Instead, Hollywood gave Martin the cold shoulder.
He had pictured Hollywood as wilder and crazier, swankier, not so tame and health-conscious. And he resented that the big stars didn’t spend their piles of money on art. (Lawrence Luhring: “Hollywood in general is not interested in art. Their egos are too big.”) Martin did not succeed in penetrating the world of the stars. In Hollywood, it wasn’t enough to say “Howdy-do, here I am!” “You need someone to introduce you, someone to bring you inside the circle,” Jory Felice said, and Martin didn’t understand that. You need an agent if you want to be in a movie, even if you don’t want to get paid for it. He went to a lot of restaurants frequented by stars like Jodie Foster; once he even managed to talk to Peter Fonda and was thrilled. He liked it less when he saw Sylvester Stallone sitting with his lawyer at the next table—the actor really did behave like Rambo. And it hurt Martin’s feelings when Dennis Hopper, who lived near Martin in Venice, didn’t even bother to decline when Martin invited him over: “He took it a bit personally,” Jory Felice said.
“He seemed to be obsessed with the Hollywood thing,” Lawrence Luhring said. “But we didn’t go to see any movies, or talk about movies—we only talked about Hollywood power and Hollywood politics.”
In Cologne, Stephen Prina said, Martin had his audience in the palm of his hand; in L.A., people simply ignored him. He was used to rejection or hate—that was just a challenge. But he couldn’t handle indifference and disinterest. At a party John Baldessari gave in his honor, Martin started telling his jokes as usual and people listened at first but then gradually drifted back to their previous conversations. He was left standing there all alone. Only Raisin, Baldessari’s elderly dog, still stood there looking at him—and Martin looked back down at him.
He bought a share in a restaurant called Capri, fittingly enough. “I walked in and saw a woman and knew right away: My people! And of course she wasn’t an American. Her roots were somewhere else. She was Swedish.” Alona Hamilton Cooke became a friend, and he felt that she understood him. She hung a “glow worm” in the backyard (a chain of tiny little light bulbs) and served noodle casserole at Capri the way he liked it—simple, no poppycock, sometimes just butter or lemon. As an owner, he had bought himself the right to “enforce happiness” on the other patrons with his speeches and endless jokes; no one could defend themselves, and if someone did ever venture to stand up and leave, they wouldn’t make it out the door unscathed. There was only one door, and Martin was standing next to it.
John Baldessari was a big fan of Martin’s, and Martin saw in him another impassioned networker, teacher, and art enthusiast—a kindred spirit. Baldessari thought photography, painting, and sculpture shouldn’t be cordoned off in separate ghettos; he also disliked New York and, like Martin, had only to look at a newspaper to start laughing, because the world was so absurd. And he wished more artists had the courage to fail sometimes: “They think things have to be right from the start. Sometimes I have the feeling that artists are not doing what they really want to do.” Baldessari made a poster for Martin, too, as did Jeff Koons.
Despite his feeling so isolated in L.A.—or because of it—Martin’s time there was productive. He created lots of sculptures there, his latex pictures, and his “Fred the Frog” series of paintings. Finally, Martin achieved one great success in California: he met John Caldwell, curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, at the Luhring Augustine Hetzler Gallery, and asked him when he would finally get an exhibition—even Förg had already had one. Caldwell thought it over for a moment and said, “In September?” Martin was speechless. No curator had ever said yes to him so spontaneously.
The show at SFMoMA in 1991 was pure pleasure for Martin. He had finally found a museum person he admired and respected as much as they did him. John Caldwell was a Harvard graduate from a liberal Southern family and was known as a pioneer, even a visionary, of contemporary art on the West Coast. He had already exhibited Richter and Polke. “Howdy-do,” Martin faxed from San Francisco to Gisela Capitain, excited and proud and ecstatic: “Everything not cobbled together here, over the moon.”
He played accordion with Rüdiger Carl at the opening, dancing around the sculptures. Carl later said that in the photographs, “I always look like the amateur and he looks like the professional. We rented the most beautiful old accordions from dusty music junk shops, usually from old Jewish people. They didn’t sound so great any more, but they looked magnificent—like classic old Buicks or Oldsmobiles.”
“Well, to have an exhibition in America,” Martin said to Jutta Koether in 1991, “I guess you have reached some sort of goal in that! And you’ll never achieve that again, the feeling, the first real solo exhibition in a major gallery, or in a foreign city.... San Francisco is something great, I mean, Polke has had exhibitions and installations there.”
The exhibition didn’t lead to anything, though. Especially not in Germany.
[ 1 ] A rhyme in German: “ Wer Bonanza selber dreht, der die Welt umso besser versteht .”
CHAPTER EIGHT
FRANKFURT AND KASSEL
For Bärbel Grässlin, who moved to Frankfurt in 1984 to open her own gallery after her years with Max Hetzler, Frankfurt was a no-man’s-land. There was no infrastructure for contemporary art in the banking capital, as there had been in Cologne, although Hilmar Hoffmann, the city councilor for cultural affairs, was interested in creating one. The Schirn Kunsthalle opened in 1986, and three years later Kaspar König became head of the Städelschule and served as Founding Director of the Portikus exhibition hall. The Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art opened its doors in 1991, under the direction of Jean-Christophe Ammann.
Frankfurt was also new territory for Martin when he arrived in the fall of 1990 to teach at the Städelschule, though it was a hub between the Black Forest and Cologne, with good international connections. Family connections, too: before he got an apartment of his own, he spent nights at Bärbel Grässlin and Rüdiger Carl’s. He would “yank on our sheets bright and early, before we were even awake,” Carl said, and would ask for a Bloody Mary, his first cigarette in his hand. Even after he’d found a place, he would often call the gallery at lunch time, twelve noon on the dot—“You could set your watch by it”—or show up at the door in person with a “Howdy-do.” After his midday nap the show went on in the evening: eating, drinking, talking, and singing until late at night. Sometimes Grässlin and Carl just didn’t answer the phone or turned off the lights in their apartment and sat on the couch in the dark, pretending not to be at home. “We thought: What if he comes by again! What if he comes by again! We just wanted a break, a little peace. We didn’t have the energy.” They knew for a fact that Martin would never take no for an answer—“You couldn’t not be there too often, or it meant you didn’t love him.” It was a demanding time, Grässlin said. Only after he started his job at the Städelschule and turned his students into constant companions did it get easier—or at least a little easier.
Even before Martin moved to Frankfurt, he had often shown work there: the Hunger Family with Bärbel Grässlin and her then-partner Heinrich Ehrhardt, the Rest Center for Mothers and Profit Peaks pieces, bronze skeletons and bath mats in the Handful of Forgotten Pigeons show. According to Grässlin, though, it was “difficult, very very difficult,” to sell his pieces in Frankfurt, whether to collectors or institutions. They usually went, in the end, to the people who were Martin’s collectors anyway: Uli Knecht in Stuttgart, the Grässlins in Sankt Georgen, or Thomas Borgmann in Cologne. The trade fair organization in Frankfurt did buy one piece, Two Proletarian Inventresses on the Way to the Inventors’ Congress (recently donated to the Städel), as did Bernd Lunkewitz.
Lunkewitz was a real estate investor with a leftist past; he had bought the Aufbau Verlag (the leading literary and cultural publisher of East Germany) after the fall of the Wall, and the newspaper Die Welt had once called him “the Che Guevara of Kassel.” Grässlin had arranged with him to rent Martin a place: a big, beau
tiful prewar apartment on Hedderichstrasse in Sachsenhausen, newly renovated according to his wishes. It was an apartment where Martin really lived, with a long Shaker table as the centerpiece. He received many visitors and students there, there were parties and meals and work, and Martin hung or displayed works from his collection, such as Franz West’s day bed.
The rent was much too expensive for him (2,700 marks a month, when he also had the large apartment with Gabi and Helena on Eifelstrasse in Cologne), but the housing that the Städelschule had arranged for him was too depressing. So Martin invited Lunkewitz and his young actress-girlfriend over with Grässlin and Carl, the Filipina cleaning ladies took care of the cooking, there was charm and haggling and negotiating on both sides, with Martin trotting out all the gangster tricks he knew from all the film noir he had seen, and finally he got what he wanted: “A good picture for a good apartment.” Martin lived on Hedderichstrasse for two years, rent-free. And Lunkewitz missed his chance to pick a picture—after Martin’s death, he thought, it was too late.
Frankfurt was not one of the cities that Martin conquered. He probably never really tried, focusing instead on a few places, some of them private, and a small fixed circle. He only rarely made his presence known beyond that circle—for example, in a reading he organized, which Martin Prinzhorn remembers with a shudder: “He really threw me to the wolves there.” Martin insisted that Prinzhorn give a theoretical lecture, which was obviously too dry and academic for the literary audience there (the previous day’s speaker was Günter Grass). “It was torture, one of the most painful experiences of my life. Albert Oehlen was there, too, sitting in the second row, actually cringing in pain.” Then, after Prinzhorn’s theoretical lecture, Martin told Opel Manta-driver jokes [1] for a whole hour, which didn’t go over any better. “Everyone hated us so much, I had never felt anything like it. And that was what he had planned. He had arranged for crazy honorariums, too, and rooms at the best hotel—he always did make incredibly sure that his collaborators were paid well.”
Martin had a local restaurant in Frankfurt, of course: the Gemalte Haus (Painted House), right around the corner from his apartment. It was an Apfelwein cider bar where he went for breakfast, cheese plates, and lively conversation at the long communal tables. He was on a first-name basis with the retirees who spent their days there, and he even charmed a few single older ladies, according to Carl, until they got to be too clingy and he temporarily took flight. He had other options: he could eat for drawings at the upscale Gargantua, with its brilliant owner Klaus Trebes; he painted a picture of a drunken streetlamp and attached little light bulbs to it for the Colosseo, his regular Italian restaurant. When, after Martin’s death, a later owner of the restaurant learned how important Martin was, he took down the picture with its light bulbs and sold it through Sotheby’s to Charles Saatchi.
“I wasn’t born for school,” Martin liked to say, and he didn’t like the institution at all. On one of his Mirror Babies from 1987, he wrote: “What my father learned in school: French women don’t wash, they wear dirty underwear. (I learned a lot, too, but I didn’t pay attention.)” Art schools were even worse: he called them “dusty” and “totally unnecessary,” “the dumbest educational institutions in the world.” The only reason anyone went there “was so you could tell Mommy you’d gotten a degree.” He couldn’t stand academic types, saying once that “Kippenberger’s better academic training” was “feeling, understanding, experience.” In his opinion, too much education was damaging for an artist: “The more intelligent types just get in their own way. Naivete is what lets anything elemental show through.” Anyone who had been rejected from school, like his assistant Johannes Wohnseifer, or who had left after one or two semesters, like Uli Strothjohann, was automatically on Martin’s good side. He recommended that Anna Giehse, a young woman who worked for him in Spain, submit boxes of pralines to the Düsseldorf professors as her application. (She did, and was rejected.)
Martin was firmly convinced that you were born an artist or you weren’t—you could learn techniques, but that wasn’t art. “Everything else has to emerge from life.” And so that was what he told art students: “Get a life!” Another recommendation: they should make catalogs, whether they had an exhibition or not. “A catalog expands your audience and gives an artist a voice outside of critics and criticism. Trade your pictures for food, for a catalog.”
It was a real challenge for him to be a teacher, with all the memories of his youth that teaching brought with it. “You have students who are insecure and looking to you for direction, and then you do something or another wrong, I’m responsible for them to some extent,” he told Jutta Koether. “And I realize how often I’m talking shit. It’s stressful, you can hardly do anything else if you’re serious about it. And you get the feeling that you have to start over again from the beginning yourself. It kind of rubs off on you!”
But art was “about developing,” for Martin, and he liked helping others develop. “Pedagogy,” in Peter Pakesch’s view, “was an important driving force for him. He was always a great explainer, he believed in Enlightenment. He wanted to improve people’s lives.” Martin gave guest lectures in Nice and Amsterdam and at Yale in his later years, and when Isabelle Graw, a guest lecturer at the time at the Vienna academy, met Martin with her students—first at his show, later in a coffeehouse—she was deeply moved to see how patiently he made himself available to answer their questions “for hours and hours.”
So now, without a high school diploma, Martin was a guest professor for a year at the Städelschule.
It had been the students’ idea to invite him. One lecturer was skeptical and thought they had chosen him only because he was “hip,” but in the end he was offered the position. As a result, he had a fixed salary for the first time in his life—not that he kept much of it himself, spending most of it right away, mostly on his students.
As a teacher, he was free to do what he so liked to do: talk, lecture, make demands, order people around, say what he thought, and show off. “One of my most noticeable characteristics is simply that I show off!” Martin once said. “And then, if you put ‘Professor’ in front of your name, that is Level 3 Showoffery (works well on taxi drivers).” It was also an opportunity for Martin to meet pretty, young female students and collect a new clan for himself. But it was impossible in the long run to turn into a teacher for life, a public official—that was not his goal. “A little of everything, but all of it intensely” was his motto. So he threw himself into his duties. Teaching became another mode of being an artist, which he wanted to plumb the depths of in all of its forms. The school turned into the stage for his performances, with the students as his costars and audience. They were a loyal public, many of them hanging on his every word. Even before Frankfurt, Martin had undergone a generational shift in his life: he was no longer the ringleader of a group of peers but instead had started collecting younger groupies. His girlfriends were getting younger and younger as well.
The first thing he told his students was that he could not tell them how to make art. You were born an artist or you weren’t. At the same time, Martin didn’t turn art into a mystery; there was no secret, he said, he never had secrets. He invited anyone who was interested to come visit his studio; he explained his work to them; he worked in public, in bars and restaurants, developing ideas before everyone’s eyes. He would show his students whatever he could show them: all the trappings of the business, the mechanics, the players involved (collectors, gallerists, artists, curators); how to put on an exhibition and make a catalog; how to introduce yourself to gallerists or talk to collectors. What he could teach them was an attitude; what he wanted to take from them was their illusions.
And he jumped right in. His strategy for picking students was to weed out the weak ones by scaring them away, beginning with the inaugural lecture he gave in October 1990—or rather, had Michael Krebber give. Almost no one could understand a word of it, and then there was a question-and-answer session the ne
xt day that Martin again left to Krebber, not even showing up himself. Out of the twenty-five or so students who enrolled in his class, about half couldn’t take Martin’s behavior and withdrew. Then there were a few guests who weren’t Städelschule students, like Andreas Höhne and Matthias Schaufler, and auditors like Nicole Hackert, a future gallerist who was studying art history.
The students saw right away that Martin was the boss, someone worthy of respect, who seemed significantly older than he was. In fact, he was only thirty-seven, a young man, but to one of his students, Valeria Heisenberg, he came across “like he was fifty.” He preached independence and demanded obedience; for the one-time bad student, it was a treat to be the strict teacher, and he went after his students’ work rigorously, with a lot fewer carrots than sticks. Nicole Hackert says it was “sometimes totally cruel.” When he praised someone—and clearly it was hard for him to give praise—it was often only to keep the student afloat so that he could torpedo him again. “That’s how the boys were toughened up for the business.”
Tobias Rehberger, a student who had been instrumental in inviting Martin to the Städelschule, said that during Martin’s first studio visit, “the first thing he did was trash everything. There was nothing there that he thought was the least bit good, it was all shit.” Bärbel Grässlin said that Martin came back from this first visit truly depressed, thinking it was all worthless, “except for one student with his jigsaw work, that was Rehberger.” Classmates say that Rehberger, twenty-five years old at the time, was the only one Martin saw as an artist, not a student. That didn’t mean he received much praise—on the contrary, Rehberger felt like the black sheep whenever he disagreed with Martin, or didn’t join him at the bar when he’d already made plans to see a movie with his girlfriend. It may have been because Martin saw him as an artist more than he did the other students, Rehberger said, that he “took more blows.”
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