Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  On the evening Stelly-Augstein met Martin, Peter Preller introduced him to her as “very gifted,” although she didn’t know why. Martin had not yet started painting seriously. She met him as “someone wild and restless, seeking creative expression on all levels.”

  The next time she saw him it was as a fallen angel. He called her one night and wanted to meet her in a bar. That was impossible, since she had a small child, but he needed to see her, he said, so he went out to her neighborhood and when he showed up at her door, quite late, he was a mess: he had gotten into a brawl, had a cut under his eye, and had shaved off his hair. There was for it but to bandage him up. “He wanted to be under someone’s wing, wanted a mother to take him in.”

  This destructive and self-destructive side of Martin, Gisela Stelly-Augstein says, “was the other side of the coin.” Once, after two weeks on Ibiza, he wrote, “Got myself some suntan, booze, and beatings.”

  They continued to use the formal pronoun with each other for a long time: “it went with his romantic ideas.” [4] He asked if she would be opposed to his being her admirer: would that look wrong? He would write her letters, give her presents, visit her, make a little installation for her out of toys and cheap department-store kitsch.

  Love and Adventure was the name of her movie, whose lead actress Martin had discovered at a flea market. He himself insisted on playing a policeman with a German shepherd. Filming with him was a lot of fun, and he entertained the whole crew over meals. Later he often visited from Berlin, sometimes overnight, and when he did “he was totally different than out in the wild world. He still talked nonstop, but he didn’t have anything he was trying to prove.” Her husband and Martin never exactly got along. It was Rudolf Augstein who uttered the sentence that Martin was all too happy to quote later: “Kippi can’t even make himself a sandwich.”

  UNO DI VOI, UN TEDESCO IN FIRENZE

  Martin was done with Hamburg. He went to Berlin more and more often, stopped going to class, and “just decided in 1976 to be a professional artist,” according to Daniel Baumann, the curator of his major Geneva “Respective” covering the years “1997–1976.”

  But before he moved to Berlin, there was one more stop he had to make. In 1976 the family celebrated Christmas together at Tina’s house in Chiemsee—three months after our mother had died and a month after the birth of our first niece, Lisa. Martin came with Inka and her daughter. From there he took the train to Florence.

  Self-portrait from Florence, 1977

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  Clearly, as a German Romantic, he had to go to Italy at some point—the home of noodles and art, of love and cinema. He wanted to stay in the Villa Romana, a German artists’ residency in Florence, but they didn’t accept him.

  At first, Martin felt homesick and alone in Florence, and maybe abandoned as well, since our mother had died. Toward the end she had been optimistic about his future—if he was in good spirits then so was she. “He is really satisfied with himself now and I think happy too. In terms of quality, I think what he’s doing is very good.” Six months before her death, when she thought she had discovered a new lump in her remaining breast, she wrote to him, “I so want to live long enough to see the great artist you are becoming. But it’s out of my hands.”

  Florence did not welcome Martin with open arms; quite the contrary. It didn’t help that he didn’t speak the language. “It’s Monday today,” he wrote in a letter, “which means Der Stern and Der Spiegel on the stands at the train station—overjoyed—something in German. I read more intensively now that I’m in Italy.” Our father wrote an admonishing letter, surprised that Martin hadn’t learned any Italian yet, but still wished him good luck during his stay. “In my life I myself always put more weight on work than on luck though.”

  The prospect of having no one to talk to but himself horrified Martin. “Searching for nothing (in particular)—looking around—drinking—keep searching, don’t know for what,” he wrote to our father shortly after he arrived. He found it annoying to have no schedule, no guiding thread. In frustration he went “shopping, shopping, shopping. It’s so sh---y to be alone.” The Italians called him “Adolfi” since “I apparently look like Adolfi, the way they imagine Adolfi to look down here.”

  He would never again write as many letters as he did then. It was a mountain of letters, already practically conceptual art: one on vellum, another on postcards glued together to make a sewing pattern; one letter was three feet long. Every day he waited desperately for the mail, like an addict. He didn’t like silence; peace and quiet had nothing to offer him. He wrote to Gil Funccius that he was grateful just to hear a dog bark. The card game mau-mau, his lifelong passion, was what he longed for the most: his “fantasy. Like in Mexico, when I had the shitters, when all I dreamed of was a clean toilet, a loden coat, and noodle casserole.”

  Florence was too much for him at first—too beautiful, too chic, too old. “Let’s just say: It made me insecure.” But he stuck it out and asserted himself. “I’ve gotten past the worst of it now”: after a long, demoralizing search, he found a room in a villa away from the crowds of tourists, “very magnificent architecture: hall, foyer, another hall, with a sun porch (giant), massive wood furniture, doors, windows, guest room. Feels like a room, not an in-an-out booth.” Many of the pension’s guests had lived there for months, even years, and at last Martin had people to play cards with: “I love being able to cheat.” He added, “The upper crust of German artists used to come and go here before the war.” The writer Oriana Fallaci had lived there too, and “I read her book Letter to an Unborn Child in bed, everything in the book happened in that room. Live theater.” There were landscapes and ancestral portraits hanging in the hallways, picturesque views out the windows (the square, the roofs, the houses, the mountains), the Boboli Gardens around the corner, and an aristocratic landlady over eighty years old.

  Despite his initial disappointments, Martin turned Florence into his “happy hunting ground.” First he went looking for a local bar and found the café where he would have breakfast every morning and take his many visitors. He met his landlady there: the Principessa del Mare. The café was across the street from the Palazzo Pitti and was run by two brothers, whom he soon painted. One brother always stood on the left behind the counter, the other on the right; they spoke English and a few words of German and tried to teach Martin some Italian. They also translated for him what the other regulars were saying: the sourpuss, the park warden, the former consul, the head of the Boy Scouts (no one knew if that’s what he really was), all talking about kidnappings, the Communist Party, and everything else. What especially fascinated Martin was how the Italians talked with their hands and their eyes, and how fast they ordered, drank, paid, and left. And came back. “If you stay in the café you can see almost everyone come back every half hour, or at least every hour.”

  Martin stopped by the Villa Romana regularly, even if he hadn’t been invited to stay there—it was right across from his pension. He liked the atmosphere there better than the scholarship-holders’ art, though. Anna Oppermann was his favorite: “We’re both from Hamburg and that’s a tremendous bond.” She was later one of the artists he showed on Feldbrunnenstrasse in Hamburg, in his Chimerical Pictures exhibition. She showed her work there as a favor to him, and he was duly grateful. She “looked a little like a witch in a gingerbread house” and “she protected me from inappropriate remarks in the Via [ sic ] Romana.”

  What he really wanted in Italy was to star in a movie, “but no one discovered me,” even though he looked, as he himself liked to say, “like Helmut Berger in his good years.” So instead he made the big move and bought turpentine and paint. “My head is giving off puffs of smoke and seeing good things,” he wrote. He had been spoiled by photography, which let him shoot dozens of pictures in a few minutes, and was a little afraid of painting, but then he bought his canvases (twenty by twenty-four inches, “a transportable size—I mad
e sure of that”) and an 6’2” easel, the same height as him. He painted copies of postcards, newspaper clippings, and his own photographs and experiences. He painted his room, his ice cream parlor, his drinking buddies, the backside of the lion monument on the street where he lived, a cop-killer, his work table, the Palazzo Pitti porter, the cobbler’s shop window, baked Florentines, bangers and mash, “the fixed stare unconsciously looking up at the ceiling,” a retired Nazi, Tuscany, “two glowing cigarettes,” a “Sicilian criminal,” “3 fireflies on their way home,” tourists on the bus, and his birthday cake that Gil had sent him from Hamburg in the form of a photograph. Eighty-four black-and-white paintings in three months, usually one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with his inviolable midday nap in between. They were left out to dry in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the hall. As he later put it, he painted like a musician who plays a gig every day.

  He was excited about his (as he himself put it) megalomania: “My brain mass swings back and forth a little—it hums + you can hear the pure tones,” he wrote to his friend Herbert Meese in Essen. “I mean things come together in my head and are already ready—not to be modest, amazing ideas.... Everything is really going to blow up!”

  His project was to paint a stack of paintings as tall as he was, but he stopped a few inches short. He left the empty canvases and his towel behind in Florence. He called the series Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze (One of You, a German in Florence).

  Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze : When no one wanted to buy the series of black and white paintings in a uniform size (20” x 24”) from Florence, Martin gave them to his friend Michel Würthle in exchange for lifetime free food and drink for himself and a guest at the Paris Bar in Berlin.

  © Lepkowski

  “To assert yourself,” our father had written to Martin just before his tenth birthday, “means being able to influence your own life, to do some of what you want to do, what matters to you. To assert yourself also means, though, not blabbing along after whatever other people say.” Behaving well may not count for much: “It’s much more important to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.” Florence was the turning point for Martin. He had lived abroad for the first time and would often do so again, though never again for such a long time alone. For the first time, he had really thrown himself into painting, and after nine months he returned to Hamburg as an artist, with work to exhibit too: Adventure pictures in 6x audiovisual show, drawings, souvenirs. For the group show he organized in October 1977 with Achim Duchow and Jochen Krüger— On the Occasion of a Journey to Italy: There and Back —his first ever catalog was published: al Vostro servizio. Print run: one hundred copies.

  “I am a seeker,” Martin was already saying back then, and “variety and experience” were what he sought. It was time to move on, even if he would return to Hamburg often to see friends old and new (such as Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner, who moved from Berlin to Hamburg just when Martin was going in the other direction) and to show his work in exhibitions in the Artist House, at Fettstrasse 7a, in the World Bookstore, or in Ascan Crone’s gallery. Now, though, he wanted to take the money he had inherited after our mother’s death and invest it in his future in Berlin. “He gave himself two years,” Jochen Krüger said, “to make his career.”

  The Hamburg Academy of Fine Art later claimed him as a graduate. But “as an independent artist your diploma is: to be an independent artist. Slips of paper don’t mean anything,” Martin had once written to our mother. “I dont have an employer like other people, or a union—someone to represent my interests. I’m on my own.” In Florence he experienced for the first time what it means to be an independent artist.

  [ 1 ] The Native American hero in several of Karl May’s enormously popular Western novels.

  [ 2 ] The Blue Rider ( Der Blaue Reiter ) was a Munich group of expressionist artists including Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, and Paul Klee, active 1911–1914.

  [ 3 ] Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a former Nazi and an influential businessman in postwar West Germany, was kidnapped by the far-left Red Army Faction (RAF) and later killed, at the height of the RAF’s 1977 terror campaign, known as German Autumn.

  [ 4 ] In German (like French), there are two forms of the word “you”: the informal du , used among close friends and family or when speaking to children, and the formal Sie , used in public situations or with less intimate friends and colleagues. Among younger Germans, it is common to use du relatively quickly; here, MK maintains an old-fashioned, courtly tone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BERLIN

  Being young, being where it’s at.

  —MK

  “This is what happened. The Russians did build a death barrier. Everyone wants to get out but they can’t because theres barbed wire everywhere. And soldiers behind it. Everywhere there are watch towers with soldiers inside and they look out with binoculars to see if anyones coming. If they see anyone or any group of people they have to shoot. If they dont they are enemies of the state and are seriously punished. The highway from Hamburg to Berlin is also a border between the two zones.”

  At nine, two years after the Wall was built, Martin described the border and illustrated his story with a drawing of barbed wire. Now, in 1977 at age twenty-four, he was crossing that border fairly often. With one leg firmly planted in Hamburg, the other was already in West Berlin. “Everything looks kind of hopeless in Hamburg,” he wrote while he was still living there. “People here repress their uncertainty too much by being cautious.” There were too few friends and “communication partners” for his taste. “Part of it may be that my development involves drastic changes of direction that take me out of one circle and throw me too quickly into another.”

  He was ready for a wild city that was up to his own energy level. “I will do a lot and learn a lot with whatever I can do,” he wrote before one of these visits. When he was lucky, Peter Preller paid for a plane flight, sparing him the slow train connections and the border patrol’s chicanery.

  INTIMATE LIFE WITH THE SKODA FAMILY

  AND CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

  Martin quickly made himself at home in Berlin, found all the bars that you needed to know about, and connected with a family. In 1974 or 1975, on Ibiza, he had met Claudia Skoda, the designer (“ chic in Strick ” as he described her, “chic in knits”), with her army of followers. They met at Anita’s Bar, “with lots of beautiful people standing around the table.” Everyone went out to the beach to work on their tans, but Martin stayed behind, bone white, with hennaed hair and gaps in his teeth. He was the only one, Claudia Skoda later recalled, “who was totally dressed,” in jeans, a shirt, and dress shoes, and he talked and talked “without a break,” a Bacardi in one hand and a cigarette in the other. When he wasn’t talking, he was taking pictures and shooting home movies.

  One of the beautiful people from Anita’s Bar was a design student and model named Jenny Capitain, who would later become a fashion editor. “Don’t I know you from the antisocial scene in Berlin?” she asked him. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Martin always admired her, calling her his “permanent fiancée.”

  And so he became, as he put it, a “friend of the house” at the Fabrikneu (Factory-New) in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Three couples split the rent of five hundred marks a month for the 3,750 square foot loft on Zossener Strasse: Claudia and Jürgen Skoda, Jenny Capitain and Klaus Krüger (a drummer who played with Tangerine Dream and Iggy Pop), and Angelik Riemer (an artist) and Reinhard Bock (a teacher). It was a community under one roof, at its best an extended family, with home cooking every day. “He was in the middle of things,” Skoda said. “He always put himself into situations in progress.” In October 1976, he built the knitwear designer a stage that he himself wanted to use too, for speeches, dancing, and slideshows. It was a photo-collage runway, his first Berlin project, and he had high hopes.

  Photographed Glued Shellacked Flooring from One Week Intimate Life with the Skoda
Family and Circle of Friends was his title for the twelve by one hundred and fifty foot work, shellacked with synthetic resin. He used in the piece thirteen hundred photographs that he had shot and developed himself, as Andy Warhol and Sigmar Polke had done before and Nan Goldin would do later.

  “Photographed Glued Shellacked Flooring from One Week Intimate Life with the Skoda Family and Circle of Friends (1300 pieces)” (caption by Martin)

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  The collage can be seen as a whirlwind tour of Berlin, almost like a movie: back courtyards in the Kreuzberg, Charlottenburg Park, shop windows in the city, pool halls, the Wall with its watchtowers, public toilet stalls with graffiti (“Smash the red mob!”), Woolworth’s, housing developments, city highways; you ride through the streets in a double-decker bus, past beautiful women and children, dogs and dog signs (“We have to stay outside”), past Leo’s Manger with its Charlottenburg pilsner, Africola, and Kassler pork chops for sale. Martin captured on film men’s bathrooms, French fry stands, and ads for Milka chocolate (“I’m insanely soft!”) along with life in the Fabrikneu: in the kitchen, over breakfast, in bed, with everything from the toothbrush cup to the record player. He shows up, too, looking a little like James Dean, mugging with Angelik Riemer’s small son, dancing in front of the mirror, and making disrespectful faces in a gallery of modern art.