Martin Kippenberger's "Problem Perspective" at MOCA: Enter the K-Hole

The art of obnoxiousness

Comments (0) By Doug Harvey Wednesday, Oct 8 2008

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What’s really amazing — in spite of this master-debater hermeticism and Kippenberger’s failure to single-handedly redeem this wicked world — is how great the work looks. His assaults on Painting began with Baldessari-esque subcontracted photorealist reproductions of snapshots, followed by parodies of Pop, Minimalism and Neo-Expressionism (specifically superhyped predecessors like David Salle and Georg Baselitz); parodies of heroes like Picasso and Géricault; parodies of himself. But, as we have learned from Spike Jones, Thomas Pynchon and Quentin Tarantino, parody is often better art than the original. (How do you think the current administration came into power? Republicans are better artists. Correction: Republicans can afford better artists.)

Kippenberger’s sculptural jibes are just as specific — and virtuosic; simultaneously puncturing and reinflating the medium’s sacred cows. His “Street Lamp” series (underrepresented here) consists of loosey-goosey surrealist translations of crispy serialist industrial quotation à la Bernd and Hilla Becher. The “Peter” series — including the Richter coffee table — takes the piss on a half-dozen streams of contemporary three-dimensional praxis. But his most epic satirical broadside was his enormous, perversely frustrated social-sculptural resolution of Kafka’s unfinished last novel: an unpopulated job interview meat-market titled The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” laid out in the Geffen space. Amerika transcends its barrage of literal but insular reference (Donald Judd, Jason Rhoades, Charles and Ray Eames ...) to offer an appropriately paranoiac, hilarious and ultimately illuminating vision of the human condition: half interrogator, half supplicant. Half prisoner, half guard. Half artist, half critic.

Martin, in the corner, you should be ashamed of yourself (1989)

Disco Bomb (1989)

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At this point, Kippenberger’s hermeticism is rendered moot. Or rather, its more pedestrian function — as knowing winks and secret signs in a Machiavellian fraternity of academic profiteers whose reputations are built entirely on the obscurity of their references — is superseded. Regardless of the specific targets of his scorn and ridicule, Kippenberger’s volleys were finally symptomatic of a grand vision of the transformational potential of art, in whose service he was willing to play the jester (and court cirrhosis). Hermeticism has traditionally been a symbolic language for encoding and communicating psychologically powerful and politically liberating philosophies. Due to his unfashionable passion, his irrepressible formal chops and his restless invention, Martin Kippenberger imbued even his most sophomoric pranks with this faith in art as a way to awaken from the nightmare of history. Art is the asshole of the Unconscious. Some people are just born without a cork.

Martin Kippenberger: Problem Perspective | MOCA Grand Ave. and the ?Geffen Contemporary | 250 S. Grand Ave. and 152 N. Central Ave., downtown | (213) 626-6222 ?or www.moca.org | Through Jan. 5