Martin’s ad lib performances, when he stood up at a meal or in a bar and told an age-old joke, were like solo pieces. He loved these jokes for the fact that they told stories, sometimes whole life stories, in the shortest possible form, quick and dry and surprising—then Martin’s joke was to take these jokes and drain all the humor out of them, destroying their concision and dragging them out for half an hour, or longer. In the words of Michel Würthle, “That’s something you rarely see: this mix of dry humor and Maghrebi embellishment.”
In one of these jokes, a man leaves a doctor’s office and steps out onto the sidewalk in the shopping district “and the way he described it was magnificent,” Johannes Wohnseifer said. “Every planter of flowers, every bike rack.” Martin could keep it going for hours, having the poor man think: “What do I have? Do I have lobster? Do I have cod? Do I have salmon?” If he was telling the joke in Kassel, it was the Kassel shopping district, down to the last detail. “It still makes me laugh today,” Wohnseifer says. Finally, Martin had the man go back to the doctor and ask him what he has: “You have cancer [the same word as crab in German].” “Other people got tired of the joke, but Martin made me laugh till my sides hurt. When he saw it he kept ratcheting it up until I sometimes had to beg him to stop!”
Martin said once that he could stop painting but he could never stop talking.
Another time, he said that what he really needed were people to write down whatever he said in passing. Some people did; Martin did have a few Boswells. But many people today are sorry that no one kept a tape recorder running. He rarely gave interviews to journalists, for the same reason that he never let art historians write his catalog texts: he was afraid to be misunderstood or pigeonholed. But he did give a few interviews to non-journalists, often artists themselves, which served, as he told the fanzine Artfan, to “let him formulate something,” as his earlier letter-writing had. He considered publishing one of them, the interview with Jutta Koether, as an experimental novel.
GERMAN LANGUAGE GOOD LANGUAGE
Martin loved the German language, and whenever he was abroad he bought Bild (which you could find in every village in Europe) and Der Spiegel. He didn’t speak any other language except English, though he often acted like he did, or just talked with his hands. Not being able to do something, or being able to do it only badly, had its own appeal, as he showed at his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Instead of being embarrassed by his limited linguistic ability, he gave an on-camera interview with his curator Roberto Ohrt that could not have been more comical: to answer Ohrt’s questions he simply read passages from his own book with a serious face in fake-French. Which sounded more like Dutch.
“German language good language,” he said. “You can play with it, always take it in a new direction.” He did with it what he did with everything: whatever he wanted. He freed it from conventional rules, treated it as a living thing, and saw words as pictures or just took them literally as words. When Michael Krebber said, “Art is an allotment garden,” Martin built a little artwork out of a garden fence; when he made “Hunger” sculptures, he drilled holes in the styrofoam figures’ bellies. He loved discovering words he’d never heard, like the English word “spoiler” for the thing on the back of a car. As Albert Oehlen said, “he invented his own language. He gave things names, but not made-up names, just words that he thought fit better. He turned this word around, used that one ironically, a third sounded like a certain word but was actually different.” Jutta Koether called it Martin’s personal “jive.”
His habit of compressing language meant that people often couldn’t understand what he was saying. He took the shortest path between two thoughts, even if that meant others wouldn’t know exactly what lay between them. His jive left a lot of gaps. For example, he wrote on a menu in Burgenland during a meal, “Mommy’s birthdaywishhappy with insalata seed & sweetbird.” In other words, the noodle casserole our mother used to make that he always requested for his birthday as a child, with a corn salad, called Vogerlsalat in Austrian (roughly, birder’s salad), made with sweet pumpkin seed oil.
The more he drank, the more cryptic he became, until he finally went under in his own secret language, as Roberto Ohrt called it. At the same time, Martin couldn’t understand that other people couldn’t understand him: “I’m not talking funny at all.” That was one reason he insisted that Martin Prinzhorn write about him: Prinzhorn, a linguist, “took the dyslexic aspect into consideration,” as he put it. “Martin was very conscious that dyslexia gave him a different approach.” As a dyslexic, Martin not only mixed up letters when he wrote, he also combined different thoughts in an extremely idiosyncratic way, free-associated, thought in leaps and jumps, and “started his sentences in one place and ended up somewhere completely different,” according to Isabelle Graw, editor of the art journal Texte zur Kunst (Texts on Art) . “They were never complete sentences. He talked very fast, swallowed a lot of words, spoke in keywords and bullet points—it was totally brilliant and funny, and very unique.” She called his way of talking “wild” while Martin called described it, in his “22nd papertiger not afraid of repetition” like this: “Even if you can’t understand what this shit is saying, you know what it means.”
American artists seem to have had an easier time with Martin’s language: since they didn’t understand German anyway (or Martin’s English, which sounded like German), they didn’t try to understand his Kippenberger-German either. They watched him tell jokes simply as a “stand-up comic’s performance,” according to Christopher Wool, who said he almost died laughing at the 109th telling of some nonsensical joke despite not understanding a word of it. “His sense of humor could be very abstract.” Martin told Jutta Koether that in telling jokes what matters is the form, “how you put it together, how you tell it.” The American artist Stephen Prina said, “It was as if Samuel Beckett was telling a joke. When Martin started telling his turtle joke, we thought, Here it comes again. How will it sound this time? We gave ourselves over to the poetry of it.”
Even as a fourteen-year-old Martin wanted to write a book, “about evil no less.” He never totally gave up his Parisian dream of being a writer. “Predestination says I’ll write the VERY GREAT book,” he said. “But I know I can’t write it alone, so I’ll do it with art people who know how.”
He never did, but he did write what he called a long poem, shortly before his death, and recited it at the opening of his major exhibition at the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum in Geneva:
People de la Muse
a typical Artist poem
PEOPLE WHO KEEP YOU WAITING
YEARNERS FOR THE ALWAYS-AVANT-
GARDE
WHINING BOOKSELLERS
“I HAVE ALL YOUR BOOKS” BOASTERS
CIRRHOSIS OF THE LIVER IS NO EXCUSE
FOR BAD ART
NOT BORN AN ARTIST
LIFETIME TENURED PROFESSORS
Artist of his generation
Collect small & paint big yourself
Collector with 2 1/2 PICTURES INSTEAD OF
ONE
CHARITY EVENTS
EXCELLENT ARTIST RESTAURANTS
Sensitive furniture-moving for art
Art-lovers who hate letting you finish what you’re
saying
WANDERESSES WALKING IN TIME ON
THE WIDE PATH
ARTISTWIDOWTERROR
POSTHUMOUS ARTIST COUPLES
NO CATALOG CHEAPSKATE-PETERS
BECAUSE OF MISER-FATHERS
ARTISTS WHO PUBLICLY ADMIRE OTHER
GALLERISTS
UNIVERSALLY-CONSTANTLY-CRITICAL
NON-MUSEUM-GOERS
$10 SPONSORS AND $18500 VOLUNTEER
WORKERS
BUILT MUSEUMS AS AVAILABLE SPACE
FOR ARCHITECTS & EMPLOYEES
ARTISTS WITHOUT A CORRECT SENSE
OF SELF-PRESENTATION
IMPOTENT QUEER FISH WITH OR
WITHOUT POCKET MONEY
; ART BUSKERS
DISCOVERERS WHO BUY EVERYTHING
NONDISCOVERIES FLEEING THEREFROM
SHE BIDS IT UP, HE KNOCKS IT DOWN
INTERESTED PARTIES WHO’LL DROP BY
AGAIN NEXT WEEK
YOUNG GERMAN ART BUYERS IN N.Y.
PEOPLE WHO WOULD RATHER SAY NO
THAN FAIL
ART WARM
Painted-on gray
PLASTIC GRANDMOTHERS
Attempts at exposing without revealing
DRAWING MOMENTARY FORM
THROUGH TIME
Chatting up conservative preserves qua art savvy
SUPPOSEDLY INTELLECTUAL HUMOR
Retouched “I KNOW THAT ALREADY” attitude
ECO-PRO & CONTRA-LONGLIFE
INCINERATORS
Operetta = megapicture
RESPECTABLE PERFORMANCE = lots of
moss
Re-cabling not de-naveling
SQUARE-CIRCLE-SCRIBBLE-STONESAW-
FRACTION
“LET’S GO WEST” CURATORS
“LET’S GO SOUTH” CURATORS
Enfant-terrible-critics for everything
WINE LABEL ARTISTS
Reserving 3 pictures (worse than not buying)
Theory-heavy contemporary art
CIAO MEGA ART BABY!
THROUGH PUBERTY TO SUCCESS
“We were trying things out,” the director Ulrike Ottinger said about her time in Berlin. “We were preparing ourselves, Martin was gathering his energies, preparing—it was the period when chaos swirled inside you, before it congealed and formed, and something came out.” Berlin was probably the most intense time of his life. “He was like a sponge, sucking everything up.” Helmut Middendorf said that the photographs and newspaper clippings that would serve as models for Martin’s paintings for years to come hung in the bathrooms at Kippenberger’s Office.
But eventually it was time to give the sponge a good squeeze. It was 1981, shortly before Martin left Berlin for good; he was already halfway to southern Germany in spirit. The period of being a genius-dilettante and do-it-yourself gallerist was over: paintings were being snatched out of the hands of the Moritzplatz painters, as well as the Mülheim Freedom painters in Cologne and the painters from Italy. “1980 was a rupture in Germany,” the critic Manfred Hermes wrote. “Painting had just recently seemed empty, invalid, and irrelevant, then suddenly ‘to paint again’ was an unavoidable slogan among contemporary artists. It was, to be sure, a specific kind of painting that ruled the day: large pictures, figurative, often coarse and with an aura of emotional directness.” The Moritzplatz painters had their breakthrough in 1980 with their exhibition at the Haus am Waldsee, a turning point for the whole art scene in Germany. To the arts editor of the Tagesspiegel in Berlin, it was “like a warm spring rain after a long drought.”
Martin were in contact with the Moritzplatz painters and went to all of their openings, which were more than openings—they were huge parties. But he himself had “imposed” on himself “a prohibition against painting.”
Baselitz later said that painting had never been dead, “but it was not allowed. I knew what we weren’t supposed to do—but of course I didn’t know what we were supposed to do.”
Martin also knew what he wasn’t going to do: dash up to an empty canvas and go to work, cheerfully slathering away with his brush. He had produced very little in Berlin, for example Lovey-dovey, Here’s My Super Breakfast (a painting later used as the album cover for Johansson’s S.O.36 show), a German shepherd painting called Here, Asta, Lick Me , and But Ducks Don’t Need Cotton Socks, Their Feet Always Stay Cool and Fresh in the Water.
How can you paint when you’re not supposed to paint any more?
Martin’s answer: Get someone else to paint for you. Huge pieces, done in style. Martin didn’t sign up just anybody, he used the best of the best, “the star among stars,” as he would later write: Werner, the movie-poster painter he had met through his friend Hanno Huth, the movie producer (“they liked each other right off”). “In the Ufa film studios,” Martin wrote about his representative,
he started doing ladies and gentlemen like Greta Garbo and Hans Albers (50 mark tip) in the size they deserved. He was off and running, by the square meter. In the postwar years, the ruined Ku-damm consisted primarily of advertising pictures from the master’s hand. 56 now, he is clearly the holder of two European records: extended outdoor exhibitions, from the Ku-damm to Bielefeld, and the second record in size: he did a St. Nicholas of more than 2150 sq ft.... After painting Bud Spencers and Hanna Schygullas, he did Kippenbergers, who forbid himself to paint some time ago.
Martin gave Werner the assignment to make twelve oil paintings, six by nine feet each, from Polaroids, many of them featuring Martin. Martin may not have set his hand to any of the painting, but he showed them in the Realism Studio of the NGBK, a left-wing collective headed by Otto Schily (later Germany’s minister of the interior). Martin called the show Dear Painter, Paint For Me.
It was a thunderbolt, a dialectical master stroke: for Diedrich Diederichsen, it was “a pointedly non-naive conceptual work that at the same time expressed the greatest enthusiasm for naiveté, simplification, and sentimentality. What underlay it was the deepest, but also the most cheerful, mistrust of the artist-subject.” Martin had done it: had his cake and eaten it too.
This first major exhibition, like so many of his later ones, came about because of his own efforts: he just decided he wanted it. While many people in Berlin considered him nothing more than a discotheque type, he put on a gray, slightly tight suit, tucked his book 1/4 Century Kippenberger under his arm, walked into the Realism Studio on Hardengergstrasse, and said that he wanted to “do some exhibition.” The curator, Barbara Straka, was among those in the NGBK who were looking for new forms of political art beyond socialist realism, and she liked what she saw: “the ironization of reality by means of everyday banalities transformed into art; defamiliarizing them by combining them into (apparently) context-free montages of text and image.” The show turned out to be a surprise for Straka herself: “He didn’t have us visit his studio first and didn’t let on what he was doing.” She didn’t know that in fact he had no studio—not even an apartment of his own.
There had never been such a conceptual project at the Realism Studio, not to mention one with so much humor. For the first time (according to Martin), he sold a large painting—and right at the moment when his inheritance was entirely used up.
The thunderbolt then turned into a real lightning storm: several weeks of Kippenberger showing what he was capable of, right before he left the city for good. Kippenberger as painter, employer, author, performer, musician, conceptual artist, and monopolizer.
“ Through Puberty to Success” was the overarching title for the series of events. “The whole thing was thoroughly orchestrated,” Barbara Straka said, “in a way that hadn’t existed at the time.” It started on Martin’s twenty-sixth birthday, February 25, with a book presentation in the Paris Bar for the book Through Puberty to Success. It was a kind of balance sheet of his life and travels to that point—a collage of pictures and texts, bursting with ideas. The events continued on March 1 in Wanne-Eickel in the Ruhr, at the Our Fritz Mine (Martin’s printed program made no mention of the fact that this was where and when our father was celebrating his sixtieth birthday), then came the opening of Dear Painter, Paint For Me at the NGBK on March 6 at 7:00, and a few hours later Kippenberger in the Noodle Casserole Yes Please! opened at the Petersen Gallery nearby. On March 11, at the Munich group exhibition Rundschau Deutschland (roughly, “Germany Today”), he showed his VW bus among all his colleagues’ paintings—to the great annoyance of the event’s organizer, who actually set up concrete bollards to stop it. Achim Schächtele, Martin’s chauffeur on this occasion, got a dozen students to lift the bus up over the barrier so that Martin could stand on its roof as planned and give his speech. Finally, the crowning event: live shows at Café Einstein on March 24 and 25.
There were not many galleries in Berlin at the time, and very few with reputations that extended beyond the region: Rudolf Springer had one (where Martin always wanted to get a show but never did), and there was René Block, who gave a platform to Beuys and the Fluxus movement. But Martin had found a kindred spirit in Jes Petersen, who showed Kippenberger in the Noodle Casserole Yes Please! “Anarchist like a hedonist / Avantgarde like a Satanist / With a giant silhouette / Giant hat on his giant head / That was Jes as a gallerist” (so went the 2006 eulogy to Petersen by a friend). Petersen was seventeen years older than Martin, a farmer’s son from Schleswig-Holstein in the north who had refused to do what he was supposed to do: follow in his father’s footsteps on the farm. Instead he discovered modernism; preferred reading Kafka, Musil, Henry Miller, and Hans Henny Jahnn to tilling the soil; corresponded with Picasso, Raul Hausmann, André Breton, Allen Ginsberg, and Gerhard Rühm; traveled around; and became a publisher, author, and exhibition organizer who, in Thomas Kapielski’s words, “showed the right things early, in the seventies and eighties.” Like Martin, Petersen had a marked interest in crossing the lines between literature and art, and a predilection for Austrians like Konrad Bayer and Gerhard Rühm. Petersen was an extravagant, excessive man, always with too little money and too many debts; after the fall of the Wall, he ended up in jail for dealing cocaine.
Petersen had never believed, in any case, that you could make money with art. But even when he was diabetic and obese and could move only with difficulty in his little Charlottenburg triangle (apartment, gallery, and his local bar, the Zwiebelfisch), “you could still smell his enthusiasm,” as the artist Georg Herold said. He was an autodidact who put on shows in his gallery on Pestalozzistrasse out of passion, “perversely going his own way,” in Angelika Margull’s words. He didn’t show what promised to be a success—he showed what he liked. Martin would have two more exhibitions with him: From New Style to Free Style [6] a year later, with Barfuss and Wachweger, and Clotheslines Backwardsround with Georg Herold in 1985, long after he had put Berlin behind him.
Kippenberger Page 18