Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  Martin may have been the catalyst, but he was once again seen as primarily a catalyst for others: “No one took him seriously as an artist at the time,” according to Pakesch. “His organizational and PR skills were valued—the fact that he never stopped moving, that he was involved in everything—but the others were seen as the real, good, serious artists.” Büttner, for instance, who “gave the impression of being the chief thinker” in the group (in the words of Wilhelm Schürmann, the collector and photographer), “or Albert, who was considered the best painter.” Joachim Lottmann described him as a character, not an artist:

  Kippi dances wildly over the plates and glasses, does the crazy-shuttle, bites a wineglass to pieces, swings from the chandelier, drops to the floor like a rock, unbuttons his pants, waggles his tongue like Gene Simmons from Kiss, babbles and blathers away, mutters and mumbles—he is the absolute epitome of the bold and reckless anarchist in the bourgeois wine-tasting gallerists’ imagination.

  As a result, the curator Kasper König invited Büttner and Oehlen to show in his major exhibition of contemporary German art— From Here , a two-month show in late 1984 at the Düsseldorf Convention Center—along with many of Martin’s other friends (Barfuss, Wachweger, Kiecol, Förg, Markus Oehlen) and enemies (Salomé, Dokoupil, Dahn). But not Martin. König saw Martin’s art as “party-basement painting.” [1] When Büttner and Oehlen protested, Martin was given two pages in the catalog as a compromise, but no space in the show itself. He put his answer on a poster, turning the show’s title, From Here, into For All I Care (“ Von hier aus ” into “ Von mir aus ”; hier and mir rhyme).

  Then again, sometimes the reverse happened and the other artists were tainted with a kind of guilt by association. Albert Oehlen said, “We lost favor with some people too—art-lovers, gallerists, museum people—when we supported Kippenberger. He was unserious. They said, ‘Do you want to go with the monkey house or with us?’ I said I’d rather stay with the monkey house, thank you—or rather, that that was real art. Not the stuff you think is art.”

  MAKE YOUR OWN LIFE

  Cologne was paradise for Martin: a city full of artists. He had only to step outside to trip over one, and he was constantly stepping outside. Life in Cologne was one long process of going somewhere with someone—from the bar to the bookstore, from the bookstore to the gallery, “and then meanwhile I’d thought of something else,” so over to the café to talk to someone.

  “There’s nothing Martin liked more than other artists,” Max Hetzler said. “He needed the discussions and debates with them—it inspired him, it made him happy. They understood him.” In the gallerist Burkhard Riemschneider’s view, “He had a very strong artist’s ethic: We Artists. A bad artist was still a lot better than someone who wasn’t an artist at all.” A bad artist was someone he could still rub the wrong way, make fun of, create some friction. He rarely spent time with people who were not part of the art scene.

  “There was no such thing as not working, for Martin,” said Peter Pakesch. Sitting around in a bar wasn’t rest and recuperation after a hard day’s work in the studio, it was an exchange with others and a performance in front of an audience: annoying them, entertaining them, developing new ideas, striking (or refusing to strike) a certain pose, concocting schemes, planning exhibitions, making sketches, and of course making sure he won the women’s hearts.

  One time, when the American artist Stephen Prina had spent the night at the Hotel Chelsea in Cologne and saw Martin coming down to breakfast the next morning, his only thought was, “Oh no! Here comes work! It was never relaxed with Martin, he always demanded your full attention.” Many people found the intensity exciting but also insanely stressful. After an hour with Martin, Attila Corbaci said, he needed a break: “It took so much energy to talk with him. He did everything so intensely! Like it was his last day on earth.”

  For everyone in Cologne, “going out was like going to work,” the critic Isabelle Graw said. The conversations were always about art: who thought who was good or bad, who was showing where, who had bought what by whom for how much. It wasn’t just chitchat, “it was about something real.” But it was also about the best arguments or punch-lines, the best jokes, who could give the best explanation of Marcel Broodthaers’s work. Often it was more of a fight than an exchange of ideas, and in fact it occasionally did come to literal blows among the artists. “There was a very special intensity there, which didn’t exist anywhere else,” in Graw’s view. “It was extremely ferocious. People didn’t act nice with each other and didn’t want to. No one ever said they were having problems, or lovesick, or anything like that. It was about status, your rank as an artist, power relations. No empathy. There was an extreme reaction in the early eighties against the bleeding-heart culture of the seventies.”

  An exhibit that traveled through the United States in 2006, devoted to this phenomenon of the tightly knit artist community, was titled after a quote of Martin’s: Make Your Own Life. Against the backdrop of today’s global art market, the exhibit portrayed the Cologne of the time as a more intimate space, where artists could discover and present themselves. The community spirit in Cologne, even with all the rivalry between various gallerists and artists, seemed especially unique and enticing to the Americans who came to Cologne in such great numbers in the eighties and early nineties. In New York it was every man for himself; in L.A., people lived hours away from each other. Twenty years later, that Cologne seems almost mythical. Even the exhibit’s curator sees this show, with its romantic picture of a vanished Cologne, as “a symptom of a real loss of community within an art world that is ever more professionalized, spectacularized, and deracinated from local specificity.”

  A VIRTUOSO AT GIVING OFFENSE

  Martin Prinzhorn used to come to Cologne from Vienna for at least a week every two months while he was in graduate school. “I was insanely fond of Cologne, with its unbelievably fun pub crawls and a totally different culture, talking and arguing at the Hammerstein every day. At the time I found this whole Rhineland conversation culture very liberating.”

  The Hammerstein was typical of the eighties scene: cool furniture, an open kitchen with everything prepared fresh, long breakfasts, and food available all day long (a rarity at the time). Most importantly, you could run into everyone there before the different camps scattered to their respective bars: Mülheimer Freiheit artists like Dokoupil and Dahn, older masters like Lüpertz and Immendorff, Rosemarie Trockel and Monika Sprüth, and the whole Hetzler group. Martin first met several of his future friends at the Hammerstein, including Reiner Opoku and Andrea Stappert. The Hammerstein gave him what he needed: friends, enemies, and a large audience.

  Enemies were important for Martin. Once, after a party at Martin Prinzhorn’s Thomasburg castle with only friends, Martin complained, “So boring I could throw up. This one knows that one, admires that other one. Where are the people we can attack or take the piss out of, have a little fun? Where are they? We need them.”

  Martin always discovered people’s weak spots and went right for them—“beat people over the head with them,” as his student Tobias Rehberger says. “This had pedagogical value, to some extent, since your weak points were, after all, your weak points, things you should part with. But of course people’s weak points are often precisely the things they can’t do anything about.” Whether it was sagging breasts or being cross-eyed, Martin would call attention to it and make sure everyone in the café noticed. If the person was embarrassed or ashamed about it, then they really got an earful. “You were not allowed to have any shame—there was no such thing.”

  Martin saw it as his highest duty to say out loud what everyone was thinking. He never said anything behind a fat woman’s back about her weight, like so many other people do; instead, when he left a disco with her, he would ask, “Should we walk down the hill or just roll?” (This actually happened; the woman in question cried about it for a whole day.) He said everything to everyone’s face, whoever or whatever they were. Even
someone who found Martin extremely unpleasant and felt attacked by him, the Cologne artist Andreas Schulze, admitted that “He was never fake. He didn’t lie.” Martin hated the hypocrisy and pretended innocence of the art world, where enemies acted like friends and gave each other little kisses on the cheek. That is another reason he liked the company of “regular people”: bartenders, waiters, children. However kitschy it might sound, he saw them as true and genuine in a way that he felt was lacking in the art world.

  With his ruthless honesty, Martin was “a virtuoso at giving offense,” as Werner Büttner called him. The truth hurt, and it should, just like art. Martin’s girlfriend Kazu Huggler experienced many such moments: “There are things he said that stay with you. Today we can laugh about them, because they were so true.” Inga Humpe had the same experience: Martin told her that what she and her band Neonbabies were doing in Berlin was “department-store punk.” As angry as the singer was, she secretly thought, “Shit, he’s right. We were middle-class punks.”

  However hateful it may have sounded, what Martin said was never meant to be mean, at least not from his point of view. On the contrary. He only wanted the best for the person he said it to. The truth was a provocation, “a prod to think deeper about something,” in Attila Corbaci’s words. “It prompted you to be creative. He was only demanding of others what he demanded of himself: improve the quality of what you’re doing.”

  But even if he loved to say nasty things to other people, that didn’t mean other people could do the same to him. He was very sensitive. In any case, few other people dared to. Even Martin’s friends were afraid of him, afraid he would take them apart. His New York gallerist Janelle Reiring said, “It was a little terrifying to know that you couldn’t put anything over on him. Sometimes you really want to present yourself the way you wish you were, after all. But he never let you get away with that.”

  He wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. “I have a camouflage battle suit,” Martin wrote in 1981, “which is as much as to say: I am a free person.”

  I’M NOT A BRAWLER BUT I AM

  A RATHER UNPLEASANT PERSON

  A gay friend of Martin’s, This Brunner, only laughed at Martin’s gay jokes; for him they were funny, affectionate teasing. Similarly, Reiner Opoku, the son of an African father and German mother, liked Martin’s black jokes. Martin thought he had a right to tell them since, after all, he had married a black woman back in Hamburg.

  The provocations were always a test: Can you take it? Are you up to being around me? Do you really love me? He had to make sure that no one thought he was a straightforward person. Of course no one would have anyway. Martin rarely made instant friends; most people felt repelled by him before they felt drawn to him. But what other people experienced as attacks, Martin’s friend Meuser saw as a kind of greeting: “Hello, so who are you?” “Slanders too are only meant in jest,” Martin wrote in his book Joints I .

  There were no such tirades or insults in smaller groups or one-on-one interactions. Being alone with Martin was “extraordinarily pleasant,” according to Rüdiger Carl, the musician:

  you were just talking with him, telling stories, not for someone to write down but just because he wanted to hear your stories, for example, things Charlie Parker and people like that used to do. Before artists got so famous, Pollock and so on, the most exciting things going on were in music and he was always curious to hear about that. About beautiful singers too. He was never full of himself. It was only when other people were around that he ramped it up and wanted to be an uncontrollable genius.

  In any case, even though Martin went after so many of the people around him, it only rarely came to physical fights. “He gave off a kind of energy,” said Elisabeth Fiedler, a friend from Graz, “that made people walk away. No one started a fight with him.” In the view of the Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss, Martin “was charming and winning. That’s why he could take his obnoxiousness so far.” Martin also didn’t spare himself ; Fiedler thought the jokes Martin told about himself and his lifestyle were particularly harsh. “There was a certain despair about it.”

  There was probably another reason why situations didn’t come to blows: Martin could be fierce and loud, and he did have firm principles, but he was never fanatical, dogmatic, or ideological. Thomas Grässlin later said that he had learned from Martin how to have an attitude but always keep it playful. Martin wanted others to play along, to defend themselves. He couldn’t stand it when they started crying.

  Of course, there were times when his charm left him: when he was in too much despair or had had too much to drink. And sometimes he certainly did mean the things he said as personally as it sounded.

  Like a child, Martin needed all the attention in the room on himself, and if his listeners weren’t listening—if they talked or even coughed while he was telling one of his jokes, for example—he would start over from the beginning. “With me, inattentiveness gets a scolding.” “Doesn’t listen, only talks himself” was his self-description in a short text called “Kippenberger and Cafés.”

  This need to force things on people was also, in another sense, a selfless quality, as Albert Oehlen saw it. “What he was trying to do was keep this big entertainment system running. Even when he demanded that everyone listen to him, which was often rough, his goal was to keep the big fun-machine going.” Isabelle Graw says, “I think he felt obligated to make sure that people were having a good time, that the entertainment never stopped. That was another reason he always took over and seized the floor: he couldn’t stand the emptiness, the silence.”

  Be that as it may, he wasn’t so selfless that he never demanded contributions from others: a song, a joke, or a story that had to be told upon his command. “You couldn’t just sit there,” Andrea Stappert said. “Martin didn’t like when people simply consumed him, when they thought Martin was taking them out and they didn’t have to do anything in return.”

  In 1982, the magazine Twen asked Martin if his bad reputation bothered him. “At some point,” Martin answered, “I realized that I had one and I couldn’t do anything about it. So I cultivated it. People need someone they can see as an enemy, so I was someone they could see as an enemy. One of my main functions! Really there aren’t many definitions of the enemy out there, like ‘The police are bad, we’re good!’ So here’s one: ‘Kippenberger bad!’” Martin worked as hard on his “bad boy” image as he did on his “bad paintings.” If he couldn’t be taken seriously as an artist, at least he would get noticed.

  He could be different when he wanted to be. Rosemarie Trockel, with whom Martin was “more or less” together in 1983, says that around her he was always “incredibly loving and nice, always extremely civilized. I absolutely cannot complain.” Once, after coming home very late at night again, Trockel found him lying curled up with her old sick dog on the kitchen floor. Martin knew how much the dog meant to her, and Martin said that since the dog wasn’t strong enough to come to him, he went to the dog instead.

  Trockel, who saw herself at the time as extremely shy and polite, liked the fact that Martin could be so different at openings, dinner parties, bars—so confrontational, so “wild, unashamed, audacious. He could be an absolute monster.” She didn’t always like it when he laid into other people, “but that was a part of him, this nasty sting that went after blood. With Martin you took the bad with the good. You couldn’t choose one side of the whole package, you also had to take the other.” Trockel also saw something self-destructive in Martin’s mercilessness: “When you have this sting, it’s directed at yourself, too. Anyone who can see through other people like that sees himself in a clear light, too.”

  In the interview with the magazine Artfan, Martin said in reference to his art, “I only want love. But too much love and you get scared. So one thing you do is test people, the other is throw a few beams so that you don’t get too much love.”

  MORNINGS HE RECEIVES VISITORS

  AT THE BROADWAY

  “Not a week goes by in
which Martin isn’t written up in the Cologne Express, for a case of pulled-down pants, little anti-Semitic provocations, or at least excessive dance moves,” the 1988 Cologne issue of the travel magazine Merian reported:

  Mornings he receives visitors at the Broadway, one of the cool trendy cafés. He sits at the end of the mirrored catwalk, starting the day off right with a Cuba Libre, and giving you a friendly laugh across his beer belly. “I don’t have time to wait eight years until I’m hanging in the Ludwig Museum,” he says.

  The Broadway was more cramped, simpler, and more alternative than the Hammerstein—“a smoky little hovel,” as the New York Times described it with a certain irritation. There, Martin conducted his “research,” as he called it: he always sat looking out at the street, to see right away who was coming in, or might come in, so that he could catch them. He always had a big table at which he could gather people around him, and he sat there for days and weeks on end. The work he did there was concrete. Ideas were born, and printing and exhibition arrangements were made. Often he sat there with F. C. Gundlach, the Hamburg photographer, collector, and gallerist who supported Martin.

  THEN YOU NEVER GOT RID OF HIM

  What does the cow do

  Moo

  What do you do

  Ado

  —MK [2]

  For a couple of years in the mid-eighties, at the height of the art boom, Martin had an even more exclusive living room: Franz Keller’s restaurant. The owner, from a well known Baden family of gastronomes and vintners, was a pioneer of new German cuisine who eventually cooked his way to two Michelin stars. He was drawn to the Rhine after a falling-out with his father. Having also considered Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf, he decided on Cologne, “the weirdest.”

  But Martin didn’t go to Keller’s restaurant for the fine cuisine. He preferred to sit at the staff table in the back, where he played mau-mau with the waiters and cooks and ate what they ate (plain fare, usually stew). That worked for Keller, too: “there were the fewest other guests there, so I had the best chance of keeping him under control.” The words flew back and forth between the kitchen and Martin’s table, and when the restaurant started to empty out, if not sooner, “the real debauchery started.”