Again it seems ready, and Martin has it brought to his room. Alas, it “was prepared French-style. Nouvellcuisinic thin slices draped across the plate. It was too bad they hadn’t fried it up in the pan, they warmed it up in the microwave oven upstairs.”
The book also lists his various favorite foods:
Cabbage roll, meat roll, good old bratwurst, fried slices of blood sausage with burnt onion rings, burnt butter sauce, and potato purée, there could also be some kidneys, a nice piece of liver from Tönshoff [a local supermarket from his childhood]. But when the waiter or owner where Kippenberger is a regular bent over the plate and criticizing it asks him “How are we supposed to make it then? How should it be?” the incontrovertible answer comes: “Like my mother does it!” His mother was hardly a master chef but she couldn’t go driving to restaurants in the city every afternoon and evening with the five kids and the au pair (she couldn’t cook but she did it right).
The search for noodle casserole was a guiding thread of the whole homesick highway of his life. In New York and L.A., Sevilla and Syros—everywhere he went he asked for it, nowhere did he find it. As it says in Café Central : “Let the noodle casserole be only made by Mother and reheated by her the next day.”
SPAIN
Albert Oehlen no longer quite recalls how he and Martin came up with the idea to go to southern Spain, in early 1988. He can only guess: “We were talking and realized we didn’t have girlfriends, no pressing exhibitions, we could actually do something. And then Juana was there and she said, ‘Come to Spain!’” Juana de Aizpuru was their gallerist in Sevilla and Madrid, a Spanish grande dame with a towering hairdo and a voice “that you never forget,” as Georg Herold said. He described her as “sophisticated and unbelievably nice and charming.” So they knew Juana would take care of them, and Albert spoke Spanish.
The house in Carmona could not have been uglier, the neighborhood could not have been more horrible. Martin wrote in a letter to Michel Würthle, later reprinted in the Joints I catalog:
A nouveauriche bungalow on the townedge with a garbage dump around the corner. Inside needing well-trained west-central european corrections eyes + hands needless to say. The tendency to throw mothball parties must have been a predilection of the landlord (instead of giving hot zipper/sausage parties a chance). After 3 evacuations + attempts to transform the furniture with the most suitable sewed-on beautiful fabrics (which didn’t work; since here & there the past still showed through). The 4th deportation now planned for the weekend.... If you dont feel so good, bars on the windows and doors keep you from jumping out of the ground-floor into the cold swimming pool.
Again the two men spurred each other on, for the last time with this level of intensity and only after a certain warm-up period: “for a few weeks, maybe even months, we didn’t do anything, or only crap,” Albert Oehlen says. “But at some point it clicked, for both of us at the same time. Spain was extremely productive for us, totally extreme, for me it was the start of my abstract paintings, a radical revolution in my painting, the decisive step in my development.” As for Martin, his first cycle of self-portraits in underwear dates from Carmona. He showed them in Juana de Aizpuru’s Sevilla gallery. He also started to draw and designed new sculptures: Streetlamps for Drunks and Chicken Disco would later be shown at the Aperto at the Venice Biennale. “It is not so simple to free yourself from ‘wanting to make art at all costs,’” Martin wrote to Michel. “Again and again free thoughts are undermined by especially crazydumb bright ideas.... I sometimes get the feeling that someone has slipped the right thing into my drink + that here between the olive pickers I’ve really found a good place.”
There was little to distract them: only occasionally a visitor from Germany. The high point of the day was the hike through the thickets of undergrowth to the village restaurant. “The garbage points the way and lots of tree stumps are charred,” Martin wrote to Detlev Gretenkort. “In general you’re glad to find a camping vibe in all the filth. People just throw things on the ground, that’s why I still dont know the Span. word for ashtray. But back to our route. Lemons fall from overhead on either side, a used stroller lies crumpled up half off the path.” The restaurant didn’t look much better: it was like a big hall with everything thrown on the floor, fluorescent tubes on the ceiling, and a propeller on the wall. But with Manölchen (Martin’s nickname for Manolo), Martin found another of his innkeeper families who loved him—father, brothers, and sisters, including Carmen, a teacher he dated. The restaurant was also Martin and Albert’s telephone switchboard: they took calls there between eleven and noon, then returned to work through the wasteland until it was time to come back for dinner.
They sometimes drove to nearby Seville, and in a bar there Martin discovered Luis Claramunt, an outsider painter he befriended and included in numerous exhibitions in Kassel and Graz. Or they took trips to Madrid, where the nightlife was definitely wilder than in Carmona. Martin liked the Spanish rhythm, where life only really gets going late at night. At the end of the year, Albert and Martin moved to Madrid, but Martin didn’t stay long. He celebrated New Year’s Eve in Spain with his girlfriend, Gabi Hirsch, and then moved back to Germany. She was pregnant with his child.
[ 1 ] German houses at the time often had a “party basement,” where otherwise upstanding citizens could go a little wild. König is being very sarcastic about Martin’s petit-bourgeois pretentions to acting out.
[ 2 ] The last line is literally “Make trouble” and the rhyme is more childlike in German: “ Was macht die Kuh / Muh / Was machst du / Mühe .”
[ 3 ] Hitler’s close confidante and chief of staff, one of the most powerful Nazis and one with a particularly brutal reputation.
[ 4 ] The show’s full title in German is Peter: Die russische Stellung , usually translated as “Peter: The Russian Position.” Stellung also means the act of positioning or placing sculptures, analogous to “hanging” pictures.
[ 5 ] “Gau” is the medieval German term for a district or region, comparable to “shire” in English; the Nazis revived the term and used it for administrative regions in their regime, so that a Nazi governor was a “Gau-Leader,” etc. Thinking of the Nazi regime as “the Thousand-Year Reich” (the Nazis’ own preferred term) is a sign of rather unreconstructed political sensibilities.
CHAPTER SIX
COLOGNE YEARS:
THE TURNING POINT
“On November 9, 1989,” the Berlin gallerist Bruno Brunnet said, “Cologne was finished.” That was the date of the fall of the Wall, which led to the end of the Republic of West Germany and Bonn as its capital. Berlin became the German capital again, first politically, and then a few years later the art capital as well. Cologne turned into a media city, with private television networks establishing themselves there—and then typically moving to Berlin.
The art dealer Rudolf Zwirner told me that until 1989 he saw Paris, a couple of hours by train from Cologne, as his “natural capital city,” but that changed, too, and he moved to Berlin in 1992, while his son opened a successful gallery of his own in New York. Paul Maenz, who had represented the Mülheimer Freiheit artists, closed his gallery in 1990 to move to Berlin; Max Hetzler moved in 1993. “It was a big step,” Hetzler said, “and a big cut”: he stopped representing all of his former artists except Albert Oehlen.
In any case, the Hetzler Boys’ time together had long since ended; they even began to lose personal contact with each other. Their attitudes were no longer compatible. In Hetzler’s view, “Martin’s overflowing creativity, these hundreds of thousands of exhibitions, were more than a gallery could handle.” Every month another opening—and Martin would rather have had it be every week—and in such insignificant cities, too: Innsbruck, Stuttgart, Graz. Betsy Wright Millard, a young curator at the St. Louis Forum for Contemporary Art, was amazed when Martin once asked her, over a meal in Frankfurt, if he could have an exhibition with her. She bravely said, “‘Hey, you want to come to nowhere in the middle of nowhere?’ and his eye
s lit up: ‘Yes!’ He didn’t even know where St. Louis was. But I got the impression that he wanted to experience everything, try everything out.”
This pioneer spirit, the pleasure he took in making and promoting art, impressed the young American. Hetzler, on the other hand, felt that all these excursions into the hinterlands were extremely bad strategy, even counterproductive. He would have liked to steer Martin, and especially put the brakes on him, but Martin never allowed that—he was always his own master. If anything, it was he who told his gallerists and curators what they should do and whom they should show, and he dragged his friends and students along to do it; especially the younger gallerists and curators had no hope of withstanding him. “You didn’t contradict him,” said Daniel Buchholz. “The orders came down from on high.”
Martin was not interested in following the shortest path up the career ladder—his path was horizontal, not vertical. He spread himself around with all his various projects, and in fact this multilayered complexity, Michael Krebber thought, was Martin’s guiding principle. Jutta Koether said:
Martin wasn’t arrogant, he never thought here or there wasn’t good enough for him, this or that gallery is only B-list or C-list. He wasn’t disturbed by those hierarchical relationships, which already back then were beginning to establish themselves. Instead, he disturbed them. Especially in America, everything is extremely hierarchical today and the least little movement is registered: if you show here or there, your market value goes up or down. And that’s what people pay attention to—that is the standard of worth. The idea of art and the production of art are warped accordingly. It was different back then.
This is not to say that Martin was always delighted out in the sticks. Of course he would have preferred a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to one at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where he had to share a room with Christian Nagel, the young gallerist he had brought along for company and as his “porter” (in Nagel’s words). That in itself was fine—it meant Martin never had to be alone—but the whole thing started to seem a bit piddling. He caused trouble at the show, which was called Not to be the Second Winner : Nagel recalls that when the crates arrived with the work, “Martin said he wouldn’t unpack anything, everything there was too stupid. The curator almost flipped out, but she bravely went to the museum director and told him what was going on—but we all went out for margaritas that night, and then Martin said he’d unpack some stuff after all.” Not everything, but most of it—he kept a couple of pieces in their crates, and wrapped some others with bubble wrap and masking tape, adding a label (in English): “I hold myself closed.”
Martin bypassed his gallerists not only to arrange exhibitions but also to make sales, which they liked even less. And the more products Martin had circulating out in the world, the harder it was for them to keep track of them all. That was one of the reasons that tensions developed between Martin and Peter Pakesch, even before Pakesch closed his gallery in Vienna in 1993. Business in Vienna was following the same path as in Germany, with the booming eighties followed by a slump in the early nineties. Pakesch no longer wanted to be a gallerist and became a freelance curator; he traveled to America often before becoming head of the Basel Kunsthalle, which would eventually show an exhibition of Martin’s self-portraits.
The beginning of the end of Martin’s Cologne collaborations had already come in 1988, when Hetzler moved gallery spaces within the city. He had the architect Oswald Mathias Ungers make an expensive new building for him on Venloer Strasse, all stern right angles of course; Albert Oehlen, Werner Büttner, and Günther Förg, the most successful of Hetzler’s artists at the time, also bought space in the building and thus helped to finance it. Martin hated the building, which a visitor described as “a housing project in aristocratic style.” “As an artist I can no longer work in a gallery like Max’s the way Ungers built it,” Martin told Jutta Koether in 1991: even the dark floorboards “bring you down so much.” He thought Eskimos knew more about architecture than this star of Cologne architecture, and he made fun of the building with a sculpture he designed in Spain, Chicken Disco (a disco floor of colored squares not unlike the building’s squares of color). He nonetheless continued to show work there—he didn’t want to give that up. But he no longer truly felt comfortable and at home in the new space.
Hans-Jörg Mayer, untitled, 1991 (l. to r.: Charline von Heyl, Michaela Eichwald, Jutta Koether, Cosima von Bonin, Isabelle Graw)
© Hans-Jörg Mayer
The Hetzler Boys had grown up by that point. They appeared in public as a gang less and less often, preferring solo shows. Now that they were established as artists, they drifted apart as a group, with each one following his own path, with greater or lesser success. Martin’s attempt to ride the coattails of the Truth Is Work show with an exhibition in Munich called Painting Is Elections ( Malen ist Wahlen, riffing on Wahrheit ist Arbeit ) turned out to be a misstep: Oehlen and Büttner felt exploited and resented not being consulted when Martin showed their works from his own collection without asking them first, and they hated the show’s title. They accused him of stabbing them in the back. “There was no back-and-forth,” Oehlen said. “In his eagerness he just took the whole thing in hand himself. He was under such pressure with all his projects, he took on more and more assignments until the whole thing took on a life of its own. He didn’t have time to listen to you.” Oehlen at that period had “taken a step back” in any case. “It bothered me that Martin’s show gave second-rate artists, random idiots, the same status as others.” He preferred to spend time with Martin in smaller circles.
Oehlen had been leading a healthier life for some time, cutting short the long nights out, going for hikes and bicycle rides, and retreating to Spain. Günther Förg likewise withdrew to Switzerland, Werner Büttner to a professorship in Hamburg, and Georg Herold to spend time in New York. Martin himself didn’t entirely break camp in Cologne, but he spent more and more time elsewhere—L.A., Syros, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sankt Georgen—whether to get a little distance or in search of a new home.
FAREWELL TO EXUBERANCE
The art market was in crisis, with the boom of the late eighties leading to the recession of the early nineties. The bubble had popped, and pictures that had just recently cost a hundred thousand marks were suddenly selling for twenty thousand. With the start of the first Gulf War in 1990, American collectors said that it was difficult to buy art anymore; war broke out in Yugoslavia and would continue for years; in Germany, the euphoria that had accompanied the fall of the Wall gave way to new low spirits. Work by American artists like Mike Kelley and Jeff Koons was still selling for high prices, which hurt Martin’s feelings, since he knew the prices his own works were selling (or not selling) for. Money was so tight at one point that Martin’s assistant, Johannes Wohnseifer, was paid his salary three months late.
Painting had become yesterday’s medium—totally eighties. Photographers of the Becher school from Düsseldorf were all the rage, and their pictures were everything Martin’s art wasn’t: regal, monumental, uninhabited, and technically unimpeachable. Before long, the practitioners of Brit Art would be causing a sensation—and showing what they had learned from the Germans.
Cologne quieted down. Franz Keller had had to give up his restaurant at the end of the eighties and had left the city; the Hammerstein was no longer what it used to be. To fight the financial and art-business crisis of the nineties (which would last until 1997, the year of Martin’s death), the remaining galleries in Cologne banded together, with younger gallerists like Esther Schipper, Sophia Ungers, and Daniel Buchholz playing important roles. They were trying to make the art scene more youthful and fresh again. Martin liked working with younger colleagues; he showed with Sophia Ungers and developed projects with Schipper and Buchholz.
One of these projects, probably from 1995, never came to pass, but developing the idea was enjoyable enough. Martin wanted to sit in Daniel Buchholz’s gallery, located behind his father’s used
bookstore, so people could buy something in front (“You know the kind of thing I like, fried eggs, Frank Sinatra”) and bring it to Martin’s table in the back, where he would draw on it. Buchholz would pay for the pens and the wine, and they would split the profits. “You’d be able to buy something for twenty marks, but also for a thousand. The funny thing would be that a felt pen can make an engraving worthless, or can make it more expensive.”
Everyone in the Cologne scene was having more or less as hard a time as everyone else—harder than in previous years, certainly. But that had its positive side, too. The photographer Andrea Stappert, for example, felt that “there were moments when you thought, Ah, humanity returns. There was a new openness, fewer rigid boundaries. Everyone had to work on a smaller scale, there was less arrogance. No more swank.”
ONE FAMILY ONE LINE
Do you feel lonely?
There is no such thing as loneliness for a family man.
—MK
The German word for the fall of the Wall is Wende, a “turn” or “turning point.” 1989 was a turning point in Martin’s personal life as well. That was the year our father died and Martin’s daughter, Helena, was born.
Martin was amazed to watch how our father fought against his cancer, year after year. Even long after our father’s death, Martin was obsessed with the question of, as he put it to Jutta Koether, “wanting to survive, wanting to keep living, where do you get the strength? When you are doing badly, where do you get the strength to believe, to keep living? Why? How?”
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