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拍品专文
As prepossessing as it is disconcerting, Fickn (1975) is a revelatory early work by the maverick German artist Martin Kippenberger. Executed using both graphic and painterly techniques when Kippenberger was just 22, it centres on the artist’s own disembodied head and hands. His visage, features heightened in white against the grey ground, leaps out at the viewer like an impish spectre. The surprise is compounded by his fingers, which are sheathed in condoms. An inscription in German alongside the lower and right edges reads: ‘Madhouse – Address Clear – Deprived Kid + Rats, Fuck Fuck Fuck – F. Jochen from Kippy with the red leather pants’. Is Kippenberger disclosing his own lust? Or is he mocking his own self-presentation as a consummate rake? As the dedication demonstrates, Kippenberger gifted the artwork to his university best friend, fellow artist Jochen Krüger, who kept the work for almost forty years. Fickn is thus a private missive from one artist to another, one saturated with personal history and connection.
Fickn reveals the young Kippenberger to be engaged with both art history and popular culture. It is twin to a pencil drawing from the same year titled Gil Funccius. Funccius was a friend of Kippenberger and a pioneering designer of album covers for Krautrock bands, and Fickn’s diagonally split background appears to echo her design for Annexus Quam’s 1970 record Osmose. Kippenberger’s manic eyes evoke Gustave Courbet’s The Desperate Man (1843-1845), while the grimacing face recalls both the Expressionist grotesquery of Otto Dix and the character heads of Jean-Jacques Lequeu and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Artists since Albrecht Dürer had used self-portraits to incarnate their own genius. Yet while Fickn’s delicately rendered hands might recall an Old Master drawing, Kippenberger forsakes the psychological penetration of the conventional self-portrait in favour of a pulling a devilish leer, turning himself into a Grand Guignol villain.
Kippenberger was a consummate self-portraitist, a passion that stood hand in hand with his fascination with self-presentation. The critic Diedrich Diederichsen referred to him as a selbstdarsteller (‘self-performer’), and throughout his all-too-short life Kippenberger took on numerous guises: nightclub manager, musician, novelist, hard-partying drunk, restaurant investor. In 1976, just a year after Fickn, Kippenberger moved to Florence in a bid to become an actor, an occupation which involves subsuming the self in fictive characters. Later he would win acclaim for both his painted and sculptural self-portraits, which figure him as everything from a matinée idol to the survivor of a nautical disaster. Fickn represents the genesis of this project, one of the most profound and radical campaigns of self-analysis in twentieth-century art.
Fickn reveals the young Kippenberger to be engaged with both art history and popular culture. It is twin to a pencil drawing from the same year titled Gil Funccius. Funccius was a friend of Kippenberger and a pioneering designer of album covers for Krautrock bands, and Fickn’s diagonally split background appears to echo her design for Annexus Quam’s 1970 record Osmose. Kippenberger’s manic eyes evoke Gustave Courbet’s The Desperate Man (1843-1845), while the grimacing face recalls both the Expressionist grotesquery of Otto Dix and the character heads of Jean-Jacques Lequeu and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. Artists since Albrecht Dürer had used self-portraits to incarnate their own genius. Yet while Fickn’s delicately rendered hands might recall an Old Master drawing, Kippenberger forsakes the psychological penetration of the conventional self-portrait in favour of a pulling a devilish leer, turning himself into a Grand Guignol villain.
Kippenberger was a consummate self-portraitist, a passion that stood hand in hand with his fascination with self-presentation. The critic Diedrich Diederichsen referred to him as a selbstdarsteller (‘self-performer’), and throughout his all-too-short life Kippenberger took on numerous guises: nightclub manager, musician, novelist, hard-partying drunk, restaurant investor. In 1976, just a year after Fickn, Kippenberger moved to Florence in a bid to become an actor, an occupation which involves subsuming the self in fictive characters. Later he would win acclaim for both his painted and sculptural self-portraits, which figure him as everything from a matinée idol to the survivor of a nautical disaster. Fickn represents the genesis of this project, one of the most profound and radical campaigns of self-analysis in twentieth-century art.