Martin himself was annoyed by different things. All the money, for example, and that it played such a big role even in the art world. His shorthand description of New York was “A dollar a step,” not only because everything was so expensive, but because of the homeless people in front of every doorway and shop window in those pre-sanitized days, none of whom St. Martin could walk past without giving money.
Martin was also disappointed at the superficiality he found even among the collectors. “It’s unbelievable that they’re still so sure of themselves even now. They don’t have the slightest idea of history. They think that what happens tomorrow is what counts.” And he was irritated by the self-contradictory conformity—that Americans would “slurp down one hamburger after another but not have any spaghetti bolognese, because they’re healthy.”
Still, he kept coming back. He wanted to be a successful artist, which was impossible without America. Martin belonged to the generation of German artists who found international recognition even in their early years. He had many exhibitions in the U.S., not only in New York and L.A. galleries but also in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn in Washington, the ICA in Philadelphia, and the St. Louis Forum for Contemporary Art. “He caused trouble in Germany and caused a sensation in America,” the Berliner Zeitung wrote after Martin’s death—even if that wasn’t exactly true, he still found in the U.S. some of the official recognition that was denied to him in Germany. The Museum of Modern Art showed him in their 1987 group exhibition BerlinArt and today owns more of his works than all the German museums put together. In 2008–2009, MoCA in Los Angeles and MoMA in New York put on a huge and widely reviewed exhibition of his work.
“Martin Kippenberger, widely regarded as one of the most talented German artists of his generation, died on Friday at the University of Vienna Hospital”: this was the opening sentence of Roberta Smith’s obituary for Martin in the New York Times , a sentence no German newspaper would have printed. “His penchant for mixing media, styles and processes influenced younger artists on both side of the Atlantic. Yet the German art establishment seemed to have difficulty with his antics, which included buying a gas station during a trip to Brazil in 1986 and renaming it the ‘Martin Bormann Gas Station.’” Even ten years before the obituary, Smith had discovered in the rawness of his work something delicate and tender, in contrast to the perfect, smooth, extremely expensive sheen of the sculptures of the time.
How did the Americans understand him and his art? They didn’t, according to his New York gallerists today: “He was an artists’ artist.” Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, Stephen Prina, Christopher Wool, Christopher Williams, John Baldessari, Ronald Jones, Mike Kelley, Sam Samore, and Willem Dafoe were among his early fans, but he was not an artist for American collectors. Unlike in Europe, Martin could never build up a real base of regular collectors in America—he was too unpredictable for their taste. What his friends so liked about him, in New York as well—that he was always trying something new—scared off many potential buyers. “Collectors like consistency,” a recognizable style, pristine pictures, no crumpled subway entrances, no sculpture shows making the gallery look like a junk room.
Many of Martin’s works had to be sent back to Europe unsold after his shows in America. Maybe, in the land where success is everything, it was particularly hard to understand someone who pulled his pants down, celebrated failure and defeat, and practiced “bad painting.” Exhibiting your weaknesses rather than hiding them away is exactly what fascinates artists like Jeff Koons to this day.
Martin respected Koons, admired his success, and coproduced an issue of the art journal Parkett with him. What especially impressed Koons was that “he was always looking, always in the moment of art.” He liked Martin’s playfulness, his cheerful aesthetic, the freedom of his work. “Some people have a lot of anxiety, and that anxiety confines them. Martin didn’t have this anxiety. When I think of Martin’s art, I think about life. Art in New York at the time was an inanimate object.”
Martin didn’t fulfill the Americans’ expectations of a German artist the way Kiefer, Lüpertz, Immendorff, or Baselitz did—in fact, he talked trash about them to American collectors whenever he could. He was an artist who was German, that’s it: nothing to be ashamed of, but nothing especially worth promoting either. His Germanness didn’t involve any flag-waving. The canary flitted through his work, not the German eagle; irony, not lugubrious pathos. Martin drew his material from German everyday life—soccer, politics, tabloids—but who in New York had ever heard of Loki Schmidt or Hansjörg Felmy?
Above all, his language was German and the games he played with it were hard to carry over. Taschen Verlag, the publisher of the 1991 volume Kippenberger, wore out several translators trying . How could you convey the title Lebendige Freizeitgestaltung am Stiel (Lively Leisure Activity on a Stick), for a picture of Helmut Schmidt punting on the river? What about Martin’s trademark greeting, “Hallöchen,” never mind “Hallööööööööchen”? It is translated in this book as “Howdy-do,” while past translations have included “a little Hi-there” and “hi-i”—none as whimsical and winning as the original. The curator of his show in St. Louis was glad to come across anything she could label Untitled .
LOS ANGELES
New York always seemed cold to Martin, as it did to a character in Kafka’s Amerika who battles “the snowstorms in the long straight streets of New York! . . . If you walk into a swirling headwind, you can’t open your eyes even for a second, the wind is incessantly rubbing snow in your face, you walk and walk and get nowhere, it’s quite desperate.”
All the more appealing, then, was sunny, relaxed California. Andy Warhol once answered the question of where he would be in ten years by saying that he didn’t know yet. “The only goal I have is to have a swimming pool in Hollywood. I think it’s great, I like its artificial quality. New York is like Paris and Los Angeles is so American, so new and different and everything is bigger and prettier and simpler and flat.”
In L.A., Martin managed to do what he couldn’t in New York: leave a real trace behind him. Young artists in L.A. still talk about Martin, his appearances, his parties. He made “a powerful impression there,” in the view of the Austrian artist Hans Weigand, who lived in L.A. for a few years himself. But there, too, Martin failed to find a real home. What was someone without a driver’s license supposed to do in a city where everyone drives? How could someone who constantly needed other artists around, who needed interaction the way others need solitude, possibly make it in a city where everyone lives and works on their own, miles away from each other? Where everything is planned out days in advance, where you spend hours talking on the phone? In L.A., Max Hetzler said, it took an hour to drive to Mike Kelley’s, “and by the time you got there, you were no longer in the mood to see him.” Hans Weigand said,
once in a blue moon there’s a party or an opening, but there’s no artists’ bar. A city of eighteen million people with no artists’ bar! That says it all. There is no social life there—nada, nothing—people just sit around the house. In Vienna you knew that if you went down to the Engländer you’d meet a few people. There’s nothing like that in L.A. There are no accidents. Everything has to be planned down to the minutiae. Organizing a meal for a couple of artists is like planning a state dinner.
Still, Martin did what he always did: spread out and took over. Within days, Luhring and Augustine said, he had marked his territory—a place to live, place to eat, place to dance, place to work. “It would be an understatement to say that Martin got settled in L.A. quickly. His arrival was more like a Santa Ana, literally taking possession of Venice and Santa Monica.”
In both of those parts of western L.A., there were at least a few bars and restaurants Martin could get to on foot. He was always at his best on foot; he took long walks, his way of seeing the world, and everywhere he went he found new material for his art. It was in front of a bank in Venice (California), for instance, that he noticed the gondola u
p on shore that inspired his gondola sculptures. With Reiner Opoku at his side, Martin even did what no white American would do: he walked across the whole city. They ran into the most trouble in Beverly Hills, where the police stopped them. They set out at six in the morning from Venice and arrived at nine at night on Sunset Boulevard. Martin’s summary: “One person has a garage, someone else has two. That’s the only difference. Nothing else is going on.”
Martin had no garage at all, but he did have two cars: a huge pink boat of a classic Chevy Cabrio he bought for Gabi (who learned to drive in L.A.) and a big black BMW. Later, the BMW ended up in a show with a gondola on its roof, but until then Martin’s assistant Jory Felice had to drive him around in it. Even in uniform once.
Jory Felice, a younger artist, lived just ten feet away from Martin’s pretty little bright, modern house in Venice. The studio was downstairs and the apartment was upstairs; Albert Oehlen moved in later, too. The night after he first met Martin, Jory knocked on the door and offered his services as an assistant—he had never seen a show of Martin’s, he only knew his work from magazines and catalogs, but he liked it and the freedom it radiated. He had gone to art school, where it was “very serious, stifling creativity more than anything else.” He liked Martin’s looser ways of handling material: “Martin didn’t have too much respect for history.” And he had never met an artist who talked all the time about art: at the openings Jory was familiar with in California, people talked about the business, the market, who was doing what where and when; a lot of people didn’t dare say what they thought of a piece, for fear of stepping on someone’s toes. Martin said what he thought. “Other people thought it was impolite”; Jory thought it was generous.
Jory also said, later, that he had no idea what he was getting himself into. In his mind, an assistant was someone who stretched canvases, washed paintbrushes, maybe ran a few errands. Martin, on the other hand, expected his assistants to be always on duty, just like him. The next morning, at nine, it was Martin knocking on Jory’s door, and the knocking never stopped, day and night and every hour in between. Martin expected Jory to drop whatever he was doing and be at his service: drive him through the giant city, accompany him to lunch at a restaurant and drinks at a bar, give him music tips. He expected perfect service. Once, at the beginning, they got lost and arrived late for an appointment—Jory Felice had a driver’s license but no sense of direction and had never in his life used a city map—and “Martin was furious. He hated to keep people waiting.” Sometimes, Felice said, he had the feeling that he wasn’t German (efficient, meticulous) enough for Martin.
Felice called their work together “confusing.” Half the time, he had the feeling that he wasn’t even understanding what Martin said: “His English was okay, but it took months to realize that he spoke his own language.” Jory never knew if something Martin said was a game with language, or a mistake, or a misunderstanding. Once, when Martin asked for some “tooth pasta” (because “pasta” and “paste” are the same word in German), Jory thought that it must have something to do with pasta, since Martin loved pasta so much and was always making fun of the phrase “al dente.” “Sometimes I pretended to know what he was talking about when I didn’t have a clue. It was frustrating. But funny.”
The empty house quickly filled up with furniture. One of the first things Martin bought, right at the start, was a gigantic TV, on which he would later watch World Cup soccer games with a huge crowd—the parties were legendary. Jory drove through L.A. early one morning with Tanja Grunert (who had to furnish her booth for an art fair to which she and various other Cologne gallerists had been invited) and bought tables and chairs at junk shops for a few dollars. The designer pieces came later: classics of American modernism. Charles and Ray Eames’s workshop was located right around the corner.
Martin set up his own little world there, as Jory Felice said, “a pretty great little world.” A world of art. Thea Westreich once said that wherever she visited Martin, she never had the feeling that he was really there in whatever apartment he had. The house in Los Angeles, too, she felt, was more like an exhibition, a workshop. “I don’t think he was a nesting animal. So with Martin—what else would you make of a house but art? Not a home.”
Even his bed was an art object—an allusion to the works of his German sculptor colleagues. Jory built it out of plywood, following Martin’s instructions. To separate it from the open living room, Martin designed a divider that recalled the Berlin Wall; it had a bookshelf on one side and a New York artist’s tapestry on the other. Pictures by Jeff Koons, Zoe Leonard, and Michael Krebber hung on the walls, and there was a giant photo of Audrey Hepburn in the studio.
Jory recalls a few moments of domestic bliss: Martin and Jory drawing at the enormous conference table Jory had found and covered in linoleum, Gabi at the stove, Helena in her baby bouncer. Martin called his daughter “Schmusi,” and already she was just like him, even if she looked different. Jory thought that even when she was just a few months old, she had her own personality and a great sense of humor: “As if she was making her own jokes.”
But before long the fights would start again. The relationship was in crisis. As Martin said later, there wasn’t much joy there so he had to supply it himself, which he did by throwing himself into his work. He took a “Runaway Forward Tour” to Stockholm, Milan, Paris, Nice, Graz, “the first time that a tour fit with my life. An exhibition every three days, always in a new city. Still, pretty stressful.”
HOLLYWOOD
Martin later brought the American furniture back to Germany and used it as the basis of his biggest work, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika.” Martin had Kafka’s unfinished novel with him in L.A., and Jory thinks he remembers that Martin actually wanted to make a movie of it. Like Kafka, who never set foot in the U.S., Martin was less interested in the real country than in his childhood dream of it: one of his drawings that he stamped with “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’” contained the words “Fury? Lässy? Flipper?” Kafka’s novel reminded Max Brod of Charlie Chaplin, who had also fascinated Martin as a child—he dressed as the Tramp character for Carnival one year.
Martin never cared about theater or opera, only the movies. He learned important lessons from the silver screen and its heroes: romance, comedy, adventure, melodrama. That was his metier. Movies survive on exaggeration, on being “larger than life,” and yet, unlike opera, “true to life” at the same time. That was another reason he had hired a movie-poster painter in Berlin for his large-format Dear Painter, Paint For Me series. If he couldn’t make it as a movie star, he wanted to be at least as big an artist as Fassbinder’s star Hanna Schygulla, or Bud Spencer. He had had three small parts in movies during his years in Berlin—in Gibby West Germany, Love and Adventure, and Portrait of an Alcoholic Woman (a.k.a. Ticket of No Return )—and was eager to play a policeman with a German shepherd. But the roles didn’t lead to anything.
He loved the pace, intensity, and complexity of the medium and felt that the interplay between the actors’ performances, cinematography, sound, story, pacing, and editing added up to a true Gesamtkunstwerk . He loved the terse storytelling of the movies, where everything had to be said in ninety minutes. He said once that you would have to go see thirty thousand exhibitions to get the intensity of one Kramer vs. Kramer. He believed in the power of cinema—its heroism, its stars. When Christine Hahn told him that she had been with a man who looked like Jack Nicholson, Martin (who looked rather like Nicholson himself, friends said) was appalled: how could she break up with someone who looked like Jack Nicholson?!
He loved the New Hollywood films of the seventies: Scorsese, Spielberg, Nicholson, De Niro, Ben Gazarra in Cassavetes’s Killing of a Chinese Bookie. He did Taxi Driver imitations in bars and was “totally fascinated” with Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, according to Angelika Margull, especially with how Richard Dreyfus heaps his mashed potatoes into a mountain and discovers his vision. “He sang the score over a
nd over and over again.”
Martin wanted to be a star like them and was over the moon when Vogue put him on the same page as Richard Gere, Kevin Costner, Matt Dillon, and Spike Lee in response to the question of who the New Man was. Martin also felt a connection with Fassbinder and his clan (Martin’s mirrored screen in the Peter show was titled “Rainer Werner Fassbinder”). Now that was great cinema—that was pure melodrama. He felt a similar connection to the John Huston movie Under the Volcano, in which he recognized himself; he had never seen the life of an alcoholic presented as realistically and intensely as it was by Albert Finney standing in the shower. Martin then called one of his shows Give Me the Summer Downtime (Under the Volcano, Part II).
He turned scenes from movies into his own works again and again. His whole subway system was inspired by the movies (Truffaut, Buster Keaton, Marilyn Monroe); he naturally went to see the hotel from Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot while in California. He reworked one of the last scenes in Hitchcock’s Rear Window into his Hunger sculptures. He even wrote a piece of film criticism, for Spex : a review of The Color Purple.
Martin loved the movies, and as always he caricatured and mocked what he liked—for example, by going around in movie costumes, striking Hollywood poses, and having Achim Schächtele take his picture like that for Slaves of Tourism. One reason Martin wanted to go to L.A., he said later, was to “get free of his childhood dream.” He wanted to appear in one major American movie, even if only as an extra, to show that he had made it. He wanted to be the hero of L.A., Jory Felice said. He imagined it like a scene out of a movie: being welcomed by Hollywood with open arms, the way he himself had welcomed American artists. (Jeff Koons said how welcome he felt when he came to Cologne in 1986, for his first show with Hetzler: “I felt totally at home, Martin took us artists under his wing.”)
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