Art - Richard Cork on an artist who drank, dressed up and destroyed his own paintings
Dying of cancer at the age of 44, Martin Kippenberger never had the chance to shake off his early reputation as the bad boy of German art. But then, he did not want to grow up. Right to the end of his defiantly unpredictable, hyperactive and itinerant career, he did his best to break all the rules.
One of his later installations, called Heavy Guy, is dominated by a skip filled with the battered fragments of 51 paintings that failed to satisfy him. The violence feels unnerving, and so does his decision to photograph each of the condemned paintings and exhibit these framed copies as if they were the originals.
No wonder that, almost a decade after his death, Kippenberger remains difficult to pin down. Britain has been especially ill-informed about his large and provocative output; there was just one London show at the Karsten Schubert Gallery in the early 1990s. Now, at last, Tate Modern is giving him a full-scale retrospective. Some of Kippenberger's most spectacular installations are recreated here, and the exhibition conveys a pungent sense of his crazily disparate achievements.
One of his earliest show-stoppers, a picture-crammed Hamburg shop window from 1976, was called The Exhibitionist. No title could be more apt, for Kippenberger dismissed any qualms he may have harboured about parading himself in front of the public. The very first room of the Tate survey contains two colossal painted self-portraits, but they make it clear that he has no intention of declaring a simple, easily grasped persona. One shows him arm-in-arm with a fellow boozer in Dusseldorf, bent on hitting the bar scene in broad daylight. Yet both men are viewed from behind, retaining their anonymity, like suspicious figures caught on CCTV footage that fails to reveal their identity.
Kippenberger discloses more of his face in the other painting. Even so, he adopts the pose of a well-dressed tourist, and confuses us still further by lounging on a wide, shiny sofa discarded on a New York street corner. Although black plas-tic bags bulge with rubbish behind him, he retains the air of a dapper sophisticate surveying the urban scene. And the artist covered his tracks even more successfully by deciding not to paint these slick, skilful pictures himself. Kippenberger supplied images to a Berlin sign-painter known as Herr Werner, and asked him to produce the work instead.
So, alongside his appetite for blatant self-exposure, this restless artist remained supremely elusive. The rooms of this Tate exhibition are punctuated, in several places, by different versions of a 1989 life-sized sculpture called Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself. They show a man in shirt and braces, head hanging forward and hands behind his back, hiding away in a corner as if deeply ashamed of himself. But the truth is that Kippenberger would have felt perfectly happy being there, absorbed no doubt in planning his next controversial project. Besides, he only bothered to make this sculpture as a riposte to a German art magazine, which had published a scathing attack on his drunken cynicism and dubious politics.
The whole notion of being in disgrace must have appealed hugely to Kippenberger. He was, after all, shameless in his desire to project a disreputable image. Unlike so many artists, who adopt the role of a gravely dignified seer, he described himself as "rather like a travelling salesman". Moving perpetually around Germany, with substantial periods spent in other places as diverse as Florence and Los Angeles, he never stopped laugh- ing at his innate absurdity. Surprisingly handsome as a young man, Kippenberger could not resist dressing up in an outrageous array of costumes. He revelled in all these contradictory images, and often had photographs taken of himself in suitably bizarre locations.
Many of these pictures can be seen in an immense vitrine stretching almost the entire length of a room at Tate Modern. Here they are interspersed with the books he relished producing, often as quirky substitutes for exhibition catalogues. Hung on the surrounding walls is a monumental series of paintings, all the same size and yet startlingly different in style. At one extreme is a tasteful abstraction, its cut-out pattern-making interrupted by the words "7th Prize", stamped in black on brown strips of paper. Kippenberger was laughing at the impossibility of ever gaining a top art award: he must have thought that no jury would ever deem him "serious" enough to merit such an accolade.
He was equally capable of going to another extreme, however, and paying unexpected homage to the socialist realism then favoured in Russia. A painting of a typically beefy and purposeful figure bending over a machine is called Cultural Revolutionary Peasant Woman Repairing Her Tractor. And a 1983 close-up of a cheerful young official boasts the disarming title Likeable Communist Woman. Her smiling face could hardly be further removed from the anguished expression of a wildly handled self-portrait, painted only a year before his death. Based on one of the shipwreck victims marooned in Gericault's harrowing canvas The Raft of the Medusa, this wild-eyed image dramatises the fear Kippenberger must have suffered as he realised just how life-threatening his cancer really was.
In this respect, the Medusa self-portrait could be regarded as a relatively direct expression of his authentic feelings. Yet we must beware of supposing that this flamboyant and multifaceted artist would ever let his masks drop completely. Although he once admitted that "tragic things" were "constantly happening to me", Kippenberger insisted he was "in favour of good-mood worlds". Humour, albeit of the most ironic kind, pervades this show. And the largest installation suggests that, far from being a hopelessly introverted loner, he valued the importance of dialogue.
Inspired by Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika, this piece is inspired by the moment in the book when Karl Rossmann, encouraged by a sign announcing "Everybody is welcome!", applies for a job at "the biggest theatre in the world". Kippenberger imagined a circus tent, and outside it "there would be tables and chairs set up for job interviews". Indulging his own fascination with furniture, he assembled a prodigiously varied collection of more than 40 tables and 80 chairs. They range from design classics by Charles Eames and Frank Gehry to an office chair covered in jokily repeated images of a fried egg. But the more we scrutinise this installation, the less heartening it becomes.
Although Kippenberger may have called the piece The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "Amerika", most of its chairs are empty - and among them we discover far more unsettling presences, like watchtowers reminiscent of a concentration camp. The disconcerting mood deepens when we realise that the whole work is bordered by lines suggesting a playing field. We cannot explore the installation ourselves, let alone rest in the chairs. Visitors can only gaze out over the silent, largely unoccupied furniture, wondering if the "happy end" is simply the biggest and most tantalising of all Kippenberger's illusions.
"Martin Kippenberger" is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 (020 7887 8888) until 14 May
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