KIPPENBERGER: ART-SCHOOL DROP-OUT

A troupe of Japanese girls take surreptitious photos of each other imitating the dunce pose of Martin Kippenberger's 1992 sculpture "Martin, into the corner. You should be ashamed of yourself" (pictured). The piece is a life-size mannequin of the artist relegated to the corner, presumably in punishment for his misdeeds. A staff member catches the girls, and chuckles as he mock-scolds them. I've never before seen such a humane reprimand from a museum guard.

Kippenberger's show at MoMA invites this kind of mood. On a crowded Sunday, the audience is alert and delighted, with only one man snoring upright on a gallery bench. There are a lot of small children, some of them speaking French, all of them engaged with Kippenberger's loopy tableaux and mega-paintings. Guests are chatting, pointing out favourites and reading titles aloud to their friends. (Kippenberger does great things with titles: "Do Forbidden Things secretly" and "In Case the Bitch gets Mouthy, Break Glass, eg.")

The German artist, who died in 1997 at the age of 44, is notorious for both the volume and variation of his work. One's first impression of the show is that it couldn't be the work of a single artist. The media include paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, artist books, prints and posters, while Kippenberger's subjects range from sonograms to pantries; hotel beds to waterboarding; the Bible to an aged Pablo Picasso in his underpants. Some paintings resemble pages torn from an Art Spiegelman graphic novel writ large in muted oils ("The Good Book", 1984). Other sculptures resemble Ikea furniture, such as the Gerhard Richter monochrome he refashioned into a coffee table in 1987.

A representative Kippenberger painting is from his 1983 series "Krieg böse" ("War Wicked") of a scrawny Santa Claus figure at the helm of a battleship. A placard clarifies the painting's subject, noting that the figure is "not the familiar benevolent gift-bestowing Santa", but rather his "evil twin", a figure traditionally painted with a fistful of switches with which to punish disobedient children. The painting summons Kippenberger's key traits: his punk roots, prankster persona, eye for satire and preoccupation with German identity. Like all of Kippenberger's work, it calls for close attention, but it also lets you in on the joke.

~ MOLLY YOUNG

“Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective” runs through May 11th at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.