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FOREWORD

ON UNDENIABILITY

Martin Kippenberger left a mark on my life twice, once as an artist, once as an ordinary man, without the two of us ever meeting. Unlike most of the medium-sized army of people who count themselves among his admirers these days, he was a person to me first—as a member, however attenuated, of my extended family—and as an artist only later. But it was as an artist that he marked me permanently.

Kurt Kocherscheidt, a well-regarded Austrian painter and my mother’s cousin once removed, had been dead for four years when I learned that his widow, the photographer Elfie Semotan, had married again. Elfie’s new husband, known to me at the time only by his last name, Kippenberger, (also an artist, apparently, and a heavy drinker, and—worst of all!—a German) was bound to be viewed somewhat critically by my family in general, and by my Aunt Elsa, Kurt’s mother, especially. Aunt Elsa, then in her seventies, didn’t think much of this new husband’s art, and the rest of us duly took our cue from her. Those members of my family who’d actually met this interloper reported that he was a loudmouth; the one concrete description of his work that reached my ears featured a frog nailed to a cross. You didn’t have to be a churchgoer (which my Aunt Elsa was to the end) to consider this a questionable aesthetic choice. I was living in New York City by then, a typically self-preoccupied twenty-four-year-old, far from my Austrian family. I filed the frog-crucifier away under Other People’s Business and focused my attention on paying the rent.

The 1990s were the years of Martin Kippenberger’s ascendancy, however, and I couldn’t help but notice—at first with indifference, then with a kind of semiconscious annoyance—that attention was being paid to his career, the kind of international, blue-chip attention that my uncle Kurt had been slow to receive. By that time I was working at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo and was superficially acquainted with Kippenberger’s art, at least to the extent of knowing that there was more to him than visual one-liners. I was aware of the prodigal extent of his output, and of its remarkable variety, because there was no way at that point not to be aware of it. Every piece that I saw—all in reproduction as yet, in Artforum or Frieze or Parkett —seemed to be the work of a completely different person.

I should have been prepared, then, for the retrospective that arrived at Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst in 2003, but the truth is that it flabbergasted me. I visited it three times in one week, and it’s still on my mind nearly a decade later. It served as an object lesson for me in, among other things, the extent to which a person can be wrong. I’d been wrong about Kippenberger: that much quickly became clear. There have been any number of artists whose artmaking has been similarly irreducible to a single approach or medium—Marcel Duchamp, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman—but none, at least that I know of, has demanded so emphatically to be judged on the totality of his or her life’s achievement. Context is crucial to appreciating Kippenberger’s art, and context is what, at long last, the MuMoK retrospective supplied.

At the periphery of my vision, as I went from room to room, from the early gray-scale paintings to the installations to the drawings on hotel stationery to the excruciatingly virtuosic self-portraits, a form began to coalesce—a kind of aesthetic and emotional afterimage, hulking and soundless—that disappeared if I looked at it directly. Self-subverting, ironic, and even flippant as many of the individual pieces seemed, the animus behind the body of work was austere and deliberate and (it seemed to me) boundlessly sad. Seen all together, Kippenberger’s work was so human that it hurt to think about. Gifted as he undoubtedly was, his art appeared to have been made in the face of—and, sometimes, directly out of—his weakness and his fallibility, which may explain why it affected me so deeply. Dissembling as it often came across (and occasionally was, most likely), I’d never encountered art that seemed more naked. And I haven’t in the antic decade since.

Susanne Kippenberger has managed to look directly, it seems to me, at what I could see only out of the corner of my eye, and she has described it with indefatigable calm. The Martin Kippenberger who emerges in the following pages may be recognizable as the man who satirized (and marketed) himself so unflinchingly, but we come to know him as a great deal else besides. No artistic self-invention, however extravagant, is ever sui generis, which is a part of what makes artists’ biographies necessary. The straightforward tone of this book is a useful corrective to its subject’s infamous extroversion and bluster, which cast an often harsh light on certain sides of his character while obscuring many others. Like a host of other artists, from Joseph Beuys to Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, Kippenberger’s persona was arguably his central creation, and it’s a credit to Susanne that she transmits this clearly without allowing Kippenberger’s version of Kippenberger to smother all the fascinating others. She has certain advantages, of course, being the artist’s sister. Maybe no one but a sister could have managed it.

It’s an embarrassment to me now, my family’s knee-jerk and essentially defensive dismissal of a body of work that we were in ignorance of; and I imagine that all those (and there were more than a few) who reacted to Martin Kippenberger’s art with prim indifference during his lifetime must feel as abashed as I do. It’s ironic, of course, that I should be writing an introduction to this remarkable book, given the smug tenacity of my own resistance. But maybe that’s also fitting. Martin Kippenberger’s work broke down my resistance through mechanisms that remain largely mysterious to me: his brilliance played a role, of course, and his wit, and his shamelessness, and his relentless energy. But the true key lies elsewhere, in something much harder to put into words. I’ve tried to summarize it, but I can’t do it justice, least of all in a single expression. The closest I can seem to get is undeniability.

— John Wray