Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  Now it was different. His show A Secret of Mr. A. Onassis’s Success opened on September 18, 1981. The paintings hung close together on the walls of Hetzler’s gallery, all the same size (twenty by twenty-four inches) and in a series, like the Florence paintings, but this time in color:

  Series A: Guitars Not Named Gudrun

  Series B: The Prevented Flannel Rags

  Combo F: From Fussyfred to Heartybrink

  Combo G: Capri by Night

  Assortment I: The Hermann Family

  Assortment I 2: New Conservatism

  Assortment I 3: Funny, Funny

  Set: Known from Movies, Radio, Television, and

  Police Call Columns

  The motifs included a refrigerator ( What Saves Every Shared Apartment ), a torso ( AOK, which is also the abbreviation for the cheapest German health insurance), pasta tongs ( My Friend Udo ), and a stupid joke ( Older Lady Cleaning the House ). This time, he hadn’t gotten other people to paint for him—or only as rare exceptions—even if the invitation said “Paintings by Hans Siebert After Models by Kippenberger,” whether to confuse the public or confuse the punks. (He was afraid, he told a friend, that the punks might come from Berlin and destroy his exhibition.) The truth was he had painted the pictures himself, with the “courage for garbage” he always demanded of himself. He was helped only with hanging the pictures, and with the titles, by his friend Meuser from Düsseldorf.

  He had done it: found a commercial gallerist and thus a home in the art market, along with a whole artist-family. Hetzler also represented Albert and Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Günther Förg, Hubert Kiecol, and Meuser. Many of them were already Martin’s friends, and he would soon meet the others through the gallery. For the first time, Martin was taken seriously as an artist, not just seen as a character on the Berlin scene; for the first time, the public was not just being entertained by Martin, they were buying his work, too. “Invest in oil!” the invitations cried. “Starting at a couple hundred marks, choose for yourself!”

  In Stuttgart he acquired a circle of collectors, who would remain faithful friends and supporters from then to the end of his life (if their finances held out that long): the Grässlin family in the Black Forest, Uli Knecht in Stuttgart, Helmut Seiler from Augsburg (who slept in a sleeping bag in the gallery, since he had no money to spare for a hotel), and Wilhelm Schürmann, visiting from the Rhineland. The Essen collector Helmut Metzger bought work as well, as did Hans-Jürgen Müller, who had just changed camps and was now a collector instead of a gallerist.

  The pictures were cheap, but that was not the only reason people bought them. Max Hetzler says today, “They bought them out of real pleasure. Here was an artist you could reach out and touch—someone you could go out with at night. Martin really was an amazingly entertaining person, who got people excited and intrigued with him. Back then he didn’t snub people so much either. It was a very friendly atmosphere, no aggression, no pressure, no competition.” Everyone knew each other in the small Stuttgart art world. “It was very relaxed,” according to the photographer Wilhelm Schürmann, “people didn‘t feel pushed to act glamorous.”

  So the collectors followed Martin’s advice and invested in oil, which is not to say they saw the paintings as financial investments—no one at the time could have predicted that art was about to increase in value so dramatically. They bought the pieces because they were funny and different. “We had never seen pictures like that,” Uli Knecht said; he was excited by “their vulgarity, their shock value.”

  These were precisely the reasons others didn’t buy. Rudolf Zwirner, an art dealer from Cologne who was successful with American artists, among others, tells the story of meeting a major collector at Martin’s show who was complaining about missed opportunities: “If only we’d met ten years ago! We could have bought a great collection—Warhols, Rauschenbergs, Lichtensteins, Jasper Johns, all the big stuff.” That’s water under the bridge, Zwirner said, but here we are today with the chance to start something now—with Kippenberger. The collector just laughed at him. “Oh, I mean real art! That’s not painting.”

  What Martin liked about Stuttgart was the small circle he found there and the chance to begin something new far away from Berlin. Stuttgart had the advantages of the periphery—it was easier to get established there than in Cologne, for example—without being entirely provincial. There was, after all, the Neue Staatsgalerie, the Ketterer auction house (whose auctions drew the whole art world twice a year), and Hans-Jürgen Müller’s gallery, opened in 1958, where he had shown the international avant-garde (Frank Stella, Yves Klein, Cy Twombly) quite early on. “The pictures cost $100 each,” Müller recalled, “and still had no buyers.” Of course he did sell some pieces—unlike the Berliners, people in Swabia had money—as well as advising the Essen collector Helmut Metzger and the Grässlin family in Sankt Georgen.

  Müller had meanwhile given up his gallery and was just starting to assemble what would soon be a major collection of art from the 1980s, shown in 1985 in a Darmstadt museum as an exhibition called Deep Looks . (One of Martin’s pictures from his stay in southern Germany is titled Small Apartment, Deep Looks ; another is Big Apartment, Never Home. ) Müller was a hard-drinking enthusiast for modern art with a real sense of mission; he would soon turn his missionary zeal toward ecology and culture. At the time, he was in a relationship with Ursula Schurr, who had a gallery in the same building as Hetzler. He met Bärbel Grässlin through her before she joined Hetzler.

  Then there were Tanja Grunert and Achim Kubinski: younger, wilder gallerists. In 1981, Martin sent out invitations to a Dialogue with the Youth show at their gallery; when the youth didn’t actually show up, everyone just went out to lunch. Still, Martin ended up with a nice invitation he could show people: a photograph of his bandaged head after his beating at the hands of Berlin’s youth. Later, he would paint a version, too. In general, his invitations and posters were always more than merely informative announcements: they constituted an independent branch of his graphic work. Martin also sometimes made what he called “belated posters,” if he wasn’t able to pull one together before an opening (for the Farewell to the Youth Bonus II show with Albert Oehlen in Thomas Borgmann’s gallery, for example).

  THE SAHARA PROGRAM AND

  ANTI-SAHARA PROGRAM

  After the opening at Hetzler’s gallery, Martin took a break that could hardly have been more radical: he retreated to a small town in the Black Forest. After the excesses of his life in Hamburg and Berlin, he spent a winter living a family life and drying out. He called it his Sahara Program.

  Martin titled a 1990 catalog Homesick Highway , and it is hard to imagine a more concise description of the life he led between the two extremes: constantly on the road at top speed, constantly settling down in another different city. Jutta Koether wrote in the catalog, “If you want to understand Kippenberger, you have to understand him as an artist who always makes use of a skewed, backward perspective. He stays in one place, for a time, lives life to the fullest there, then abandons it just as quickly.” He always intended to stay in a given place, as he assured Koether in 1991: “I never managed to do it, but the intention was always there and still is.” To stay was always a possibility that turned out to be an impossibility after all; Martin’s craving for a home could only be satisfied temporarily.

  Martin made a series of drawings with the floor plans of all his apartments and rooms—taking stock of his Moves 1957-1988, as the catalog was subtitled—and called the series Input-Output. For Martin, the cliché of being happily married with two kids was a terrifying vision of comfortable domesticity that would have meant the end of his life as a creative artist. He was always angry at fellow artists who made things too easy for themselves—accepting professorships, moving out to a castle in the country, working in only one style or on only one theme once it had proven to be successful—though of course it was stressful to lead the restless life that he led. “Insanely stressful.”

  He was at ho
me with people, not in particular places.

  Martin sought out rest stops along his highway, places he could refuel for a night or a few days, sometimes even enjoying a domestic life for a few weeks without it smothering him. These were friends who he knew would take him in, with whom he would not have to constantly produce. He had portable families everywhere and he could show up without warning, be welcomed like a prodigal son, be spoiled and not need to take responsibility for anything—he could worry only about art, a good time, and women. When his tank was full he could disappear again at any time, driving on down the highway of his life.

  He often moved in with someone else rather than looking for a place his own. On one poster, he called himself “Occupant”; Grässlin’s granddaughter complained he was more like a squatter, since he made every house his own, the same way he reshaped, overran, and appropriated his bars or his cities.

  The Grässlins were his most important host family. Martin called them “his alleged family” in the 1994 catalog for their large Kippenberger collection, collected since 1981. In the Black Forest idyll of Sankt Georgen, he found what had long since disappeared from Essen: a mother, a home, and a large family that collected art. His move to the Black Forest was a return to his childhood. Sankt Georgen was even near the boarding school he had attended as a boy. On New Years Day 1982, he visited the school with Karola Grässlin and did what he had always dreamed of doing : went to lunch at the Golden Eagle and spent the night. Of course, he was no longer a child. He allowed himself the Anti-Sahara Program on holidays, but it turned out to be impossible to get a drink in the evening, either in the inn or in the village, and they ended up clambering up a steep mountain in deep snow in search of a nightcap, with Karola in gold pumps. He told Karola how strict it had been at boarding school, and that whenever he misbehaved he had had to go running through the woods and around the lake. He could not remember anything good about his time there.

  The Grässlins were big, loud, tightly knit, and firmly rooted. The composition of the family was a familiar one for Martin—three sisters and one brother, and Martin made five—but in this family, Martin was the oldest! Bärbel Grässlin worked for Max Hetzler but was still so influenced by the bourgeois world of her youth that Martin was “a shock” for her: he always seemed more than just one year older than she was, since “he already had such a totally different life behind him.” Thomas Grässlin was in a nearby town, studying to take over as his father’s successor in the family business; he was an artistic advisor for the Rottweil Forum and was a driving force behind extending the art collection in a more contemporary direction. Sabine was studying haute cuisine near Lake Constance and came back to Sankt Georgen on weekends; her young daughter Katharina, nicknamed the Scream Monster, stayed with Sabine’s mother. Finally, Karola, the youngest, was just finishing high school. It was a clan with which Martin could eat, drink, party, dance, fight, and play mau-mau. He could make fun of them and interest them in his projects.

  They were one thing he wasn’t : rich. Their father, Dieter Grässlin, had run a very successful company that made electric timers and had started the family art collection, concentrating on Arte Povera and Art Informel. He was Baroque in both personality and physical appearance, and bought art “like a feudal prince,” acquiring pictures by the dozen, according to the gallerist Hans-Jürgen Müller. He had died suddenly in 1976 (the same year as our mother), and his children had just started focusing on the artists of their own generation, including Martin and the Oehlen brothers, Büttner, Förg, Kiecol, and Meuser, and later Franz West, Michael Krebber, and others.

  After Dieter’s death, his widow, Anna, became the head of the family. She was a strong woman, her hair in a flawless wave, whom Martin was only too happy to let mother him. “He was really very vulnerable,” she would later say. “Strangers could find him shocking. He knew how to behave himself, he had manners, he just didn’t always put them into practice.” He always treated her with great respect—“he never said a single nasty word to me”—however mean and cruel he could be to her daughters. “Anna was always the greatest,” Martin’s assistant Johannes Wohnseifer later said. “He would never let anyone criticize her.” He liked her nonchalance, her kind-hearted discipline, and her humor. Never once in all the years he visited and spent the night there did he do what had so gotten on our mother’s nerves: bring home another of his ever-changing girlfriends. “It would never have crossed his mind,” Anna Grässlin said. She could say things like “I’d never be Kippi’s little floozy!” and he would quote them in public and in his catalogs with great delight. In general he loved the family’s unique language, how they said jetset instead of jetzt (now)—“jetset it’s dinnertime” or “jetset we’re talking,” for example—or Ha ja instead of Ja for “yes” (he turned Ha ja into a painting). Martin brought Anna matchboxes from all over the world, and she did a lot for him, but she never turned into another member of his entourage—she always maintained a certain skepticism. On one occasion, when the art shipper delivered the EuroPallets that her children had paid a fortune for as Martin’s sculptures, Anna “almost flipped out, practically fainted. I couldn’t understand it at all.”

  The first time Martin arrived in Sankt Georgen it was evening. Anna was sitting in front of the TV quietly knitting with her daughters Sabine and Karola. Even if Karola never picked up her knitting needles again, Martin liked this initial glimpse of wholesome family life and its atmosphere of security. After a test-residence at the Grässlins’ house, he came back as soon as the Stuttgart gallery opening was over and moved into an apartment of his own that the family had made available to him. At twelve on the dot he walked through the deep Black Forest snow to lunch at the rustically furnished house—noodle casseroles that surely tasted better than our mother’s. This family knew how to cook.

  He always played little jokes on the grandmother of the family and sang a song that made her laugh every time: “Ding-a-ling-a-ling, Here Comes the Eggman.” He gave her one of his egg paintings, a self-portrait, which she hung over the sofa with its throw pillows and armrest-covers in her Black Forest living room. She had formerly worked as a maid, and Martin praised her ironing artistry to the skies, to other artists too: he told Meuser that he absolutely had to have Grandma iron one of his shirts someday. He could also discuss pasta for hours with “Eggman’s Grandma,” as he called her in the Grässlin catalog—his favorite food and her absolutely least favorite, “that Italian stuff.”

  The family rituals and dramas fascinated him, of course. For example, Grandma, who lived downstairs, came to dinner every night with her own plate and her own butter, bread, and sausage. Every night, the same scenario unfolded, “like in Dinner For One, ” Thomas Grässlin said, “the same every night.” The last knife and fork were barely laid down on the table when Grandma whipped away all the plates; every night Anna said, “Mama, don’t worry, we’ll take care of it”; and every few weeks a fight broke out over it between mother and daughter. And of course Martin had to do something with Grandma’s hobby, latch-hook, so he did bath mats. He showed latch-hooked bath mats as multiples in 1990 at Bärbel Grässlin’s Frankfurt gallery: A Handful of Forgotten Pigeons, with yin-yang, New Age, and Goethe City designs. Grandma hadn’t made all of them—Martin dragged everyone he could to Sankt Georgen to work on them, children as well as old people, all co-ordinated by Sabine Grässlin.

  “Dear Berlin Filmikin!” Martin wrote to his friend Uschi Welter on November 26, 1981, from “St. Georg City,” “I’ve polished off the hustle and bustle with var. slipups in the snow + now i’m sitting dry as the Sahara in the hotel Garni Kammerer cafe + waiting til the shops reopen. Hours: 8:30-12:30, 4:00-6:30.”

  Café Kammerer was his local during the day, where he regularly met with Karola Grässlin, his girlfriend at the time. She cut school a lot: “It just didn’t interest me at all any more.” It was more fun with Martin, and she learned more, too: “He laid out the whole art scene for me. I thought it was super interesting, everyt
hing he knew.” At Café Kammerer he unpacked the shopping bags full of stuff she had bought at the only department store in town—absurdities of life that he would turn back into art, such as little gummi animals or an eraser with “Absolute Hardship Case” printed on it (he had himself photographed with the eraser stuck in his mouth). It was Karola, one time when she and Martin were enjoying themselves at a bar and two women stared at them, who turned around and said: “Envy and greed, that’s what I need.” Martin liked the phrase so much he immediately turned it into a painting.

  Saturdays at Café Kammerer he always sat at the table with the regulars, the same way he played dice with the locals at the Klimperkasten, a lumberjack bar. In no time everyone in Sankt Georgen knew him—he had chatted with everyone, told his little jokes, and was known as an odd duck. Martin said once that he had had the same experience over and over again: in the most isolated places, people would react to him as though he were E.T., would be horrified at first, but then would affectionately take him under their wings. That was why, he thought, there were so many bars where he never had to pay.

  Then again, the reverse was also true: after his Kreuzberg nightlife, the village and structured family life with lunch and dinner on the table at the same time every day were as alien to him as American suburbia was to E.T. Even in his own childhood, he had never lived like that. Karola even complained to her mother once that the Grässlins’ life was too sheltered, which Martin right away turned into a painting: Mommy, You Never Showed Me Misery.