“The events of 1976 have now passed into myth,” Ulrich Lehmann writes. “If one decodes or merely episodically presents this myth, one would be honoring the studied banality of Berlin’s bourgeois dandyism with a significance it actually had yet to earn. The floor collage in the studio of an avant-garde fashion designer can also be considered the foundation of a mythic, historical avant-garde and of a geopolitically-based desire for freedom imbued with a desperate hedonism that has traditionally defined Berlin from the ‘Roaring Twenties’ until the late 1970s. This perspective necessitates taking into account a certain irony that Kippenberger was inclined to use as a relativizing gesture. So if this floor, defined by the photographic documentation that forms it, not only harks back to a mythic past but also serves literally as the grounding of a dialogue with its contemporary environment, then its banality, especially when contained in the most extravagant or provocative of artistic gestures, must be discussed as well.”
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Martin Kippenberger: A Floor Collage for Claudia Skoda at NRW-Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft Düsseldorf, 2005.