PRINTED & UNPRINTED PAPER
Of course he didn’t need to write a novel to make books, which he did to excess, like everything else in his art. He wanted to trump Dieter Roth and overtake our father and produce a bookshelf-foot or two more than Kirchner, and he did it: the catalogue raisonné lists 149 titles, from al Vostro servizio in 1977 to No Drawing No Cry, planned before his death in 1997 and published in 2000 (the third in his series of drawings on hotel stationery—with all but one of the pages blank). He averaged roughly seven and a half books a year, even if some were not exactly tomes (the smallest, Introduction to Thinking, measures four by three inches) and many were co-productions with other artists. When Walther König emptied out the big shop window of his Cologne bookstore and filled it with Martin’s books the night after Martin died, people couldn’t believe their eyes. “Martin always wanted that,” according to the photographer Andrea Stappert, “a whole window at König’s. It was like documenta.”
The window of Walther König’s bookstore with all of Martin’s artist books, arranged the night after his death
© Andrea Stappert
For Martin, who was so often shut out of the official German art business, books were an especially important way of staying visible and making himself known. “I use every means I can to make something that will last, that will speak for itself. Because I think that before I get the other kinds of ‘recognition,’ like ‘hanging in a museum,’ I’d need to see the museum directors hanging in a museum. And that won’t happen.”
His books were a part of his artistic production and very much like his painting and sculpture in their variety and scope. His strategies were the same as well: repetition, variation, exaggeration, and misleading or withholding from the reader. He designed a book called Untouched & Unprinted Paper for the New York nonprofit bookstore Printed Matter, which consisted of a stack of blank paper wrapped in brown packing paper in a slipcase.
Almost every book of Martin’s looked different, and every one went against the grain in one way or another. For example, Women, published by Merve Verlag in 1980. This small Berlin publishing house, run with great consistency and humor by Peter Gente and Heidi Paris, publishes all its books paperback, in the same small format and with a uniform cover design. There, among all the highly theoretical structuralist and post-structuralist texts, was Martin’s volume of nothing but pictures of no more and no less than what it said on the cover: women. Female strangers, friends, colleagues, and our mother, too, laughing in Martin’s arms. The only words in the whole book were the author, title, and publisher on the front cover and the publisher’s colophon on the back.
Martin preferred to let other people do the writing whenever possible, just as he preferred to let other people do the painting. After a rest cure at Knokke, the Belgian seaside resort, he sent Annette Grotkasten, the book designer in Hamburg who had worked on his Truth is Work catalog, there to spend five days retracing his footsteps so that she could write up how he had probably experienced the place. 1984: How It Really Was, Using the Example of Knokke, dedicated to his friend Werner Büttner, looks like the little yellow books in the well-known Reclam classics series but was actually published by the Bärbel Grässlin Gallery. In 1987, the text went unchanged into Martin’s book Café Central: Sketch for a Study of a Figure in a Novel, in which the character from a novel is, of course, Martin himself, though he mostly left the writing to his assistant at the time, Michael Krebber. The book opens with a “Hellish Prelude with Tape Recorder,” which involved setting Krebber loose to answer questions from Joachim Lottmann (“Stupid questions, right answers”). The rest of the book consists of text dictated to Krebber or sent to him in the form of letters. Café Central was published by Werner Büttner’s Meterverlag press and illustrated with humorous drawings from the estate of Albert and Markus Oehlen’s father.
The network of friends who provided texts for his books and catalogs grew ever tighter and more stable: Diedrich Diederichsen, Jutta Koether, Roberto Ohrt, Werner Büttner, Martin Prinzhorn. Martin felt that they understood him and could express what he meant. He used his writer friends, too: Oswald Wiener, Rainald Goetz, Walter Grond. One time he printed an entire play by the Austrian playwright Wolfgang Bauer in a catalog, which Bauer then performed at one of the openings. Anything someone else could do better, Martin didn’t have to do himself, he simply assimilated the other person’s work into his own oeuvre. The exception: he never asked real art critics to write for him. He said he couldn’t stand “art-history German.”
He played with the myth of the artist and the artist’s authorship (who is an artist? what does he actually do?) in countless ways. For Women, Martin left it up to the printer to decide the order of the pictures. In a used bookstore in Paris he found copies of a book called Les mémoires d’un Cordon Bleu and bought up every copy, numbered and signed the shrink-wrapped books, and lo and behold, another genuine Kippenberger. The majority of his books were, if not self-published, at least self-financed, at least in part. He had two real publishers: Rainer Pretzell in the early years in Berlin and, later, Walther König in Cologne.
THERE HE GOES AGAIN, THAT BOOKWORM
As a dyslexic child, Martin had hated reading books. This was incomprehensible to our mother, and certainly unacceptable, so she sent Martin with our father to the Baedecker bookstore, where her friend Ulla Hurck worked. They came out with a bag of books about the medieval German hero Klaus Störtebeker. At home Martin pretended to read them, but it was much too difficult and boring—he only turned the pages, though very convincingly, since he wanted to receive praise and he knew there’d be praise for reading. That is how he tells the story twenty years later in Café Central.
As an adult, he continued to show how well he could perform with books. “Smart Is Where It’s At” he wrote on the cover of the tenth anniversary publication for Merve publishers, whose demanding list (Virilio, Baudrillard, and so on) was read by everyone who wanted to prove their intellectual chops. Not Martin: he ordered “3 ft. light reading + serious lit. = 981.10 marks,” according to the receipt from the Bittner Bookstore in Cologne that he reprinted in a little booklet he included as an insert in a special issue of the art journal Parkett. In their obituary for Martin in Spex, Cosima von Bonin and Michael Krebber said that Martin bought the books at Bittner in order to carry them home past his regular café so that the people sitting there would think, “There he goes again, that bookworm.”
He couldn’t read, because he needed the empty space in his head so that he could stay open to everything he encountered, “could organize his free filtering process himself,” as he put it in Café Central. He needed emptiness so that he could fill up himself. Martin Prinzhorn believed that since he didn’t read any books, “he had the brain of an elephant.” He needed space to breathe, in his head no less than in his apartments, where he hated knick-knacks and clutter. “I couldn’t work like that. I need an empty desk and a clear head,” he wrote during his Hamburg period to a friend who had a lot of junk. “My 4 walls are white and they’ll stay that way.”
Life, not fine literature, is what interested Martin. On the rare occasions he did read a book, it was a biography: Nora, about James Joyce’s wife, for the sex and because it was the story of a woman who had cleared away obstructions for her artist husband, or Pepys’s juicy diary, or a biography of Romy Schneider, the German actress he loved for being so beautiful, vivacious, and happy, and at the same time so melancholy and broken. He recommended Overdose, about John Belushi, to Michael Krebber, along with Kurt Raab’s biography of Fassbinder—he thought it was great that Fassbinder’s former close collaborator would dare to write something so bad about the master so soon after his death.
Martin didn’t read, he turned the pages. Newspapers, magazines, and catalogs were important sources for him of reality, art, and the zeitgeist; they stimulated and challenged him. And he listened. “As a dyslexic,” the artist Rosemarie Trockel said from personal experience, “you have a different co
ding system: you can pick things up relatively quickly, you have your own ways of learning things.” Anyway, why should he read when other people did it for him. Friends like Albert Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Michael Krebber, Roberto Ohrt, Martin Prinzhorn, or whoever else was around told him about what they’d read, and—just as he always preferred to paint or draw from photos or postcards instead of from nature—he thought retellings were often more interesting than the originals. For example, he sent people to the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt with the most enthusiastic recommendations, saying it was the most interesting museum in the city, even though he had never set foot inside himself. “I always hear what people say, what people have seen or heard, and I store it up.”
He once had Michael Krebber (“MK1”) draw up a list of twenty important books; Martin (“MK2”) then printed it in Café Central : Knut Hamsun, Hunger ; Musil, Three Women ; Huysmans, Against Nature ; Huysmans, La-Bas ; Kafka, Amerika ; Gogol, Taras Bulba ; Goncharov, Oblomov ; Baudelaire, Paris Spleen ; Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare ; Rigaud, Suicide ; Vache, War Letters ; Carroll, Alice in Wonderland ; Vischer, Auch Einer ; de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons ; Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time ; Babel, Red Cavalry ; Proust, Swann’s Way ; Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew ; Macarenko, Road to Life. (The list has only nineteen books.) Krebber had to buy them all for Martin and bring them to Teneriffe, and it seems that Martin did in fact glance through them. Some of the titles appeared later as titles for artworks, for instance, a Rameau’s Nephew sculpture: a cardboard book box from the Roggendorf moving company with wallpaper glued to the inside that shows a little man sitting on a park bench and eating, with a few pigeons at his feet, and the words “ Ne me regarde pas manger ” (Don’t watch me eating). He reprinted all of Vischer’s Auch Einer in one of his catalogs and turned Franz Kafka’s Amerika into the gigantic installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika.” He originally intended it to be a book “that you keep by your side and turn to for strength, like a Bible,” but instead he used his sculptural means to give Kafka’s unfinished novel a happy ending.
TALKING INSTEAD OF WRITING
Talking is what he most loved to do, as he had already said in the late seventies in Berlin: “I like it more than painting—it goes faster.” “Kippenberger’s whole existence,” according to the Austrian writer Walter Grond, “is an excessive speech.” For Martin, art was always communication, a way to convey himself, and so conversation (or the monologue it often mutated into), talking, telling jokes, and telling stories were the literary forms that suited him best: the most immediate and spontaneous forms of communication, ad lib art. “Kippenberger conducted his relationship with the discursive while entirely avoiding writing,” Diedrich Diederichsen said. That is mostly true, although from childhood on, Martin used letter-writing as an artistic form of sharing information, telling stories, and finding himself. While in Hamburg, he admitted to a friend he regularly sent letters to that writing actually wasn’t his way, “because for me there are other paths of communication,” such as taking the subway or walking around. So he mostly stopped writing letters as his artistic production increased; he came to prefer postcards, where it was enough to write a little and the picture was, of course, part of the message.
He was an excessive talker, but he talked, Rosemarie Trockel recalls, “in short form, like in comic books.... It was speech-bubble-German. He talked like a comedian.” In his slogans and jokes he brought things to a point in just a few words, a quality that many people admired and some feared. That is why he so enjoyed reading the tabloid Bild : along with all the soccer scores, he found the craziest stories, written in telegraphic style with snappy headlines. He did criticize Bild ’s racism, “but other than that, what’s in there is tops.”
Many of the titles of his paintings, books, and exhibitions were as pointed as the Bild ’s headlines, for instance the series War Bad, which he made during the heyday of the peace movement. “The whole moral rearmament was never put into words so sharply,” Martin’s friend Meuser said. Martin had already asked Meuser to come to Stuttgart, in 1981, before an opening, “to slap together some titles,” and earlier still had written some of his “poemicles” in France with him. Meuser had also grown up in Essen; they spoke the same language and “had a similar vocabulary—it was like home.” While they were slapping together titles, the artists sometimes had to be careful not to fall off their chairs from laughing so hard.
Germany, Its Waters; Cold on Canvas; Tina Onassis’s Favorite Aunt on Her Way Home; Ashtrays for Singles; Nothing Heard, Nothing Hurt; I’m Going to Pieces, Are You Coming Too; Turn It Then Toss It; Steel Helmets in the Early Afternoon; What on Earth is Happening on Sunday? (a silly rhyme in German, Was ist bloß am Sonntag los? ) . Those are some of his picture titles. His exhibition titles have their own poetry: Helmut Newton for the Poor; Buying America & Selling El Salvador; The Battle against Bedsores; Sand in the Vaseline; Peter: The Russian Position; Nada Arugula; Give Me a Summer Hole (Under the Volcano Part II); How in Times of War Do I Cope with Broken Bones and Futurism; 14 Million for a Howdy-Do; Clotheslines Backwardsround; Capri by Night.
Many of his titles and mottoes became catchphrases (“Dialogue with the Youth,” “Farewell to the Youth Bonus,” “Taking the Law into Your Own Hands Through False Purchases”), and others were used by curators again for group shows later: Dear Painter, Paint For Me; From Impression to Expression; Deep Looks; Do I Really Exist.
Being unread, or you might say un-miseducated, turned out to be an advantage for him. “Words come to him like a stray dog rolls up to you on the street,” the Schwabian News wrote in 1982 on the occasion of his show at the Rottweil Forum, “and from this accidental encounter he makes a little picture.” Sometimes, Niklas Maak wrote much later in the FAZ, you even had the impression that Martin threw together his pictures quite quickly, almost reluctantly, just to have something to give a good title to. And sometimes he even skipped the painting step altogether: in 1986 he published a book called 241 Picture Titles for Artists to Borrow. One of the titles is: With Nothing in Hand, There’s Nothing That Can Go Up in Smoke. Also in 1986 he put out a portfolio of posters called TU (“Title Unnecessary”).
Indeed, the titles had a life of their own—they never explained the pictures they went with and often the two didn’t go together at all. The relationship between picture and title was like that between an exhibition and its catalog: they stand alongside each other, complete, undermine, and counteract each other, but do not simply explain or illustrate anything. At its best, the result is what Martin admired in certain films, like The Graduate with its music by Simon and Garfunkel, which Martin thought of as one of the first music videos, or Doctor Zhivago, which he saw countless times. “You don’t just take in the image—and not just the sound—but both together.” One time, on Brussels Hotel Amigo stationery, he drew garden furniture and gardening tools with their measurements and wrote underneath: “If only that goddamn manicuring would stop.”
He often put the text right into the picture, messing up the picture in the process: he stuck large stickers on paintings (“I Love Nicaragua,” “I Love No Waiting,” “I Love Collagen,” . . .), stapled sayings and quotes to photographs, sprayed silicon onto canvases to make squirts of letters, often reducing the language so much that only initials remained: H.H.Y.F. (“Heil Hitler You Fetishists”), S.h.y. (“Siberia hates you”), T. M. H. F. G. W. (“The Modern House Of Good Will”). Sometimes Martin himself forgot after a few years what the initials stood for.
“Wrong I write wrong things, never mind, I’m dyslixic,” he explained to a prospective girlfriend in his first letter to her. He always treasured spelling mistakes and other errors and used them as creative, poetic possibilities. If it’s wrong, then do it right and make it really wrong. “The coffe, capucino, and its big brother Americano empty us out: Sure theyre German but we’re not used to drinking and handling so much coffe, capucino, and its big brother Americano. How do they do it?” The text is from “Address to the Br
ainless,” a talk Martin and Albert Oehlen gave at the Viennese Academy of Applied Art and later printed with a postscript: “Original grammatical mistakes copyrite Kippenberger-Oehlen.”
Annoying readers and viewers until they could no longer tell which mistakes were actual errors and which were made intentionally was something Martin loved to do. He acted this out in many of his books, but also in his other languages: painting, sculpture, or photography (his photos were often grainy, blurry, or out of focus).
“Isn’t misunderstanding what someone says the most acceptable misunderstanding in communication?” Martin asks in Café Central while describing the origin of his Peter sculptures: a Spanish carpenter had totally misunderstood Michael Krebber’s instructions. Both artists were so excited by the results that they started building in errors themselves. Martin had similar luck later in Andalusia: he asked a Spanish farmer to bring him one live chicken at twelve o’clock, and the farmer showed up with twelve dead chickens at one o’clock.
No small part of his literature was created live, in conversations at the bar or the dinner table. It was a fleeting art that would nonetheless be preserved in other people’s stories. The Swiss artist David Weiss called it “literature in situ”: Weiss was at a dinner party given by a gallerist in Zurich when Martin stood up and gave thumbnail portraits of everyone at the table, many of whom he had never met. Through Puberty to Success contains several such portraits, for example, “Hans-Peter Feldmann, antique toy dealer, lives sauna-style.” Sometimes it was enough for him to give someone a name, and almost everyone was misnamed, as though they were characters in Martin’s personal play. Hans-Jürgen Müller, the proselytizing contemporary art dealer, was rebaptized Hans-Jesus Müller; Reiner Opoku, Dokoupil’s assistant, became Okudoku; Birgit Küng, a very thin gallerist from Zurich, was “the Swiss pretzel stick”; Martin’s own assistant Johannes Wohnseifer was called Didi at the beginning because Martin thought he could be Diedrich Diederichsen’s little brother. Wohnseifer saw Martin’s turning the other person into his own creation as an “educational process”; once the process was complete, Wohnseifer was Johannes again.
Kippenberger Page 17