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Lot Essay
'I am not an easel-kisser...I actually have nothing to do with painted pictures. That's why one of my solutions for this problem has been to let others paint for me, but only in the way I need it, the way I see it.' (Martin Kippenberger cited in (ed.) Angelika Muthesius Martin Kippenberger: Ten Years After, Cologne, 1991, p. 34.)
In a follow-up and challenge to Joseph Beuys,who believed that the occupations of daily life could be employed as a kind of reforming social sculpture and that 'everyone is an artist', Martin Kippenberger came up with his own defiant platitude: 'every artist is a human being'. Much of Kippenberger's eclectic and sometimes seemingly schizophrenic oeuvre operates within the paradoxical bounds set by these two, not necessarily contradictory, statements. As his sister Suzanne has pointed out, Kippenberger's art cannot be interpreted in simple biographic terms or even along the lines of life equalling art. 'Art' she has pointed out, 'was not a reflection of Kippenberger's life, it was his life' (Suzanne Kippenberger 'Heimweh Highway or Start Simple Get Home' in Martin Kippenberger exh. cat. Tate Modern, 2006, p. 53). Kippenberger worked in exactly the same unique way that he lived, constantly wandering from one place to the next, from one activity, medium or style to another, often restless, self-contradictory and perpetually searching, on the look-out for excitement, novelty, entertainment, meaning or a place to call home. As an artist Kippenberger was, he once said, 'a travelling salesman'. 'A travelling salesman is constantly travelling around knocking on strange doors, asking to be let in; someone in the business of persuasion, selling his wares - or not - and moving on again. An exhausting life, a lonely trade, a "one-man business".' (Ibid)
It is this aspect of Kippenberger's work that has made him such a unique, provocative and influential figure in contemporary art. Operating on the edges of the art scene he established a reputation for himself as an eccentric maverick, a troublesome provocateur and enfant terrible who prompted both widespread ridicule from some and fierce loyalty and admiration in others. For a long time he was ignored by many people in major museums precisely because his life and work seemed so erratic, uncategorisable and shamelessly self-promoting. As with any travelling salesman however, shamelessness and self-promotion sit at the heart of Kippenberger's work. His life, activity, ideas, travels and performances are all an integrated part of his work. Each is interwoven with the others and all are conveniently expressed in the numerous and often bizarre images of himself that appear frequently in his work. From his lost-looking vagrant-child self-portrait with a sign painted around his neck saying 'Please don't send me home' to the humorous acknowledgement that he could sometimes go too far, a sculptural self-portrait entitled, 'Martin into the corner, you should be ashamed of yourself', Kippenberger took the German concept of the Selbstdarsteller as a key through which the febrile relationship between art and the art world and between the artist, his daily life and the need to create work could all be expressed.
Lieber Maler male mir... (Dear Painter, paint for me...) is one of the earliest and most important series of Kippenberger's works. It is a series of twelve paintings that Kippenberger commissioned to be made for him by the film poster painter known as 'Mr Werner'. The delegation of the making of this series of paintings to another is not only a clear dig at the earnestness and supposed 'authenticity' of the very 'painterly' Neo-Expressionist art, then currently in vogue in Germany, but also a firm statement about Kippenberger's sense of identity as an 'art/business/life artist'. As such the Lieber Maler male mir... series forms one of the few lynchpins through which much of the later diversity and eclecticism of Kippenberger's oeuvre can begin to be understood. It is probably for this reason that the Tate Modern and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen have chosen to open the current retrospective of Kippenberger's work with examples from this celebrated series.
Lieber Maler male mir... originated from a journey to the USA that Kippenberger made with his friend Achim Schächtele in 1979. There they took photographs in which Kippenberger often mockingly posed himself as a kind of crass or bumbling tourist in front of typical American scenes. Unlike the grand romanticism suggested by Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer's epic and mystical voyaging, Kippenberger, in keeping with the style of his former mentor Sigmar Polke, usually adopts a deliberating ironic and clowning role often interacting with the basest forms of popularist culture. In one photograph he appears wearing a cowboy hat on the New York subway and in another suited like a stockbroker seated on a thrown-out sofa on the corner of a New York street. A pervasive sense of banality and of the artist as a cheap cultural tourist is propagated in these works - one that stresses the non-heroic nature of artist as cultural voyager and asserts his commonplace humanity.
Many of these photographs came to be used in Kippenberger's books, some became part of his Knechte des Tourismus (Servants of Tourism) and some, like the sofa photo, were given to Herr Werner to be made into the large scale oil paintings that formed the series Lieber Maler male mir... Kippenberger himself appears in four of the twelve Lieber Maler male mir... paintings, the aforementioned picture of him on a sofa, as a would-be film star ('like Helmut Berger on a good day' he once said) in front of a Berlin tourist stand, in Picasso-like underpants mysteriously holding some inflatable rubber tubing and, as in Ohne Titel (Lieber Maler male mir...), seen from behind setting off on a bar crawl in Dusseldorf.
The slick production of the series - the rendition by Herr Werner of these images in a glossy photorealist style of painting - is in some ways in keeping with the often shallow nature of the paintings' subject matter. They are not only an ironic statement against the 'peinture' of Neo- Expressionism but the large scale of the paintings and the painstaking craft of their production deliberately heroify the banality of their subject matter in a way that anticipates Jeff Koons' later critiques of capitalism. Yet, Kippenberger's intention is not to seduce or create a work that is aesthetically pleasing it is to create an anomaly through which the rifts that exist between art and reality and between art as a living practice and the artificial concepts held about it by the art world can be seen and understood.
Rooted in the daily life of the painter Ohne Titel (Lieber Maler male mir...) is a work that demonstrates this consistent aspect of Kippenberger's work more clearly than most. Shot from the back, the photograph on which the painting is based depicts two evidently close and almost tragi-comic figures heading on a bar crawl through the streets of Dusseldorf. The ordinariness of the scene and the fact that it is daylight with the streets still full of busy shoppers underscores both the mundaneness and the gritty realism of the image. It is both an intimate and tender image of ordinariness, made epic and extraordinary by its magnification and translation into a slick photorealist oil painting.
Indeed, it was largely for this very reason, for its intimate and unmistakable portrait of 'Kippy' and a friend on his way to the pub, that the present work came into being. Ohne Titel (Lieber Maler male mir...) is a unique and slightly smaller copy of the work of the same title from the series Lieber Maler male mir ... which Kippenberger had made at the specific request of a close friend in 1983. It was a visit to the first exhibition of the Lieber Maler male mir... series at the exhibition Werner Kippenberger: 'Lieber Maler, male mir...' at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin in 1981 that prompted this request and Kippenberger happily agreed to arrange for Herr Werner to paint an alternate version. In so doing, the artistic process through which the work itself had first come into being seemed to come full circle. Originating as a snapshot memento of an ordinary event in Kippenberger's life that was later translated into a grand-scale painting, the present work completes this cycle of transformation by becoming again a painterly memento of Kippenberger's life as both artist and human being.
In a follow-up and challenge to Joseph Beuys,who believed that the occupations of daily life could be employed as a kind of reforming social sculpture and that 'everyone is an artist', Martin Kippenberger came up with his own defiant platitude: 'every artist is a human being'. Much of Kippenberger's eclectic and sometimes seemingly schizophrenic oeuvre operates within the paradoxical bounds set by these two, not necessarily contradictory, statements. As his sister Suzanne has pointed out, Kippenberger's art cannot be interpreted in simple biographic terms or even along the lines of life equalling art. 'Art' she has pointed out, 'was not a reflection of Kippenberger's life, it was his life' (Suzanne Kippenberger 'Heimweh Highway or Start Simple Get Home' in Martin Kippenberger exh. cat. Tate Modern, 2006, p. 53). Kippenberger worked in exactly the same unique way that he lived, constantly wandering from one place to the next, from one activity, medium or style to another, often restless, self-contradictory and perpetually searching, on the look-out for excitement, novelty, entertainment, meaning or a place to call home. As an artist Kippenberger was, he once said, 'a travelling salesman'. 'A travelling salesman is constantly travelling around knocking on strange doors, asking to be let in; someone in the business of persuasion, selling his wares - or not - and moving on again. An exhausting life, a lonely trade, a "one-man business".' (Ibid)
It is this aspect of Kippenberger's work that has made him such a unique, provocative and influential figure in contemporary art. Operating on the edges of the art scene he established a reputation for himself as an eccentric maverick, a troublesome provocateur and enfant terrible who prompted both widespread ridicule from some and fierce loyalty and admiration in others. For a long time he was ignored by many people in major museums precisely because his life and work seemed so erratic, uncategorisable and shamelessly self-promoting. As with any travelling salesman however, shamelessness and self-promotion sit at the heart of Kippenberger's work. His life, activity, ideas, travels and performances are all an integrated part of his work. Each is interwoven with the others and all are conveniently expressed in the numerous and often bizarre images of himself that appear frequently in his work. From his lost-looking vagrant-child self-portrait with a sign painted around his neck saying 'Please don't send me home' to the humorous acknowledgement that he could sometimes go too far, a sculptural self-portrait entitled, 'Martin into the corner, you should be ashamed of yourself', Kippenberger took the German concept of the Selbstdarsteller as a key through which the febrile relationship between art and the art world and between the artist, his daily life and the need to create work could all be expressed.
Lieber Maler male mir... (Dear Painter, paint for me...) is one of the earliest and most important series of Kippenberger's works. It is a series of twelve paintings that Kippenberger commissioned to be made for him by the film poster painter known as 'Mr Werner'. The delegation of the making of this series of paintings to another is not only a clear dig at the earnestness and supposed 'authenticity' of the very 'painterly' Neo-Expressionist art, then currently in vogue in Germany, but also a firm statement about Kippenberger's sense of identity as an 'art/business/life artist'. As such the Lieber Maler male mir... series forms one of the few lynchpins through which much of the later diversity and eclecticism of Kippenberger's oeuvre can begin to be understood. It is probably for this reason that the Tate Modern and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen have chosen to open the current retrospective of Kippenberger's work with examples from this celebrated series.
Lieber Maler male mir... originated from a journey to the USA that Kippenberger made with his friend Achim Schächtele in 1979. There they took photographs in which Kippenberger often mockingly posed himself as a kind of crass or bumbling tourist in front of typical American scenes. Unlike the grand romanticism suggested by Joseph Beuys or Anselm Kiefer's epic and mystical voyaging, Kippenberger, in keeping with the style of his former mentor Sigmar Polke, usually adopts a deliberating ironic and clowning role often interacting with the basest forms of popularist culture. In one photograph he appears wearing a cowboy hat on the New York subway and in another suited like a stockbroker seated on a thrown-out sofa on the corner of a New York street. A pervasive sense of banality and of the artist as a cheap cultural tourist is propagated in these works - one that stresses the non-heroic nature of artist as cultural voyager and asserts his commonplace humanity.
Many of these photographs came to be used in Kippenberger's books, some became part of his Knechte des Tourismus (Servants of Tourism) and some, like the sofa photo, were given to Herr Werner to be made into the large scale oil paintings that formed the series Lieber Maler male mir... Kippenberger himself appears in four of the twelve Lieber Maler male mir... paintings, the aforementioned picture of him on a sofa, as a would-be film star ('like Helmut Berger on a good day' he once said) in front of a Berlin tourist stand, in Picasso-like underpants mysteriously holding some inflatable rubber tubing and, as in Ohne Titel (Lieber Maler male mir...), seen from behind setting off on a bar crawl in Dusseldorf.
The slick production of the series - the rendition by Herr Werner of these images in a glossy photorealist style of painting - is in some ways in keeping with the often shallow nature of the paintings' subject matter. They are not only an ironic statement against the 'peinture' of Neo- Expressionism but the large scale of the paintings and the painstaking craft of their production deliberately heroify the banality of their subject matter in a way that anticipates Jeff Koons' later critiques of capitalism. Yet, Kippenberger's intention is not to seduce or create a work that is aesthetically pleasing it is to create an anomaly through which the rifts that exist between art and reality and between art as a living practice and the artificial concepts held about it by the art world can be seen and understood.
Rooted in the daily life of the painter Ohne Titel (Lieber Maler male mir...) is a work that demonstrates this consistent aspect of Kippenberger's work more clearly than most. Shot from the back, the photograph on which the painting is based depicts two evidently close and almost tragi-comic figures heading on a bar crawl through the streets of Dusseldorf. The ordinariness of the scene and the fact that it is daylight with the streets still full of busy shoppers underscores both the mundaneness and the gritty realism of the image. It is both an intimate and tender image of ordinariness, made epic and extraordinary by its magnification and translation into a slick photorealist oil painting.
Indeed, it was largely for this very reason, for its intimate and unmistakable portrait of 'Kippy' and a friend on his way to the pub, that the present work came into being. Ohne Titel (Lieber Maler male mir...) is a unique and slightly smaller copy of the work of the same title from the series Lieber Maler male mir ... which Kippenberger had made at the specific request of a close friend in 1983. It was a visit to the first exhibition of the Lieber Maler male mir... series at the exhibition Werner Kippenberger: 'Lieber Maler, male mir...' at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin in 1981 that prompted this request and Kippenberger happily agreed to arrange for Herr Werner to paint an alternate version. In so doing, the artistic process through which the work itself had first come into being seemed to come full circle. Originating as a snapshot memento of an ordinary event in Kippenberger's life that was later translated into a grand-scale painting, the present work completes this cycle of transformation by becoming again a painterly memento of Kippenberger's life as both artist and human being.