Kippenberger
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Throughout the article, Lottmann consistently referred to Martin as “Kippi.” Martin hated when people continued to use his nickname years after he had put it aside. He liked “Kippilein” even less, as Kaspar König’s then-wife used to call him—“I can’t be the baby in public my whole life, can I?”
Even Lottmann’s article was much too positive for Wolfgang Max Faust’s tastes. Faust portrayed Martin as not only a sexist pig but also homophobic, racist, petit bourgeois, cynical, and a coward. His article in Skyscraper was called “The Artist As Exemplary Alcoholic.” Martin’s answer was the sculpture series Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself, which went over so well that instead of the planned three figures he had Uli Strothjohann build him six.
It was a time when many people talked like that about Martin, even if few of them dared to do it so publicly. This caused Jutta Koether, in turn, to publish an article in Artscribe that same year, 1989, which took the opposite position. In “Who Is Martin Kippenberger and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things about Him?” she tried to explain the phenomenon of Kippenberger and his artistic attitude.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AMERICA
“It was a land of possibility,” Max Hetzler said, “and impossibility.”
They wanted to conquer the West. Hetzler’s gallery was a success in Cologne, as was Lawrence Luhring and Roland Augustine’s in New York, and now these three gallerists wanted to try something new together, something different. The omens were good: German artists were showing in the United States, Beuys had had his major show at the Guggenheim Museum, Günther Förg was enormously successful, and the other Hetzler Boys had regular exhibitions. The West Coast was virgin territory in the art world, certainly compared to New York. The Luhring/Augustine/Hetzler Gallery opened in Santa Monica in 1989—and closed in 1992. There was not much competition, but also not much of an audience. Los Angeles at the time was, in Ed Ruscha’s words, “the Australia of the art world”: very far out of touch. The art boom would hit L.A. only later.
For Martin, it was a dream to go to Hollywood, have his international breakthrough, and maybe even make it work with his family. It was another instance of his pressing ahead: leaving Cologne, where he had reached a dead end, for a place where, if nothing else, the gallery would provide an anchor. His dream, like the dream of so many others who come to L.A., was to be a star. Instead, he remained what he always was: “a one-off.” No matter how hard he tried, he “had to Keep Out.” After going to California in 1989, he went back to Germany in 1990 and in 1991 summed up “the knowledge gained during my stay in America” as follows: “L.A. is a sprawling pit.”
America was the land of our childhood dreams. Everything we saw on TV came from the U.S.: The Little Rascals, I Dream of Jeannie, Bonanza. “In Color!” the opening credits bragged, even if our own TV set, like most at that time, was black and white. Fury, Lassie, Flipper : we knew all the theme songs by heart and played America on our school vacations in Trier. Martin threw himself into the histrionic hero’s death from Western movies or waddled down the street with a hat and cane like Charlie Chaplin. One of his sayings was: “Whoever films Bonanza himself / understands the world that much better.” [1]
Our big sisters were into blue jeans and black men; we younger siblings longed for Milky Ways and Mickey Mouse. Everything was different in America, everything was modern—the clothes were made of paper, the milk came in cardboard, the cars were enormous, and the buildings scraped the sky. The Americans had John F. Kennedy, while we Germans had Ludwig Erhard; they flew to the moon, while we sailed on the Moselle. Anyone who went to America, we thought, would come back a different person, and that turned out to be true, to a certain extent: our grandmother came back with purple hair and a manicure; our sister came back with five or ten extra pounds.
America was the land of freedom and adventure, Hollywood and rock and roll, LSD and Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol and Hair. It was a faraway, foreign land: flights were very expensive then, as were phone calls, and there was a lot less American culture in Germany—no muffins or bagels, no Gap or Nike. In Frillendorf, the opening of the first French fry stand was sensational news—we wouldn’t hear of McDonald’s or Burger King for years. America was also the land of forbidden pleasures: chewing gum (vulgar), comic books (trash), and fast food (unhealthy).
Later, the underground would come from New York to Berlin. Iggy Pop and David Bowie played at S.O.36, as did John Lurie and Christine Hahn. In 1979, when Hahn, the drummer of the artist-band Static, went back to New York after playing in Berlin, Martin heaped cards and kisses and phone calls on her and soon followed.
Martin had always liked the Leonard Cohen song “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” Now he was trying it the other way round.
He won over Christine Hahn: “he was very romantic with me,” she said. They saw New York together and “he was so hungry to take everything in,” from the clubs to the museums to Coney Island on a dull winter day when everything looked abandoned, almost spooky. They went to the movies, too, and saw Apocalypse Now on a giant screen with a top-of-the-line sound system. Martin was impressed by the technology (how real the helicopter and gunfire sounded) but less taken by the content: “He was mad about it, really upset. He probably thought the movie was too pro-war.” But Hahn was often not sure if she really understood him (Martin’s English was quite bad at the time), and whether the confusion was because of the language or her or him. “He was very theatrical,” so was he being serious when he asked her if she would marry him at the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas? She thought it over, “but I didn’t want to be a joke.” For breakfast he ordered “two eggs looking at you,” with a scotch (the German for “fried egg” is Spiegelei, literally “mirror-egg”). He told her stories about our mother and said that he’d never gotten a driver’s license because our mother had died in an automobile accident—not exactly a lie but not exactly the truth, since our mother wasn’t driving, and besides, Martin was twenty-three when the accident happened, long past the age when he could have gotten a license. In any case, it made Christine all the more willing to drive him around.
And so he criss-crossed New York in search of adventures, encounters, and noodle casserole: he asked for his favorite food everywhere, but they didn’t know what he was talking about. It was his first disappointment in a country whose possibilities, he soon realized, were limited after all. “He ended up with spaghetti.”
Martin was a European and wanted to stay that way, not disappear into the melting pot like other German artists. He wanted success in New York as Kippi Kippenberger from Berlin, not to be a New Yorker. “He wanted to set up a home base in New York,” Hahn said. So he presented her with a very detailed list of the people he wanted to meet—“he had antennae for who was really interesting.” He was hungry for exchange and interaction and made plans to meet people even over breakfast. After all, he wasn’t in New York on vacation: everything he did, saw, and took pictures of (he was always in front of or behind the camera) would later be material for his postcards, posters, and catalogs.
Many of the people Martin did meet later appeared in the zine he put out in Berlin: sehr gut, very good. If no one else would praise him, he would just have to do it himself. The zine cost three marks and in the end he had so many unsold copies left over that he stacked them under his bed to support the mattress. The issue (there was only one) opened with a kind of family photo album as table of contents: Jochen Krüger, Middendorf and Fetting, James White, Scott B., Meuser, Kippenberger (“boss”), Eric Mitchell, Christine Hahn, Klaus Krüger. Along with the photos of these artists, musicians, and filmmakers from Berlin and New York, there were also photos from S.O.36 and Kippenberger’s Office, of course, and photos that didn’t show the people they were said to depict (the one captioned H.P. Feldmann, for example, was not of H.P. Feldmann).
Martin was so excited by his meeting with the filmmaker Eric Mitchell that he invited him on the spot to join the band he had
started with Christine Hahn: Luxus (Luxury). The name was a provocation—he wanted to be the exact opposite of the artists of the time who showed off their poverty by going around in torn rags—and the band itself was a fiction that existed only on its one single (“New York—Auschwitz”) and the posters he and Hahn put up all over the city, the way musicians do.
But who were these musicians? No one knew—everyone was waiting for their first concert, but in vain. That was the concept. Hahn said later that Martin swept through New York like a whirlwind; to her he felt like “a breath of fresh air.” Artists in New York didn’t act like that: so theatrically, so playfully, so curious. No one tried to win over the whole city at once. “New York artists were so serious back then, dead serious. Everyone wore black.” That was the big reason she and other artists had gone into music: “We wanted to have some fun.”
Martin made these New Yorkers a bit unsure of themselves, with his boozing and bragging, his tight leather pants and his dress shirts and ties. “They didn’t know what to make of him.” They didn’t understand this unknown but extremely intense German artist (at least he said he was an artist—no one had seen any of his work), but they were certainly curious. What more could he want?
Picture of Helena as the invitation to the Kippenblinkys show at David Nolan’s gallery in New York, 1991
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
Martin would often return to New York—you couldn’t get around it. His home base gradually came together, but never quite all the way: he never managed to found a Kippenberger Family in America, “a group of people you could count on and trust,” as Wilhelm Schürmann said. He found a steady gallery to represent him in 1985, Metro Pictures, where the gallerists Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring were, like him, more interested in ideas than in painting. His first show there was called Selling America & Buying El Salvador. Martin hounded the gallerist David Nolan (a specialist in works on paper, like Gisela Capitain at the time) so persistently that Nolan finally gave in and started working with Martin, which in this case meant keeping Martin company on nights out. Helene and Janelle were spared that. Martin was also friends with Hetzler’s partners, Lawrence Luhring and Roland Augustine, and with Thea Westreich, an art dealer. Julie Sylvester became his closest friend in America and his companion, publishing many of his editions, including his shrink-wrapped used socks and Disco Bombs (disco balls with ladies’ wigs). Friedrich Petzel, the young German gallerist, accompanied Martin through the city and brought along Martin’s alcohol-free beer (it was a phase when Martin wasn’t drinking, and alcohol-free beer wasn’t readily available at the time). Tracy Williams and Martin were a couple for a while. He had his regular hangouts too, of course—a bar in Soho, on Prince Street, where he could get his morning screwdriver, and an Italian restaurant in Tribeca, Barocco. They kept a table in the corner reserved for Martin whenever he was in town, and he designed the restaurant’s matchbox; obviously everyone there knew him immediately, from the dishwashers to the maître d’. “We’ll expect you in October,” Julie Sylvester wrote to him on a postcard once, “Barocco Pasta Factory will make bratwursties and cabbage rollies.”
But Martin would never be as fun, lively, and playful on his later trips to New York as he was the first time. The pattern was always the same: do everything, take in everything, try everything, take limos, look at exhibitions, meet people, go dancing. New York was the clubbing capital of the world in the eighties, with Studio 54, the Limelight, and the aptly named MK—which, in Martin’s opinion, looked exactly like the Pop-In had looked in Essen, twenty years earlier.
“New York is misery,” he said once. He never worshipped the metropolis—he called it “Greater Ibiza.” Nor did New York worship him. The indifference that bothered Martin was something David Bowie liked about New York: “People don’t care what you do, they pay attention to their own thing.” And if David Bowie didn’t turn their heads, Martin Kippenberger sure wouldn’t.
In 1979, Martin raced through America for a few weeks with Achim Schächtele, his partner from S.O.36 (and possessor of a driver’s license). S.O.36 had closed, and, Schächtele said, “We were on the lookout for new horizons. What can we do there? What do people do there?” So, camera and Super-8 in tow as always, they were off through the land of pioneers, “outfitted in style: beautiful suitcases, flannel suits.” They tried everything, gambled in Las Vegas (Martin lost two thousand dollars in a single night), rode horses through the Grand Canyon like cowboys, stayed at “adults-only” hotels, and tried to follow the trails of rock stars like Patti Smith, ending up, for example, in the Tropicana Motel with its black swimming pool, surrounded by musicians. At a peep-show, Martin realized that there was no glass between him and the stage and clambered through the window; in New York, they saw the pope, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Beuys all in the same week, and they went to museums, concerts, and other performances. Everywhere they went, they posed and took photographs, especially on movie sets.
And of course they made art out of it all when they got back: the Slaves of Tourism show at Café Einstein (discussed above). Many of the photographs showed up in various forms in Martin’s work later, too: as models for the Dear Painter, Paint For Me series, book covers, or catalog entries. The last of a series of pictures he later showed in a performance at Café Einstein was taken by Gisela Capitain at Alexanderplatz: Martin and Achim as cowboys in East Berlin.
Still, Schachtele says, they never really connected with the U.S. “There was no common ground, no people with the same sorts of ideas. We put on a pretty big show, we wanted cheers and applause, but there was no real relationship between what we put out and what we got back.” They didn’t even have the success they were used to with women: the Americans didn’t like being hit on so aggressively. “What takes a couple days in Berlin takes a couple weeks in America.”
They had planned to stay in America for three months but went back to Berlin after six weeks.
Nevertheless, America was a treasure trove for Martin: this “smoke-free, cholesterol-free, fat-free, zero-calorie, no problema America,” as Jan Avgikos described it in Martin’s St. Louis exhibition catalog, was the source of the stickers Martin plastered all over his paintings (“I love . . .”), the “Don’t Wake Daddy” board game, the “Fred the Frog” character in old Bermuda shorts. New York was big, fast, exciting, made for Martin—but maybe it was too big, too fast. Maybe also too small and narrow; he sometimes felt like he was in a small town: “after a while you never get out of Soho.”
And he missed having people who spoke his language, understood his jokes, and would spend nights out with him. He often took his own gang with him as a precaution—Gisela Capitain, Uschi Welter, Max Hetzler, Jörg Schlick, Uli Strothjohann, friends, assistants, students. Once, when he said to Georg Herold, “Sheorsh, come with me,” and Georg said he didn’t have any money, Martin bought one of his works on the spot so he had no excuse. Herold, born in Jena in East Germany, said that New York reminded him of the East at first: “Everything was so run down.”
Martin shocked and fascinated the Americans with his uninhibited openness and spontaneous way of saying whatever he saw and felt, whether making a comment to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art about the curator’s bizarre haircut or telling Mrs. Pulitzer at a dinner in St. Louis— the Mrs. Pulitzer, a white-haired lady in a white suit—“You are the whitest white woman I have ever met.” The first time he went to the curator Betsy Wright Millard’s house, where he was to spend a week with Jörg Schlick, he didn’t politely compliment his hostess but instead burst out with “Oh my God, my worst nightmare has come true!” The ground floor was full of paintings by the New Wild Ones, the Mülheimer Freiheit painters, and the Moritzplatz group. “But,” Betsy said, “he didn’t just turn around and leave,” and so he saw the Oehlens and Kippenbergers hanging on the second floor.
What Americans may have found new and refreshing at first—all the loud ringleading—soon turned them off. Americans
were suspicious of heavy drinking like his; that sort of thing was no longer done. If you needed to calm down or pep up, you did it in private, with pills, not all pushy and out in the open. In America, an artist who drank was seen as a junkie or a loser. Why drink when there was AA? As Peter Schjeldahl, a critic with an ambivalent relationship to Martin (“I sort of despised him, and he sort of fascinated me”), wrote in the Village Voice, Martin’s sculptures of drunken, swaying streetlamps really took him aback: they struck him as “civic monuments of the phantasmagoria and sorrows of alcoholism. As a citizen of self-help America, I find it hard to get with a culture that still issues points for fuckedupness. But there it is.”
Martin’s student Ina Weber said, “I think America stressed Martin out: this perpetual insistence on being polite, always speaking in code.” How are you, I’m fine, have a nice day, that’s nice . Martin’s style of saying hello was more like, Hey asshole, Hey nigger. He could only mock the American jargon of meaningless niceties and American bigotry, which provoked him to further provocations and only cemented his reputation as a bad boy. The more politically correct New York became (long before there was any such thing in Germany), the more people reacted against him. Americans went out of their way to avoid someone with the reputation of being anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, and homophobic.