His ideas moved too fast to be contained by a single style the constant is the dynamic presence of the artist himself. He stumbled, sometimes literally, but deliberately and dramatically, through the art system, leaving a legacy ranging from his hotel-stationery drawings to the false subway entrances of his Metro-Net World Connection (1993–7). Since his death in 1997, aged 44, his party-boy persona has become an art-world legend. Kippenberger reproduced his surrounding world as art at manic speed, and his art reproduced the role of Kippenberger. The catalogue for his retrospective ‘Nach Kippenberger’ at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 2003, featured an essay by Diedrich Diederichsen entitled ‘Der Selbstdarsteller’ – literally, ‘the self-performer’. The theme of reinvention recurs throughout Kippenberger’s body of work. The Happy End… is a concept, but it also signifies a performance, of every job applicant and every artist, and the capacity to reinvent the same subject with each performance. Kippenberger’s installation was an effort to complete Kafka’s work without fixing it to a single narrative each desk represents a job interview, to be carried out by Kippenberger and his colleagues, collected and published. The piece takes its title from Kafka’s unfinished last novel from 1927, which ends with its protagonist applying for work at the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma after reading an advertisement stating: ‘Whoever wants to be an artist should sign up’.
In Martin Kippenberger’s epic installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ (1994) a roomful of unmatched desks and chairs are arr-anged on a green sports ground, with bleachers on each end. Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' (1994)
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