* * *
A week after the first postcard reached Uschi Welter in Charlottenburg, the second one came, with a picture of a Black Forest girl and a Black Forest cake (with recipe) and the message “7th day Sahara Program—150 canvases & easel arrived.” For the next few weeks, hopped up on nothing but coffee, apple juice, and Mother Grässlin’s cooking, Martin painted in his attic apartment like a man possessed. Visitors like Uschi came every now and then, and Martin took long walks with them. At night he went to the bar or went dancing at the Bear’s Den with Karola, putting on shows à la John Travolta on the wooden dance floor with everyone else standing around the edges, watching in wonder. That was another advantage of the provinces: you could shine even brighter there.
He left sometimes, most often to attend art openings, and when he came back he brought Karola heaps of records, all groups she had never heard of: the Lounge Lizards, Kraftwerk, Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, punk music that had never made it to Sankt Georgen. He “broke open” Thomas Grässlin’s taste in music, as he said himself, introducing the dedicated jazz fan to Palais Schaumburg and Laurie Anderson and encouraging him to be more playful, in everything. Karola copied the records Martin brought onto tapes so that he would have something to listen to in the studio. By that point, he was really in full swing, making three or four paintings a day and prepping the next day’s canvases at night. Karola later said: “That was the great thing for me, to see for the first time how work like that is made.”
When Thomas Grässlin got a slot-car racetrack for Christmas in 1981, it was Martin who played with it the most. The Grässlin Family gave him one of his own for his 40th birthday.
© Grässlin Family
He packed it all up for Christmas, while the Anti-Sahara Program took effect for a few days, and hauled all his work to the Grässlin family’s house. He took their art off the walls and hung his own paintings around the whole living room, floorboards to ceiling, some with the paint still wet. Mother Grässlin was not amused—first of all, it was Christmastime; secondly, nothing like that, so real and concrete, had ever been hung in her house before. Then the family spent Christmas Eve arranging Martin’s paintings into series, big and small, while Frank Sinatra records played and Karola, at Martin’s insistence, wore a Black Forest folk costume. The whole holiday season that year smelled of oil paint instead of pine tree and roast goose. In return, each of them got a picture as a present : Thomas’s was Buying Feels Great, Paying Feels Terrible ; Karola’s was I Too Wanted to Be the First ; Sabine’s was a photo of a gravestone at the dog cemetery, Our Little Bimbo. Remembered Always, With Love. In Martin’s opinion, the best Christmas present anyone got was Thomas’s new slot-car racetrack. Martin played with it the whole time.
FIFTEEN LEGS, STILL ALONE
The Sahara Program and Anti-Sahara Program / Life is hard and unfair was the title of Martin’s show at the Rottweil Art Forum that opened on February 28, 1982, three days after his twenty-ninth birthday (and its accompanying Anti-Sahara Program). The invitation showed a humpty-dumpty eggman who had fallen off a wall; the poster showed a cheeky, confident Martin in the Black Forest snow, sitting in a Beuys felt suit on the Erich Hauser sculpture the Grässlins had placed in front of their company office. He occupied art the way he occupied houses.
Hauser, the big fish in that small pond, didn’t think it was funny. He smelled competition. Martin was the first artist in the new generation to show at the Forum, which Hauser had launched. The distaste was mutual. “There was a storm in the air,” Anna Grässlin said, and it hadn’t helped that Martin had unashamedly lain down on Hauser’s sofa and made out with Karola. Mrs. Hauser had had a hysterical attack. The great Joseph Beuys, on the other hand, found Martin’s rudeness funny and simply did to Martin what Martin did to everything: he appropriated the appropriator and turned a Kippenberger into a Beuys, stamping and signing a series of Martin’s posters.
The opening was packed with two hundred visitors. The artist supplied the beer himself. Martin gave several speeches at the same time, getting other people to read for him; Michel Würthle, who had come from Berlin, called everyone together for a group portrait, but the press photographer didn’t think that was his job, “so the likewise attending Papa Kippenberger took it with his pocket camera. That only sometimes worked—‘The thing fell into the toilet.’” The critics were confused by the number of different styles and pictures, but they recommended the show.
On view were his six-part series of Black Forest motifs (Sankt Georgen’s City Hall Square, the Grässlins’ windmill), called Fifteen Legs, Still Alone, [1] and his most famous series to date, Well Known Through Film, Radio, Television, and Police Call Columns. The latter had grown from fourteen to twenty-one pictures by that point, mostly portraits—of Helmut Schmidt and his wife ( Let the Weeds Grow ), Yasser Arafat ( Arafat Is Sick of Shaving ), [2] a beaming Ronald Reagan with a mouse in a bloody puddle on the collar of his suit, a Francis Bacon–style self-portrait with a spattered face ( Little Asshole Kippi ). The Grässlins bought the whole series. The show also included Berlin by Night, the three small pictures that summarized Martin’s years of excess in Berlin. They were all grubby little pictures in his usual twenty by twenty-four inch format, copied from photographs, painted as garishly and badly as possible, and jammed up next to each other in a single row around the gallery.
The catalog ( Mr. Kippenberger ) ended up a bit too nice, too tasteful, for Martin, but otherwise he was happy with the exhibition and proud to be able to bring our father to see it. He introduced his two families to each other the way he wanted to.
Martin’s Black Forest mission was accomplished and the Sahara Program completed. “Suddenly he felt pulled away again,” as Mother Grässlin said. He couldn’t have stood it any longer in the idyllic small town where everything closed early, so he left the desert behind and moved on to the next oasis.
FAVORITE THEME : MISERY
“Suddenly, there was Kippi,” the men’s clothier Uli Knecht says. He no longer remembers where, when, and how he met Martin for the first time, just that there he was and he wouldn’t stop being there. Martin lived in Stuttgart for only six months (he had often visited before), but it felt like years to many people. He lived in the converted basement apartment of the building where Hetzler’s gallery was, on Schwabstrasse, and he was with Hetzler “day and night.”
But he worked at Uli Knecht’s place. Knecht emptied out his garage (actually a warehouse for his business) and Martin set up a studio there, in the middle of the city right next to Knecht’s store and under his office. From there you could easily get to everything on foot—most importantly, Martin’s two locals: a Spanish restaurant and an Italian restaurant, Come Prima, one of the few places allowed to stay open late in Stuttgart. He quickly befriended the owner, and even at 3 a.m. Martin could drink, talk, smoke, and do anything he wanted at Come Prima.
After having had to get by with not much money for such a long time, Martin could finally spend freely, buying things for himself and taking friends out. At the time, Uli Knecht was for men what Jil Sander was for women, except he didn’t design his elegant clothing himself, he imported it from Italy: Armani, Brioni, Cerrutti, in an era when most Germans couldn’t spell the words. Knecht bought Martin’s work “fresh from the studio, as it came out the door,” and gave him in return coupons for free clothes, which Martin then gave away. Some as gifts to ladies of the night—“and then he was the boss”; some to me and his other sisters.
Martin “had a good home base” in Uli Knecht’s store, Knecht later said. “The store was always full of pretty girls and things going on and something to look at. First he’d check out the girls downstairs in the store, and if they said no he’d come up to the office. He always gravitated toward whoever listened to him the most, whoever was nicest to him.” He especially liked hanging out with the ladies who worked in Knecht’s front office. He brought his record player, played them Paul McCartney songs, and chatted them up.
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bsp; Martin picked up additional coupons at the office and used them downstairs in the store to shop some more. Horse-leather Alden shoes from America, for example: “they cost five hundred marks, such sturdy, classic shoes, handmade, it was a real status symbol at the time.” He took them back to the studio and covered them with paint—this mix of chic and sloppy would become his trademark. Knecht admitted that Martin had good fashion sense, “but after all, he’d had time to look around.” He spent hours trying on clothes, going in and out of the changing rooms: “All the girls had to stand at attention and serve him. After six suits I said, OK, Martin, take that one and we’re done.” The Swabian clientele were annoyed—they weren’t used to such impudent behavior, and “people didn’t talk as openly back then as they do now.” So Martin would be sent away, or better yet, tempted away: “suggest something else fun for him to do and you could get rid of him.” Then it was time for lunch, then back to the office to tell stories about his nightlife, the women he’d met, and the people he’d told off, and then out to the bars when the office closed, and on into the night. “You couldn’t say ‘OK, time to go home’ at eleven; that was a pathetic night—it wasn’t a night at all. That’s when he was just getting started. And there were seven days in his week.”
Whenever it did get to be too much, or when Uli Knecht, his faithful drinking buddy, wasn’t in the mood for once, Martin took a short trip to Ludwigsburg to see Knecht and his wife and fill up his tank on the comforts of home. “There he could spoil himself” in a beautiful bathroom; he used the softest hand towels and was given the thick Jil Sander bathrobe, which meant a lot to him. He relaxed, watched TV, ate good home cooking, and let himself be pampered.
If a Stuttgart night ended early after all, Martin went back to the garage and painted some more. His next shows were approaching fast : Fmoking, Frinking, and Felling at studio f in Ulm (the pictures for the selling, or Felling, in that show were already getting larger—three by four feet) and the group show You Have to Cross Seven Bridges at the Coach House in Berlin.
But even at Hetzler, exhibiting work was never enough for Martin. Art for him was always more than just hanging pictures on the wall. “He identified himself with the work so strongly,” Hetzler said, “that he saw himself as part of the gallery, not just as an artist. He always wanted to be involved with organizing things.” Thus he went to the art fair in Basel for the first time in the summer of 1982, calling himself “Mattin Kippenberger” on the invitation. He was not there to take a quick look at the show but to be there the whole time. He hung the World Cup soccer results up on the wall of his booth and had a TV there, too, but as Pakesch, the Viennese gallerist, said, “watching the game was not as important as talking about it.” Max Hetzler and Martin struck him as being “welded together—they showed up everywhere together and each admired the other equally: for Martin it was Max’s self-assurance, for Max it was Martin’s big mouth.” They popped up at Pakesch’s booth, too, and told him they wanted to work with him. Martin said Pakesch’s booth was all wrong. Later that summer, on the way to a fasting cure in Carinthia in southern Austria, they came to visit him in Vienna and confirmed their collaboration, which was to last ten years.
Martin’s efforts weren’t only aimed at promoting himself: “he was a catalyst,” Hetzler said. He considered himself the “bandleader” of the Hetzler Boys, the group of artists just coalescing and already practicing what Albert Oehlen called “extreme artist-behavior.” They gave the public what it wanted (and what it soon enough began to be afraid of): the artist as wild man. When they were together in a group, every evening was a happening.
After all, they were “The New Painters,” as an article in the magazine Twen was titled in May 1982:
Stuttgart, Hetzler Gallery, Friday Night. The opening of an exhibition of batik pictures by Markus Oehlen, in one of the two most important galleries of new art, with Maenz in Cologne. Kippenberger arrives late, but to great effect, and greets the suspiciously prominent opening-night guests in a suspiciously tailor-made gray suit. Everyone speaks softly; Kippenberger talks loud and acts exactly like it is an opening for his show.
He tells embarrassing jokes in a barracks voice, makes a deal with a dentist to trade his picture Plaque [3] for a new crown on his upper teeth that were smashed up by Berlin punks last year. At the same time, the artist—who knows exactly what his reputation is worth—stares into the dentist’s wife’s eyes with a masculine look. Kippenberger knows how to sell himself. And since he’s started painting pictures, he knows how to sell them too. Out of the roughly 250 pictures from last season, in standard 20 x 24 inch size, more than 200 have changed ownership by now.
Up to now, Kippenberger, with his various activities connected to art, has been seen as an eccentric self-promoter, something like the village idiot of the art scene. Is that behind him now? He says: “I’ve checked that off my list. Now it’s time to give people something tangible. Before, I entertained people; now they get entertainment they can lay their hands on. And this entertainment costs twelve hundred per picture. The prices will go up in June. It’s that simple.”
There was a short interview at the end of the article:
TWEN: Do you even know how to paint?
K : Yes.
TWEN: Do you have a favorite theme?
K : Misery.
TWEN: How do you paint?
K : It varies.
TWEN: Do you have a favorite style of painting?
K : Stop-painting, keep-going-painting, just no cock-
and-pussy-painting.
These were Martin’s own ways of stilling the “hunger for paintings” that the critic Wolfgang Max Faust attributed to him in this period.
Martin’s collaboration with Albert Oehlen, his most important artist friend and the one he most admired, also began in 1982. Together, they showed their painting-filled Orgone Box by Night at the Hetzler Gallery, Door by Night at a gynecologist’s office in Tübingen, and Capri by Night at Tanja Grunert’s garage gallery. Grunert had opened her Stuttgart gallery in 1980 in the same building as Hetzler’s gallery, but she had since moved to a garage “23 feet high, 50 feet long”: the ideal site for the Ford Capri painted in orange-brown paint mixed with oatmeal flakes. The opening took place at eleven at night and in the dark, since there was no electricity (the gallerist hadn’t paid her bill), so the car doors were all open and every possible light source was on, from headlights to cigarette lighter. Shoved into the back of the trunk were paintings by Martin. Thirty or forty people came to the opening, “peanuts compared to today” in Tanja Grunert’s words, and none of them bought anything. There were cheap cans of beer and steaming dry -ice, everyone was drunk, and one Stuttgart artist felt so outraged by the work that he picked up a fire extinguisher and started spraying the art and the artist. “Martin himself was already a real live provocation,” in Tanja Grunert’s view. “Many people were jealous of the fact that he just stood up and made his statements.”
Martin was starting to get invited to group shows as well. Zdenek Felix, the head curator of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, accepted Martin, Oehlen, and Büttner along with other artists from Cologne and Berlin for his “Contemporary Painting in Germany” show. After the opening, in Bologna, the three artists jumped up on the table with Hetzler, as usual, and pulled down their pants. The outraged Italians called the police, and the carabinieri had to be calmed down. That didn’t stop Felix from inviting them to their first major group show, Truth is Work, in 1984.
Stuttgart was over. Cologne was calling. But first came another of Martin’s interludes: he worked for three months as a guest of the Folkwang Museum in Essen-Werden—“a home game,” he called it, and he was particularly delighted that he, the Essen dropout, was housed in an old school. At the end of the three months, members of the Folkwang Art Circle could visit him in his brightly lit studio, ask him questions, and look at his pictures before they were sent to Ulm for his next show, Fmoking, Frinking, and Felling.
Karola Gräss
lin had moved with him to Essen. After a drive at top speed down the autobahn, with Martin sticking his tongue out at everyone who was driving too slowly for his liking, they stopped into a typical Ruhr District bar. Karola had graduated by then, and Martin kept hammering into her head that she had to move away from the Black Forest immediately. When she said that she couldn’t cut her ties that fast, he said yes, she should do it instantly, otherwise she would never make the leap. In the end she actually did go to Stuttgart to study art history, for which “Martin was largely responsible.”
Martin sent the Grässlins one of his pictures from Essen along with a postcard that he would later include in the 1994 catalog of their Kippenberger collection. As the caption in the catalog, he wrote: “Postcard M.K. to his alleged family (Homesick).”
[ 1 ] A rhyme in German: “ Fünfzehn Beine, trotzdem alleine .”
[ 2 ] Another rhyme: “ Arafat hat das Rasieren satt .”
[ 3 ] The film on teeth, not a sign or nameplate, which is a different word in German.
CHAPTER FIVE
COLOGNE YEARS: BEGINNINGS
All roads led to Cologne. From Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Berlin, Kiecol, Oehlen, Büttner, and Förg all came to live, show work, or at least visit often. Georg Herold, who had studied in Hamburg and worked in Berlin, was there already: “The whole rumpus was happening down on the Rhine.” There were collectors—ones who didn’t only look but also bought—and critics, gallerists (first and foremost Zwirner, Werner, and Maenz), art stars of the earlier generation (Beuys, Polke, Richter, Immendorff, Graubner, Rückriem, Palermo), Cologne eminences like Astrid Klein and Jürgen Klauke, and the younger generations long since hot on their heels. Like the Moritzplatz painters in Berlin, the young artists of the Mülheimer Freiheit movement (sometimes known in English as the “New Wild Ones”) satisfied their hunger for pictures with “effervescent productivity” ( Der Spiegel ). Dokoupil, Dahn, Bömmels, Adamski, Kever, and Naschberger were already stars, and they had a head start over Martin: they had started to paint seriously in the late seventies, while Martin was still in Berlin running S.O.36 and his Office. Cologne was hip.
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