At first, Albert Oehlen says, it wasn’t easy for other people to accept that Martin just took what he wanted:
Büttner said something and the next day there it was on one of Martin’s posters or invitations. That happened a lot. It was kind of shocking how fast it happened. For a while we felt used, but we got over it. Then we thought, well, that’s how he is. And eventually I also felt that actually he has every right to do it. If he makes something out of it, it’s his. Bit of bad luck that you can’t do anything with it yourself any more, but it would be petty to say no. That was his art, this constant putting to use all day of everything that came in. If you don’t like it, you can just break off all contact.
One time, for example, they developed the idea together of putting stickers on oil paintings—but Martin was the one who did it first. “He always wanted to do everything faster, better, sooner.”
Martin portrayed himself not as a spider but as Spiderman: someone who casts his web to make the world a better place, to help other people. He was a “networker” long before the word was in fashion; Rüdiger Carl called him “a connector” (and in fact, Rüdiger met his life companion, Bärbel Grässlin, at a concert Martin had arranged). He was someone who constantly brought people together, crossing boundaries between different camps in the art world that were often sharply defined. Even a passionate networker like the New York gallerist Roland Augustine was “amazed, even jealous, how easy it was for him to start a conversation and create a relationship. He was always introducing someone to you or introducing you to someone else.”
Werner Büttner described him as “fanatical at starting families”: he would take people with various abilities and “bring them together into a clan,” then “put himself right in the middle, decisively, elegantly, naturally playing the godfather.” His catalogs overflow with “family portraits,” so to speak, the most famous being the photograph taken for his fortieth birthday that he later used on the invitations to his 1993 Centre Pompidou exhibition. The picture was evidence, proof that he wasn’t alone but rather embedded in a network of friends, women, relatives, and colleagues who gave him the support, recognition, and dialogue that the official art market with its critics and curators so often denied him. This clan—protectors, patrons, reservoirs of energy, cheerleaders, and audience in one—had to go with Martin from opening to opening, with Martin in turn making sure that everyone had a good time. There was no such thing as a VIP-only opening with Martin, where “important people” took precedence over his family.
But the members of this clan had to accept that Martin set the terms—that he was the godfather in charge of everyone else. When he organized group shows (which participants sometimes learned they were in only when they saw their names on his posters), it was typically Martin who designed the invitations, decided or at least had a say in which art works would be shown, and fiddled around with the works themselves. For example, Johannes Wohnseifer’s piece for Martin’s museum on the island of Syros was a museum guard’s stool, and Martin vehemently insisted that Wohnseifer cover it in concrete, which Wohnseifer had had no plans at all to do.
Martin also had personal relationships with everyone who worked for him. He never had completely neutral relationships, except maybe with landlords or bank tellers, although even with them he felt an emotional connection, a feeling of hatred if nothing else. He was friends not only with gallerists, artists, curators, waiters, bartenders, and restaurant owners. His tax advisor and sometime travel companion was a childhood friend, Herbert Meese. His dentist, Heliod Spiekermann, was also a trusted friend, collector, and occasional collaborator, who wrote one of the books for his Kafka installation. As Martin explained in the publisher’s note: “Mr. M. Kippenberger was responsible for the design of the book, not for the text.”
Like every spiderweb, Martin’s had inner and outer circles. There was the real Kippenberger Family, as it was called—friends, fans, collaborators, and relatives—as well as more distant relations, like Hans-Peter Feldmann. Martin and he rarely saw each other, and when they did it was usually in a personal context, but they felt very connected in their attitudes. Then there were the “substitute players,” in gallerist Tanja Grunert’s term: “When everyone else was gone, he called me up and I had to stand in. We went out to eat, it was very nice, very intense. We had good conversations, about ideas.” But when the others were back and she ran into Martin in his bigger circle, she felt that he used her as a whipping boy, constantly insulting her. “At certain moments we were very close, and then the next day we barely said hello to each other.”
Ultimately, slotting friends and acquaintances into his projects didn’t happen only in one direction: his demands were often challenges that helped with the other person’s own work. Andrea Stappert said that if Martin hadn’t constantly forced her to take photographs—for instance, the time he’d fallen down a flight of stairs at a disco, showed up at her house, and had her take his picture like that, with a bandaged head, a cowboy hat, and a grin—she might not have become a photographer: she didn’t know what to do after she’d finished art school, only that she didn’t want to be a painter. He pushed people, encouraging the curator Barbara Straka to go back to school, Gisela Capitain to quit teaching and become a curator, the linguist Martin Prinzhorn to write about art, the gallerist Barbara Weiss to start her own gallery. His assistant Sven Ahrens said, “He had an unusually humane attitude for the art business.”
I SEE MYSELF RIGHT THERE
BETWEEN OTHER PEOPLE
For the people in his family—the “horde people,” as Martin called them—there was no “I” and “you,” and no artwork without its context. The individual piece was interesting to him only as part of a greater whole. “It’s about your life’s work, you have to achieve something lasting in life. That’s the real stage direction you get from on high. Otherwise it’s hell.”
As a result, he always produced and presented his art in contexts, too. He worked almost exclusively in series. What linked his works was not a common style—he refused to give them that—but common motifs or themes that appeared and reappeared and connected his various phases and groups of work: the frog, the egg, Santa Claus, the lamppost, noodles, and especially, of course, himself. At some point he realized “that my style is there when the person is there and transmits this style through behavior, individual objects and actions, decisions, and a story grows up out of those things.” His own life was the basis of his art, and other people were always a part of that life. “I see myself right there between other people,” Martin said in describing his position as an artist. “Not alone in the desert sands.” He always saw himself as part of a whole, part of something greater, in the history of art as well as in the present: “I work in a tradition, in any case. Everything I learned I learned from art. I love art.”
Many people were amazed to learn that he was very well versed in art history, although it was not an academic knowledge—here, too, he had developed his own way of looking at things. “He had very refreshing views about what was important and what wasn’t,” his New York gallerist David Nolan said.
Martin often spun new strands of his web from existing art; many of his works were sequels. The point of art was to make new art from, as far as he was concerned. Andy Warhol had published a book called a, so Martin published B ; Kafka had left his novel Amerika unfinished, so Martin helped it along to a happy ending.
Even as a boy, he had asked our parents’ artist friends to send him things he could use as material; as a nine-year-old, he used Picasso in one of his own collages. Martin needed dialogue and engagement with other art as well as with other people. His works are closely linked with the world. In Spiderman Studio, for example, there are references to Jasper Johns, scientific discoveries (for instance, the fact that drugs affect how spiders spin their webs), personal experiences, Hollywood movies, and the bars and restaurants of Cologne—one window of the studio is from the Königswasser, where Cosima von Bonin had worked as a waitres
s, and it shows the shadow of a saxophone, a reference in turn to Matisse, who drew jazz with a pair of scissors and whose studio in Nice, a gallery by that point, was the first to show Martin’s sculpture. In the middle of all these relationships crouches the artist himself as Spiderman, like a sprinter about to start a race.
Martin also had friends and colleagues design many of his exhibition posters as a way to define and expose the contexts he saw himself in: Michel Würthle, Jeff Koons, Uli Strothjohann, A. R. Penck, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Günther Förg, Rosemarie Trockel, Franz West, Clegg & Guttman, Heimo Zobernig, Markus Oehlen, Werner Büttner, Cosima von Bonin, Louise Lawler, William Copley, Sigmar Polke, Lawrence Weiner, Mike Kelley, Jörg Schlick, Matthias Schaufler, Ronald Jones, Günter Brus, Heiner Blum.
PICTURES OF AN EXHIBITION
“I realize,” Martin said in his 1991 interview with Jutta Koether, “that it’s more and more important to be permanently clear in your mind about what context you hang your work in and live in. To determine this for yourself, to build up your own network, is one of the artist’s decisive tasks. That’s what I’m working on now. And not only to create this context but to make it visible, make it indelibly manifest.”
His own collection of art was one way to create this context and reveal it. For Martin, the collection—which contained a notable number of pieces by women—was part of his own artistic work. He already felt that any picture by another artist belonged to him “the moment I understand it”; if he had bought it or exchanged something for it, it belonged to him fully. Exchanging was better, of course, since that way the connection went in both directions. Martin never acquired pieces as investments, but only “when I could make something of it and knew how to relate it to something else.” It might be the Gerhard Richter he later attached to one of his own sculptures as a tabletop, or a drawing by the musician Sven-Åke Johansson that Johansson himself described as a doodle.
Martin saw collecting as a labor-saving device: “If someone does something better than I do or someone has already done something but it’s part of my labyrinth, I don’t need to do it again. If it came off well, that’s enough for me, I buy it if I have the money and exhibit it with my own pictures.” For example, in St. Louis, where he showed his own works with works by artists like Richard Prince and Jeff Koons in a show he called Pictures of an Exhibition.
THE GAME WITH INFINITY
Martin always made new contexts for his own pieces, including them in ever-changing installations and new exhibitions and thereby creating closer and closer connections between each piece and the rest of his work. Kafka wrote his novel Amerika “heading off into endlessness,” as he wrote in a letter to his fiancée, and Martin’s Kafka project, into which he integrated earlier works of his own as well as works by other artists, struck the curator of the Copenhagen Metropolis exhibit as “like a game with infinity.” “The dynamic of his constant reworkings ended only with his death,” wrote the critic Manfred Hermes. “That is why his works often seem ‘out of service’ or inoperative in museums today.”
In Martin’s view, it was impossible to look at a single picture in isolation. The wall it hung on was already part of it, as were the floor it hung above and the room around it: “All of that is just as important as the art on the wall itself.” That is why he paid so much attention to how his work was installed. Exhibitions, for him, were never just arrays of recent pieces—he always had a very precise idea in mind for their presentation, worked out in advance, to the gallerists’ and curators’ surprise. “He worked it all out in his head,” his friend Franz Keller said.
Of course, the entirety he was working toward was not a closed-off whole—his work is one big collage. If something was whole, he would break it and put the pieces together anew. That is what he did with The Raft of the Medusa : he took apart Géricault’s painting, had himself photographed in all the poses of the various figures in the painting, then drew, printed, or painted each pose as a self-portrait.
GRAZ
“You want to feel free and welcome in a city,” Martin wrote in Café Central. That is how he felt in Graz. “In Graz,” Martin Prinzhorn said, “Martin was the boss.” People there did everything for him, and “asked him questions like, ‘Might you have time to do a portfolio of work?’” according to Krebber. “In Graz he was in residence like the pope himself.”
If Vienna was already a city on the periphery, Graz was even farther away: in southern Austria, half an hour from the Yugoslavian border, “the ass-end of nowhere’s socks, ” as Martin complained every time he had to take the long and tiring trip there. All the more comfortable he was, then, when he arrived. He could walk to everything in the old city center. At the heart of the old town was Martin’s regular café, the Glockenspiel, where he would find Herr Joszi from Hungary, his favorite waiter, of the old Austro-Hungarian type, whom Martin would immortalize on the cover of one of his catalogs. The café was his office: his gallerist Aki Bleich-Rossi was there too, always with the same small espresso, and the gallery itself was right around the corner, on Peinlichgasse. Everything was right around the corner from the Glockenspiel: the Frankowitsch (an old deli with unusual sandwiches), the Artelier gallery and publisher, the Fiedler piano shop, the Joanneum’s Neue Galerie, the Forum Stadtpark. The “plank shack” was not far, either—this was Martin’s nickname for the strange, wood-paneled bar actually called the Braun de Praun, where artists, students, and locals would meet. Jesus hung on a cross in the corner, and the waiters didn’t blink an eye no matter how crazy the nights got, whether Martin and his friends sung workers’ songs in Nazi style or everyone just drank until they fell over or started fights. “We’d just scrub the blood away,” the owner said calmly. “The eighties were a brutal time.”
“Graz,” an article in Skyscraper said in 1987, after Martin and Albert Oehlen appeared at a symposium there, “is an ideal world, where the avant-garde flourishes unbroken, where Arnold Schwarzenegger was born, where the bakers know all their customers’ names, and Gau is considered a term from the Thousand-Year Reich.” [5] It was an extreme city, but in an unusual way: bourgeois, reactionary, and progressive at once. During the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, retired officials of the multiethnic state, without a homeland of their own, liked to move to Graz, which was less expensive than Vienna and had a better climate. The city has an almost southern, Mediterranean flair, which became especially pronounced once students started to outnumber retirees. In the words of Michel Würthle, “Vienna is loneliness and suicide. When I picture to myself the Sundays, the old apartment, the Third District. . .” Martin told his Graz gallerist Gabriella Bleich-Rossi that he couldn’t be in Vienna for more than three days without getting depressed.
In the thirties, Graz had been one of the major strongholds of the National Socialists and received the honorary title “City of the People’s Uprising” from Hitler himself. After the war, as a reaction against the lingering fascist culture of the city, a conservative politician had systematically promoted modern art and the city became “an absolute mecca for the avant-garde and their experiments” in the sixties, Martin Prinzhorn said. “You could be insane there in a way that was impossible in Vienna.” The Forum Stadtpark was founded in 1960 as a meeting place for artists, including writers like Alfred Kolleritsch, Peter Handke, and Wolfgang Bauer. It defined itself as an “interdisciplinary labor of contemporary art,” with concerts, readings, plays, films, and exhibitions of architecture, fine art, and photography.
Yet the city always reminded Martin Prinzhorn a little of a Chekhov play: “all these people with their international fantasies but who never made it out of Graz.” Martin was just what the city needed: he brought the world with him—artists, students, assistants—and “attracted attention” to Graz, as Sabine Achleitner says. Everyone benefited. Elfie Semotan says, “Martin gave them the feeling that what they had done there was not provincial.”
Martin transformed Graz just by looking at it in his own unique way. For example, Petra
Schilcher says, there was “the horrible bar designed by Ernst Fuchs at the Erzherzog Johann Hotel—we from Graz were ashamed of it, it was so embarrassing. Then Martin walked in, and from then on the Ernst Fuchs Bar was the place to be.” Martin liked the bartender there, Herr Manfred: “they were two of a kind, their styles went perfectly together. He was a gentleman from head to toe.”
Martin had been brought to Graz by Jörg Schlick, who became one of his most important allies, closest friends, and eventually the best man at his wedding. Their first encounter, in Vienna, was not surprisingly an unfriendly run-in: they happened to be sitting at the same table at a bar one evening, Schlick accidentally picked up Martin’s glass, and Martin got excessively angry, at which point Schlick ordered ten glasses of liquor “for the great German artist.” By the end of the night they had planned an exhibition for Martin in Graz.
Auch Einer (Another One) is a whimsical nineteenth-century novel by F. T. Vischer, about the adventures of its hero, “A. E.” (for “Auch Einer”). Martin and Schlick reprinted the whole text in the catalog they produced together, Broken Neon, which also gathered together such different artists as Beuys, Dokoupil, Fischli and Weiss, Franz West, and Zobernig. Schlick was “another one” himself, who immediately became part of the family—“our man in Graz,” as Albert Oehlen called him (Oehlen, too, lived in Graz for a while and had many shows there).
Schlick, two years older than Martin, was another person who refused to let himself be pigeonholed. He was a conceptual artist, author, painter, curator, musician, and photographer, who made everything (movies, operas, plays, ballets), was interested in everything (contemporary art, music, literature), and had read everything (from philosophical theory to pulp fiction).
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