Author: jameswagner

Rachel Whiteread Water Tower 1998 translucent resin and painted steel 12′ 2″ x 9′ in diameter [installation view]

I don’t know how long it’s been up there, but while at the Kippenberger press preview at MoMA last week I spotted a discreet label on the wall behind that artist’s jaw-dropping Styrofoam-to-aluminum “Santa Claus Lamp”*, which is installed where Rodin’s Balzac normally stands. I turned around and looked past the Sculpture Garden and up to the roofs where you see it here. Now owned by the museum, Rachel Whiteread‘s “Water Tower” was commissioned by the Public Art Fund. The last time I saw it was ten years ago when it was installed in its temporary home on top of a building in Soho.

*
It’s shocking to find that there’s no image of this piece on line, and perhaps even more shocking to find that MoMA has only one image of the entire Kippenberger show on its site (MOCA, where the exhibition originated last year, has only six). Especially for a museum operating in the twenty-first century, such neglect doesn’t make it look like the “educational institution” which its founders wanted MoMA to be when it began in 1929.
To be fair, MoMA is relaunching its website later this week, and that may be the reason for the lack of images on moma.org.

the artist’s life becoming a concept [the wooden cell]


documented in time [the photographs taken daily]

I was ashamed that I hadn’t immediately recognized who Tehching Hsieh was. That is, I had not only forgotten about his 1978-1979 “Cage Piece” but I had also, for the moment at least, not remembered the “time clock piece”, “the outdoor piece” or “the rope piece”, even though just the idea of these had thrilled me at the time, as I read about them in ordinary newspapers while living in Rhode Island before moving to New York.
After having breezed through Hsieh’s exhibition at MoMA last Tuesday on our way to Klara Liden’s piece in the next room (a first priority, because her piece had not yet been opened to the public), Barry and I were returning to check out his own, more sober installation, located just off Kippenberger’s “Kafka’s ‘Amerika'” piece in the atrium. Museum Director Glenn Lowry had left the Liden room just before us, where I had heard him congratulating the curator for introducing such a terrific piece into the museum. He stopped to look at the Hsieh materials and documents and turned toward us as we entered the room apparently wanting to his clear enthusiasm for the work. [I love to see the guy at the top running around the big “shop” and sharing his excitement with visitors.] We agreed that it was an incredibly impressive and even astonishing project. I said that on registering it for the first time my second thought, and first question, had been, what does such a long experience of isolation from any outside stimulus do to your mind? I wondered aloud, what do you do after being alone with your mind for a year? I asked Lowry, do we know what he did later? He answered, “Apparently he didn’t do much”.
Which is both true and not quite so true, as I started to learn almost immediately after asking the question. Hsieh went on to commit himself to several more long-term performances equally as challenging, although not nearly so isolating as the first. But no, apparently until very recently no art was ever formally exhibited or sold. The last (latest?) two projects, the first a one-year assignment to “go in life”, not seeing, making or talking about art, and a “13-years plan” to make art but not show it publicly, would each appear to have been a relative piece of cake, but together they seem to have meant the end of his art, at least by his own account, as documented inside a long and fascinating piece. “A caged Man Breaks Out at Last“, by Deborah Sontag appearing in tomorrow’s New York Times [slide show].
Tehching Hsieh tells us he is no longer an artist, but I think we can’t take him at his word, and we must not, as I’ll try to explain.
The work haunts me as I sit here trying to express something about the inexpressible. Alexandra Munroe, the senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, is quoted in Sontag’s article, referring to Hsieh, “He is deeply philosophical”. It seems to me he is something else: Hsieh is not a conceptual artist; rather, he has reduced his entire life to a concept. The work he has given to us seems to have come out of nowhere. It is so pure and sublime that it doesn’t seem we could possibly deserve to be its legatees, especially since we’ve virtually ignored it for thirty years.

Martin Kippenberger Now I’m Going Into the Big Birch Wood, My Pills Will Soon Start Doing Me Good 1990 twenty-nine artificial birch trees (rolls of cardboard and plastic and black-and-white offset prints), metal stands and wood pills – dimension variable [large detail of installation, including “Kippenblinky”, “Street Lamp for Drunks”, “Untitled” (street lamp), “Disco Bomb”, and parts of two rubber on canvas works hanging on walls to the right and left]

[cropped version of photo above]

I didn’t include this image in my Kippenberger show post of two days ago because it seemed to me somehow adulterated for including works that were not actually part of “Big Birch Wood” itself, but which the curator, Ann Goldstein, had intermingled with the larger piece.
And yet, since I published Tuesday’s entry, I’ve scrolled several times through the many images I took home with me, always finding myself being drawn back to the oddly-calming picture of these trees and oversize pills. I decided to try cropping the document to eliminate most traces of the other works. Then I wanted to share what I came up with, and that suggested this follow-up post.
But then something unexpected happened, barely two minutes before I started writing this paragraph. I had already decided I had to know more about why the installation had been given this shape so I did a little research on line, in the press materials, and in the George Baker’s article on the Kippenberger show in the February Artforum, “Out of Position” [unfortunately not available on line]. As a result of what I learned, I made the decision to add a thumbnail of the original image below the full-size representation of my large detail.
By this time I had apparently arrived at a sufficient degree of enlightenment to see something that has escaped me earlier, because when I took another look at the un-cropped picture I couldn’t understand why if had not satisfied me before. I reversed the arrangement I had just determined upon, so that now my preferred image is at the top. I left the cropped photo as a thumbnail mostly to show what I’ve been talking about here.
Ain’t art wonderful?
I still don’t know enough about this extraordinary artist’s life and work to critique the curator’s decision to meld several different disparate [?] pieces in this part of the gallery. I’m convinced however that Kippenberger’s “Now I’m Going Into the Big Birch Wood, My Pills Will Soon Start Doing Me Good”, largely because of its title, and its relationship to the artist’s personal circumstances, is one of the saddest, sweetest, and yet grandest poetic expressions of Kippenberger’s pain and his creative genius.

I’ve one more thing to share about Kippenberger right now, this quote from Ronal Jones, writing in Artforum in 1997 [I found it on Douglas Kelly’s site] which captures his remarkable fecundity:

Someone was always mistaking Martin’s solo exhibitions for a cattle-call group show. That pleased him no end.

This kind of project is one of the things that we have not been seeing often enough at MoMA, and that was the case even before the opening of the new building. Since there’s now more space, there’s less of an excuse then ever to keep “emerging artists and new art“* out of our premier modern mouseion, founded and endowed as the premier “seat of the (here, visual) muses”.
Maybe some people understand “modern” in a way that does not include the “contemporary”, and MoMA’s decision not to engage in the regular deaccession of works in its collection which reach a certain age might explain what seems to be the museum’s frequent uneasiness with art being created in real time. I hope the appearance of Klara Liden on the second floor gallery signals a new openness on 53rd Street.
I’ve been one of the many champions of this artist’s work since first encountering it inside the storefront of the old Reena Spaulings four years ago, and yesterday during a press preview Barry and I were both charmed to see her working again with cardboard, this time inside a very different space.
Not everyone might agree with us, at least at first, as I learned when we were about to leave the room. A smartly-dressed woman all in black, of a certain age, who, along with several other women, also in black, had been in conversation with the curator, Eva Respini, asked us if we liked the work. I immediately volunteered, “yes”, with a little giddy enthusiasm. She asked me why, and I first described Liden’s earlier work. Turning to this installation, I mentioned the re-cycling element, the ransacking of the museum’s bowels, the white cube, the reference to consumerism (even in a museum context) and waste, the careful ordering of materials, and such. She looked up at the rows of cardboard boxes, broken down and tied, lined up high above the pure white walls, and she nodded, apparently unpersuaded of its virtues. She thanked me, and as she turned to leave, while she passed by I distinctly heard her give a very soft sigh.
Respini told us that the accompanying video of the artist casting stones into the water had only been finished last weekend. It has a more casual air, than the structure behind it, which almost fills the room. At the time I took this picture the huge window behind the heavily-tinted glass (which turned daylight into something like the twilight East River scene on the screen, and also cast a blue light on the cube) was partly filled by a New York cab and a parked school bus, painted an identical yellow. It reminded me of the fact that MoMA routinely hosts visits of young school children on the days it is closed to the public, and we encountered one such very fortunate group, probably a kindergarden class, minutes later on our way out.
Now that’s even more than contemporary. May the gods save this kind of temple forever.

Martin Kippenberger Down with inflation 1984 oil and silicone on canvas (2 parts) 63″ x 104.75″ each



Martin Kippenberger Untitled, from the series Fred the Frog 1990 oil on canvas 94.5″ x 78.75″


Martin Kippenberger Snow White’s Coffin* 1989 Plexiglas, synthetic foam and metal 15.75″ x 33.5″ x 71″


Martin Kippenberger With the Best Will in the World I Can’t see a Swastika 1984 oil and silicone on canvas 63″ x 52.75″


Martin Kippenberger “Stammhelm”** from Three Houses with Slits (betty Ford Clinic, Stammheim, Jewish ELementary School) 1985 oil and lacquer on canvas 49.5″ x 59″ each

This one really is for us. I mean the glorious, rich show, “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective“, which will open on Sunday (March 1) at MoMA. And I mean that it’s especially appealing to us art junkies: artists, fans and whatnots, zealots who regularly traipse through some of our meaner streets, searching out, and even haunting the more adventurous galleries and grittier rooms in this city and the incredible world beyond it, looking for the real thing, art which both reflects and challenges a world unlike that of even the most recent past. An anomalous rabble, we’re notorious (or more often ignored) for being sustained by under-known art not yet “elevated”, even made sacred, by the respectable museums we’re just not visiting so much any more (and not only because admission to the pantheon can set us back twenty bucks a pop).
But today I feel much better about the Museum of Modern Art than I have for some time.
Because of our interest in the subject of the retrospective, and our relative ignorance of it, Barry and I were eager to go to the press preview on West 53rd Street even though it was scheduled for something like our dawn this morning. I’m delighted to see that this month our local cabinet of early-modern curiosities is bringing us both Klara Liden (opening tomorrow, February 25), and the Kippenberger show, although I have to point out that the Kippenberger was put together by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles [MOCA], Ann Goldstein, curator.
It’s a great show.
This is a collection of work which passes back and forth (sometimes doubling and tripling up) in what seems to include just about every medium. Although it all really looks like today, some of the pieces being displayed have been around for three decades. A few of the articles installed in the museum’s sixth-floor Special Exhibiton Galleries may be little more than the size of a hand, and the paintings are generally less than gigantic, but there are also room-size pieces, and one installation, “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika'”, which totally fills the bottom of the huge atrium, leaving only a modest square path lining its sides for all the visitors it will delight.
In her remarks today Ann Goldstein shed some light on the title of the retrospective (still slightly obscure to me, since I haven’t yet read all the material handed out at the presentation) when she described Kippenberger as a “profoundly productive problem maker”. I was suddenly all ears – or, in this case, all eyes.
Because of its inherent strength, its enormous influence on other artists, and the fact that, as Goldstein also said, we’ve finally begun to catch up with Kippenberger, I think by now we would probably be seeing this body of work in these major, established settings in some form even if the artist had not died so young, in 1997, of cancer. He should be turning 56 tomorrow, February 25. I can’t imagine what our world would look like if we were lucky enough to still find ourselves provoked, repeatedly, by the wisdom, the humor and the irreverence of this prolific virtuoso.
Now the work he has left us looks like it’s here for the ages, whatever that may mean, but I have to hope “the ages” will always cultivate the liberality which Kippenberger’s art seems to ask of us.
It’s a totally delightful show, great fun and without a dull note. I will be visiting it as often as I can while it’s still here in New York.

The choice of the images uploaded here [yes, they’re mine; fortunately we were allowed to take photos, since the museum seems to have virtually nothing on their site yet] was necessarily impacted by my fast run through the galleries during a far-too-brief press preview this morning, and it therefore doesn’t necessarily represent either a good overview of the installation itself or a list of my top favorites – if any arrangement of either were even possible.

*
the German text above the perforated opening translates literally as “here promise”; the English text below it reads “here misunderstanding”
**
Stammheim Prison, where the leading members of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof) were held and tried. It is also the site where four of them either committed suicide or were murdered – extrajudicially.