During the opulent eighties, a lot of art dinners took place at Franz Keller’s restaurant. The success of the contemporary artists resulted in a new flood of guests at the openings, and since there were more and more artists and galleries, there were more and more openings—“a shot in the arm for the whole business,” in the words of longtime Cologne gallerist Paul Maenz. Even if someone was not invited to the meal after the opening, they could be sure of meeting everyone, even the stars, in the bars of the city afterward. Reiner Opoku says the openings then “were more fun than today. The art trade has since become a highly professionalized business, almost an industry. Everything very meticulous, but it’s lost a bit of its soul. Nowadays if you smoke, or have a drink at lunch, people look at you funny.” At the time, you were suspect if you didn’t.
Martin got his food for free at Keller’s, and whenever the bill ran up too high, he had to give Keller a picture. Keller didn’t necessarily get the one he wanted, only the one that Martin “prescribed” for him—the same thing Martin did with many of his collectors. One time he made a giant screen especially for the restaurant, with the Hunger Family on it. To keep the proprietor up to date—since Keller couldn’t go to openings himself, of course—Martin brought him his catalogs: “Here, read something good!”
Along with the artists and gallerists, Keller’s restaurant was full of people with money, from bordello owners to a chocolate manufacturer, Imhoff, who had himself chauffeured from the factory every day at 6:30, polished off his meal, and dashed out the door at 7:45 to make it home in time for the nightly news. It was never boring. Martin “thought it was fun to observe these people, these moneybags.” When he went too far, got too crazy, insulted the other patrons too harshly, or pestered the waiters too much, Keller threw him out, “but it didn’t matter, he just came back in through the back door.” By the next day, all was forgotten.
Sometimes they crawled the pubs all night and then Martin went straight to his studio. Other times Keller put him in a taxi or took him home at 3 a.m., then there he was in front of Keller’s door at 6:30 a.m. “You have to go to the market anyway!” Martin told Keller. There was a bar there, too.
SUNDAY IS THE EMBODIMENT OF THE
MIRROR IMAGE OF MARTIN KIPPENBERGER
Everyone who knew Martin speaks of his unbelievable energy with amazement. He could stay up drinking all night and then show up at nine the next morning with new ideas and plans and projects. His lust for life, for people, for art, was probably the most important source of his energy. Once, when he was asked what he thought his great talent was, he answered, “That I have a happy nature. And that I’m curious.” The gallerist Tim Neuger said, “Martin could have a good time getting his hair cut.” He took such childlike pleasure in his own jokes, Andrea Stappert said, “in whatever struck him as strange or funny. He could laugh at his own ideas. You could see it in his face when something he was about to say had already made him happy.” Defiance and contrariness, his student Tobias Rehberger thought, were sources of energy for Martin, too—“and an incredible will.” Finally, let us not forget, there was his midday nap, and alcohol. His energy could not be portioned out. He never dared to try to put the brakes on, Georg Herold said: “It would have been like pulling the plug on him.”
He was always afraid of the moment when the lights went out. He knew that that was when he would encounter his other side. As he wrote in Café Central , “Sunday is the embodiment of the mirror image of Martin Kippenberger, whether on Ehrenstrasse or the Rambla.” On Sundays the city was dead, and places especially lively during the week seemed especially dead.
“Many people confuse vitality with robust strength,” the Frankfurt artist Thomas Bayrle says. “But Martin was extremely sensitive and fragile.” Whenever he saw Martin alone in the halls of the Städelschule art academy in Frankfurt, he says, Martin seemed deeply melancholy: “If the security system of communication isn’t there, you are thrown back on yourself, on the wretchedness of life.”
“Maybe no artist has ever needed so many collaborators to represent existential loneliness as Kippenberger,” the critic Rudolf Schmitz wrote in the context of Kippenberger’s Kafka piece. Martin always gathered crowds of people around him, offering them food, drink, work, and entertainment. “The way he organized his life so that he would never have to be alone,” Rüdiger Carl thought, “was extremely cunning and involved lots of subtle little strategies. He couldn’t just apply direct pressure: If you leave now I won’t look at you for a year. That would be too weak. He always had to come up with a way to turn the situation the way he needed it to go.”
He would call up Gisela Capitain at five in the morning to ask what she was doing; 8 a.m. would find him in front of Eleni Koroneou’s door in search of beer and coddling. He promised Sabine Grässlin pictures in twenty-five percent increments if she would stay out, a quarter of a picture for each hour she stayed with him. He once phoned Günter Lorenz, a manager at BMW, in his Amsterdam hotel room at 4 a.m, after everyone else had gone to bed, to request some “artist-coddling”: Lorenz had to go to Martin’s hotel and keep him company at the bar until dawn.
The worst was being alone at the end of a night in a group, after one companion after another had disappeared. If Martin didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, or a one night stand, he would ask (or force) a female friend to lie in bed with him “like a little brother and sister,” as one of them said. He would even ask a female curator he didn’t know if he could sleep in her hotel room with her, totally chaste.
“Martin was hyper,” his New York gallerist Janelle Reiling said, “hyperactive, hyperintelligent, hypersensitive.” Just as he could never not work, and never not communicate, he could never not perceive. There was no off switch; he was always at a boil. Even when he finally did go to sleep, he didn’t get any rest. “I’m so tired in the morning,” he told Jutta Koether, “because I dream so much. I have a whole day’s work behind me as soon as I wake up!”
Sometimes Martin didn’t go to bed at all, but straight from the bar to the studio. There he could withstand the solitude—he needed it there. He didn’t drink there, either.
The proprietor of his regular bar in the Burgenland called him “a truly special person.” One of a kind. His Graz friend Elisabeth Fiedler said that was why he was so excited when his assistant Johannes Wohnseifer found a painting of an Indian chief for Martin that looked just like him: “He had the feeling I’m not alone. Who understood him? No one understood him. This solitude had something desperate about it.” He suffered from loneliness but at the same time valued the fact that there was no one else like him. Peter Altenberg, the Viennese coffeehouse writer whose works Martin so admired, once said, “It is sad to be an exception, but much sadder not to be.”
TRUTH IS WORK
At the start of his time in Cologne, for the first time in years, Martin rented a proper apartment of his own. It was big and old and beautiful, directly on Friesenplatz; Rudolf Zwirner’s former wife had lived there, Gisela Capitain lived there with Martin for a while, and Max Hetzler would live there after Martin. Cologne really was like a village. He could paint there, and he did—lots of big paintings. He always had another exhibition to produce work for.
In June 1983, Martin showed Marks of an Innocent Man with Zwirner, which was something of a coronation. Zwirner was one of the pioneers of the Cologne art scene who, first as an art dealer and then as a gallerist, had sold works by many famous modern artists and brought the younger, contemporary artists along in tow. He showed very different artists on the different open floors of his gallery: “I might be showing Richter, Warhol, Kippenberger, and Picabia at the same time, i.e. works ranging from ten thousand marks to a hundred thousand dollars. When people insisted on an expensive painting, I said ‘Why not take something more contemporary too?’”
Also in 1983, Martin showed work for the first time with Erhard Klein in Bonn: an exhibition with Albert Oehlen called Women in My Father’s Life. Klein was Polke’s and Beuys’
s gallerist, and Martin would later have other shows with him, with titles like What Is Your Favorite Minority—Who Do You Envy the Most. Klein was always up for something unusual, was very interested in artists and their projects, and took great care with artist’s books, as a librarian himself. He was a good drinking buddy as well.
But the biggest event in these early years was Truth Is Work , a group show at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, with “Mattin” (as he called himself), Albert Oehlen, and Werner Büttner. The 1984 opening is one of the legendary events of the time, with Martin doing handstands in the bathroom and pouring a plate of spaghetti over his head (all of it documented in photographs) while the band Night and Day established itself as the go-to dance orchestra for art openings. The most important thing was the catalog, which Roberto Ohrt would later call “the incunabulum of the eighties”: “It reduced to a minimum the conventional function of a catalog, with its demoralizing reduction of the artist to providing the illustrations in need of commentary.” Albert Oehlen said that he and Büttner prepared the catalog largely on their own in Hamburg, as a kind of collage: “Martin was too impatient for that. We spent weeks cutting and gluing. He came by for a few days and dropped off his cuttings, added them in, it was good like that. Anyway, he also took our material very much to heart and created a lot from the text. Several phrases appeared later as his picture titles.”
Zdenek Felix, the director of exhibitions of the Folkwang Museum, used the show to make up for what he had missed out on before. His earlier exhibit Ten New German Artists , from 1982, had omitted precisely these three, and now he wanted to give them their own platform. “It turned out that the New Wild Ones didn’t last—their fast painting ran out of steam fast too. It was harmless. These three were doing something different: they were more radical, tackling taboo subjects like the Nazi legacy, but they weren’t crusading do-gooders. They were just interested in showing social and political life as it was.”
Felix believed that these three complemented each other well, and in fact they formed a sort of core or mini-group within the Hetzler group. Büttner and Oehlen knew each other from Berlin and had moved to Hamburg in the late seventies, just when Martin moved in the opposite direction. “We were as extreme and excessive as Martin,” Oehlen later said when asked about what they had had in common. “We were euphorics.”
Büttner said: “We were a classic pack of dogs, career-wise.” He dated Inka Hocke after she and Martin broke up, and he eventually married her. “We were a fighting team, and we acted according to the motto ‘Success is the best revenge!’” They talked about new movies, about artists and books, and told stories about their adventures, “but we never really talked seriously, about our love lives or death. It was all about who was quicker with the bright ideas. We were three quick-draw cowboys with big mouths. When we were together, no one else had a chance.” Their politically incorrect humor, Büttner says, “prepared the way for Harald Schmidt.” One crude performance with the title Herr Doctor, Herr Doctor, I Think I Have Three Balls, was infamous—the men pulled down their pants and stood on tables while the women in the room had to go up and feel their balls. Büttner says, “We were a reaction to the terrible seventies, when everything was so normal and black and white. They wanted to be cool and untouchable.”
The Essen exhibit prompted two different reactions: artists liked it, while several critics were outraged and even thought the curator should be fired. “I had compared the three of them to Goya,” Felix later said, “that really made their blood boil.” Due to the negative reaction and fearing a scandal, the curator had Martin remove one of his pictures (of a blonde with a startled look holding a gigantic, floppy, garden hose–like penis in her two hands) “as a precaution. I was afraid the whole exhibition could be shut down.” Martin took it off the wall but left empty the place where it had hung.
VIENNA
“Six weeks ago we went to an opening in N.Y. Big city, it was too boring there. So we decided to go to Vienna, we’d always wanted to anyway.” This is how Martin and Albert Oehlen explained their presence in Vienna in their “Address to the Brainless.”
Vienna was a big city too, of course—but not too big or too fashionable, and with a culture of hospitality that New York lacked. Since the two places most important to Martin, Oswald & Kalb and the Old Vienna Café, were on the same street, Martin’s Vienna was on a very manageable scale.
Unlike New Yorkers, the Viennese spoke Martin’s language and understood his jokes. The first time the Berlin gallerist Rudolf Springer met Martin, in the late seventies in Berlin, he thought Martin was Austrian though he no longer recalls why; it couldn’t have been because of Martin’s accent, which was unmistakably from the Ruhr and which Martin especially emphasized, for example by pronouncing his name “Mattin.” It was probably more his clothes, his style. “In the mass of badly dressed Berliners, he was always the best dressed man in the room—except for the Viennese,” in the words of Attila Corbaci, who worked at the Exile at the time. The Viennese wore English suits and custom-made shoes, even in the Kreuzberg. Most likely of all, it was his way of talking that made Martin seem so Austrian: the ambiguity and irony, the performance, the provocative clowning, the characteristic mix of black humor and melancholy, being charming and giving the finger at the same time.
Sabine Achtleitner, from Graz (Austria’s second-largest city), says, “The Germans take a word literally, as what it is. But with us Austrians it’s often meant differently from what it literally says. Martin was a real master of this enigmatic style. What he said to people often had a very nasty surface message, but I never thought it was nasty, it was...critical. He said it full of humor, wittily.” Martin often felt that humor was lacking in Germany.
Thanks to Michel Würthle “and the whole Austrian gang” in Berlin—Oswald and Ingrid Wiener, Reinald Nohal, Lampersberg, Attila Corbaci, the owners of Café Einstein—Martin “got very familiar with that Austrian way of using language, that clowning: I learned a lot.” Austria was everywhere in the Berlin of those days—in the restaurants and also in the Kreuzberg backyard of Martin’s publisher Rainer Pretzell, who had a special love for Austrian literature and looked after its playful practitioners (he also published Friederike Mayröcker, Elfriede Czurda, and H.C. Artmann). Martin must have also liked that so many Austrian writers and artists crossed the boundaries of their own media and were active in numerous areas.
And then the language: that slightly old-fashioned, sometimes almost archaic German with something poetic about it, something of a sound-painting. Even the street names—Naschmarkt, Himmelpfortgasse (Heaven’s Gate Lane), Morellenfeldgasse (Field of Morels Lane)—and names of dishes: Paradeiserl, Melange, Schmarrn. . . The language was like the people. Vienna was earthier and more primitive than New York, filled with catastrophic drunkards and surly characters. Helmut Qualtinger was one of the latter, an actor who later reproduced Martin’s and Oehlen’s “Address to the Brainless” in a filmed performance.
Whatever the language, Martin always talked in his own characteristic style: voluble, quick, and direct. Even in Austria, that rubbed some people the wrong way, while others admired it. “He was full-on shameless,” said Peter Pakesch, his Vienna gallerist, “and at the same time played up his Germanness very cleverly, so that people could see it for the caricature it was.”
When Martin went to Vienna in the early eighties, it was a city, like Berlin, where the war seemed to have just ended. There was no Berlin Wall around Vienna but it was so far out on the edge of Western Europe, just a few miles from the Iron Curtain, that it also seemed like a city that time had forgotten. Peter Pakesch says that the Vienna of twenty-five years ago, when he opened his gallery, still had an air of The Third Man about it. You could see, smell, and taste history everywhere. “To make matters worse,” Oehlen and Martin said in their “Address to the Brainless,” “it’s really very dirty here. Can’t someone clean up the birdshit from Bäckerstrasse and not dump it right back on Lugeck Square?”
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br /> In Vienna, the art scene was undergoing a breakthrough much like the one in Cologne, with artists like Peter Weibel, Franz West, Herbert Brandl, and Heimo Zobernig leading the way. In 1981—the same year that Martin showed with Max Heztler in Stuttgart for the first time—Peter Pakesch opened his gallery on Ballgasse in Vienna, showing work by Hermann Nitsch, arguably the wildest of the Actionists. Pakesch soon shifted his focus to the younger generation, showing work by Büttner, “Mattin” Kippenberger, and the Oehlens two years later in a show called Swords into Faucets.
Martin Prinzhorn later said that the show “was a great success. A blockbuster.” The four artists were glad not to be conflated with the New Wild Ones of the Mülheimer Freiheit movement for a change, unlike in Germany, where the violent style of painting was so prominent. At least in artistic terms, they wanted nothing to do with that movement. Martin may have belonged to the same generation, the curators of his Kafka show would write years later, “but Kippenberger is a savage in a manner all his own.”
Martin “thoroughly orchestrated” the opening of the Swords into Faucets show, according to Peter Pakesch: “The drinking lasted a whole week.” It mostly took place at Kurt Kalb’s, who threw large dinner parties. “He must have spent mountains of money.”
Oswald & Kalb was for Vienna what the Paris Bar was for West Berlin. Evelyn Oswald, an art historian, and Kurt Kalb, an art dealer, had opened the restaurant on Bäckerstrasse in 1979; Kalb ran his gallery there too. “They whitewashed the vaulted ceilings and furnished it simply,” it said in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , “combining an attention to cozy comfort with laconic modernism.” There were numerous soccer trophies on display, from the restaurant’s soccer team: they employed only Yugoslavian waiters, so Croatian players from the national team played for the restaurant against the other restaurants’ teams. Oswald & Kalb were invariably the league champions.
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