Annotated Catalogue Raisonne of the Books by Martin Kippenberger 1977-1997 - Book Review

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Raphael Rubinstein

by Uwe Koch, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 2003; 335 pages, $55.

It's been over six years since Martin Kippenberger died at the age of 44, and his artistic presence seems to just keep getting bigger and bigger. He's already been the subject of several retrospectives, most recently at Vienna's Museum Moderner Kunst. His brand of tongue-in-cheek, gleefully provocative, culturally omnivorous "bad" painting has made him an influential figure on young painters everywhere, eclipsing, at least for the moment, his more reserved compatriot Gerhard Richter. His work brings ever greater prices in galleries and at auctions. He has even managed the rare feat of being posthumously chosen to represent Germany (with Candida Hofer) at this year's Venice Biennale.

Of course death, especially of the premature variety, can often have a beneficial effect on artistic reputation, all the more so when the artist in question possessed a lacerating wit that he enjoyed inflicting on everyone with whom he came in contact. But I suspect that the real force behind Kippenberger's Lazarus act is not that his death has made involvement with his work safer for dealers, collectors and critics, but simply our growing awareness of his enormous, consistently brilliant output. Kippenberger was such a productive, wide-ranging artist that, as more of his oeuvre becomes accessible through exhibitions and catalogues, it almost seems as if he is still alive somewhere, turning out a steady stream of new work.

The latest proof of Kippenberger's ceaseless creativity is Uwe Koch's annotated catalogue raisonne of Kippenberger's books, a 335-page volume with 149 entries. The high number of items for the 20-year period under examination (1977-97) reflects Koch's decision to admit to the canon not only Kippenberger's many artist books but also exhibition catalogues, publications that Kippenberger contributed to and those he edited or "initiated." The argument for this inclusive approach is articulated in an introductory essay by critic Diedrich Diederichsen, who discusses what he calls Kippenberger's "total service concept." Inspired partly by Joseph Beuys, Kippenberger believed that artists should take control of all aspects of their careers. In keeping with this belief, he never left details such as the design of exhibition announcements and catalogues to the graphic designers usually hired by galleries and museums. He also made a point of publishing catalogues for nearly every one of his many exhibitions of paintings, sculptures and installations. Diederichsen suggests that these volumes were more important to the artist than the actual shows they documented, offering an instant and durable "reward." For Kippenberger, writes Diederichsen, "producing his own catalogue meant that the mythological promise of immortality could also be consumed in the moment." At the same time, as Diederichsen points out, the relentlessly satirical Kippenberger was parodying the legitimacy that catalogues are supposed to confer.

Indeed, parody is everywhere in Kippenberger's books, which often copy the format, graphics and typography of preexisting publications. The cover of a catalogue of his 1987 exhibition "Peter" at Galerie Max Hetzler in Cologne, for instance, is closely based on the cover of a 1972 Piero Manzoni monograph. He apparently liked this design so much that he used it for nine subsequent catalogues at nine different galleries. If the allusion to Manzoni may have been as much homage as parody, other bibliographical allusions were more clearly satirical. The 1984 catalogue Die I.N.P.-Bilder, also published by Hetzler, is a near-perfect copy of Die Afrika-Bilder, a catalogue published earlier that year for a show of African-themed paintings by Walther Dahn and Jiri Georg Dokoupil at the Groninger Museum in Holland. The initials I.N.P. stand for "Ist Nicht Peinlich," which means "is not embarrassing." The implication, for those familiar with the Groninger catalogue, is that Kippenberger found his colleagues' "Africa" paintings to be embarrassing examples of cliched exoticism.

There's a photo-archive aspect to some of Kippenberger's early books that seems related to Hans-Peter Feldmann's collections of found photographs and Gerhard Richter's encyclopedic scrapbook, Atlas. Yet the contents of Kippenberger's books, which mix found images with newly created material, tend to be far more autobiographical than theirs. Invited in 1980 to do a volume for Berlin's Merve Verlag, a publishing house that focused mainly on critical texts, Kippenberger produced Frauen (Women), an uncaptioned sequence of 114 black-and-white photographs of various women in his life. A series of books arising from what Kippenberger called his "Magical Misery Tour" of Brazil documents, amid numerous shots of Rio's bikini-clad beauties, his and his friends' extensive drinking and gambling. In 1987, he published a 264 page autobiographical book titled Cafe Central: Skizze zum Entworf einer Romanfigur (Cafe Central, Sketch for a Study of a Figure in a Novel). Although the title refers to Kippenberger's favorite Cologne watering hole, the diaristic narrative chronicles the artist's travels throughout Europe and beyond.