“Lieber zuviel als zu wenig”

In the run-up to this year’s Venice Biennale, Julian Heynen—the man who chose Martin Kippenberger and Candida Höfer for the German pavilion—announced that the punk aspects of Kippenberger’s work had been overemphasized. “Lieber zuviel als zuwenig” (Better too much than too little) might be seen as a rejoinder. Highlighting the punk movement in Berlin circa 1978–85, the show centers on the legendary club SO 36, where Kippenberger was a prime mover. A sort of padded cell with blaring music invites you to pogo among the fanzines, records, and other artifacts of the era; you can also screen a series of Super-8 movies (the cheap, readily available stock took Germany by storm in the ’70s) by artists from both sides of the wall. The films—there’s work by Jörg Buttgereit and Knut Hoffmeister—are dominated by images of radical individuality, of the lone figure against the backdrop of the barren concrete city. They touch on West Berliners’ sense of isolation, on the work ban imposed on artists in the East, and on the city’s omnipresent atmosphere of paranoia. Contrary to Heynen’s assertion, Kippenberger’s affinity with punk (represented here by a series of photos and ephemera documenting his record label, Luxus) seems central to his oeuvre: Its “anti-art” sensibility and hedonistic rejection of convention were in fact at the root of his practice.

Translated from German by Emily Speers Mears.