| Martin Kippenberger |
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 Eva Meyer-Hermann Broken Off – The Incomplete, Unfinished, Abbreviated and Fragmentary in the Work of Martin Kippenberger“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function.” [1] Louis Sullivan, 1896 Best known in the version “form follows function”, the American architect Louis Sullivan’s motto could also serve for the work of Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997). The question about the form of the artwork was anything but clarified at the end of the 1970s when Kippenberger began his artistic career. After art seemed to have drained itself out with theories and concepts, many artists responded to this predicament with a spate of neo-expressionist pictures, or with backwards-looking pictorial motifs. Kippenberger assumed a position from the outset that shared at first glance the style of new figuration and references to the twentieth century avant-garde, but that on closer examination questioned and extended it. He sought possibilities of going “from the impression to expression” (Martin Kippenberger, 1981), away from an art-for art’s-sake, away from the utopian idea that art could change life, and towards art as a carrier of meaning. His own, today legendary, artistic persona as a “self-promoter” (Diedrich Diederichsen) was always inseparably bound up with his œuvre. Kippenberger’s excessive and hubristic conduct is still legendary. One number in his repertoire was the oft-told endless joke whose punch line was never the decisive momentum. Comparable to the subversive power of such actions was also the ambiguity and openness with which he would position himself. It was not enough that within the space of two decades he created an inflationary corpus of pictures and picture series, drawings, graphic prints, posters, books, editions, sculptures, objects and installations; Kippenberger was also known for poaching in foreign terrains. Thus he made quite a splash as a nightclub operator, book publisher, writer, entrepreneur, gigolo, musician and restaurant owner, museum director and curator. The direct exploitation of the produced and the experienced ran parallel to his restless life in Hamburg, Florence, Berlin, Stuttgart, Cologne, Brazil, Spain, Los Angeles and Syros. Breaking-off and continuing seemed to be his motto. His life influenced his art and not vice versa, as Joseph Beuys, another great self-promoter of the twentieth century had postulated the relation. Beuys’s idea of a “social sculpture” in which every human being is an artist becomes in Kippenberger the reverse: “Every artist is a human being”. His goal of combining life with art, and letting the former flow into the latter, was ambitious and always bore within it the possibility of failure, which Kippenberger accepted. He never desisted from trying however and repeatedly began anew, constructed, added, pulled down, continued, repeated himself and broke off, but only so as constantly to be able to begin again. The form that emerged from this restless striving – or perhaps it would be better to say the form that was left over – was often unfinished, incomplete or abbreviated. Perhaps the artist knew that he could never find the perfect form. [...] [1] Louis Sullivan: “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”, in: Lippincott’s Magazine, March, 1896. Catalog excerpt "Extended. Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg" Editors: Lutz Casper, Gregor Jansen, published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2009 ^
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