Every event with its own poster, of course. Despite the announcement, though, the First Vienna Carriage Race took place in a deserted Prater Park—no one showed up on that cold December day, unless you count Attersee, the artist, and Didi Sattmann, the photographer whom Martin had asked to document the event. Photographs and stories and the presentation of the winner’s cup were enough to create the legend. They had met up at the Old Vienna Café, gone to Stephansplatz, the cathedral square, and hired two tourist fiacres for a price everyone was happy with. Then came the race, not particularly fast—Sattmann guessed that the winner had already been decided in advance. Martin’s later announcement ran as follows: “1st Place: Martin Kippenberger. 2nd Place: Albert Oehlen. 3rd Place: Not awarded due to shortage of serious participants.”
“I thought it was just magnificent,” Didi Sattmann says. “I had never seen anyone like that. It fascinated me that an artist could follow his path like that—so creative, so direct, so unconventional.” Sattmann and his camera often accompanied Martin, who wanted to be documented as a living work of art. Sattmann photographed the drinking contest, the “Address to the Brainless,” and whatever else took place, or even things that never took place, for instance Albert and Martin lying passed out from alcohol on the floor (they were actually completely sober). He did so both on his own initiative and under pressure from Martin: “You have to!” Martin had said. He liked Sattmann’s pictures, “and he knew that I’d be there.” He was there even when there was no fee and no newspaper that would publish his photographs, and even if he had to postpone other assignments. When Martin said “Come on, we’re going to the disco to dance the boogie-woogie,” Sattmann went—apparently the Austrians could dance it as eagerly and well as Martin. Or when Martin said “Come on, we’re going to buy shoes,” they went to a cobbler who still made shoes by hand.
The First Viennese Carriage Race , 1985. Competing: Martin and Albert Oehlen. Audience: Three spectators
© Dietrich Sattmann
Even though Martin had a certain exotic status in Austria that he lacked in Germany, he polarized the Viennese even more than Albert did. Opinions varied widely even between close friends, for example between Walter Pichler and Christian Ludwig Attensee, Vienna’s two great art heroes. Pichler, representing sublime High Art and the autonomy of the work of art, disapproved of Martin, while Attersee respected Martin just as Martin respected him (poking a little fun at him too, but that was par for the course).
RENT ELECTRICITY GAS
Martin painted like a world champion in those days—1983, ’84, ’85. Heil Hitler You Fetishists; Not Knowing Why but Knowing What For; Hysterialand; It’s a Shame That Wols Is Not Alive to See This; With the Best Will in the World, I Can´t See a Swastika ; opinion pictures, architecture pictures, Is-Not-Embarrassing pictures, profit-peak pictures. There was one exhibition after another in 1985: at Ascan Crone in Hamburg, Van Beveren in Rotterdam, Metro Pictures in New York, Silvio Baviera in Zurich, Hetzler in Cologne, CCD Gallery in Düsseldorf, Leyendecker in Teneriffe, Heinrich Ehrhardt in Frankfurt, Bärbel Grässlin in Frankfurt, Kuhlenschmidt in Los Angeles, Petersen in Berlin, and Erhard Klein in Bonn.
Johann-Karl Schmidt, the curator, said of himself that it was in Cologne that he “learned that museums do not always have to work with eternal values, but can work with present-day ideas.” When Schmidt became the head of the modern art department of the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt in the late seventies, he wanted to create a platform for the new contemporary art movement, together with Hans-Jürgen Müller. Necessity was the mother of invention, since the Pop Art collection that a new building was being built for was on loan in Frankfurt. But by the time the building was finally finished, in 1984, the idea was not so easy to put into practice: artists like Fetting were already too expensive (“they made it unbelievably fast”), and most young artists already had solo museum shows behind them. Only Martin was unspoiled territory—no museum director had given him a show yet, because they saw him as a clown, not an artist, or because they were afraid of him and his unpredictability. “It was too awkward for me,” admits Klaus Honnef, who at the time ran the State Museum in Bonn. “I had the feeling that it would blow up on me, that I couldn’t control it.”
The collaboration in Darmstadt went smoothly; the curator now recalls only the discussions that went into the catalog as a problem. They were both bashful: “We absolutely didn’t speak the same language. I couldn’t handle Martin’s vitality and he couldn’t handle my intellectualism. So he sat there like a good little boy, and I did too, both of us totally embarrassed.” Maybe, Schmidt adds, Martin wasn’t shy about him in person but about the institution: “Maybe it was uncomfortable for him to finally be accepted into the art market and to have those demands on him, or to show work in a museum with its claims of permanent value.”
Rent Electricity Gas was a show of paintings and sculptures, mostly on the theme of architecture; it included many of Martin’s classic works: Betty Ford Clinic, Haus am See Sanatorium – Negative, Positive, Right-Left Reversed; Houses with Slits; If You Stand In Front of the Abyss, Don’t Be Surprised If You Can Fly; Two Proletarian Inventresses on the Way to the Inventors’ Congress; the Cost Peaks and Profit Peaks, the Hunger Family, New York Seen from the Bronx, and EuroPallet sculptures like Essen-Frillendorf Station, Student Housing in Riad, and Design for an Administrative Building for Rest Center for Mothers in Paderborn.
“Painters are rediscovering the world,” Michael Royen wrote in a review of the show in Skyscraper : “Kippenberger has thrown in his lot with this world. That’s what he looks after.”
There were no scandals; Schmidt has “no clear memory” of the opening. One reason no conflicts arose, most likely, was that Martin was given free rein to design everything himself, from the poster to the invitations to the catalog—the whole thing was supposed to be “an artist’s exhibition, as authentic as possible.” Martin included in the catalog not only Schmidt and Bazon Brock (a professor of aesthetics and leading thinker in the Fluxus movement) but his friends and colleagues, even with just a word or two: Hubert Kiecol, Martin Prinzhorn, Diedrich Diederichsen, Georg Herold; Wolfgang Bauer was represented with an entire play, A Cheerful Morning at the Hair Salon, which he also performed at an opening at the Hetzler Gallery.
Schmidt says that one should not overestimate the importance of the show. “It was hardly a milestone in Martin’s biography—there wasn’t a Before Darmstadt and After Darmstadt. Kippenberger was dynamic enough on his own not to need the exhibition.” Still, it was his only solo show at a German museum until shortly before his death. (In 1997, eleven years after the Darmstadt show, The Eggman and His Outriggers opened at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach. The museum director, Veit Loers, was a friend of his.)
For the curator, on the other hand, it was a turning point: “the exhibition was such a success that I was made director of the Stuttgart City Gallery.” Which is not to say that the masses stormed the gates of the museum, not to mention the critics, who largely ignored the show. The catalog (print run: 1,500 copies) was eventually remaindered.
THE MAGICAL MISERY TOUR
The day after the Darmstadt show opened came the next event, Give Me the Summer Downtime at the Klein Gallery in Bonn, accompanied by three booklets and two editions. And that was just a fraction of the material Martin had brought back from Brazil. He had spent a good three months there—one of his worst trips but also one of his most fruitful. It was like a sequel to Slaves of Tourism, but more extreme: The Magical Misery Tour.
Martin had set out for his trip to Brazil in high style. He threw a farewell dance on December 13, 1985, in Cologne: “10 p.m. to 4 a.m.” Night and Day played; Martin joined them onstage and loudly declared his love for Ursula Böckler (involved with another man at the time) in front of a large painting Hubert Kiecol had made for the occasion, which showed a ship in the waves and the caption “Kippy Come Back.” Gisela Capitain said that Martin “wanted to show Cologne that he was
leaving.” Festivities continued the next day with a brunch at Andrea Stappert’s (sixty guests), and then he was off. Hanno Huth and Curny, two childhood friends from Essen, traveled with Martin to Rio, along with Albert Oehlen, though he only stayed for ten days.
Even now, more than twenty years later, Oehlen describes the trip as though he would have preferred to escape from the very beginning. The Rio travel report by Martin and Albert in Café Central says: “With the first door we opened, the starting gate went up for drug abuse, insanity, prostitution, and shabba-da-shabbad under a superheated nicotine bell jar.” In the blazing sun they drank Sexy Piranhas from morning till night—Martin’s hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t butter his bread, and “our heads, attached to our legs, started to itch,” as he described it in Café Central. The most dangerous thing about Brazil, the passage continues, was “the belief that everything was just like at home, only warmer.” Culture shock struck them with full force.
Hanno Huth remembers the trip perfectly, especially the New Year’s party it included. They rented an apartment in Copacabana on the thirteenth floor, apparently furnished in psychedelic style: a “desolate accumulation of colors, shapes, and sea-sail posters. Kippenberger had insisted on his right to claim the biggest bed, which looked like an oversized stereo system with broken knobs. (You have to bring your own Dolby.)” On New Year’s Eve they went out to eat and only just managed to force their way back through the crowds of people to their apartment with a view; they rushed to the window just in time for midnight and saw “a couple million people dressed in white on the beach, sending candles on little boats into the sea, and at that moment the music started: a Viennese waltz. The Blue Danube Waltz. Tears ran down our faces.” A fat black cleaning lady was in the apartment with them; she had asked if she and her family could spend New Year’s with them. “When I turned around, Martin was dancing a waltz with her. It was one of the most emotional moments of my life.”
Albert Oehlen, on the other hand, who was certainly adventurous enough, found the whole thing decidedly too adventurous: “too stressful, too crazy, just suicidal. I was totally overwhelmed emotionally by all the new impressions I was taking in: poverty, wealth, the samba, the girls everywhere—not prostitutes, just beautiful girls who wanted things in various degrees or sometimes didn’t want anything at all. We were always on the edge; there was such a color difference (white and rich or brown and poor), and you felt it the whole time. Always. It made a huge impression on me and was a huge burden. I could barely stand it; I was so damn happy when I could leave.”
“You have to hang yourself in misery” was Martin’s motto: immerse yourself in the misery of the world. He said you have to “fall down the hole and feel it so you can report on desolation all the better, that’s how you can be so intense.” In Brazil, he definitely crossed his pain threshold. As he later said in an interview with Jutta Koether,
I always know here come some stupid minutes, now it won’t be much fun. You have to get through that too. You have to have spent three months in Brazil! Not two weeks and cross Brazil off your list and say Now I’ve had the girl from Ipanema and her sister too, and then it got to be too much for me and then I left and . . . talk about “poor people,” “I saw poor people!” That’s it? That can’t have been it! You have to be able to stick it out! To experience things that flip the greatest feelings of pleasure and fun into their opposite and to stay!
He did stay, first in Rio and then in Salvador, where Ursula Böckler joined him as his photography assistant, driver, and companion. When she arrived “he was already a bit unnerved by the whole thing, frightened too.” He had been robbed—and no wonder, since he went around like the prototypical tourist, in shorts, sneakers, and tennis socks with a camera hanging down over his belly. They drove around together, and he was interested in the architecture: all the “Psychobuildings” he saw on the roadsides, then a sixty-foot sculpture in the middle of an intersection. Naturally he had his picture taken standing in front of it. The gas stations fascinated him too, not least because they had alcohol coming out of some of the pumps.
He bought an abandoned gas station in Salvador de Bahia (Russ Meyer had had a similar gas station in one of his movies already), named it after Martin Bormann, [3] and had Ursula Böckler take his picture striking a pose in his shorts between the pumps. Böckler found it easy to photograph him: “he was a good poser.” She was not a professional photographer herself, just someone who liked photography, but Martin liked that about her. He did sometimes heap abuse on her, when he thought she wasn’t trying hard enough: “The division of roles was clear; there was no discussion about it. Martin was like a mad professor for me, who never stopped trying to teach me how things should be.”
It was hardly a dream vacation. “When he was in a good mood, it was nice,” Böckler says. But he was often in a bad mood. Martin was determined to work even when they had just had another fight; once she took his picture in just such a moment, a series of portraits that turned out especially well. They also played a lot of mau-mau,
because we didn’t get along with each other very well. Over mau-mau, you didn’t have to talk, and you could drink. And then it turned into a meaningful activity and was used for an artistic postcard action: he kept all his friends and the art people who mattered to him up-to-date with the running mau-mau scores, and Erhard Klein “finally” published them in a series of booklets [called Finally ]. We usually had a lot of fun, with the mau-mau at least.
Martin celebrated his birthday at a dance bar and arranged to have noodle casserole onboard a boat for lunch, which moved him to tears. On the street, Martin gave “foreign aid” to young boys, namely a lecture about how selling was better than begging along with buying bags and bags of peanuts off them (and eating them too). Using nothing but hand gestures, he taught them how to bargain.
No sooner was Martin back in Europe than he called up all sorts of gallerists and said he wanted to show work. Erhard Klein, the Bonn gallerist, told him he had already committed to shows by two other young artists, Jo Schultheis and Albert Oehlen, and then by two older artists, Sigmar Polke and Imi Knoebel, at which point Martin told him: “Give me the summer downtime.” That turned into the title of the show.
He certainly had something to show from the trip. With Albert he made three records— The Alma Band: Live in Rio, White and Dumbass: Rio Clamoso, and The Know-How Knockers: Knocking for Jazz —along with a book of texts and drawings called 14 Million for a Howdy-Do, a book of poems called No Problem, and a collection of material called It’s Not Your Fault. He published photographs and made multiples like Copa and Ipa : garish Brazilian beach towels and cheap fabric from Cologne sewn together with sleeves, which Andrea Stappert had had to cut off of Martin’s expensive Uli Knecht shirts before he left for tropical Brazil. A series of paintings came out of it: Anticipation the Wrong Way Round: I Have To Stay At Home. His “Analyses of Things Written on T-Shirts” was later “revealed as Picture Titles for Artists to Borrow. ” In the Sand in the Vaseline show in Düsseldorf, he exhibited photocollages along with pictures our father had taken on the beach in Zandvoort. He drew floor plans of the apartments he had lived in throughout his life on receipts from the Bahia Othon Palace Hotel, Salvador, and titled the series Input-Output. He showed silkscreens of sketches along with texts about Rio he had written with Albert, in a show called 23 Proposals in Four Shades of Gray for the Modernization of the Backstroke Swimmer (the Backstroke Swimmer in question being the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer above Rio, with his arms outspread). He cut circles (“Everything in Brazil is round: the samba, the sun, the soccer balls”) out of cardboard boxes (“This is what they make their shacks out of down there”) and painted the boxes the Brazilian national colors.
“Now it all seems so conceptual, so completely thought-out,” Ursula Böckler says. But the whole thing seemed much more chaotic to her at the time, when she was with Martin in Brazil. Albert Oehlen, on the other hand, thought that Martin had it
all planned from the beginning, and that that was why Martin stuck it out so long in the poverty and misery:
He always had insane plans like that in mind. The older he got, the more complicated the plans were. He knew: If I go to Brazil I’ll make a Martin Bormann gas station there, I’ll buy a hundred washcloths and embroider this and that word on them, that’ll be the connection to the book that has the photograph of the gas station, then I’ll have it embroidered in gold again and include it in the record I’ll have Albert press in Germany and then I’ll hang the photograph of the record up in the gas station, but I should do it as a multiple, Erhard Klein’ll take it, he’ll give me $X for it, and if any’s left over I’ll make such-and-such and Ursula can take a picture of it and so-and-so will print it and that’ll be my Graz show . . . All the content and meaning proliferated alongside the financing situation—it was like a three-dimensional spiderweb of financing, printing, exhibition obligations, plus this whole insanity of the content. No one could keep up with it. But the whole construction did in fact exist. Sometimes, in later years, people were tempted to wonder if all he really did was drink away all his brain cells or just tell jokes, but looking at this whole fabric, they had to realize that it was all still there.
REST CURES
It was so relaxing: to go unrecognized once a year, not to have to put on a show, not to play the wild man. At his rest cure near Innsbruck, Martin was a clown only on the wall (he had given the hotel a painting, a genuine Kippenberger for the gym room) and The Wild Man was just the name of a local inn, where he regularly went and drank water. In the clinic he sipped tea and ate dry bread, a hundred chews per bite. After a few weeks he had reacquired his usual tastes—“it resensitizes everything for you”—and he felt hungry again. He needed his hunger, in life and in art: he always said that “not-having-enough” was his motor. The only thing he indulged in during his cures was smoking like a chimney.
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