Merlin Carpenter
	The Sound of Bamboo

Writing about Michael Krebber I write about myself. So it is not easy to write this. One week before my 1989 degree show at St. Martin's School of Art I had an empty studio space. I had not started the work for the show. The white space was empty apart from a chair. On the chair were a Marcel Broodthaers book and a Piero Manzoni book. Then two days before the show I came in and did the paintings.

I did not know Michael Krebber's work at that time but I certainly knew Kippenberger's. It was inevitable that when I did meet this ex-Kippenberger assistant, as a Kippenberger assistant myself, I should feel an affinity for someone who seemed to present a parallel and also alternate universe to Kippenberger. I was already interested in Krebber-like ideas, including an interest in escaping from a new father to be immediately repressed.

But enough autobiography. I just wanted to point out that I feel like part of the story. And Krebber is a story that overleaps the limits it intends to set for itself.

STUCK. How can an artist be so stuck? Starting again. Starting from nothing. And stuck again.

Painting is a real subject matter. But is it really possible to stay within the frame when the frame constitutes such a massive question? In Schnabel and also Corot you have a kind of richness or roughness about the edges (of a face for example). There are painterly qualities that are not about truth or invention but about pure repetition for the nth time. Why is it not embarrassing to keep quoting Polke and bamboo and the whole bamboo aesthetic? Why is repetition OK, why is this particular kind of dried up riverbed of second order reference still functional? Why is being stuck so cool?

Not going beyond means in a sense going beyond: beyond the notion of development. A specificity of painting is opened up. And not only in painterly terms, it is also opened up to analysis or mockery. To go beyond mistakes. A realm where nothing functions ­ and suddenly it starts to function.

The problem is to speak about this work. Krebber's position implies that everything important that happens in the work happens within the frame of the painting. He even uses very thin wooden frames, which function more as a symbolic demarcation line than a visual effect. Everything important is inside. Painting is a feeble, unsuccessful activity. Yet Krebber asserts that to turn it around and make it good you cannot include outside information (whether text, biography, objects, etc.). This seemingly limiting position is actually a way to reframe the frame and avoid the usual highly embarrassing outcome. The frame explodes. It's an attempt to explode a conservative medium with its own reactionary qualities. And it's a barely conscious process.

But we are still stuck with the fact that there is hardly anything to engage with inside the frame. What model could be used to describe how an internal invisibility changes the environment? Perhaps the most useful analogy one could use is the concept of repression as formulated by Freud. The attempt to keep everything in the frame produces the opposite effect ­ inability to talk about what is in the frame. The repression, visible in the high-tension surface of Michael Krebber's paintings, creates the need to escape.

The repression Freud speaks about is generally repression of homosexual desires, particularly towards the father. But the question when writing about a heterosexual artist in the year 2000 is not whether he or she harbours homosexual desires. That much is freely admitted by all. The question is: could this be used as a way to get beyond the stuckness that we feel when facing and trying to describe these paintings? What is the relation in them to repression, homosexuality and the father? Could this shed any light on the matter?

Michael Krebber, 1980

One would have to start speaking of relations to specific contexts; those encapsulated by the figures: 1. Martin Kippenberger; 2. Markus Lüpertz; 3. Kai Althoff.

In an interview with Jutta Koether published in 1991, Martin Kippenberger described Michael Krebber as being 'Number One', his ultimate tip for the top to be the biggest artist of the coming decade.(1) The fact that this did not happen says perhaps more about the explosion of the art world into non-art-specific contexts and the decline of Cologne than it does about the worth of Michael Krebber's work. Kippenberger consistently described Krebber as the ultimate artists' artist, a 'pure' artist whose every movement became art. I definitely do not blame Krebber for this reading. If you look at what he said at the time he did not really support it. I think it is necessary to reject Kippenberger's projection: Krebber's purity is as illusory as any other.

Kippenberger needed to ascribe this purity onto someone else in order to avoid being the 'first winner' himself and avoid being a 'real' artist producing 'real', 'quality' artworks. At the most basic level Kippenberger was producing Marxist deconstructions of art's range of meaning possibilities. Krebber was not. He was engaged in roughly the same type of thing that he is now ­ working inside a frame that contains nothing. This position is more Freudian than Marxist. It implies a deeper and dirtier psychology. Whilst both Kippenberger and Krebber offer a 'dirty reading', a dialectical German antidote to the more theoretically located work of Mike Kelley, Krebber might in the end be closer to Kelley in this regard. But in Krebber's case the repression is actualised, played out rather than described or, one could say, the repression is repressed.

The most dramatically 'dirty', unexplained artist/painter on the scene in Germany is of course Markus Lüpertz. If Kippenberger continuously pushed Krebber as a pure Michael Asher-type concept artist, and Krebber to some degree went along with it in the politicised atmosphere of Cologne c.1990, then Krebber's earlier unconscious allegiance to his former professor totally disrupts this reading. Lüpertz is the oedipal father and not, as Kippenberger wanted, Kippenberger.

In 1993 Michael Krebber produced an issue of the magazine 'Sonne Busen Hammer', the central organ of the Lord Jim Lodge, a virtual club based in Graz. On page three is myself with Krebber and Theo Altenberg at an art fair. Then there is some other stuff including a short text about Georg Baselitz. Then a picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then some other stuff. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then another picture of Markus Lüpertz. Then a picture where Krebber has attempted to erase Lüpertz's face with a scribble that looks a bit like Jörg Schlick's Sonne Busen Hammer logo. Then a picture of Lüpertz with a circular hole cut out of the page, thus removing his face. Then a picture of Lüpertz where the hole has not successfully erased his face, he has moved a bit and peers around the edge. In the next picture Markus Lüpertz's face has again been successfully covered by the hole. Then follow nine more pages where the hole successfully removes the face of Lüpertz.

Needless to say this is intended as a joke, and it is funny. I find it very touching and it also makes me nostalgic for children's books with similar cut-outs.

But, jokes aside, the fact remains that Lüpertz fills half the book, and meanwhile a very definite attempt has been made to erase him. In the same way that Krebber repeats himself in his approach to painting, he repeats the image of what I would maintain is his 'true' father. In order to fill the book there is joke which is a repetition. A joke which is about its own attempts to annihilate the father who is the genesis of the repetition and the joke. It is obvious that we are not a million miles away from Freud.

Krebber hardly knew his biological father. Perhaps this explains his tendency to create multiple fathers who function as a series of partially-forgotten half-registered stand-ins. But I propose Lüpertz here as the most central, 'real' father, because he seems to be the one to whom the most repressive energy is devoted. When I asked Michael Krebber how he felt about Lüpertz at the time he was studying under him he expressly emphasised that he had not respected his professor. But Freud points out that when patients volunteer information such as 'I dreamt so and so but it was not my father', this is easy to analyse. You simply remove the negation and there you have the true state of affairs. As Freud says: 'we take the liberty of disregarding the negation and picking out the subject-matter alone of the association'.(2)

Georg Baselitz was a mentor and friend to the young Krebber after he left Lüpertz's class in Karlsruhe. Krebber claims to have respected him more than Lüpertz. Baselitz is perhaps equal to Lüpertz in terms of symbolical transference and oedipal conflict. And the reader will have to accept that I may be mistaken and Baselitz is the key figure. For me as a non-German painter the more mysteriously attractive and deeper figure remains Lüpertz, but perhaps that is my problem. The idea of this analysis is not to secure the position of Lüpertz as the central character, but to suggest that secondary 'fathers' such as Polke or Kippenberger are in fact a smokescreen for earlier and deeper identifications.

If one always starts from nothing one ends up always doing the same thing, because one does not analyse the fundamental starting conditions themselves. They remain repressed in the tortured moment of trying to get beyond them. In fact you see the same thing with Lüpertz in his laughable wrestle with Picasso. Freud talks about therapeutic situations which seem to proceed very well, but then he realises that the patient does not get better: ' "it would be all fine," thinks the patient, often quite consciously, "if I were obliged to believe what the man says, but there is no question of that, and so long as this is so I need change nothing." Then when one comes to close quarters with the motives for this doubt, the fight with the resistance breaks out in earnest.'(3) The central identification is never questioned, the result is stuckness.

For non-German readers it should be noted that Lüpertz is a highly influential teacher and the head of Düsseldorf Art Academy. His legions of devoted fans never become famous avant-garde artists like Krebber. Indeed most of them never escape his pernicious influence. So instead of accusing Krebber of failing to engage with his father we should celebrate his partial escape, albeit an escape which must continuously repress its attachment, occasionally using open acknowledgement itself as a form of repression in joke form. We should be asking why he is the only Lüpertz student to ever do something new.

I think it is here that we could speak of the fear of homosexuality which also underlies the repression visible in Krebber's paintings ­ there is a repression of the father and a repression of the real, the actuality of the painting, the reality of the sexuality of the father.

Michael Krebber's first exhibited works were floor sculptures. These consisted of children's long or short trousers sewn together at the hips in groups of three to five. These objects, like some other parts of Krebber's early work, are partially authored by Martin Kippenberger in as much as they are offshoots of Krebber's work as a sculpture assistant. Kippenberger functioned as a catalyst to get Krebber active. And, as I have suggested, it is Krebber's lack of authentic oedipal tension with Kippenberger that allowed him to allow Kippenberger to do this and laugh about it. All of which created misunderstandings for the audience that I think can only be cleared up now, in the light of Krebber's later work as a painter. It was not only always about painting rather than conceptual position-making, but also about a relation to a specific history of painting.

These objects suggest ­ if one is to take them at face value ­ sexual contact between young boys. They are like Siamese twins. This is a distorted image of child sexuality. These fetishistic objects are a bizarre commencement for a painting career. What they introduce is a world of tension, repression. A world of imagined brothers, imagined comrades bound by the hip. They sit ­ abashed ­ directly on the ground in anticipation of rejection. The are second-order images of an image of the non-expression of something in fact very expressive. And the analogy to the properly Freudian work of Mike Kelley is explicit here. What Krebber does, unconsciously in this case, is split himself into several doppelgängers. This is in order to avoid confronting the centrality of the (painter) father. But it is the 'homosexual' nature of the binding which allows us to see that these doppelgängers are still secretly in thrall to the master.

But to go back to the more positive side of this slightly unkind analysis, what exactly was it that Krebber did to escape from Lüpertz that no one else could? To get to an answer to this question one has to first take a detour through the paintings which follow on from this earlier 'neo-conceptual' period and make up the main body of his work.

The paintings are about repetition. Repetition is a kind of mockery. The wealth of Krebber's knowledge and love of painting means he is able to employ a range of ruses, avoidances and jokes to cover the fact that he is basically trying to deal with the legacy of the Michael Werner generation. The paintings are made according to Lüpertz-type methodologies deeply embedded in unconscious subjectivity, meaning what a painting is and how one moves in relation to its logic. But these methodologies are repeated, painted again at one remove, very thinly and nervously, often in the style of someone else. It could be Wols or Helen Frankenthaler. The result often looks very 80s/50s-coffee table. I do not wish to suggest that Krebber deals with simple references. The two aspects ­ the underlying Lüpertz and the overlying jokes ­ are intermixed to a quite undecodeable extent, and the jokes or references are themselves never clumsy or simple, or if they are then in a knowing way. The mix is complex, and I would emphasise that this complexity is quality. But if Lüpertz is explicitly used, even in a hanging, a catalogue or a conversation, it is always as a joke, whereas other references are allowed to be more 'serious'.

This repetition dressed in other references and encoded as jokes is one of the main two leitmotifs. The other is the covering over of previous layers of the painting. Krebber has exhibited several painted and unpainted monochromes. One gets the impression that erasing everything, painting it out very carefully with a single colour, is something that feels quite natural to him. It feels cool. But what, one wonders, could be underneath? Could it be the real of the father-love-denial that is each time covered up so scrupulously? Typically, what is then painted on top of this layer is a series of quick, light-hearted semi-referential gestures. We have another ineffably 'light' painting that in actuality feels quite heavy.

It is in the nature of this covering layer that I think we must find the central aspect of Krebber's (artistic) repression. It feels like a tightly stretched piece of Lycra. It is matt and flat. It absorbs reality. As the base on which a repetition of modern abstract gestures is re-enacted it tends to say this is it, this is the base, and there is nothing behind. But there is. Behind lies a psychosexual conflict with the father that has not been sufficiently successfully encoded into a joke. So it is this skin-like covering layer that functions as the repression itself, monochrome yet visible for all to see.

And this is one of the main reasons why it is difficult to write this text. What is within the frame feels like it is stretched so taut that it allows no access, one tends to immediately bounce off into the world outside.

And what kind of world do these paintings inhabit? It is here that we can start to answer the question of what, beyond repeating gestures as a joke, actually differentiates Krebber from the Werner generation.

I wanted to here bring in Kai Althoff (with apologies) as a third figure who, to a degree, solves the problem. Althoff, like Krebber from Cologne, is an artist who offers us a weirdly intense vision of German art subjectivity that is also explicitly gay. And he does not do it alone. Althoff and Krebber are friends and exist in the same social scene. A scene of which I am now and again also a part.

Isabelle Graw has written several times about how Cosima von Bonin, a long term collaborator with both Michael Krebber and Kai Althoff, produces work which is so entangled in its social context that it has to bring the scene with it into the museum.(4) The implicit injunction of painting, shared by Krebber's paintings as a ruse, that all readings should stay within the frame is here turned on its head. Here a discrete object automatically demands the inclusion of real communities for its very functioning.

Something which Krebber, von Bonin and Althoff all share is the aforementioned bamboo reference. This is for me the epitome of the joke that supposedly does not go stale with repeated telling. There is something uncanny about the way Sigmar Polke can do an already hackneyed joke to death, only for three more artists thirty years later to get infinitely more mileage out of it. It has even popped up in the charts recently: 'The Sound of Bamboo' by Italian producer Flickman merely mentions the existence of bamboo and it is enough to breathe new 'life' into moribund and overdetermined techno structures. And similarly it is because the medium of painting is so worn out (even more than cheesy techno) that such a reference can continue to function as the pleasure of perennial recognition. But what is the reference? Gilbert and Sullivan? Isn't it an orientalist view of a generalised east? The user-friendly German racism of the Asia Imbiss sign? A colonial throwback?

Perhaps. But it is also an example of how the second order emerges from the frame into a set of references that a group can expand in a pansubjective way. Its extremely mild colonialism is similar to Krebber's mild version of Lüpertz. The repression or colonialism actually produces a space of understanding and work. The fact that the real painting is screened or blocked makes the fake painting curiously available. The group projects of Krebber, von Bonin, Althoff et al redefine a subjective space by precisely holding closed the set of meanings contained by the dead signifier 'bamboo'. They have control of their world of reference, which they can share and use as a weapon. There is a freedom produced by this repression. And this is the point at which we would have to go beyond Freud and say that Deleuze/Guattari can also be correct, for all that they have distorted and hindered the potentiality of Freud's discoveries, in seeing that other machinic assemblages are indeed possible.

Many of the Cologne group of friends which centre on Krebber/von Bonin/Althoff are gay. But, more significantly, we can say that the group language employed, one of mockery, humour, light digressions and particularisms is essentially quite gay. And, ironically, much of this language was invented by Krebber himself precisely in his fear and repression of a homosexual attachment to the father: Lüpertz/Baselitz. For me this is the centre of the mystery. It's a rebound.

So to come for the last time to the question 'what really differentiates Krebber from Lüpertz?' one would have to say not the content of his paintings, but the amazingly truthful, intelligent, loving, inclusive social scene which they have attracted around them. The key to this repression is that it frees others. The empty surfaces of the paintings re-enact the sexist, unfunny world of Baselitz/Lüpertz as a totem to deny its effectivity for the next generation. Every artist/painter faces the undigested reality of these older figures. Their achievements are weighed down by their pompous and draining failures. The presence of someone who, even unconsciously, takes on the full weight of their success and failure is important beyond measure. Which also explains why Krebber attracts such long-term devotion.

It could be argued that I have not been very nice to Michael in what is a commissioned text for his own exhibition catalogue. I would partly agree. But, as William Blake put it, and Krebber has never contradicted, 'Do be my enemy - for friendship's sake'.(5) And Michael is a friend who has, by becoming a tortured, contorted human bridge between the dinosaurs and new, radically contextualised, gendered, 'gayed' and thereby politicised art networks, given me permission to paint.

	Footnotes

1. Jutta Koether, interview with Martin Kippenberger, Flash Art, Jan-Feb 1991, p. 88.

2. Sigmund Freud, Negation, in 'The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytical Works of' Volume XIX, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London 1961, p. 235.

3. Sigmund Freud, A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman, in 'Case Histories II', The Penguin Freud Library Volume 9, London 1979, p. 391.

4. For example: Isabelle Graw, Cosima von Bonin: Warum hat die es geschafft. Der Bürgertraum vom Adelsschloss, in Artis Nr.5, 1995, p.48-55.

5. William Blake, On Friends and Foes.

	This Essay first appeared in the exhibition catalogue Apotekerman by Michael Krebber, published by Kunstverein Braunschweig and Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany, 2000. It is also translated into German in the book. Contact Kunstverein Braunschweig for more info.
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