Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  Ten years later, Krebber and his wife, Cosima von Bonin, would write in their obituary for Martin in Spex : “For a very long time it wasn’t clear whether this was an artist you could work with, or if you had to take a stand against him or ignore him or something like that. Until at last you decided: he’s good. The stories that made us suspicious were the stories about him showing off, acting swanky, throwing Rolex watches around.”

  Martin included work by Krebber in his early exhibition in Hamburg, Action Piss-Crutch , without asking Krebber first, and even dedicated the catalog of Truth Is Work to Krebber—a challenge, to a large extent, at a time when no one really knew what Krebber was doing.

  The whole thing was an experiment, with a fixed time limit from the beginning. Since Krebber was an artist and didn’t want to be referred to as an assistant, he called himself an “employee.” Since he thought it was stupid that Martin no longer wanted to be called Kippi, he always referred to him as “Kippenberger.” But he was ready and willing to do anything and everything. He practiced service as his form of art for a year, and his absolute devotion to a given idea or project is exactly what Martin liked, since that is what Martin always did: give himself 150 percent, whether fervently singing religious songs in the car as a boy, or taking drugs as a teenager, or being the wild impresario of S.O.36, or undertaking his Sahara Program.

  Martin threw himself into the role of the lord and master, making the “employee” his errand-boy for everything. As a first step, Martin told him stories about our family all night—not always flattering stories, it seems—because he thought Krebber had to know these stories if he was going to work for him. Then Krebber had to put up Kippenberger posters in Café Broadway, before the eyes of other Cologne artists like Walter Dahn; had to take his dirty shirts to the laundry; had to paint pictures Martin had already sold before they even existed, and deliver them too; had to make sure there would be lentil soup in Teneriffe for the Christmas party. A passage from Café Central says what it meant to work for Martin, namely, to be on call around the clock; Krebber worked on the book, and it is impossible to know whether the passage was written by Martin, Krebber, or someone else:

  I am Kiprenbersher’s emproyee and Im here at a inshtrallation in Teneriffe. The bossh says I can drink after work but I hafta trink til the lasht dishco closhes. Then geddup early in the moaning and go to the offish becaush itsh lunsh from 1 to 5. At 1 I hafta trink with the bossh on the beash. Then he takesh hish afternoon nap and Im back to the offish, and when he wakesh up he hash the crayshiest ideash.

  They had ended up on the Canary Islands at the invitation of the Leyendecker Gallery, where Martin had an exhibition. They were working on the Peter sculptures. Krebber later said about his time working for and with Martin that it “gave rise to a common understanding in many areas.” One important area of commonality that they discovered then, developed further, and exploited was their love of mistakes—the “unintentional poetry” (in Krebber’s words) of mistakes.

  Krebber tells the story in Café Central of how he went to a carpenter in Teneriffe with drawings, paper models, and a dictionary in hand, to explain to him how to build the sculptures. He went through everything, talked out and drew every detail, but the fact remained that “the carpenter misunderstood everything.” Eventually they would take their leave of each other, politely, “with a gesture of Well, there’s nothing to be done about it, what will be will be. The next day I would see whether the boxes looked the way I thought they would. Thus Art is born.” Both MKs liked the misunderstandings so much that they built a few more into their sculptures on purpose.

  Krebber’s perceptions and his way of describing them, Martin later said, “can make people cry.” Anyone who heard Krebber talk about gray suits, Martin said, would never see one on the street the same way again. Other people describe Martin’s way of seeing in similar terms. “I can look,” Martin said himself, “I don’t only look at the canvas or look out the window, I can also look at people.”

  Krebber told Diedrich Diederichsen that what he (Krebber) offered as an artist was not “an object to look at and admire,” a tangible thing, but rather ideas and conversations. His audience consisted of the people he was with, “who care about similar things, people where I like something about them and vice versa.” There was mutual admiration between him and Martin, and mutual fear. But an imbalance remained: one MK was the boss, and the other MK was the employee, and when their year was up and they spent almost as much time together as before, there was still the subjective difference in their ages, which both of them felt. With Martin’s high productivity and Krebber’s long abstinence from artmaking, they were in fact many more years apart in their artistic careers than the one year between their actual ages.

  Krebber described their relationship as a liaison dangereuse. When he describes Martin today, he casts him in terms that seem taken from Laclos’s novel: as an older, jaded, melancholic figure feeding off of the other’s youth and freshness.

  “One mode of Kippenberger’s thinking is to turn something upside down,” Krebber said once, “and that’s how I ended up while I was working for him.” Martin took a lot of what Krebber told him—about things he had read, about his own life and thoughts—and appropriated it, turned it upside down, and spit it out in a new form. Martin took as uninhibitedly as he gave. He never added it all up later. Krebber, in contrast, kept a meticulous account. He had had a fixed concept in mind of how he would approach this year as an employee. He never protested against his meager salary, but in no way was he willing to let himself be “bought off,” as he put it. When Martin wanted to give him art as a present, Krebber stubbornly refused. He did accept books, but it felt like he was being bribed. On the other hand, when Martin paid the bill in restaurants, that was different: “That was work, after all.”

  “Someone like Diederichsen,” Krebber said later, “could say, ‘Well, here comes Kippenberger, he’ll humiliate me but I know that’s what he’ll do and that’s OK, it’s amusing.’ Diederichsen could laugh about all that nonsense. He was on the outside. But I didn’t have that distance. I was right on the inside, with my whole existence.” Nevertheless, he didn’t get up and walk away. “There was always something going on where Martin was.”

  Their liaison dangereuse stayed in effect after the year of “employment” was up. In the years that followed, they were often together day and night—excessive nights that were often spent in the company of Cosima von Bonin. She was Krebber’s girlfriend (and later his wife); Martin was also friends with her and promoted her work.

  Now Martin would use Krebber as his representative, his mouthpiece. In 1990, instead of giving his own lecture to inaugurate his guest professorship at the Städelschule, Martin put Krebber at the lectern: Krebber read the transcript of his extremely theoretical interview with Diedrich Diederichsen about his (Krebber’s) artistic methodology and approach, standing so close to the microphone that almost no one in the audience could understand a word. The talk was torture for Krebber as much as for the audience; so too was the event the next day, where students were given the chance to ask him and Martin questions, except that Martin never showed up and Krebber was there by himself.

  Martin arranged numerous shows for Krebber and for Cosima von Bonin, sometimes without asking them first. (He never managed to get Krebber a show with Hetzler, to Krebber’s disappointment.) He ceaselessly praised Krebber so highly that it started to get on many people’s nerves, including Krebber’s own. Finally, Krebber and Bonin told Martin that they didn’t want him to push and promote their work anymore. It made them feel humiliated and overwhelmed. In general, it annoyed Krebber that Martin stuck his nose into everything—for example, at a group show in Friesenwall that did not include Martin, he took one look and immediately started rehanging the pictures. Krebber’s first reaction: “Always needing to get involved in everything!” But: “Then I unfortunately had to admit that the way he did it was better.”

  A Cologne colleague d
escribed the relationships between Martin and several of his assistants as “insanely Oedipal, with everything that goes with it: support, admiration, subordination, rebellion, rejection.” Merlin Carpenter, who actually was much younger than Martin and had come to him as a brand-new college graduate from London (his final project was an homage to Martin), worked as Martin’s assistant for a short while before working for Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner; he distanced himself from Martin much more quickly than Krebber did. On the other hand, he published his patricide (as it were) only after Martin was no longer there to see it. In a book called Guitars Not Named Gudrun that Max Hetzler published in 2002 as an homage to Martin, Carpenter called Martin a “Back Seat Driver” (the title of his essay): someone who leaves all the work to others, who makes others drive and pay for the gas, who turns their stories into his own sculptures.

  In any case, working with Krebber proved very instructive. Afterward, Martin worked a lot with others and, especially in the early nineties, often had students, assistants, and colleagues produce works—although he always wanted them to do more than just paint-by-numbers and do what he told them. He could do that himself. The others were supposed to give his work new facets, to enlarge it. He wanted to be surprised.

  Unlike Jeff Koons, whose New York workshop and studio is run like the ones in seventeenth-century Holland, except with modern technology (he designs his pictures on a computer and a whole staff of assistants then transfers them onto canvas, accurate to the millimeter), Martin had a very open system of collaboration. Ideas were developed together in bars and restaurants, Martin made sketches at most, and within the framework of what they had discussed, the collaborators executed the ideas according to their own ideas. “He didn’t want assistants to execute his plans,” Uli Strothjohann says. “He wanted people to apply their own style.”

  THERE WAS REALLY A MUTUAL

  UNDERSTANDING THERE

  When Michael Krebber—no more a craftsman than Martin—didn’t know how to proceed with constructing the Peter sculptures, Uli Strothjohann came on board. Martin would have been only too happy to make him Krebber’s successor, but Strothjohann didn’t want to be an assistant. Being a paid collaborator was acceptable. And so a different mode of working together began for Martin, sometimes more intense, sometimes looser, according to the projects he was working on, but one that remained relaxed and friendly to the end.

  They had met in Berlin, and in Cologne they went to the same bars, were part of the same scene, and liked each other. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have worked for Martin. It’s not like I needed to.” Strothjohann was, like Krebber, a year younger than Martin, and he protected his artistic freedom by earning money without having to sell his objects and sculptures. He used his ideas and craftsmanship in construction projects for fairs (he once built an entire miniature village out of styrofoam) and television (he also made a backdrop for the Rudi Carrell Show): “I had a knack for finding jobs that paid relatively well without taking much work.” And he enjoyed his independence in a relaxed way, without bragging about it. In short, Strothjohann was so far on the margins of the official art market that he wasn’t competition, and Martin ended up with one of the most likeable figures on the Cologne scene at his side, a man of integrity who was always himself, in his appearance, his clothes, his language, his work, and his dry humor. Even Martin couldn’t ruffle his feathers.

  Uli Strothjohann was making art at fifteen, and by sixteen he ran a gallery out of an old hat and glove shop in his hometown of Rheda Wiedenbrück. Since there were hardly any art journals in the provinces that he could learn from, he wrote to all the galleries that advertised in a national magazine and asked for information. “That’s how I knew about Blinky Palermo when I was only fifteen.” After fulfilling his mandatory national service outside the military, in a hospital, he moved to Berlin to study at the Academy of Art, leaving after only a couple of semesters when he found it too academic. He preferred to rent the floor of a factory with a few other artists, and he ran it as an open house—Krebber showed up sometimes, to lie in the bathtub. “The aversion against everything academic, musty, or slick, against strategically planning your art career, was something that Martin and I had in common,” Strothjohann says.

  Their close collaborations began in 1989-90, a time when Martin had no studio of his own and decided “to try out the Koons system”: showing one exhibition three times, at Hetzler’s in Cologne, Metro Pictures in New York, and Luhring Augustine Hetzler in L.A. “But of course that was too boring for him,” Strothjohann said. Instead he did what he always did: smaller series, in this case with three variations on the same theme. For example, he had Strothjohann build a life-size gondola in three versions: realistic, as patchwork, and as a skeleton. Those were the only instructions Strothjohann got. So Strothjohann ordered a miniature souvenir gondola from Venice, sliced it apart to get a cross-section, drew the cross-section on graph paper (which Martin, who let nothing go to waste, would reuse later in drawings and paintings), and built the whole thing life-size from the blueprint.

  During the intensive period of their collaborations, they would meet up every day, for meals, at bars, and “bounce ideas back and forth.” Then it was up to Strothjohann to put them into practice. This was how various multiples were created, many of which Gisela Capitain published and showed: Cineastes’ Egress, Kippenberger You Can Touch, Mirror for Hang-Over Bud, Fake Yourself, If You Don’t Know Me By Now—Artsy Model, as well as larger works such as, right at the end, the Spiderman Studio and the crumpled subway stations. Strothjohann also worked on the sculpture series Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself, clothing the figures among other things. Since money was tight, as always, Martin had him get the shirt and pants and suspenders as cheaply as possible, so he bought them at Woolworth’s, but they weren’t quite right—Martin insisted that the sleeves be visibly taken in, like in the fifties and sixties, when “things you’d inherited were made to fit in this uncharming way.”

  Martin had found a congenial sculpture and multiple builder in Strothjohann. When Martin said “Can you make me a carousel with an ejection seat?” Strothjohann said sure, even if he had no idea how to do it. It was exciting for him, too, to work it out—that was why he was doing it. So he built a carousel with an ejection seat, which Martin saw for the first time only after it was finished. Later, Strothjohann put a fried egg in the middle.

  “There was such basic trust, such mutual understanding there,” Strothjohann says. “We didn’t have to talk about the underlying basics.” His refusal to fit into the streamlined art market—any more than Krebber, Jörg Schlick (Martin’s close friend friom Graz), or Martin did—was part of their mutual understanding, in Strothjohann’s view. And Strothjohann did not feel exploited or sucked dry in the process. Martin invited him to show, as an artist, in exhibitions he curated (in Graz, Kassel, Syros), and Strothjohann says, “I had the feeling of taking part in the process, of coming up with the ideas.”

  The collaborators didn’t have to talk much, in any case, and certainly not all the time. Martin and Strothjohann could travel or just sit in a café and look out the window and not say a thing. “Half an hour in total silence.” Martin’s Graz friend Elisabeth Fiedler later said Uli Strothjohann “was one of the few people who was totally sensitive to Martin and understood him.”

  THE SPIDERMAN

  I’m a gardener of people.

  —MK

  A fat spider was Cosima von Bonin and Michael Krebber’s image for Martin in their obituary in Spex : “He was a fat spider who snatched up the things flying by on every side and then turned them upside down a few times, going from one room to the next, picking up things to use in his own work, and so on, back and forth, here and there. Always a new digestive path and so more stuff.”

  “He was like a vampire at everyone’s neck,” the artist Charline von Heyl said. “His listening was harvesting, picking, appropriating.”

  Martin said, “You have to be selfish. B
ut that doesn’t mean someone else has the right to call me selfish, not by a long shot, because that sounds like I never give anything back.” His analogy was detox: he had to swallow something but then he spit it out along with something of his own—he always gave more than he got. He saw his works of art as gifts, gifts to the world.

  He was no vampire lurking in the dark to pounce and suck blood; what he took, he took openly. “He was grounded in a strong network of relationships with friends,” in the view of Bice Curiger, the curator, “and he proclaimed how much he valued them loud and clear, by collecting their work, hanging out with them, and candidly, flamingly plagiarizing them.”

  “He didn’t use anybody,” Uli Strothjohann says. “It was no secret that art was being produced in those bars, from those conversations.”

  And being produced nonstop. The Frankfurt artist Thomas Bayrle said that Martin was always on, always receiving signals, “like a computer that’s always online. Every once in a while I’d do the healthy thing and take a break, to save electricity.” Whatever Martin heard or saw, even out of the corner of his eye, was taken in, commented on, and reworked. Werner Büttner said Martin “heard everything and had eyes in the back of his head and was superhumanly alert.”

  It also was not true that Martin had no ideas of his own. On the contrary, it was more like he had too many pouring out. “He was always cooking up something,” as the gallerist Daniel Buchholz said. But he threw everything he thought was interesting into his cooking pot, whether it came from himself or someone else, from an artist or a child. All he cared about was the quality of the idea. “Let it not be old, let it not be new, let it be good” was one of his favorite slogans.