The mysterious underground network of Martin Kippenberger – culture

Officially, there are 472 subway stations in New York. But a particular station is never included. It is imaginary, but its entrance, made entirely of polished aluminum, has been in the collection of the since 2007 Museum of Modern Art.

“METRO-Net Transportable Subway Entrance (Squeezed)” was originally produced in 1997 for an exhibition in the New York gallery Metro Pictures. The three meter high and eight meter wide object is one of the last large sculptures that Martin Kippenberger left behind by posterity. The artist died in Vienna in March 1997 at the age of only 44. The transportable subway entrance in New York was part of a large-scale and intricate artistic narrative, the ramifications of which are now being traced for the first time in an exhibition at the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts (MdBK).

The Leipzig curator Marcus Andrew Hurttig spent three years researching Martin Kippenberger’s Metro-Net project and collecting a lot of material. With the help of drawings, posters, photographs, technical drafts and models, it becomes clear how Kippenberger developed his strange and confusing art from a peculiar idea. Or maybe the fictional subway network thing was very contemporary, because the internet was just gaining popularity in the early 1990s. “Kippenberger”, as the Kippenberger connoisseur Diedrich Diederichsen once put it many years ago, “could not ignore any keyword of the time without turning it around for its own purposes: big, wacky conceptual art, its contribution to the volatilization of the art object through a worldwide network of Access to an imaginary underground. “

Fictional underground and a box with the motto “sun, bosom, hammer”

The Leipzig exhibition also shows how the artist reacted to difficulties with great improvisational skills. The creative overcoming of obstacles in the production process and situational flexibility were decisive. The Metro-Net project began on the Greek island of Syros, where construction work for the first subway entrance began in late summer 1992 on the private property of artist couple Katerina and Michel Würthle, who are friends. In the summer of 1995, another entrance in a log cabin aesthetic was inaugurated in the Canadian gold rush town of Dawson City, again on private property. In one point all the following constructions followed a similar pattern: The artist always closed the access to the supposed underground with a gate, which adorned the “Sun, Breasts, Hammer” sign of the so-called Lord Jim Lodge, a secretive and male group of friends that he belonged to himself.

This combination of local public transport and the lodge idea is one of those built-in contradictions that are even more difficult to unravel today than in Martin Kippenberger’s lifetime. For Documenta X in the summer of 1997, Kippenberger finally planned a floating metro station in the Fulda. But the technical devices required for this threatened to blow up the production budget. The artist reacted and then planned his metro entrance for Kassel as a “drop sculpture” that was placed on a meadow.

He made a similar decision in the case of a “Transportable Ventilation Shaft” belonging to the “Metro-Net”, which was shown above ground in the same year at the Sculpture Projects in Münster. In May 1997, parallel to Münster and Kassel, another and last permanently installed Metro-Net entrance was inaugurated posthumously in Leipzig on the grounds of the newly built exhibition center in the northern periphery of the city.

How Kippenberger’s metro led into the “blooming landscapes” of East Germany

In Leipzig, the Metro-Net was now integrated into a larger art-in-building project that the three curators Brigitte Oetker, Mechthild von Dannenberg and Christiane Schneider developed on behalf of the exhibition company in the first half of the 1990s. In addition to Kippenberger, Fischli / Weiss, Isa Genzken, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Dan Graham commissioned to deliver art. Because the state of the ground work on the island of Syros is uncertain and the entrance in Canada was dismantled after 2009, the pressure on Leipzig has recently increased to take care of the world’s last Kippenberger station.

Of course, the Leipziger Messe never defined itself as a museum, but rather as a work site and trading center. But the art inventory, which includes architecture-related works by Günther Förg, Sol LeWitt, Niele Toroni, Angela Bulloch and Olaf Nicolai, has meanwhile become art-historical itself. The basic idea behind the art concept was based on an increased integration of art into social contexts. If you want to keep this claim alive, more engagement in the placement work is necessary.

Open detailed view

The political dimensions of the new Leipzig Exhibition Center, which was officially opened in April 1996 by Roman Herzog according to plans by the architects Gerkan, Marg and Partners (gmp), will only become apparent after a quarter of a century. Kippenberger’s “nonsensical building project” was suddenly framed by a major political fiction. With an investment volume of 1.335 billion D-Marks (approx. 683 million euros), the New Leipzig Trade Fair was the major prestige project in the so-called “Construction East” program and was significantly promoted by the Helmut Kohl government, although the former East-West trading center had largely lost its relevance with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Another narrative was obviously more important. The “blooming landscapes” promised by Kohl at the beginning of the nineties on the occasion of the monetary union were given a representative architectural form here.

For a few years now, the CDU parliamentary group in the Leipzig city council has been trying to find the space in front of the large glass hall of the New Fair with the gigantic Isa Genzken rose Helmut Kohl to name. The fact that Martin Kippenberger had his fictional subway entrance positioned on a meadow behind the hall next to a no less fictional helicopter landing pad seems like one of the artist’s last and astonishingly visionary volts.

Martin Kippenberger: Metro-Net. Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig. Until August 15th. The catalog costs 22 euros. There is also one for the project Podcast.