Artaud's Cross (Artauds Kreuz)

Martin Kippenberger

1987

Wood and plastic cassette

Dallas Museum of Art

Efforts to make sense of Martin Kippenberger's wooden structure, curiously interwoven with a chain of plastic links, are likely to be unsuccessful. Kippenberger purposefully maintains an attitude of "not-thinking" and a disdain for balance, order, and rationality. In his title, the artist pays homage to Antonin Artaud, the early 20th-century French author whose idea of a "theater of the absurd" is one of the cornerstones of modern art's reliance on irrationality as both a method and a subject for art. Efforts to make sense of Martin Kippenberger's wooden structure, curiously interwoven with a chain of plastic links, are likely to be