Kippenberger
Page 19
Martin put on a variety show at Café Einstein: a “One-Time-Only World Premiere” co-produced with the composer Gerhard Lampersberg (twenty-five years older than Martin) called “Whatever May Be / Berlin Stays Free / Jimmy Carter.” With another book (print run: four hundred copies).
It was not Martin’s first appearance at the Einstein. Back in 1979, the young Matthias Matussek had already written in the daily evening paper Abend about Martin’s Slaves of Tourism, an evening showing slides with Achim Schächtele of their tour of America:
He’s struck again: Together with “Akim from ’44,” the clever avant-gardist has pulled off what artists with serious reputations can only envy him for, and packed Café Einstein full to bursting. . . . People have once again coughed up their six marks, enjoyed a stifling, conspiratorial atmosphere, with candlelight to create an outpost of enlightened consciousness amid the late-capitalist decadence, and waited in suspense for what would come next. For no one knew what the title Slaves of Tourism was supposed to mean.
All at once the candles were blown out and the electric lights turned off, and the title melody from Once Upon a Time in the West , on the harmonica, rumbled out of the loudspeakers.
In walk Kippenberger and friend, in cowboy hats and heavy leather down to their boots. They use their flashlights to clear a path to a bed that had been set up for them, get undressed, relax with the beer they’d brought with them, and start running a prepared movie.
A film strip with lots of red stripes, a hectic collage pace, a totally dated experimental-film attitude with content that’s not up to snuff: oversized snatches of asphalt cracks in Manhattan sidewalks and the gorges of the Grand Canyon. The only organizing principle seemed to be Kippenberger himself.... What audience was this show actually meant for?
The people in charge of Café Einstein were apparently happier with the event than Matussek: immediately afterward, they hired Achim Schächtele (unemployed since S.O.36 had closed) to run their cultural events program.
KIPPENBERGER OUT OF BERLIN!
“Anyone as out as Tuscany and me / Shouldnt wear leather pants anymore,” runs a poem of Martin’s from July 1981. “Kippenberger Out Of Berlin!”: the phrase had already started appearing in bar bathrooms all over town—put up by Martin himself. Now it was time to put the demand into action.
“Berlin,” said the artist Angelika Margull, “was like a pressure cooker. At some point you had to get out.” Precisely what had made the city so attractive—the combination of wildness and manageability—grew hard to take after a couple of years. At some point, Martin wondered why the Jungle was still, after years and years, the only disco in town—“To me that’s the sign of a scene circling round and round on the same little spot.” Gallerists had been clamoring for pictures from the Moritzplatz painters since the success of the Haus am Waldsee show, and the underground was turning bourgeois—the Selbsthilfegalerie (Self-Help Gallery) they had founded in 1977 closed in 1981. Middendorf thinks that the movement’s success was one reason Martin left Berlin: “It was hard to go up against it.”
Martin was in the middle of the scene but at the same time shut out of it. He had “contributed a lot of his own special qualities to the liveliness and confidence of the group of artists,” according to the curator Johann-Karl Schmidt. “He was the motor for many of the artistic activities—even if an outboard motor.” In Kippenberger’s Office, he showed mostly other artists. Barbara Straka saw him as “an exotic species in the Berlin scene.” In 1982, a major show, Zeitgeist, opened in the Gropius building. Christos Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal had invited all his friends to show work—Ina Barfuss, Thomas Wachweger, Albert Oehlen, Werner Büttner—but not Martin, who embodied and shaped the zeitgeist more than almost anyone. Martin had already photographed the sign for dogs—“We have to stay outside”—and built it into the platform he had constructed for Claudia Skoda. It was something he would often experience himself.
The mood in the city grew more aggressive, too, with more and more violent clashes between squatters and the police, whole streets blocked off, the Kreuzberg in flames. After closing Kippenberger’s Office in 1980, Martin no longer had a fixed residence in Berlin. He stayed a few months with Angelika Margull, painting a little, and this was the period when he went to Paris. He then moved to Charlottenburg to stay with Uschi Welter, the costume designer. As he wrote in Through Puberty to Success :
Uschi has a built-in closet with a mirror that I dance and run back and forth in front of and every now and then I think about if what I have in my head is really right; when she’s there I ask her—and then she answers. After that I wander around through the room or take my afternoon nap . . . on the bottom shelf of her china cabinet there’s the necessary ingredients to make spaghetti, if I feel bad.
On top of everything else, Martin needed money—desperately. In the summer of 1981, the tax office threatened to kick down his apartment door (that is, Uschi Welter’s apartment door) to collect the 1,080 marks he owed in back taxes; a year later, Deutsche Bank cut off his credit because he had overdrawn his account by 6,734.75 marks. All his Berlin activities—exhibitions, catalogs, stickers, concerts, the Office—had cost money, a lot of money, but brought in nothing.
He brought in a little playing mau-mau and pinball, but he couldn’t live off that. And there was no way he wanted to go back to the kind of unskilled part-time jobs he had had as a student in Hamburg. He had to make money, and since art was the only thing he could do, he had to produce art he could sell.
The decisive impetus to really start painting came from his friend Meuser, the Düsseldorf sculptor. Martin later called it a turning point. Meuser said to him at the Paris Bar, “‘Kippenberger, the way you talk—you should just start painting pictures exactly the way you tell stories.’ And then I was off. Somehow that was a clear argument.” But not many people understood Martin as well as Meuser did. Martin’s painting would give rise to lots of misunderstandings in the years ahead.
Once again, Martin moved to Italy to really start painting; he also needed to find somewhere else to start selling his work and decided to return from Italy to Stuttgart and the Black Forest, not to Berlin. Berlin lacked not only major galleries but also buyers with disposable income—a lot of young people had come to Berlin, and the old people had stayed, but the middle-class, middle-aged adults had largely left for West Germany. It was time to leave town. Martin’s excessive lifestyle was also getting too boring, and too dangerous. Christel Buschmann, the director who gave him a small part in her movie Gibby West Germany, still remembers the exact moment when she was sitting with him at the window of the Paris Bar and he said, “I’m either going to the loony bin or to the Black Forest.”
PARIS BAR
Berlin no longer interested him, but there was still the Paris Bar and its owner, Michel Würthle. The Paris Bar was home base on the highway of Martin’s life—the “psychological port from which he set sail,” as Meuser called it. Martin knew that whenever he went, there would always be someone there for him, morning, noon, and night, seven days a week. Spoerri’s snare-picture assemblage would still be hanging from the ceiling, the same waiters would be there, oysters and blood sausage would still be on the menu. He knew he would run into someone—friends, enemies, strangers, Dieter Roth, Otto Sander, Bruno Brunnet, Lüpertz, Koberling, maybe Fassbinder, too. The food and drink were free for him and a guest: back before Martin could sell his art, he made a deal with Michel Würthle to trade the black and white paintings from Florence that no one else wanted for lifetime free food. Now the pictures were hanging in a corner of Paris Bar near the bathroom.
He could act at home at the restaurant on Kantstrasse—he was allowed to climb on the tables, pull down his pants, tell his endless jokes, drink, and insult people. The owner did it, too. They danced together until dawn, and then “the hour of turning into an animal” struck, as Heiner Müller called it.
When Michel Würthle and his partner, Reinald Nohal, took over the Paris Bar in 19
79, it was already a French-style bistro with an artist clientele. Then the two Austrians gave it their own special touch, drawing on their memories of Café Hawelka in Vienna. Michel embodied the combination of cultures, with his worldly Parisian elegance and sharp Viennese humor; his real name was Michael, but he preferred to speak French with his waiters. Despite having lived in Paris for years, Michel came across less as a Frenchman than as an actor playing a Frenchman, with the way he smoked, the way he dressed, and the way he performed at his bar. The Italians, too, had taught him important things about style and la bella figura : “That was bananas for me, in Rome, to see someone keeping a spare pair of silk socks in his Ferrari but no money for gas.”
“First Meeting at the Exile” (Michel Würthle)
© Michael Würthle
“Michel Würthle: Foreigner (Au), unrecognized vocal talent at a given hour, e.g. to give just two representative examples: ‘Humanity is the hit, that’s it’ and ‘(What’s up here with) Doodle-ee-doo.’ Can smoke through his nose while performing.” This is Martin’s description of Michel in Through Puberty to Success.
Michel’s grandfather ran a well-known gallery in Vienna. Michel had gone to the arts and crafts school in Cologne at sixteen, studied with Kokoschka at the Salzburg Summer Academy (“I liked him, he was so well dressed, a dandy in flannel slacks”), and ended up at the Art Academy in Vienna, where he found the stench of academia so repulsive that he spent the whole time going to the movies. He could find a lot to copy there, too.
He was ten years older than Martin and had come to Berlin in 1970. They met each other at the Exile, the Viennese bar and in Kreuzberg that Michel ran with Oswald Wiener. In Berlin, the environment was not so Catholic and conservative, but another form of cultural barbarism ruled the day: the culinary kind. As a result, Ingrid and Oswald Wiener and Michel Würthle opened the Exile with artists like Dieter Roth, Günter Brus, and Richard Hamilton helping to decorate it.
Wiener and Roth carried out the principle of provocation, the same way Martin liked to. “Nothing but tests,” Michel said. “The ceremony consisted of the most unpleasant shit-talk you can imagine, using the most ordinary expressions, and the examinee’s role was to not show any shock.” He later described his first meeting with Martin as “a kind of sniffing each other out, Mexican dogfight style. Later I already felt that he really loved me.” Wilhelm Schürmann said that Martin “trusted [Michel] with every bone in his body”; Michel was his best friend, stage partner, drinking buddy, and travel companion. “All night long Martin could only look at Michel,” said Johannes Wohnseifer, Martin’s assistant. In Wohnseifer’s view, one thing Martin admired about him might have been his stamina: every evening Michel would be standing ramrod straight at the door of the Paris Bar, greeting the guests, even if he had spent the whole night before pulling down his pants with Martin and dancing on the tables and sometimes falling off of them, too. Martin liked this extreme “combination of insanity and professionalism,” as Michel’s wife Catherine described it: “the ambiguity, the irony and performance.” Catherine said Michel was “ready at every moment to give you the most stately Viennese kiss on the hand and let fly with a fart at the same time.”
“Portrait of Martin Kippenberger” (Michel Würthle)
© Michael Würthle
When Martin was in Berlin, he was at the Paris Bar almost all day—morning, afternoon, evening, and all night too, even if he had a room at the Kempinski (a hotel he liked chiefly because of its location, around the corner from the Paris Bar). He didn’t even have breakfast in the hotel. Instead he went to the Paris right after waking up and sat down with the staff, who ate breakfast at 10: . He talked and joked with them, drew and pondered, and had them tell him stories. Their life stories. Michel said, “He had the waiters in the palm of his hand. They loved him, they had fun together, he could do anything with them.”
The legendary Herr Breslauer, with his artful combover, won Martin’s special admiration: “Employed as a conveyor of meals and drinks in one and the same bar on Kantstr. since before I was born,” as Martin described him in Through Puberty to Success.
All over the world, old-school maître d’s like Herr Breslauer were recognized by Martin as kindred souls. They had attitude, pride, and style; they never curried favor or demeaned themselves; and they always used the formal Sie, even with regular guests, at a time when using the informal du was almost mandatory. They were not students, temps, or wannabe artists, but professionals in the world of service, as skilled and masterful in their career as Martin was in his, to the point where they made it look easy. In their uniforms they were born performers who knew they were playing a role and at the same time were fully themselves. And so Martin always treated them as his equals, with respect, and as artists in their own discipline. Many waiters remember Martin as kind, funny, and not arrogant in the least. What they had in common, in the view of Attila Corbaci, a waiter at the Exile in Berlin when he met Martin and later the owner of Café Engländer in Vienna, was that they were born to be what they were: like art, “gastronomy is something you can’t learn at school. You either have it or you don’t.”
Martin later said that he only used the medium of painting “to tell stories or make a copy of myself.” He used the Paris Bar as his stage, or his museum, where he could show his own works and later a part of his collection. In 1991, on the night the large Metropolis exhibition opened at the Martin Gropius Building—all the important contemporary artists were represented, all except Martin—he rehung paintings throughout the entire bar. In a spectacular action, he put up an entire exhibition of his own with the help of friends and students in one night. “It was magnificent,” Helmut Middendorf said. “He knew that after the Metropolis opening everyone, absolutely everyone who was anyone in the art world, would come to the Paris Bar. It was the best contribution to the show.” “The most alive and lively,” according to Fischli and Weiss, the Swiss artists, not least because Martin’s exhibition showed many young artists, especially female artists, whom he found interesting: Louise Lawler, Laurie Simmons, Zoe Leonard, Andrea Fraser, and others. Of course many more people saw Martin’s show than the Metropolis show, since it hung on the walls of the bar for years. Yellowed with age and lived-in like a real home, the Paris Bar now had as many pictures on the wall as we once had on the walls of our house in Frillendorf—some of them actually the same pictures.
Martin continued to come by the Paris Bar, out of love for Michel, even when he started to think Berlin was horrible and no longer felt as much at home, even in his old favorite bar. After the fall of the Wall, there were Bonn politicians, Berlin hairdressers, and tourists among the artists; the place lost some of its exclusivity since it now had competitors in the city. During the nineties, Martin preferred to visit Michel at his house in Greece instead of at the Paris Bar.
[ 1 ] Heinrich Zille (1858–1929), illustrator famous for his depictions of Berlin’s working-class life, prostitutes, beggars, etc.
[ 2 ] In German, Neid und Gier, das ist mein Bier —literally, “Envy and greed, that’s my beer.”
[ 3 ] Comparable to “Heart and Soul” in the U.S.
[ 4 ] “Der Eiermann,” a hit in Germany for Klaus & Klaus.
[ 5 ] Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor (American Sector Broadcasting), a West Berlin radio and TV station.
[ 6 ] The title riffs on the German word “Jugendstil” (literally “New Style”), the movement corresponding to Art Nouveau.
CHAPTER FOUR
STUTTGART AND
THE BLACK FOREST
Invest in oil!
— MK
“Berlin needs a new paint job,” Martin declared in a postcard to Berlin from Stuttgart. “Arrived safe and sound.” Redoing the past was never Martin’s way—he would rather move somewhere new, where the paint was still wet, as it were, even to provincial Swabia if the opportunity arose. Max Hetzler said, “Stuttgart was good for him.”
One day, Martin showed up at Hetzler’s front door to un
load an entire VW bus full of art. He had said on the phone that he had painted some pictures he wanted to show the gallerist and Hetzler had said OK, thinking Martin would come by with a few photographs, maybe one or two paintings as examples. He hadn’t expected a load of freight like this.
But Martin always worked “for the moment.” Whatever he had, he wanted to show without delay: paint today, exhibit tomorrow. He had driven to Siena with thirty blank canvases and had come back a couple of weeks later with thirty paintings. He had called his old friend Achim Schächtele from Italy and told him he needed to come down, and so Achim did, getting a week’s vacation in Martin’s bed and breakfast, painting another few paintings for him, and then driving him back to Germany. Martin sat in the back of the van on a little chair, crammed in among finished paintings, stretchers, and barrels of oil paint that he proudly explained he had gotten dirt cheap. Hetzler wasn’t the only gallerist Martin had called, but he was the only one who didn’t say no right off the bat.
They had met in Berlin two years before, while Martin was still an artist without any art, without a studio, and without a home. Hetzler had visited him during his grand tour with the older, established Stuttgart gallerist Hans-Jürgen Müller. The IXth International Art Congress and Deutscher Künstlerbund (German Artist Association) exhibition was due to take place in Stuttgart in 1979, a major event that yielded lavish grants and support for related activities as well, so Hetzler and Müller were traveling through Europe to collect contemporary art for their exhibit, “Europa ’79.” They had hit if off with Martin and spent their nights going around Berlin with him, but he didn’t end up in their show. If you don’t have any paintings, you can’t show any paintings.