Kippenberger
Page 14
All the money that Martin poured into Hopi weaves was thanks to our maternal great-great-grandfather. In his early years he had told a friend, “Sträßer, I’m going to get rich.” And he did. Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Leverkus (1804-1889), a pharmacist’s son from Wermelskirche in the Bergisches Land, founded a clan of eleven children and forty-two grandchildren, and also a thriving business. After studying chemistry and passing his apothecary exam (“1st Class”), he went to Paris, over his parents’ objections, to gain practical experience. He earned a living manufacturing flashbulb powder and selling it to the Paris theaters, among other things. In 1830 he wrote to his brother Wilhelm: “Either I’ll become a manufacturer and not be a pharmacist any more, or I’ll do both at the same time, or I’ll end up as nothing.”
He followed the first path and manufactured artificial ultramarine dye, something he had learned to do in France. (The blue powder, which up until then had had to be expensively extracted from the semiprecious lapis lazuli, had been used as far back as ancient Egypt, where it decorated graves.) “A magnificent color,” the mayor of Wermelskirchen enthused. It could also be used as a bleach: anything yellowish, whether fabric, paper, or sugar, could be whitened with the help of this pigment.
Business boomed, and soon the factory in out-of-the-way Wermelskirchen was too small. He moved the business to the Rhine, bought meadows and fields from the peasants, and soon owned a large property with railroad and shipping connections. It had only one aesthetic flaw: who could run a modern big business in a place called Wiesdorf (“Meadowville”)? So Carl Leverkus simply made up an address—the fields and meadows would now be called Leverkusen. Everything else followed: food co-op, casino, businesses, bowling alley, apartment buildings, spa, school, fire department. His son established another fire station and a choir and organized card-playing evenings and hikes in the nearby mountains, because otherwise, a colleague later said, the young people would be living in a place with no civic variety and would “inevitably fall into depression.” Seventy years later, the city’s name was officially ratified, after debates about whether Leverkusen should be named Wuppermünde after all.
By then, the Leverkus family no longer played an important role in Leverkusen. The boom had been followed by a slump, due to too much competition, and so several companies combined into United Ultramarine, most of which was eventually sold off to Bayer, a Wuppertal company that wanted to expand into Leverkusen. Our mother’s brothers took what was left of the business after WWII—not much—and managed it well in the fifties, making good money.
Martin inherited more than some cash from our great-great-grandfather. He had his entrepreneurial talent, too, and the decisiveness to be his own boss. He may not have named a whole city after himself, but he did leave his mark on many cities, including Cologne and Berlin. In his zine sehr gut, very good, which he “premiered” at S.O.36, he gave his title as “Boss.” Martin never had a factory, but he had the seventh floor of a factory in Berlin. The poster for Kippenberger’s Office said “Please make use of our entire range of services: agency, consulting, pictures,” with illustrations of a painter’s palette, brushes, cash, and checks. Later he painted the “Cost Peaks” and “Profit Peaks” pictures: he was familiar with both, which was one reason he started painting larger canvases as time went on—he could sell them for more. He made no secret of the business side of art; he made it one of his themes.
“I’m very interested in leadership,” Jeff Koons wrote in the issue of the art journal Parkett that he designed with Martin in 1989. “I like the seduction of making a sale.” Martin, who saw himself as this successful American artist’s German counterpart, could have said the same. He was head of sales and head of marketing in one: everyone knew him, lots of people were afraid of him or hated him, but no one had to tell him that a bad reputation is a whole lot better than no reputation at all. In an interview with Jutta Koether, he called his gallerists “middlemen”: he was the one in charge of his own business and he never liked to put it entirely in their hands, no matter how much use he made of their infrastructure. With charm and a flood of words he sold the customers works—often works that didn’t actually exist yet. And he scared off customers, by savagely attacking them and their taste, as forcefully as he had acquired them in the first place.
The Kippenberger business grew more and more complicated as his activities multiplied and the productions and people involved grew more and more intertwined. “But Martin always had his business under control,” said Michael Krebber, Martin’s assistant for a year. “He had unbelievably good management skills, his timing was always spot on, and he never had problems delivering on time.” His American gallerists were especially intrigued that Martin, despite boozing it up night and day, was so punctual, hard-working, disciplined, and reliable—exactly how you would imagine a German businessman.
One reason he had no problem delivering on time was that he had countless helpers, some of them official but most of them unofficial, including small children and old grandmothers. He knew how to delegate and command, how to exploit others’ talents for his own benefit; he was constantly giving orders and assignments and making requests. Just as he had demanded paints, sweets, and jean jackets in his letters from boarding school, he wrote postcards to Hanno Huth, who had moved to Berlin before him: “Hanno durrling, Rmember to get the set (Saxo) in Kreuzberg and German shepherd cards too if they have them. Kippy.” Or: “Hanno Bayybee, Send some photies. Kippy.”
He needed to keep his business in order because he was living in high style: while his friends lived on five hundred marks a week, he would spend five hundred a day, or a thousand in a single night. “Lots of people think Martin was swimming in money,” according to his Düsseldorf friend Meuser. “That’s not true at all. It’s just that he spread it around.” One of Martin’s Picture Titles for Artists to Borrow was: It’s sad you always have to leave me so soon, money. He wanted to make money with his art—a lot of money. Our parents had told him when he was young that that was precisely what you couldn’t do, and he wanted to prove them wrong. At the same time, he wasn’t the slightest bit interested in money as such. Martin took one of the earliest checks he ever got (30 marks for a piece he had sold to Reinhard Bock in Berlin in 1975), cut the outline of a palette out of it, and painted it: “Gotta clown. Waddeveridcosstss. Leonardo Luxury.”
At times he had everything, at other times nothing—for Martin, money was always there to spend and show off with, never to hoard. The grandson of a banker who always made us take the present he had just given us and put it in a steel safe before his eyes, he never saved for the future. He lived in the here and now. “No account number, no phone number” read one of his rubber stamps. Phones and credit cards were too virtual for him: he liked his life live. He always paid from a thick wad of cash he had in his jacket pocket—he wanted to be free to go anywhere at any time, on the spur of the moment, and free to leave again too. Once, when asked why he didn’t have a credit card, he answered: “I’m on the run.”
He never invested in real estate, either. Not a few of his fellow artists eventually owned estates or castles, but he never wanted to. Five-star hotels, on the other hand—in later years he often made that a condition of his accepting an exhibition invitation. For all their comforts, though, it was not so much a matter of luxury for him—he could barely enjoy any luxury in the tiny amount of time he actually spent in the rooms—it was about status. The expense that his hosts went to was a sign of respect, and Martin thought he deserved the best.
Which is not to say that Martin couldn’t also be frugal. However much he poured himself into work, he was always economical with resources. Martin was known for reusing things many times over, especially photos from his childhood, like the one that showed him deep in the act of painting—he reprinted that one in several catalogs and on postcards. Poems showed up onstage, in a book, and then again as the title for a picture or exhibition; he took a conversation between Joachim Lottmann and Michael Krebbe
r from his book Café Central, reprinted the first half again in his Peter 2 catalog and the second half in Journey to Jerusalem, and used excerpts, translated into Serbo-Croation, yet again in his Crtezi catalog. If something went over well, like his lamppost sculptures or the Peter exhibition, he would make a few more—just as long as they weren’t exactly the same, because that would be boring.
His way of using leftover things was even more pronounced. As a postwar child, and as a conceptual artist who saw everything as material and his work as an ever-expanding spiderweb of connections, Martin never threw anything away. Sketches for the Peter sculptures ended up in the art cabinet of the Petra exhibit, and material that didn’t make its way into the Truth Is Work catalog was printed on the slips of paper cut off of the edge of printed pages, resulting in the minibook Introduction to Thinking. When the printer of Michael, an accordion-fold book in homage to Krebber, mistakenly printed the color illustrations in black and white, Martin turned it into a second accordion-fold book that he called Micky.
Sometimes his efforts to save everything had something “touchingly helpless” about them, according to his assistant Johannes Wohnseifer. After the Pope visited Cologne, and the whole stadium’s turf had been covered with chipboard to protect it for future soccer games, Martin looked into what they were going to do with the wood. It was due to be thrown away so he arranged to get it at no cost. He used it in some of his works, such as the “Tabletops blessed by the Pope” in his Kafka installation, but transporting and storing the giant, heavy boards was so expensive that he ended up spending many times more than what he saved.
Meuser said that he always knew exactly when Martin ran out of money: “he would be on edge and in a terrible mood,” and his jokes were no longer funny, just cutting. It was no joke for Martin to be out of money, even if he made fun of himself for ending up in that situation (“We don’t have problems with the Deutsche Bank, because we spend our money before entering”). It was demoralizing. “You can see the lady at the bank counter not bother with you and make a dumb joke about you just because you’re out of money.” “Thats why I dont go into banks, I sign things for other people and let them go in. Its too existential for me what goes on there.” Meuser did go with Martin into a bank once, where the teller told him: “Mr. Kippenberger, I have already explained to you that you can’t get any more money.” Martin thought for a moment and responded: “I don’t see it that way at all!”
He himself never refused anyone anything. Michel Würthle wrote on his portrait of Martin as a cowboy: “You can have his last peso but you can’t have his melancholy-module.” That quality only made it worse for Martin when his friends refused him. At one point in the early eighties, he had hopelessly overdrawn advances from the Hetzler Gallery in Stuttgart, and when Bärbel Grässlin came to Cologne to visit Martin, Hetzler made his overly kind gallery partner promise not to give Martin another penny: “Enough is enough, the account has run dry, now he has to learn to manage his money!” When she invited Martin over to eat, the question naturally came up: “Do you have a little pocket money I could have?” She later recalled that she said: “‘I am under strict orders, I can’t.’ He held that against me his whole life, practically to the very end: that I left him in the lurch. That’s how he saw it—leaving him in the lurch. He brought it up again and again.”
Since Martin almost never had as much money as he wanted to spend, he became a master of the barter system. He had a restaurant in almost every city where he could eat and drink for free; in Zurich he traded artworks for custom-made shoes, in Graz it was for a grand piano, in Düsseldorf for dental work. He also, of course, traded art for art, ending up with an impressive collection.
He was not practically inclined—and was only too happy to leave this side of his work to friends, students, assistants, and gallerists, keeping them on their toes with his perpetual requests—but he was pragmatic. In Hamburg, when he didn’t have the money for a catalog—and he always wanted a catalog—he bought a doormat and a bicycle seat from a gas station on the way to the gallery and built multiples from them. In Copenhagen, when there was no money for a party in honor of his receiving the Köpcke Prize, he made a couple of drawings and used the proceeds for the festivities.
He had already tried out his business acumen as a boy: when he’d spent all his allowance on the first day, again, he sat on the sidewalk during school vacations and sold his drawings. “I’ve always been involved with wheeling and dealing,” he said, and he had to be, since he never received official subsidies in the form of scholarships or the like and won prizes only toward the end of his life. When he had exhibits, his projects almost always went over the respective institution’s budget. When he came back from Florence with his giant stack of paintings, he sent (or rather “Mattin Kipmberga” sent) “Dear Madame Stelly” an offer: 490 marks a piece, “for you, 465,” with discounts for bulk purchases—a dozen, small selection, a third of the set, half the set, large selection, or the “Complete Program” of eighty-four adventure paintings for 20,580 marks (“for you, 17,640”). “I hope these prices do not have a depressing effect on you,” he added. In fact, he sold her no more than four pictures and gave a couple away as Secret Santa presents on Feldbrunnenstrasse.
Martin was always caught in the same cycle. Since he wanted to produce so much art, realize all his ideas, and put together so many exhibitions, catalogs, posters, parties, and postcards, he needed huge sums of money. But since art was his only way to earn that money, he always had to make more and more to finance his countless projects. “It’s no fun at all to make art when you have no money,” he said, and added in the same breath that it was also no fun when you had too much money—he was afraid of becoming rich, well-fed, and sluggish. “Its a kind of engine, this never having enough. Its probably from nature somewhere, and we have to work to live, you know? And when you suddenly do have money...me, I’d get lazy, and when I’m lazy, and dont work, right away I get drunk.” His motto was “Envy and greed, that’s what I need.” [2]
Still, he did have a few simple but effective tricks for dealing with his perpetual shortage of cash: pinball, gambling, and mau-mau. In his lowest periods, that’s how he made money for food. He played mau-mau to excess, with anyone and everyone, sometimes for days and nights on end. In Tokyo he taught a distinguished Japanese lady how to play; on an airplane flight to San Francisco he passed the time playing mau-mau with the artist Rosemarie Trockel and won seventeen drawings from her. Martin always wanted to win and usually did (and if he didn’t, look out: you had to keep playing with him until he came out ahead, no matter how long it took). No one was ever as much in practice as Martin, and no one cheated as much as he did, either.
Since winnings from the game were debts of honor, he went all out to collect, whether it was money (sometimes a lot of money, since the stakes got higher as the night went on), or a mining lamp from his brother-in-law Andreas, or the red wine that Gisela Capitain had to buy him after their first meeting at the Exile, or the MRI of his own brain that he won off a radiologist’s son and used as the cover of one of his catalogs ( We Always Thought Kippenberger Was Great ), or the Kelly Family poster his nephew Benjamin had to get him.
What Martin bet was almost always his art, but every now and then he lost money, too. He once owed three thousand marks to Bärbel Grässlin’s life partner, the musician Rüdiger Carl. Then Martin made him an offer: cash or some fun, a trip to Tokyo or San Francisco (Martin had invitations to both cities for openings). Carl decided in favor of some fun, in America, and Martin was relaxed and in good spirits after the success of his exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:
He always had it in him to just get into a mood, so that you’d think: You dumbass. This time he took care of me like an angel. He’d decided to make things as nice for me as he could have possibly wanted if he were in my place. How easy he could make everything, with his refined sense of luxury and glamour! But that trip had everything, he even brought the ladies w
ith big boobs to the hotel. I can’t remember any time in my life that someone took care of me so sweetly, sensitively, tactfully, and good-naturedly. Without crowding in on me—it’s not like he was all buddy-buddy all the time. But not all lordly either: I own America, let me show it to you, that sort of thing.
Taking care of other people, spoiling them, was Martin’s specialty. He would hang an especially beautiful tie on his Vienna friend Martin Prinzhorn’s doorknob or bring his Cologne friend Hubert Kiecol a particularly accurate Serge Gainsbourg doll because he knew Kiecol was a fan. When Brigitta Rohrbach visited him in Florence and her most valuable possessions, three cameras, were immediately stolen from her car, he went to a nearby toy store and bought her a child’s camera. “He treated me like royalty,” the American artist Christine Hahn said about her visit to Berlin. Martin introduced her to everybody, took her to all the restaurants and museums, the New National Gallery and the Bauhaus Archive, and explained every work to her precisely, “like a perfect little art history course.” When he wasn’t free, he asked Gisela Capitain to show her East Berlin. His attentions gave her a new sense of confidence.
Especially with women, Martin was very generous, showering them with attentions and bouquets of flowers. When they sent him packing, though, he could just as easily shower them with nasty remarks in public.
He gave away countless pictures, often with a dedication and sometimes made especially for the recipient. A lot of the time, though, his giving was also a taking. When he invited someone out to a bar, that meant he had someone to talk to and an audience—he didn’t have to be alone and he also got ideas that he could immediately appropriate. When he invited a friend on a trip, he got both company and a chauffeur. When he invited the photographer Andrea Stappert to Spain for Christmas, hotel costs included “so you can’t say no,” he got someone who could photograph the trip. And when he invited Johannes Wohnseifer to Greece for an exhibition and a week’s vacation, he knew that he was bringing not just another artist but an assistant he could send on errands.