Martin Kippenberger @ MOCA first retrospective in the US

According to the New York Times:

From Sept. 21 to Jan. 5, is the Museum of Contemporary Art’s long-awaited Martin Kippenberger retrospective, his first in the United States. Since his death from liver cancer in 1997 at the age of 44, Kippenberger has attained mythic bad-boy status, with his alcohol-fueled antics (as well as his paintings, drawings, sculptures, posters and books) inspiring high-minded interpretive glosses. Not unlike Mike Kelley and Richard Prince, he gets cast — and taken seriously — as the Joker of the art world.

Yet the curator Ann Goldstein says he used his sometimes ugly behavior and imagery to powerful ends, exposing contradictions in the world around him as well as in his own life. She got to know this itinerant artist — who blew through Dortmund, Hamburg, Berlin and Cologne in Germany early on — when he lived in Los Angeles from 1989 to 1990 and was working on his “Fred the Frog” series of portraits, which are really self-portraits. One sculpture shows the frog nailed to a cross, stein of beer in hand. The retrospective will have related paintings on view.

Also look for a 1982 sculpture the artist made with Albert Oehlen by painting a Ford Capri car in an earthy color mixed with oatmeal flakes, a dig at the crusty, soulful surfaces of his fellow German artist Anselm Kiefer. A kitschy American car modeled on a European sports car and produced in Germany before it was imported into the art world, the Capri was a vehicle for Kippenberger’s heavily layered variety of irony.

“His work is about contradictions, failure and the productivity of failure,” Ms. Goldstein said. “It’s about finding something interesting in what most people would consider useless or shameful.”

On the heels of that show comes “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures,” from Jan. 25 to April 19 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Covering art on both sides of the East-West divide from the end of World War II until the fall of the Berlin Wall, this sweeping survey puts Kippenberger and 120 or so other German artists into historical context.

The show works against clichés like the old saw that all important 20th-century German painting was Expressionist. “It wasn’t all angst-ridden figuration, emotion and pathos,” said the show’s co-curator, Stephanie Barron. “In West Germany there was also a very serious interest in performance art, abstraction, Fluxus, political art.”

Meanwhile artists in East Germany went beyond state-sanctioned socialist realist imagery. While the museum has some official Communist art, it will also feature some critical and even some nonpolitical works that were typically made discreetly and shown illegally by East German artists. Hermann Glöckner of Dresden, for instance, was revolutionary for his abstraction, like small Constructivist-style sculptures he made in the 1950s out of scavenged materials: newspaper, cardboard and rubber bands.

The heart of the show promises to be the 1960s and ’70s, the watershed period when Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz and Mr. Kiefer emerged, and artists began taking on the subject of the Holocaust. This paves the way for Kippenberger and his gang in the 1980s, the generation that flaunted national borders to achieve celebrity, and notoriety, as truly international art stars.

“Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective” will travel from Los Angeles to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and run there from March 1 to May 11.