Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective

Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) is a special case in art. His life and works were inextricably linked in a remarkable practice that centered on the role of the artist within both the culture and the system of art. With his larger-than-life persona, Kippenberger cast himself as impresario, entertainer, curator, bohemian,
collector, architect, and publisher. He collected art, set up clothing companies and nightclubs, and ran art-world scams. Nothing was sacred to this iconoclast except the right to satisfy his enormous appetite for life, appropriate anything for his art, and create continual chaos around himself. This book, which accompanies the first major U.S. retrospective exhibition of Kippenberger's work, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, documents Kippenberger's extraordinary twenty-year career with works in many media--paintings, sculptures, works on paper,
installations, photographs, collaborations with other artists, posters, postcards,
books, and music. Among the major works reproduced are key selections from the I.N.P. Bilder (Is Not Embarrassing Pictures) and No Problem paintings of the 1980s;
the landmark 1987 exhibition of sculpture "Peter. Die russische Stellung"
("Peter. The Russian Position"); self-portraits in a variety of media;
Laterne an Betrunkene (Street Lamp for Drunks); the Raft of the Medusa cycle of the
1990s; the renowned Hotel drawings; and the monumental installation, The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "Amerika." Accompanying the artworks is an essay by exhibition curator Ann Goldstein; newly commissioned texts by art historian Pamela Lee, Kippenberger scholar Diedrich Diederichsen, and curator Ann Temkin; reprinted excerpts from a 1991 interview with Kippenberger by artist Jutta Koether; and an illustrated exhibition history, chronology, and bibliography. Martin Kippenberger:
The Problem Perspective offers readers the most comprehensive view yet of this legendary artist's body of work.

Works spanning the legendary and prolific artist's twenty-year career, including many of his self-portraits, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and exhibition posters.

Prudence Peiffer - Library Journal

This excellent catalog accompanies seminal German artist Kippenberger's first major retrospective in the United States. While there have been previous English-language introductions to his work (see the 1991 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art catalog and, most recently, the 2006 Tate catalog), this book offers a comprehensive, if happily messy, view. Kippenberger, who died in 1997 at the age of 44, left behind a sprawling, humorous, serious, and ambitious oeuvre ranging from warehouse-scale installations to traditional canvases and from controversial sculptures to a series of hundreds of drawings made on hotel stationary. The catalog examines Kippenberger's constructions of personal biography and modern history, exhibition and performance ephemera, and his embrace of failure as a generative strategy, as exhibition curator Goldstein explains in her introductory essay. With four thorough essays, a long interview with the artist by Jutta Koether, and a time line, this is a great resource for exploring the formal and historical issues manifested throughout Kippenberger's "problematic perspective." Recommended.

Ann Goldstein is Senior Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.