Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  Since an artist’s action in 2006, Graz is probably the only city in the world with a Martin Kippenberger Square.

  PURE EXUBERANCE

  Meanwhile the art boom in Cologne was only growing: the glamour, the openings, closings, artist’s dinners . . . “The revolution in Cologne has to be postponed,” said a 1986 poster by Martin and Walter Dahn, with which they applied for an event at the Broadway: “The artists feel too weak.”

  Peter Nestler had already said, in 1985, that “the critical mass has been reached.” The head of the cultural department of the city felt that Cologne had no need for more artists and gallerists. The international address book of the art world, Art Diary, listed fifty artists in Cologne in 1979 and two years later more than two hundred. By 1985, the community artist directory had six hundred names.

  But there was still money to be made along the Rhine; the eighties were “pure exuberance,” as Markus Oehlen said. A.R. Penck, an artist known for not liking to wash, supposedly passed out on a park bench in Cologne after a night of drinking, in a parka and sneakers, as usual, his face so overgrown that you could hardly see it, and with forty thousand marks in his pocket. The police arrested him as extremely suspicious, the story goes, and his gallerist had to get him out of jail.

  Prices kept climbing and soon reached five figures—a big painting could cost between six thousand and twenty thousand marks. The prices were calculated based on how big the painting was, and how big the painter: length plus width (in centimeters), times the artist’s multiplier (1 for beginners, 5 for stars). In Cologne, everyone knew each other’s multiplier. Helge Achenbach, a so-called art consultant from Düsseldorf, declared that “Great art has no valleys, no zigzags, only peaks—the value always moves upward.” In the eighties, art became in Germany what it had long been in the U.S.: an object of financial speculation. The Cologne journalist Willi Bongard called it “the most beautiful investment in the world that you can have on your wall.” He invented the annual “art compass” in the journal capital, which listed the top hundred contemporary artists every November; Martin wanted to get to the top of the list.

  The pioneers sometimes had the feeling that they had summoned up forces they could no longer control: “When it comes right down to it the eighties were shitty,” Rudolf Zwirner says today. “That was when this damn business started of buying something just to turn around and sell it at auction.” Art Cologne—today known as “the mother of all art fairs”—put the commercial side of art in the foreground, in Hans-Jürgen Müller’s view: “Duchamp had said that when you take an ordinary object and put it in a museum, you change its aura, and it turns into art. We took art and changed its aura by hanging it in a fair, for sale. We turned artworks into merchandise.”

  Martin and his artist friends experienced both sides of the booming art market: growing success and recognition on the one hand, with lots more money (although Martin continued to be permanently short of funds) and increasing interest from the general public, but on the other hand increasing commercialization and pressure, with globalized competition and interest from people whom they were not interested in themselves.

  In 1987, the year of the Peter exhibition, Martin finally achieved international, not just German, recognition. He had never had so many exhibitions so widely dispersed: his work was shown in Zurich, Copenhagen, Vienna, New York, Paris, Graz, and Antwerp, not to mention Cologne and Frankfurt. Meanwhile, the whole world was coming to Cologne, where an artist could feel at the center of everything. “There are only five significant galleries in Europe,” Max Hetzler announced in 1988, “and five of them are in Cologne.”

  As a result, more and more foreigners came to the Rhine. Graz’s Forum Stadtpark rented an apartment in Cologne for visiting artists, for example, and the city became a magnet, especially for Americans: Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Stephen Prina, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, and Larry Clark showed in Cologne, and there were partnerships between the Luhring/Augustine and Hetzler galleries, and between David Nolan (who had studied with Michael Werner) and Gisela Capitain. For gallerists, dealers, and curators, a trip to Cologne was a necessity, if one undertaken with great pleasure. Even New York was not as wild and fun as Cologne—political correctness had taken hold there much earlier, and the cosmopolitan residents acted much more blasé, not as passionate about art.

  HOTEL CHELSEA

  Martin had bet on Germany and won: “Patriotism pays after all.” This made him the lone exception. It was a period when good German soccer fans enthused over Brazil, crossed their fingers for the English, wished the Dutch luck, and rooted for everyone except their own team. No one waved German flags at the 1986 World Cup. But Martin, having already won five hundred marks worth of free food at a restaurant and five hundred marks worth of free drinks at a bar betting on Germany, decided to try his luck with Werner Peters, who ran Cologne’s Hotel Chelsea, and made a wager for a week in a double room, breakfast in bed, “and all the trimmings.” Patriotism paid off once again. When Germany won on Sunday, so did Martin, and on Monday morning he was standing at the reception desk with his suitcase, demanding his prize.

  He liked it there so much that he stayed.

  He had a studio around the corner at the time, on Lindenstrasse, and came to the Chelsea’s Café Central at least three times a day. He was living (that is, sleeping) in a kind of storage room under the studio, and he wanted to escape—also to get some distance from the studio, even if only a short walk. “I want to go to work.” A hotel room was enough for him, and in any case he was hardly ever there: he went to bed at the Chelsea at three, or four, or even later when he was drinking with the hotel manager, and by eight or nine he was back downstairs, where he always had company waiting for him in the café. Only during the Fair did he have to make his room available—so he slept in the studio again for a few days.

  Martin moved into the hotel in 1986 and stayed four months, and until his death he continued to use the Chelsea as his home base. He spent the night there when he didn’t have an apartment—or an apartment in Cologne, at least—or when he had an apartment but just didn’t want to sleep there. The Chelsea was his mobile home, his living room, his office.

  When the owner, Werner Peters, met Martin in 1985, “Martin already had a name, and one to fear.” Peters had just recovered from a serious case of hepatitis; the first time they met, Martin greeted him with a joke about livers.

  They could not have been more different, Martin and the slight, frail man with a perpetual slight smile, who looked like a philosopher and was one. He had a Ph.D., though “no one knew exactly what he had studied,” as Martin wrote in Café Central . “In any case it wasn’t business and certainly not gastronomy. He is a slow person in a quick time and makes sure that his outfit never crosses the line.”

  Dr. Peters (as Martin loved to call him) did everything possible wrong and succeeded anyway. Martin loved to make fun of his ambitions: entering the hotel business out of left field, taking over a conventional city hotel named Maria Lentz, and rebaptizing it after probably the most legendary artist hotel in the world. Dr. Peters only gave a gentle smile, as usual, in response to Martin’s teasing. He admired Martin’s honesty, his authenticity: as he said, “the fact that he lived how, who, and what he was. That he didn’t care about conventions.” Martin, of course, wanted to show him how it was done, over and over again; he took over the hotel’s fifth anniversary party in 1989, for example, and Rüdiger Carl played, Wolfi Bauer read, and Udo Kier was there. The party lasted from noon until noon, twenty-four hours.

  Martin paid for his room with pictures: his own and others’ from his collection. The walls were too bare anyway. Only large paintings, since Peters didn’t have the money to insure the art and big works couldn’t be stuffed in a suitcase and stolen. Martin paid cash in the café and was there every day and every night. He sat at the table and drew, held court, did business, met with his collaborators, and ordered people to run errands for him. Since the Chelsea eventually did
develop into the hotel for the art scene—thanks in large part to Martin’s constant presence—he met countless foreign visitors there, too, without it being necessary to make plans with them first. There was no getting around Martin in the small café.

  Martin was the frontman at Café Central, as another Cologne resident said. The staff obeyed him. He got whatever he wanted—bloody marys for breakfast, a breakfast egg for dinner—and could do whatever he wanted, too. “He demanded that others pay court to him,” Peters said, “and that he call the shots. He could be loud. But he was never offensive.” After a lot of whining, he even finally got his beloved noodle casserole there. Just not the way he wanted it.

  ONLY MADE BY MOTHER

  The gallerist Christian Nagel said, “He always needed something in his mouth—something to eat, or drink, or smoke.” He ate for consolation when things were going badly in Berlin—his favorite dishes were always comfort food (plain cooking and dishes for children)—and he had Uschi Welter cook him spaghetti whenever he needed it, even in the middle of the night. Rudolf Augstein once said “Kippi can’t even make himself a sandwich,” but it wasn’t a question of ability: he thought it was much nicer to have someone else make the sandwich, and buy the bread and sausage in the first place, and wash the dishes afterward. Much nicer to feel taken care of.

  Martin reprinted Augstein’s comment in Through Puberty to Success and he knew that his eagerness to be coddled was part of both his adolescent behavior and his success. That was also why he liked to stay with friends and in hotels: someone made his bed and cleaned his bathroom, which left him completely free, with nothing to worry about. Except art.

  On a fundamental level, Martin was not especially interested in eating as such; he was no gourmet. Food was like money: something you need to stay alive. “The only thing that bothers me is that I have to eat,” he said in 1991, a period of his life when he seemed tired of many things. Eating bored him, he said: “there’s nothing new for me in it.” He wasn’t a big eater, and the more he drank, the less he ate; by the end, he only “nibbled,” as a girlfriend said, but even then he never ordered something light—God forbid a salad! He ordered roasts or innards, then shared his portion. This was one reason Martin liked to eat in his Chinese friend Davé’s Paris restaurant: the food was “really very, very fine,” but Davé was not insulted when Martin left some on the plate. He often ate it all just to please Davé and proudly showed him the empty plate.

  He was not a big eater, but he was a grateful one, who could enthuse about Sabine Grässlin’s or our sister Bine’s culinary skills as much as he did about artists. He had done that as a child, too. In a letter from boarding school in Honneroth, insulting the circus and the teachers, he praised only the new cook. “She cooks unexpectedly well. She uses amazing spices and makes only the best food: muesli, spagetti, egg ravioli, all sorts of stuf like that.”

  Eating was first and foremost an occasion for talking, for getting together. It was something you made plans to do. Nothing could be more wretched than the scene his ghostwriter described in his little book 1984: How It Really Was, Using the Example of Knokke : Martin sitting all alone, in a hotel room that was already depressing enough, ingesting a breakfast of three rolls (“rather big but almost brittle”) that tasted like nothing, with equally tasteless mystery-marmalade (the fruit indiscernible under the pinkish-red and orange color), served on a plastic tray.

  In fact, Martin absolutely never ate alone, just as he never drank alone. When he wasn’t living with someone or spending the night somewhere where he was cooked for, and when he didn’t have an invitation to a meal, he went to a restaurant, two or three times a day.

  He liked it best when he could eat with one hand, keeping the other hand free to talk with, sketch, and make notes. He thought that food should be “monosyllabic”—after all, he talked enough himself. Bread dumplings and noodles in a soup was already too much for him. Disks of pickled rhubarb sliced with an asparagus peeler on a delicate ribbon of mint purée, with a semolina cake on top, a paper-thin leaf of cinnamon pastry, and rhubarb ice cream, garnished with a little stem of dark chocolate—such a dish would have left him completely helpless. So many sensations and combinations, each one demanding his full attention, were much too stressful for him. He wouldn’t have wanted to have to stop and think about whether that green purée was mint or spinach or gooseberry, or wanted or pay attention the cinnamon dough—only to the person across the table from him and the conversation. Everything pretentious was foreign to him; when a maître d’ held out the cork of an expensive bottle of red wine for him to sniff, he would stick it in his eye. He made fun of modern dishes with a floating sculpture: Santa Claus Disguised as Frog on a Fried Egg with a Streetlamp Disguised as Palm Tree.

  Life was eventful and exciting enough—food should be simple and honest, like the blood sausage and oysters he so loved to eat at the Paris Bar. That was why he loved Italian cooking so much: it was like him, open and direct, complex in its apparent simplicity, straightforward, never sophisticated. In Italy, the food in the best restaurants was like home cooking. It was a Mama’s cuisine.

  He liked that Italian cooking was based on traditions and recipes handed down from generation to generation, not on trends. So it was all the more disheartening when some fashionable trend fundamentally misunderstood and diminished it, as in the art world of the time with its beloved mozzarella and tomato bruschetta and spaghettini. Nowhere were the fussy affectations and craven conventionality of the art business so obvious as on the plate. Martin wrote on one of his paintings: “We don’t have problems with mozzarella and tomatoes with basil, because we pay back with Tiramisu.”

  Martin ate pasta no matter where he was—Belgium, Greece, even Dublin, “and their misunderstandings of Italian cooking are by no means the worst.” He rejected good taste—“bad food is good, good food is bad,” just as bad painting was good in his view, and paintings with impeccable craftsmanship were bad. This doesn’t mean that he always ate badly and painted badly, only that he was especially fond of mistakes. In his book about the Easter vacation he took in Tunisia with his girlfriend Gabi Marzona, Kippermann as Neckermann (Neckermann is a famous packaged-tour company), he noted: “Finally, mealworm bolognese—specialty of the house. Gabi says: ‘Tastes terrible.’ — Kippi answers: ‘I won’t let the noodles down.’ (Doesn’t matter who, where, when — Everyone does the best he can.)”

  Pasta is “the friendliest foodstuff you can find on a plate,” he wrote in Café Central, “smooth, soft, and unbelievably aesthetic.” As an artist, too, he liked it. It was inexhaustible material, in its variety of form if nothing else: thick and thin, very thick and extremely thin, long and smooth, shell- or spiral-shaped. It had great comedic potential.

  Pasta appears over and over again in his work. He called one of his early shows, in the Petersen Gallery in Berlin, Kippenberger in the Noodle Casserole Yes Please! (a macaroni curtain covered in red pearls). He titled one of his paintings Spaghetti Full Moon, another Painted Under the Influence of Spaghetti No. 7, and garnished his bronzes called Badly Filled Noodle Casserole with a few stray strands of spaghetti. The photographs he reprinted in his catalog Homesick Highway 90 include himself eating spaghetti, the Transporter for Social Boxes with the pasta crate, and his Homesick Highway installation in Barcelona: a macaroni curtain, which he also produced as a do-it-yourself multiple (macaroni, string of pearls, and wooden balls), called Per Pasta ad Astra.

  What Martin found especially gripping about pasta—as with the egg—was the insignificance of the material. In his view, to make something out of nothing was always the highest form of art, in cooking no less than in painting:

  The egg is white and insipid, how can a colorful picture result from that? You can turn it this way and that and you always discover something new. Sometimes sociopolitical things, or humor, besides, it does have a beautiful shape after all, just like breasts have beautiful shapes. It’s like with spaghetti, you never get bored eating the same t
hing over and over again. There is always the same thing on the menu, and then suddenly you have something else, the surprise special, and it’s not the same.

  The art lay in the constant variations on an identical theme.

  He made art out of noodles because they were what lay closest to hand—the most commonplace thing, the most emotional thing, and therefore exemplary. Pasta became his artistic leitmotif and his trademark precisely because it was right there on the plate, beneath most people’s notice—and because it was a central part of his life. Diedrich Diederichsen called Martin a happy revolutionary, in the Rent Electricity Gas catalog, because the pasta that was “the inexhaustible reservoir of metaphorical beauty” in his work was food he really and truly loved to eat. For Diederichsen, this was proof that Martin was a critical artist but not one locked in bitter mortal combat against the world.

  If there was anything even more noodly than noodles, it was noodle casserole. As he wrote in a poem, “Puerto Escondido (Mexico),” about an unhappy moment of his travels in Mexico in the seventies: “Beans / Pesos / Diarrhea / Around the shack / And 3 wishes inside: // Loden coat / Noodle casserole / Tiled bathroom.” Noodle casserole as longed-for paradise.

  Noodle casserole was the absolute epitome of home and homesickness. In Café Central, Martin describes how he

  fought for three years for lentil soup with nice spicy sausage. Now that I have this dish on my plate, and I’ve tried it in various moods and conditions, I don’t eat it anymore. The application process for noodle casserole has stretched out even longer. I preached noodle casserole, I praised noodle casserole, gave hints, gave damn good advice. When it comes right down to it it’s the one food I know by heart and really understand. Granted, whole memories of deep wounds in my life’s happiness are bound up with macaroni. OK. The day arrived. The preparations were underway. “This weekend,” they said: the key to unlock the door of my contentment. Sunday evening I came in as usual, sat down, and ordered noodle casserole. To make a long story short: Not for me. Other people might have eaten it after three years of waiting and more.... Another two weeks went by, begging and pleading, with various conversations with Dr. Peters: whether it might be possible to obtain a new casserole for preparing the dish.