Taking a Toll.(Martin Kippenberger)

"Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective" is the Museum of Modern Art's aptly titled retrospective of a German artist whose work is nothing if not purposely troublesome. Kippenberger died, of liver cancer, in 1997, at the age of forty-four, but by that time he had created enough paintings, sculpture, drawings, installations, photographs, posters, books, recordings, and whatnot to furnish several ordinary lifetime careers, and enough distraction, as a globe-trotting carouser, to make it marvellous that he produced anything at all, even with teams of assistants at his beck and call. I met him twice: once in Madrid, where he was seraphically drunk; and once in Los Angeles, where he was grouchily sober. Handsome when young, he became a dissolute wreck long before he fell ill--a decline that he tracked in defiantly, almost cheerfully abject self-portraits. He was extraordinarily intelligent as well as gifted, especially in drawing. But nothing he made has the inevitable feel of satisfying art. The hundreds of pictures and objects (counting discrete components of suites and ensembles) at MOMA seem undermotivated or supererogatory, leaning on tortured concepts, obscure in-jokes, and random impulses. The best pieces comment on his dishevelled life: lampposts as crooked as they might appear to drunks; endless cabin-feverish drawings on hotel stationery; numerous statues of himself enacting the title "Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself."

Why, then, does the show, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (and was organized by its senior curator, Ann Goldstein), exude a distinct, hard-to-deny majesty? I think that it's because Kippenberger's career, as a whole, was consciously his one actual work: it both epitomizes and burlesques the art game's pell-mell institutional, commercial, and academic expansion in the biennial-bedizened nineteen-eighties and nineties.

Kippenberger was born in Dortmund and grew up in the industrial environs of Essen. He was the middle child, with four sisters, of a father who managed a coal mine and a mother who was a doctor. His sister Susanne, a writer, remembers him as a demanding and even domineering child. He attended a "strict evangelical" boarding school in the Black Forest, where he boycotted art classes after the teacher had the effrontery to award him only the second-highest grade in the class. Kippenberger quit school at the age of fifteen and, in short order, trained as a window dresser, was fired for using drugs, travelled in Scandinavia, underwent psychotherapy at a farm near Hamburg, lived in various communes, and studied at the Hamburg Art Academy. In 1976, he inherited considerable wealth when his mother, who was already ill with cancer, was killed by a shipping palette that slipped off a truck. (Shipping palettes, employed matter-of-factly, would figure often in his art.) He promptly moved to Florence, with brief ambitions to become an actor. There he painted about seventy identical-size canvases in black and white from multifarious, banal postcards and snapshots, emulating a style of works by Gerhard Richter. Kippenberger planned to do enough of them so that when stacked they would match his height, but he lost interest inches shy of that goal.

He returned to Hamburg in 1977, meeting, or, rather, ganging up with, fellow young artists--including the insolently virtuosic abstract painter Albert Oehlen--who, like him, were in Oedipal revolt against Joseph Beuys, Richter, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, and other fixtures of the growing German preeminence in contemporary art. Kippenberger's works, from then on, might be considered a series of studied insults to that legacy, even as he took on the mantle of its prestige, as the crown prince of German genius. (He left the succession in poor shape, with no heir apparent to this day.) Toward the formerly reigning American art he struck an attitude of affable condescension, enlisting numerous of our local heroes, such as Mike Kelley and Christopher Wool, to design the publicity for some of his shows. To the extent that his work displays any American influence, in paintings reminiscent of Julian Schnabel or David Salle, the spirit is parodic.

Moving to West Berlin in 1978, Kippenberger commenced blowing his inheritance on organizing exhibitions and concerts (flying in artists and acts from far and wide), running a C.B.G.B.-like night club, founding a punk ...