interrupted: Martin Kippenberger’s Receding Punch Line’ in Martin Kippenberger, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2006, p. 46).
The canary remains one of the most enduring icons of Kippenberger’s practice. Brazenly opposed to the grave cultural significance of Baselitz’s eagle, the bird is delicate, unimposing, even saccharine, challenging the viewer to read anything into it whatsoever. In an ironic effort to elevate the canary into the same sphere of importance as the eagle – and playing on Baselitz’s 1975 published book of Adler (Eagles) – Kippenberger published two books each containing 186 scribbled drawings of canaries, Die Welt des gruenen Kanerienvogels (The World of the Green Canary), 1988, and The Canary searching for a port in the Storm, 1991. The canary motif, however, and works like the present that make use of it, display more than an exercise in barbed wit. In Ohne Titel aus der Serie Krieg Böse, with its disconcerting cacophony of styles and symbols, Kippenberger also makes a serious point about how images can change over the passage of time, and accrue or be given different meanings in different contexts. Can we take a picture’s stability for granted? Is it art’s responsibility to deal with history, and the gravity of war? How far is it artist or viewer who dictates what something means? As Ann Goldstein has written, ‘To encounter a work by Kippenberger is to experience the discomfort and embarrassment of getting too close, of knowing more than one would wish to know or admit, of confronting something that is banal and annoying, that dismisses received notions of right or wrong. His work is not simply about getting to the truth or unearthing dirty secrets, but about uncovering the mechanisms that produce meaning and the ways in which they define the role and position of the artist’ (A. Goldstein, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, exh. cat. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p. 40).