Martin Kippenberger
Art
Martin Kippenberger
Tate Modern
Until 14 March 2006
Tickets £7 Students £5.50
It's strange that the name Martin Kippenberger isn't better known in Britain - his prolific output, both mischievous and satirical, seems to scream for attention. Dying in 1997, aged just 44, this madcap Germanbor n artist did everything from exhibiting a sculpture of a frog being crucified to planning an imaginary global subway system.
Now, Tate Modern has decided that the time is ripe for audiences to get a taste of this unconventional personality, whose tremendous influence on modern British and European art is becoming ever more recognised.
If, like me, you are dubious about conceptual art in general, you're unlikely to be convinced by the images in Room 1. These large, photorealist canvases are the creations of Mr Werner, a painter of Berlin cinema posters, hired and directed by Kippenberger.
But it's just as well to keep walking and take a look at what else is on display, because very soon it becomes clear that looking at Kippenberger involves looking at art in a completely different way.
It was not the production of a succession of separate works that mattered to him, but the ongoing narrative of ideas, encompassing everything from the artist's own paintings, books and sculptures to installations that scavenge the creations of his colleagues and assistants. Once you accept art à la Kippenberger, the conceptual posters, the diversity of media and styles and the incorporation of commercial objects begin to make sense. It was as if his life was one sprawling artwork, expressed throughout the 1970s and 1980s as an outpouring of kitschy flotsam and jetsam and pointed political statements.
His sculptures, many of which have rarely been seen in Britain before, repeat his favourite motifs: lamps, gondolas, and not least of all, himself. Many of the paintings on show commandeer slogans and imagery that suggest socialist sympathies in a Germany that was still divided by the Berlin Wall, mocking the modern world's triumph of materialism over ideals.
The most impressive room contains "The Happy End of Franz Kafka's `Amerika'" (1994), a children's playground of chairs, tables and ephemera that refers to Kafka's unfinished novel `Amerika', in which a theatre welcomes universal job applications from `whoever wants to become an artist'. Kippenberger recreates this idea by imagining his installation as the stage for a mass, communal job interview, packed with various items of furniture that stand on a mock football pitch, a literal `playing field'.
There's a curious charm about the set-up, although it can only be viewed from the edges; you want to stroll among the objects and brica-brac like a tourist in a flea market and explore the scene yourself. It's also hard to resist picking your favourite chair-and-table combo, a reminder of how much personality there can be in inanimate things. My own choice were the umbrella-shaded seats that spun around at the touch of a button, like a fairground ride for two, although I'm not sure what the giant fried egg was doing in the middle.
Every new room brings you face to face with yet another facet of the artist's diverse career. Near the end of the exhibition we find the minimalist Untitled [The installation of the White Paintings] (1991), a series of texts, painted with white enamel on white canvas, recording descriptions of Kippenberger's earlier works. Each description is followed by the response from an nine-year old boy who was asked to comment on them, and every time, the comment is the same: `sehr gut', or `very good'. You could call it egocentric (and this being Kippenberger, it probably was), but the banality of the child's repetition also seems to mock our unquestioning praise for any work shown in the rarefied confines of a gallery.
Although you wonder whether an artist who titles a work `Suicidal Oil Piglet' wasn't laughing at his audience, at least a little, looking at the White Paintings, it seems that the indefatigable Kippenberger could laugh even at himself.
