Martin never took vacations as such, trips to really relax. He traveled to Siena to paint, to Teneriffe to plan sculptures, to Madrid to drink, to Tokyo to shop, to Paris to write, all over the world for exhibitions. He tolerated breaks only in order to work better afterward and sustain his wild life.
The Grässlins, who were regulars at the clinic, introduced Martin to the rest cure as a kind of better, shorter version of the Anti-Sahara Program. From that point on, Martin regularly took rest cures at various places, most often in the Lanserhof near Innsbruck and sometimes with others such as Max Hetzler, Werner Büttner, or Albert Oehlen. “It was nice,” Valeria Heisenberg told me about her stay at Bad Pyrmont with him. “So restful.” They played mau-mau and went for walks in the woods.
“It was,” said Alex Witasek, Martin’s doctor, “a fairy-tale time.” Martin told him in the nineties that he would never escape his role as a wild man—it was his brand. But at the Lanserhof, where no one knew or cared he was an artist, “he was sweet as a lamb, almost like a baby, sometimes even maudlin.” They understood each other well, the patient and the doctor—Witasek played the cello and also liked to push himself to his limits; like Martin, he talked fast and went through life “with a wide-angle lens.” Martin surely liked having a doctor who didn’t just scold him. “You have to take people as they are,” in Witasek’s words: he thought you couldn’t get anywhere with accusations and threats. The doctor gave Martin tips about how he could drink less, but he knew that Martin would never stop altogether: “He had decided that quality of life was more important than quantity.” As Martin once said, “I’m the only one who can repair myself, that’s something only I can do. That’s why that drink is called a screwdriver.”
After his rest cures, he felt ready to conquer the world. He always looked “magnificent” afterward, Gisela Capitain thought. Rosemarie Trockel said she could hardly recognize him when he came back to Cologne in the early eighties, slim and tan with short hair. Only in his last years was he unable to restore himself quite so completely. His big belly, which he used to stick out for self-portraits in underpants pulled up high, was due not to eating but to drinking; even after the cures, his hands were still red. Martin drank less at the end of his life not only out of love for his wife, Elfie Semotan, but also because his body could no longer tolerate as much.
What remained from the fairy-tale times was work. He transformed the rest cures too into art, of course: a gigantic painting of a cigarette-lighter sandwich, and then a small drawing of it in his Little Cure Booklet, or a painting of the Haus am See Sanatorium – Negative, Positive, Right-Left Reversed. Even on a cure, he could never stand not working at all: hobbies, walks, TV, miniature golf, conversations, and looking at caves in the mountains were not enough. He developed ideas, called his assistants, gave them assignments, ordered catalogs, drew, and even taught in Kassel. Roberto Ohrt wrote this about Martin’s stay in Tyrol, in the catalog of the Widauer Collection:
He looked very precisely at what was around him, talked with the people in the restaurants and cafés, whether Café Central or up in the mountain villages, went out to the soccer fields or tennis courts disguised as a jolly tourist (“up the mount’n in my city shoes”), flashed victory and peace signs at the huts, made his rounds through the shops and galleries—not that there were any of the latter—reflected on the beauty of the Tyrolean women, and got along marvelously with the local farmers, as long as they didn’t tell him how great his art was, because all he wanted to do was play cards with them in peace.
As always, he took whatever he found and incorporated it into his work: Tyrolean local color, Martin-style. Johann Widauer, the gallerist and collector known as “the Schwarzenegger of Innsbruck,” was Martin’s point of contact in the area after Martin returned home, and he arranged a lot of things for Martin while he was there, including putting him in touch with the crucifix carver he would use for numerous assignments in the years to come. The carver made Martin his crucified frogs, in natural wood and sprayed with metallic auto paint; giant oversize pills for his installations with birch forests; a bust of Richard von Weizsäcker; Martin’s own head for the sculpture series Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself ; pizzas for Martin to spatter ( Lousy Spread Toppings on Pollocked Student Pizza ); the Kippen Seltzers; the Open Manta dashboard; and the wooden cellphones Martin showed in Innsbruck’s Café Central.
Eventually the crucified frogs would be shown in Umhausen, quite nearby, at the three-day art festival organized by Herbert Fuchs, another wild man. Martin Prinzhorn used to detour around Umhausen out of “fear of a booze-fest. You would be wasted for days.”
THE GARDEN GNOME DOCUMENTA
Taking stock of his career at the end of his life, Martin could point to one unqualified hit he felt he had had as an artist: the 1987 Peter exhibition at Max Hetzler’s gallery in Cologne. The sculpture show was the talk of the town—everyone wanted to have seen it—and since documenta was running at the time in Kassel, Martin’s show had a lot of out-of-town visitors as well. Even today, this is the show that the people who knew Martin are most enthusiastic about. Gisela Capitain says, “ Peter was a bombshell. The show divided the art world of the time even more clearly into two camps: those who admired his work and those who despised it.”
“Peter” had become one of Martin’s favorite nicknames: he called a collector and chocolate manufacturer named Ludwig “Chocolate Peter,” called a baker “Roll Peter” or gave other people names like “Catalog Peter”; maybe he felt a bit like “Black Peter” himself (the bad card you get stuck with in various card games—in English usually called Black Maria). By the mid-1980s, Martin expanded this relatively standard German usage of “Peter” into all sorts of other meanings, applied to both things and people—“Peter” meaning “thingee” was a perfect label for what filled the Peter show. Meanwhile, the “salon style” of hanging paintings (crowded together on the wall, floor to ceiling—the way they were in our stairwell back in Essen-Frillendorf) is called “Petersburg Hanging” in German, after the Russian city whose Hermitage Museum uses that style. Ascan Crone hung pictures that way at his Hamburg gallery, so Martin put on an exhibition called “Hamburg Hanging” at Gisela Capitain’s gallery in 1989. And the Peter show used “Russian Placing”: Max Hetzler’s gallery was stuffed full of sculptures. [4]
While the Rent Electricity Gas show had been about architecture, the focal point of the Peter show was the issue of furnishing a room: tables, shelves, boxes, coatracks, tea trays, or, to be more precise, objects that looked like tables, shelves, boxes, coatracks, and tea trays gone terribly wrong. There was a bookshelf titled Wittgenstein, a mirrored screen called Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a box filled with boxes ( Masterwork ), a chair on a pedestal ( Not to be the Second Winner ), a rolling trestle with briefcases ( Work Timer ), a table with assorted stuff on it ( I Have Nothing Against Depressions As Long As They Don’t Come Into Fashion ), a tabletop ( Who Was It We Bought At the Table Again ), a table with a Gerhard Richter painting as its surface ( Model Interconti —the most famous piece in the show and, because of the Richter, the most expensive), a triangular thing on rollers ( Pyramid Colonia ), and other pieces: Simone de House Bar; When the Rain Starts Coming Through the Roof; Once a Friend, Never Just an Acquaintance Again. Forty-five bulky, tragicomic objects in total, crammed into a gallery that started to look like a junk room. This was Martin’s answer to the sculptors of his time, artists like Herold, Mucha, Rückreim, Donald Judd, and Jeff Koons, and to the large shows that were always so neat and tidy and manageable.
One visitor found this “blocking up the gallery space” to be “truly wonderful,” as he wrote in a letter that Martin immediately had made into a poster: “this mix of handicraft art, storeroom, and garden-gnome documenta.... Once you’ve seen Peter there is no going back. It takes you by surprise even when you see it a second time.” The gallerist Bruno Brunnet said that Peter “opened a door”; Jutta Koether felt that Martin had pioneered new di
mensions in conceptual art by allowing in everything that had previously been excluded “and ghettoized in neo-expressionist painting”: fullness, multitude, forcefulness, humor. “Of all the exhibitions that shaped my understanding of art,” the gallerist Esther Schipper said, “this one was one of the most crucial.” Peter was a hit in every sense except the commercial one.
There was no going back for Martin either. Suddenly, he was taken seriously as an artist: “it dawned on me,” Peter Pakesch said, “that what Martin was doing was in a whole different league.” He had earlier focused on painting and graphic work, but now he threw himself into three-dimensional media—sculpture, multiples, installations—and soon he would start his series of drawings on hotel stationery. From this point on, his path diverged from those of Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner.
Martin and Gisela Capitain in the Petra exhibition, Galerie Gisela Capitain, 1987
© Martin Lutz
A whole round of shows followed Peter , and the catalog for each one used the same design: a white booklet with a picture of a sculpture on the title page. There was Petra at Gisela Capitain’s gallery, Peter 2 with Peter Pakesch in Vienna, The Applause Simply Ends at Grässlin-Ehrhardt in Frankfurt, Sorry III at Metro Pictures New York, Broken Neon (a group show) at steirischer herbst in Graz, Pop In at Forum Stadtpark in Graz, Journey to Jerusalem with Bleich-Rossi in Graz, 67 Improved Papertigers Not Afraid of Repetition as a Julie Sylvester edition, and Once Again Petra the following year at the Winterthur Kunsthalle.
In the catalog dedicated to Michel Würthle, Diederichsen wrote that “not-thinking,” as he called Martin’s artistic method, was what determines
how the parts are put together, where and why they are coated/not coated with whatever, where why and with what sewn, nailed, burled, knobbed, and which intentional or unintentional but respected mistakes would be painted over to what extent and in what colors, so that on the one hand the mistakes are still visible but on the other hand so is the decision to recognize the mistake as a mistake and thus need to correct it, but also need to interrupt this correction halfway through, out of respect for the beauty the mistake gave rise to, and still leave the beginning of the correction alone, out of respect for the fact that the beauty came to pass because of a mistake, and respect for free will, and no doubt also not entirely without keeping in mind that so much respect might give off a certain beauty of its own.
Diederichsen’s text came out of a long interview with Michael Krebber about the creation of the sculptures—in which Krebber himself played a large role.
A LIAISON DANGEREUSE: MK1 AND MK2
Martin liked to say he had two friends, both named Michael. They were Michel Würthle and Michael Krebber. Meanwhile Krebber—and Martin too, for that matter—liked to say that he didn’t believe in friendship.
Martin had long dreamed of finding an assistant who would help bear his burdens. Dokoupil had had one for a while, Reiner Opoku, whom Martin tried to lure away (“You can’t seriously want to work for the worst painter in the world!”), but in vain. Martin always had someone to help him—run errands, perform various tasks, chauffeur him around, bring him material—but never someone who could do everything, truly everything for him, from making phone calls to painting pictures.
Until 1986, when Michael Krebber showed up and offered his services.
He was only a year younger than Martin and, unlike most of his assistants, had long been an artist, not just an aspiring artist. But he had done what Joseph Beuys only threatened to do: quit. In addition, Krebber (like Martin) had inherited some money and then quickly spent it all, and now he wanted to spend a year without having to worry about income. He didn’t want a normal job, and he knew he wasn’t cut out to be a manual laborer or work in the trades. He wanted a position. He applied first with Hubert Kiecol, but Kiecol wasn’t interested—perhaps he disliked the idea of having an artist his own age working for him. Martin was number two on Krebber’s list.
They had much in common: both were friends with Albert Oehlen, both admired Oswald Wiener (Krebber even more than Martin), both had lived in Cologne, Hamburg, and Berlin. And then their initials—in Martin’s book Café Central, Krebber is called MK1 and Martin himself is MK2. Both men were outsiders in the art business, and both were passionate about art. There was nothing they were more afraid of than making “normal art.”
MK1 and MK2: Martin with his collaborator and friend Michael Krebber
© Andrea Stappert
Jutta Koether wrote in Martin’s catalog Homesick Highway that there was never an anti-Kippenberger because Kippenberger was always his own opposite already. Now, in Michael Krebber, he had found a living opposite: someone like him in many ways but primarily by being a mirror image, exactly reversed.
Martin always looked older than he really was, while Krebber looked younger—and still does (today, at well over fifty, he looks like a tall schoolboy). Krebber read a lot, Martin read very little; Krebber did drink significant amounts but couldn’t hold his liquor as well as Martin. Krebber had a dominating father, too, but one who dominated by his absence, not his presence. Krebber had studied with Lüpertz, had been Baselitz’s assistant, and, like Martin, had wanted to be an actor.
Like Martin, Krebber worked conceptually; while Martin consistently expanded his artistic means and methods, though, Krebber preferred renunciation. Martin opened one exhibition after another, but Krebber showed absolutely nothing for long periods, refusing all invitations to present work; if Martin could paint a picture a day, Krebber contented himself with one a year. Or none at all. Martin crammed the Hetzler Gallery full of his Peter sculptures, but Krebber, the following year, had a show at the Christoph Dürr Gallery in Munich consisting of empty rooms that contained nothing but a single Broodthaers quotation. While Martin did everything all at once, Michael Krebber was more like Herman Melville’s famous Bartleby the Scrivener, forever repeating the same sentence: “I would prefer not to.”
Martin seemed to make everything in his life public, in the form of stories or artworks, but Krebber cloaked himself in an air of mystery. Martin’s trademark was quick, voluble, aphoristic talking; Krebber cultivated a hesitant, faltering way of speaking. Nothing was embarrassing to Martin, and he would unload his opinion of you when you walked in the door, or shout across the room what he thought of you, your art, your haircut, and your wife. Krebber, on the other hand, is said to have once bitten through a glass of beer at an artist’s opening so as not to have to say what he thought of the artist’s work. When he did say something, he could be as merciless as Martin—maybe even more merciless, since he didn’t soften his judgment with irony or humor. But it took you a moment to understand what you had just heard Krebber say, since he wore the same schoolboy smile on his face no matter how malicious the comment was.
Krebber is a “communication hound” like Martin was (the description is from the Frankfurt artist Thomas Bayrle, whom Martin substituted for at the Städelschule and whose professorship Krebber would later take over). But Krebber prefers to communicate by e-mail, whereas Martin never touched a computer, used the telephone only to quickly exchange information, and never owned a cellphone—for him, communication always had to be live, and he never felt comfortable around machines. Once, in his Hamburg period, he wrote to a friend that he had “inhibitions”: whenever he was around electronic gadgets, he said, “I keep quiet.”
They thought the way they talked: Martin spontaneously, directly, and instinctively; Krebber via detours, around corners, at a distance. Krebber once explained his artistic approach like this: “Actually with me up until this point there has not been a method except insofar as not having a method manifests itself as a method and I can enjoy it very much, having that as a method, because now I can work with it.”
As the catalog for a 2000 show at the Brauschweig Kunstverein under the direction of Karola Grässlin says, “Michael Krebber (b. 1954, Cologne) worked on his legend before his first picture came into existence. He is surely one
of the most rigorous observers of art, which has inhibited his own production of work to this day.”
From a very young age, Martin, full of love for pictures and performances, threw himself into his life as an artist. But when Diedrich Diederichsen asked Krebber about the various forms of artistic life Krebber had journeyed through (“For a very long time now, you have existed as an artist who shows no work, whose ideas are taken up by others but whose name is missing, but then that changed and there were exhibitions”), Krebber answered, “The first form was of desperately trying to be an artist.” Martin’s light, playful, uninhibited artistic life—and his lack of inhibition about making use of other people’s ideas—was foreign to Krebber. “I hesitated for years about my debut in the art world, hemming and hawing, at least that’s how it seems to me,” Krebber said.
While Martin, accused of being nothing but a clown, devoted a series of paintings to the figure of the fool, Krebber availed himself of the figure of the dandy, someone who likewise turns his life into art but without producing actual works of art. For example, Krebber took care to always wear something no other artist was wearing, “even if it was just a certain pair of shoes.” He also gave himself a pseudonym in his early years, since he hated his real name: someone had once said to him that an artist’s birthplace worked well as the artist’s name, so for a while he was Mario Köln (the German spelling of “Cologne”). In the opinion of Valeria Heisenberg, who met him when she was a student in Frankfurt, Krebber “was like a fabricated character.”
It was clear from the start that the relationship between MK1 and MK2 would not be an easy one.
When Krebber applied to work for Martin, they had already known each other for years. They had met in 1980, in Hamburg and Berlin, unpleasant encounters from Krebber’s perspective: “When I’m asked today how I met Kippenberger, when and where, there is only one answer: I met him at such-and-such and he made me want to throw up,” Krebber said in the interview Martin had him conduct with Joachim Lottmann and then used as the introduction to Café Central under the title “Hellish Prelude with Tape Recorder (Stupid Questions, Correct Answers).” Krebber was no less repelled by Martin’s art: “At the time, I thought the Kippenberger works were bad, blunt, and insensitive. It took me five or six years to see the quality in them.”
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