Martin Kippenberger

“Put Your Freedom in the Corner, Save It for a Rainy Day” 1990

---“The Wall is a part of German History. Now that all that’s left of it is a bit on Potsdamer Platz, it no longer feels like you’re walking through a wall. History is something you need to feel. First they weren’t Nazis, then they weren’t Communists. So what were they? They pulled down the wall without asking us and smartly wiped out some German history. The wall ought to have been preserved. We don’t need excavations, like in Greece—in this country history happens at your front door. Joseph Beuys thought the wall should have been seven centimeters higher---on purely aesthatic grounds. Everybody cheered when the wall was pulled down. That’s the wrong way to handle history.” Martin Kippenberger

Image Credits;
Martin Kippenberger in Venice, Italy, 1996, © E. Semotan