Footnotes

We are grateful to the Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Cologne for their assistance in cataloguing this work

Provenance
Collection of the artist, Germany
Private Collection, Germany
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Berlin, Café Einstein, Knechte des Tourismus (Vassals of Tourism), 1979

Literature
Angelika Muthesius, Martin Kippenberger: Ten Years After, Cologne 1991, p. 27
Ann Goldstein Ed., Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, Cambridge 2008, p. 349, 370


Martin Kippenberger is the quintessential 'artist's artist'. Not only was his work the first to deconstruct and probe the notion of the celebrity-artist and define a truly multidisciplinary art practice, but his legacy paved the way for generations of conceptualist practitioners and contemporary painters alike, who nod to his subversive, punkish resolve that consistently upended 'high art' and sought to reinvent the artistic gesture with every iteration. The documentary form was at the heart of Kippenberger's practice, charting the artist's ascension, ideological pathways, and movement through the world – not least in his hotel drawings and his iconic installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' (1994), arguably his magnum opus.

Presented here is a work that captures Kippenberger's burgeoning sense of himself as 'an artist in the world' – forced to be retrospective, open-minded, elusive and visionary. From 1979, this Untitled work forms one of the key pieces of Kippenberger's Knechte des Tourismus (Vassals of Tourism), resulting from his journey across the United States of America with his artist friend and collaborator Achim Schächtele. They conceived their trip as a continuous artistic action, in the context of which various works in different media such as photography, film, and installation were created. Ticking through a fully operational Kodak Carousel S Projector, the eighteen 35-mm slides of the present work offer one of the clearest senses of Kippenberger's vision of his life as a performance, a total work of art. Indeed, "his ideas moved too fast to be contained by a single style; the constant is the dynamic presence of the artist himself" (Natalie Haddad, 'Reviews: Martin Kippenberger; MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, USA', Frieze, 1 January 2008, online).

In the eighteen slides presented here, the spectator observes Kippenberger moving through the streets of New York, appearing before us as an intrepid cowboy amid a blur of people and sidewalks. It is both a romantic and impoverished vision of the artist. As a movie-like sequence, it is both an impactful documentary of Kippenberger's journey to America – whose mere representative function, like that of Joseph Beuys' momentous work I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), would grow to be foundational theme of his complete oeuvre – and capture the artist in the throes of his raw creative process as, what Diedrich Diederichsen's termed, 'Der Selbstdarsteller' ('the self-performer').

As part of his Knechte des Tourismus body of work, first shown at the Café Einstein in Berlin upon Kippenberger and Schächtele's return from the USA, the present lot forms a cornerstone from one of the most energetic, creative periods of the artist's life. Kippenberger, who had taken charge of the Berlin club SO36 in 1978, was embedded in European circles of musicians, artists, fashion designers, and filmmakers. His moving between Florence, Hamburg, Paris, and Berlin in the 1970s had become a generative process; Kippenberger's vassalizing amounts to an acknowledgement of the artist's nebulous presence within the fiefdom of the 'art world'.

The present Untitled work represents a significant passage from the career of one of the most lauded and influential artists of the twentieth century, who remains highly sought-after and mythologised by collectors and institutions alike. Completely fresh to market, this is the first piece of its kind to be offered for public sale that truly captures Kippenberger's creative process at its most candid and engrossing.