Martin with the Viennese art dealer and restaurant owner Kurt Kalb in Club 45
© Dietrich Sattmann
When Kurt Kalb was given the “Gold Order of Merit for Service to the City of Vienna,” in 2006, the journalist Eva Deissen praised both his sense for authentic, non-kitschy art and his gastronomical activities, which revolutionized the city’s restaurant scene. “With his legendary generosity, he made life possible for many artists.” Pakesch called Kalb “a crucial social nerve center and a source of money too. He sold art, he had connections.” The Vienna Actionists often had just a few shillings for the streetcar, but they showed up in the city center and Kalb served them. The food there was to Martin’s taste, too. His posthumous papers include an old menu listing all the traditional specialties of the house: chopped calf’s liver, house-cured meat with horseradish, boiled beef, homemade blood sausage with sauerkraut, and Styrian caraway cutlets with parsley potatoes.
Prinzhorn says that Martin went to Oswald & Kalb “every night, to rumble around at top volume and live out the cliché of the German. The Viennese are a people who are on the one hand incredibly frightened by such things, but on the other hand totally fascinated. Kurt Kalb used Martin, too, as an instrument of terror to shake up the city’s certainty.” With great success.
Kalb, along with Pakesch, was the most important figure for Martin during his early period in Vienna, according to the photographer Didi Sattmann: Kalb “believed in Martin and understood him.” What did Kalb like? “Martin the entertainer, the jolly drinking buddy, the bad boy,” Peter Pakesch surmises. They were also both friends with Michel Würthle. In “Address to the Brainless,” Martin himself said what he liked about Vienna: “Aunt Maridi’s good food at Oswald & Kalb and the table of regulars that we try to avoid.” Of course “he sat at the regulars’ table often enough,” according to Peter Pakesch. But it was very Viennese—there were insiders’ rituals there that had developed over decades. The regulars would close ranks and fiercely defend their territory. There were people who were Martin’s type—the Graz gallerist Bleich-Rossi, Kalb himself, the Attersee artists, journalists like Eva Deissen—but also politicians (especially from the Austrian Socialist Party, and even Sinnowatz, the chancellor at the time, and Fischer, the current president), notorious figures like Udo Proksch, and the various ladies who went with them. It was a place where the various classes of society mingled, where even a neo-Nazi politician like Jörg Haider would try to gain entry until it was made clear, relatively quickly, that it wasn’t going to happen.
Eventually Kalb had to give up the restaurant—his generosity grew to be too expensive for him to sustain. Peter Pakesch describes how Kalb used to “close the doors at one and from then on everything was free. The guests got calf’s liver out of the kitchen themselves and helped themselves at the bar, Evelyn Oswald ran over to the gallery for the record player, and everyone danced until the wee hours.” He sold the restaurant to the waiters, “but Kurti couldn’t leave well enough alone” and he became part owner of the Old Vienna Café across the street. The Old Vienna was known for the posters that covered the walls right up to the ceiling, “so Martin started to make posters like crazy until he’d managed to have the walls of the Old Vienna entirely covered with his own posters.”
When Kalb gave up his restaurant, Martin lost his free-food privileges. As compensation, Kalb gave him a pair of custom-made shoes, which was fine with him.
Martin had his first solo show at Peter Pakesch’s gallery in 1984: Shock Out Is the Name of the Game. The poster showed him doing a handstand in the toilet. Martin had found a family and home-base in Vienna as well—Pakesch showed most of the members of the Hetzler group (Büttner, Oehlen, Herold, Kiecol, Mucha, and Meuser) as well as Austrian artists Martin befriended in Vienna, such as West and Zobernig, and like-minded Americans, such as Mike Kelley, John Baldessari, Stephen Prina, and Christopher Wool.
Martin in Peter Pakesch’s Vienna gallery (Pakesch on right; Max Hetzler sitting)
© Dietrich Sattmann
It wasn’t friendship at first sight between Pakesch and Martin. They met in 1982, at an exhibition of German painting at the Basel Kunsthalle that included most of the artists from the Mülheimer Freiheit and Moritzplatz groups, and Albert Oehlen, but not Martin. Later, Martin would call one of his catalogs for a show at Pakesch’s gallery in Vienna Are the Discos As Stupid As I Think They Are, Or Am I the Stupid One . Pakesch says, “He leveled his protest at everyone in the restaurant after the show in Basel.” In an homage to Martin after Martin’s death, Pakesch wrote: “His attacks were often very witty, but you could feel the deep sadness of someone who felt himself to be in the right but not acknowledged.” At the time in Basel, though, Martin only “incredibly pissed [Pakesch] off. I didn’t understand how someone could go on and on like that. He turned the whole opening into the Martin Show.”
They got to know each other better a few months later, at the Art Fair in Basel. Martin told him his booth was weird (Pakesch was showing, among other things, a bicycle with an apple). “I said ‘Max, who’s that guy with the chubby cheeks?’” Martin said later. And the way Martin used the fair as a performance stage impressed the gallerist: “I realized he was really engaging critically with it.” The three men agreed to do something together and over the course of the following years they collaborated often. “And no matter what we did,” Martin said, “it was allowed.” He attributed to Pakesch “a truly very fine way of behaving, doesn’t take everything so seriously, enough to be successful but still he can overlook it if an artist smokes a bit too much pot and talks stupid stuff and cries and so on. Then he calms him down... so, he’s a nice guy, Petzi is.” Things between them were not always quite as harmonious as all that—especially in the nineties, there was serious tension between them, and Pakesch started to keep his distance.
BUCKLIGE WELT
It didn’t take long for Martin to find a place to retreat and paint, in the Bucklige Welt region in eastern Austria. Martin Prinzhorn, who would later write so much for and about Martin and about art in general, was studying linguistics at the University of Vienna at the time; he had inherited a castle in Bucklige Welt, more of a ruin than a castle, but in a small part of it it was possible to live, work, and occasionally throw parties—big, blowout parties with the whole clan. Martin came, as did Oehlen, Pakesch, Kiecol, Schlick, Bonin, Krebber, Diederichsen, and so on.
Dokoupil had introduced Martin to Prinzhorn during one of Prinzhorn’s trips to Cologne; when Martin heard the word “Vienna,” he was all ears because he knew he would be going there soon, with Albert Oehlen. When Martin and Oehlen arrived, they occupied Prinzhorn’s apartment in the city right away: they didn’t like it at the hotel so they dropped by for a few hours a day, played and worked, and discovered a specialty paper store nearby where they found material for their collages. Later, Martin sometimes borrowed the apartment to seduce a woman with his noodle casserole.
Eventually Martin asked Prinzhorn if he could come to the castle. Prinzhorn agreed, thinking he meant for a short visit. “Then suddenly a car pulled up with all his things. He had just been in Italy; he brought his favorite painting stool and all his things like that and set up shop.” Martin lived in this idyllic hill country for a whole summer, in 1984, and often went back there from Vienna later. “At first he was totally shocked when he realized that it was an utterly isolated house, on a cliff, an hour on foot to the nearest bar. He was really depressed.” But after he overcame his initial shock, he soon got used to the idyllic surroundings.
The two of them focused on their work. Prinzhorn, a few years younger than Martin, was there to write his dissertation, “so every day it was ‘How many pages did you write?!’ Then he bragged how many pictures he’d painted. Sometimes it was three or four a day.” The next show at Pakesch’s gallery was fast approaching, as was a show in New York.
Martin took long hikes with Prinzhorn and when he got too bored, Prinzhorn had to play mau-mau with him, which Prin
zhorn in turn found “insanely boring, so he tried to tempt me by any means possible; there were special prizes for me, drawings.” They ate noodle casseroles, traded stories of boarding school (Prinzhorn had attended one too), and even read. Since Martin “couldn’t rampage around as usual” in isolation, and had spare time, his host recommended he read H.C. Artmann’s complete works: Martin “enthusiastically worked his way through it.” Martin also got Prinzhorn to read him works by Wolfi Bauer out loud.
Prinzhorn was more of “a literature person,” he says. “When I met Martin I didn’t really understand anything about art.” When they were in the city together, Martin would take his friend to the museum, where he “explained things to me, he really liked doing that.” He told Prinzhorn that our father had always dragged him to museums as a child and how important that had been for him. “I had the feeling that he thought his father was responsible for making him an artist.”
Since Prinzhorn had to finish his thesis before his exams, he didn’t want to go out drinking all the time, and Martin was “not as tyrannical as usual” with him. He let him go home at 1 a.m. without protest, whether in the city or in the country. Martin had found a bar even out in the country, of course: the White Cross, an inn run by a large family. “As always, he quickly made friends and slaves out of them—they loved him and he liked them a lot too.” He proposed marriage to one daughter in public, at a firemen’s festival; the other sister’s husband, “poor thing, had a job where he had to be up and out the door by five in the morning, but Martin acquired him to chauffeur him around the Burgenland to discos” (Martin didn’t have a driver’s license). Martin hatched plans with the father, who was also the mayor—he wanted to build a gas station to expand the inn’s business but Martin preferred the idea of a vacation camp, and “they had serious discussions on the topic.”
The White Cross was also where, in 1991, during one of Martin’s many later visits to the region, he gave a long interview over a hearty meal to an anonymous writer for the fanzine Artfan. The interviewer said he was amazed that Martin “did that with himself—this strain and effort, all that drinking, and then relaxing at a place like this.” Martin answered, “You can only relax if you’re tense, how can you relax if you’re not tensed up?”
WITH ALBERT OELEN IN VIENNA
At some point the castle got to be too cold for Martin—and maybe, in Peter Pakesch’s opinion, he was worried that Albert Oehlen was gaining too much ground on him in Vienna. So he returned to the city, where he and Oehlen were sharing an apartment.
Of all the artists Martin was friends with, Albert Oehlen was the most important for him. Their relationship was marked by competition, friendship, and great admiration. When Oehlen met Martin, he saw him as a poser:
The preparations for his twenty-fifth birthday were underway and Berlin was holding its breath. He was quite the rebel, and at the time I thought it was just pushy. But when I realized that he’s an artist, I actually liked it, this combination of braggart and artist, exactly what other people thought was shit because they thought an artist can’t be like that, so ostentatious, so tacky, with that whole performance of himself. So many people think of the artist as this oddball genius sitting in his garret with his charcoal pencil, not bothering anyone. He was just the opposite.
Still, Oehlen didn’t like Martin as a person until after the Misery show in Berlin:
That’s when I understood how he is. You just had to get the hang of it, and once you did it was fun to be around him on a personal level too, it wasn’t like you constantly had to put up with him, he was really a great person. You just had to clear this little hurdle. It wasn’t just bragging, he was generous with the way he told you about his work and his discoveries and the whole adventure.
There were weeks, sometimes months, when they didn’t see each other or even talk to each other: neither of them was the type to call the other and chitchat. Six months might have passed, and then Martin would call to suggest that they go on a trip, and they would be off to Italy for a week of drawing and going out to eat.
When they were together, it was with an intensity that made Martin’s girlfriends jealous. They made books together, records, pictures, and exhibitions, and they worked at the same table. In this early period, Prinzhorn said, they had a symbiotic relationship that both of them profited from. There were similarities between the two (in Albert’s words, “we both had fathers who were difficult in their excess of humor and their need to be part of everything”) and dissimilarities too (Albert was calmer, better read, more political, more musically trained, and a more abstract painter). “For me,” Martin said, “Albert also represented something different. A supplement.” He may have taken Albert’s art more seriously than his own, in the early years. Martin told Artfan that what he valued in his relationship with Albert was the exchange, the trust, the mutual respect: that they “recognized things” in the same way “and had fun with it, I’m never bored with Albert. He sees the whole panorama of your discoveries, the big picture, and he has one, too.”
They lived together a few times—in Vienna, and later in Spain. “It was like we were engaged,” Martin said in retrospect.
And always scheming around, what is important now, what’s the right thing, or is what we just said maybe the worst ever, dumbest ever, and pow! you’ve gotten good practice, now you can throw it on the floor and forget about it, pow! you can work some more.... It’s like Laurel and Hardy, hurling jokes at each other so fast that you could make a movie in three days.
When you’re so on each other’s wavelength, in the morning when you get up he needs his two hours, he just stares at the table, bores a hole in it with his eyes, and has doubts about life. I have doubts about life in the morning too, those first two hours when I’m waking up out of my dreams, I despair too: Shit, do I really have to put myself back together, build it all up, build visions, everything will have its good side too, get up and do something again. Into the void like that. As an artist you’re always working into a void.... So I let him sit there for two hours first, in the living room, over breakfast, and there he is, alone, and he has his peace and quiet and then I unobtrusively go in and sit down, drink a little something, Howdy Albert, it gets better so slowly, and then you can start to talk again. Every day a new relationship . . . it was about how do you motivate yourself to live or act out your life. In fun ways, in style, finding your style, always a new one.
They lived together in Vienna for six months, constantly in cafés, exchanging ideas—“more than we could put into practice,” Albert said later. “We were fruitful for each other. He was one of the very few people I could talk about my paintings with.” They also had fights—Max Hetzler later said, “it wasn’t as though Martin and Albert had twenty years of the most loving and close friendship. But their drive to get somewhere led to great moments.”
In Vienna, each of them painted at his own end of the apartment, but there was a big table in the middle with piles of collage material on it. “We made great progress together,” Oehlen says. “He made a leap in his own work, and I in my work. Everything went well, the things were totally great. You forced yourself up to a higher level—both of our collages were more daring and funnier than they would have been if we were each making them ourselves. It was a competition. It was great.”
Not that they were stuck inside all the time, of course. They had readings, made books, put on events; “in Vienna it was extreme,” Oehlen later said:
Too much. We were done afterward. Vienna was brutally stressful. Especially toward the end, Martin promised an unbelievable number of things and we had to carry them out, it was insanely tough. And the girls too, everything was always a madhouse, and I was unhappy, we partied a lot out of despair, and worked, and drank. The final phase was really apocalyptic, in those last few weeks. Our paths diverged for a little while then, to be safe—and from the girls, too. We flew off in different directions, to survive.
Even for onlookers it was stressful. The two
men were soon the “terrors of Vienna,” as the Graz artist Jörg Schlick called them. Among their many activities was the “Officer’s Club,” a vodka drinking contest between German and Austrian artists at the Club am Opernring, a basement bar that Attila Corbaci ran for a little while.
Martin and Albert Oehlen at the “Officer’s Casino” artist’s vodka-drinking contest, Vienna
© Dietrich Sattmann
“Martin was unbelievably enthusiastic and meticulous and worked incredibly hard organizing it, with posters and flyers,” Corbaci later said. “He even hired a paramedic and we set up a hospital bed in the next room—there were one or two people who needed it.” Anyone who wanted to watch had to pay an entrance fee. The artists stood in line, and whoever’s turn it was stepped up to the table, drank, handed the bottle back, crawled under the table to the other side, and then went around to the back of the line. The Austrian team was the first to empty their ten bottles.
The pace of these actions and events was relentless. One Friday at noon there was a carriage race, followed at 7 p.m. by the “Address to the Brainless” that Peter Weibel (a vodka-drinking-contest participant) had invited them to give, then at midnight the Peter Altenberg Cup was handed out to the winner of the carriage race in Café Alt Wien, then the next day at 6 p.m. came the closing of Martin’s Shock Out Is the Name of the Game show at Pakesch, then on Sunday morning Albert and Martin appeared onstage at the Museum of the Twentieth Century as the Alma Band with Martin as the singer (singing “freestyle,” in the artist Hans Wiegand’s description, “panting across the stage with the microphone in his hand”).
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