Tony Oursler Donald Judd Martin Kippenberger Marcel Breuer Charles Eames A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s Dia’s Big Day First Annual Art Awards Winners Announced

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Franz Kafka’s Amerika—his first, unfinished novel, published posthumously in 1927—concerns the fate of one Karl Rossmann, an immigrant of epic naïveté. Karl’s adventures in New York consist, to an even greater degree than in Kafka’s later fiction, in negotiating cramped, obscure spaces: corridors, stairways, a desk with dozens of drawers, the lift at the hotel where he works as bellboy. Fired from his first post, Karl attends a maddening round of interviews (held at a racecourse) for a job with the Theatre of Oklahoma—an institution of opaque intent and unknowable dimensions that might be an actual theater or a vast utopian community. Kafka never resolves the enigma, leaving his protagonist shunted hopefully from one official to another.

Martin Kippenberger’s sprawling installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” which was first shown in Rotterdam in 1994 and is on view this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in the artist’s first major US retrospective, is in part a remapping of Kafka’s bureaucratic archipelago. Kippenberger’s collection of tables, chairs, and artifacts— including works by Tony Oursler and Donald Judd, as well as furniture by Marcel Breuer and Charles and Ray Eames—is ranged across an Astroturf playing field, composing at once a museum of modern design and a vision of colorful, eccentric officialdom. The artist, with typical insouciance, claimed not to have finished Kafka’s novel, and his disregard is nicely in keeping with the book’s incomplete nature, as well as the fact that its author never actually visited the US, giving his depiction of it a notably surreal bent. Kippenberger’s antic wit, furthermore, is an apt response to the oddly upbeat note of the book’s narrative. In retrospect, The Happy End appears a sly comment on the rise, after the artist’s death in 1997, of relational aesthetics—the open field of artistic dialogue, it seems to imply, looks a lot like the bright nightmare space of bureaucratic inquiry.

Which is to say that Kippenberger’s installation possesses today a political charge that is only enhanced by its darkly comic aspects. The work cannot fail to bring to mind the official absurdities foisted on visitors to the US in recent years, not to speak of those imposed on actual immigrants and vanished denizens of the new international carceral labyrinth. But “Kafkaesque” in The Happy End (as in Kafka) is hardly a matter of literal reference or leaden allegory; it’s rather a form of metaphysical lightness and material oddity, a comedy of diverted ideas and refound objects. Roberto Calasso writes that Kafka’s Theatre of Oklahoma exists apart, “in a kind of cosmic autism,” a description that might also apply to Kippenberger’s manic, multivalent, and ever-mysterious oeuvre. "Welcome to Amerika" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' September 2008 Table of Contents.