The critical reception of Martin Kippenberger’s work is indiscernible from that of his persona. Kippenberger died of cancer in 1997 at the age of forty-four. But his myth lives on, carefully perpetuated by his peers and by a cohort of assistants who were involved in not only the production of his work but also the production of its meaning, and faithfully disseminated in the circulation systems that Kippenberger’s work addressed or that became at times the work itself. (His reintegration of self-designed promotional material for exhibitions, like posters and announcement cards, into an ongoing output signals the importance he ascribed to the art market as a social system.) The historical significance of this myth is considerable. Kippenberger’s experiments—with social scenes and spaces of intersection between his selfhood and commerce, with galleries and restaurants as an artistic form in itself, and with the boundaries of authorship, all of this somehow consolidated and grounded around producing and selling objects identified with classic disciplines such as painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography—resonate across various “new” scenes in the contemporary art world, from Berlin to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, from Santiago de Chile to Athens.

Since premature demise is a crowning prerequisite of myth-making, a postmortem consecratory retrospective presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York poses, then, the question of to what extent a production so devoutly executed under personal parameters of contextual contingency can retain agency in the institution that has within its core mission the very definition of historicized artistic autonomy. What is at stake in “The Problem Perspective” is the terms in which Kippenberger´s myth will fulfill its implicit normative promise.

The retrospective, which originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles—a city among the many where the nomadic Kippenberger lived—was organized by Ann Goldstein. At MoMA, it was a comprehensive overview installed in special exhibition galleries featuring a loosely chronological display of the artist’s Promethean output. Kippenberger’s major tour de force, installed in MoMA’s monumental and central atrium, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” (1994), signals the importance that the museum ascribed to this show. The vast installation was composed of a couple dozen sets of chairs and tables, found and constructed objects, and sculptural works by the artist and others, all precisely assembled on a green floor representing a soccer field complete with viewing grandstands on either end. The gigantic scene represents a job recruitment center, which the protagonist of the novel encounters among the many insurmountable obstacles characteristic of Kafka’s nightmares. The idea of generalized competition implied in a regulated contact team sport is broken down into smaller plays of individualized contest (i.e., job interviews). Each “interview” set contains two or more pieces of furniture and art in different styles. Each and every style (the piece includes very recognizable designs such as an Aldo Rossi chair), along with the sociocultural implications of their attendant notions of taste, are precisely subverted, pitting function against image, object against narrative, structure against surface, culture against subculture.

A festival of reciprocal readymades, of inversions and negations, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” serves to retrospectively clarify the extent to which meaning was simultaneously constructed and negated throughout the artist’s life-oeuvre through the use of each and every element of the total field of art itself: collecting, teaching, talking, working, not-working, creating a museum, showing in museums, etc. Kippenberger’s essential strategy was non-exclusive accumulation, both at the level of the object and the idea; in this sense, it was the methodological opposite of the modernist reductionism that informs Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and even Institutional Critique. This also does not mean saving face under the poetic umbrella of chance, or randomness. His accumulations and plays with the ontological limits of sculpture, painting, and design are the opposite of, for example, Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines. Kippenberger jokes seriously and from every debunking juxtaposition, mocking title, or deviant attitude; the result is a precise and unique commentary that never really requires exaggerated hermeneutic decoding to drive the point home. If nothing is to be discarded, then everything must be articulated and recycled through skill and wit in some direction or other, even if there is no guarantee of an all-encompassing meaning to be derived from it. Permutations and combinations do not ever refer to a larger system. Instead, Kippenberger’s persona and personality is always so ever-present that it is actually absent by means of a perennial iterative differentiation: while the viewer feels directed, even pushed, toward any given horizon of meaning, in the end the results are open-ended and without definitive conclusions. This taxing logic, which implies its own lack thereof and obliges the artist to master every technique in order to destroy the myth of mastery itself, constituting a self-feeding machine of mise-en-abyme, resembles indeed the world of Kafka.

This is not, however, to imply that Kippenberger sidesteps the historical questions of his time and place. He addresses the shamanistic pretensions of utopian national redemption during the late postwar reconstruction period embodied by Joseph Beuys with the creation of a buffoonish and mordant persona, and the very German question of historical responsibility and painterly mastery is succinctly dealt with in his signature delegitimizing fashion when he famously acquired a Gerhard Richter monochrome painting and turned it into a coffee table, Modell Interconti (1987). Kippenberger’s discontent with the official posturing in relation to the war and the general complicity of German society is voiced in his painting Ich kann beim besten Willen kein Hakenkreuz entdecken (With the Best Will in the World I Can’t See a Swastika, 1984), a tangle of forms that gestaltically suggest swastikas, yet never deliver one autonomous or discretely readable swastika. The depiction of the swastika was of course forbidden in Germany, exemplifying both the amicable guilt of the state and the will to repress rooted in its psyche. If anything, once the humor and the transgression perpetually foregrounded are cleared out of the system, Kippenberger’s opinions are just what we expect from a lucid contestatory member of the very intelligentsia he so mocks. He does not veer away all that much from, say, Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Alexander Kluge’s positions at the time. In the hyper-conservative realm of the mainstream art world, however, Kippenberger appears daring.

Another example of Kippenberger’s alignment with liberal-humanist values is his photographic series Psychobuildings (1988) unassumingly installed at MoMA on a lateral and small wall. Uncharacteristically presented devoid of any other visual or written comment, the small pictures record observations of architectural situations and details, urban spaces, and public sculptures in context, which by an abrupt and often clumsy excess of formal aspirations have become unbalanced or plainly dysfunctional. These pictures of front yards, interiors, sculptures, masonry, staircases, doorways, windows, and street curbs are an ideological index to the visual situations that feel familiar or spatially acceptable but where there is something wrong, or off, signaling the dysfunction that Kippenberger expertly explores and conjures in different media. The values that render Kippenberger’s architectural observations of urban and public spaces absurdly comical, that which is signaled to be “out of balance,” are none other than the traditional assumptions of modernism thought of as an ideology that became a style. We can conceive the large and complex repertory of artistic practices that accompanied modernization as “modernity,” which between 1945 and 1965 crystallized into “modernism” as a characteristic and hegemonic aesthetic paradigm sanctified, precisely, by the Museum of Modern Art. That Kippenberger elects the misfortunes of those values as a departure point does not imply such a radical rejection, but also a built-in celebratory stance. In the end, he does not seem to be out of place at the Modern.