Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  If the students had decided to go to school, Martin was going to make sure it felt like it. Laziness was not tolerated; there were massive homework assignments. The students had to prove themselves with classic exercises, like a drawing of their own hand, an abstract oil painting, and a painted still life (of spaghetti bolognese); they had to take photographs (the Jewish Museum in color; a nude in black and white), write poems, make a record, produce a multiple, keep a journal, make a poster (and attend a silkscreen and work-on-paper class for it), and, finally, produce “1 Kippenberger.” The best pieces would be exhibited in the Grässlin-Ehrhardt gallery under the title Virtuosos of Their Time. Hundreds of young people came to the opening.

  The lesson plan also included playing mau-mau, with the rules printed in the student handouts. Once, when Martin took his class to the Black Forest to visit the Grässlins and tour the Grässlin factory (a field trip called “Where does the dough come from & who hands it over where?” in the syllabus), they played mau-mau, of course, and the pot kept being doubled until one student ended up having to paint the Grässlins’ warehouse for a week to pay off his debt. When Thomas Grässlin lost sixteen thousand marks, Martin told him on the spot that he had to pay it by financing the catalog for the student show.

  It was called Virtuosos Before the Mountain and listed Matti Braun, Andreas Höhne, Adam Kuczynski, Martin Liebscher, Tobias Rehberger, Matthias Schaufler, Markus Schneider, Tatjana Steiner, Ronald Wullems, and Christian Zickler as authors. It was a guidebook through the art world as the students had come to know it through their numerous class trips to Stuttgart, Cologne, Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, New York, and Dublin, and proof that they had learned their lesson. They put together an associative collage in the Kippenberger spirit of names, places, pictures, and events, their own and others’ photographs, real and fake quotations. “We thought we owed it to Martin,” Rehberger said, “not to make a normal catalog with our works, but something special. We also didn’t think it was really appropriate to make a book of our works when Martin didn’t think they were so great.”

  Obviously, Martin didn’t guide his students through the major museums on their class trips like a normal professor. They went to the Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart because he thought it was pretty, or to the fair in Sankt Georgen. Instead of showing them noteworthy local sites like castles and churches, he introduced them to noteworthy local sandwiches; he took them to see bars more than to see art. In Graz, for instance, students were sent straight to the Frankowitsch, famous for its unique canapés; in Vienna, they went to a cellar bar where you could get “Storm,” a kind of Federweisser (a cloudy, fermented grape juice), and then to the King of Hungary for a drink of the house vodka Martin spoke so highly of, before going to a gallery opening.

  Martin taught according to Beuys’s motto: “Wherever I am is the classroom.” That might be his apartment in Sachsenhausen, David Nolan’s gallery in New York, on a walk, in a bar, oron the train. Martin rarely set foot in the school itself, so great was his dislike of institutions. He never painted in the studio the school had made available to him as a teacher—he rented one himself, on Bockenheimer Landstrasse, where he worked on his self-portraits and War Bad pictures—so they tried to figure out what to do with the space and ended up turning it into a club room, à la Oxford or Cambridge. Of course, every true club needs a club jacket, so the students headed out to the flea markets, found dark blazers, and sewed on the “Friendly Kippenberger Class” emblem. It was a game that had to do with drawing boundaries, demonstrating difference, and showing a bit of arrogance, too, according to Rehberger: “we wanted to piss other people off a bit, pull them out of their comfort zone.” And they did.

  There was no escape for the students—attendance was mandatory, and not just for a couple of class hours but round the clock. At night they went from bar to bar, drinking a lot, some of the students probably more than was good for them. Not that Martin was ordering them to, “but that’s how it is with students sometimes,” Rehberger said. “They take it too far or try to be crazier and more out of control than the teacher. We wanted to please Martin, too, and show him how edgy we were. It was all about taking on certain things from Martin and being wild.” The next morning, though, Martin would be the first one up, dragging the students out of bed. They weren’t there to sleep, after all.

  Martin looked at their work and judged it and told stories from his own life, often the same ones over and over. “We spent an enormous amount of time together,” Rehberger said:

  and no one has that many stories that they can tell without repeating themselves. It was strange, though, it usually wasn’t annoying, we were glad to hear the stories again. Of course it did happen sometimes, we were like, “Hey! not again, Martin, we’ve heard that one five times already!” Then he’d say, “What?! Shut up! I’m telling you something! If you don’t like it, I’ll tell it five more times.” He wanted to tell a story and so he had to tell it—not primarily to communicate it to anyone, but so that the story would be told. It was like he wanted to tell it again to himself. He felt at home in these stories.

  He also liked to have other people tell him stories—sometimes so he could add them to his own repertoire. As he warned the young gallerist Friedrich Petzel once: “Don’t show up in a bad mood, show up with a good story!”

  He brought his friends into his classes—Krebber, Carpenter, Schlick (who gave a talk on the Yugoslavian War), Isabelle Graw. Even as a teacher, he didn’t see himself as acting alone. He once proposed to Jan Hoet, head of documenta, that he be given a full professorship but that his salary be used to pay for guest speakers to come and give lectures, two or three days per person. Hoet was enthusiastic—“New people all the time, from all over, that would be fantastic!” Then Martin laughed, “Yeah, then I wouldn’t even need to show up.”

  Martin was the magnet and motor for the group—after he left, the cohesion fell apart and everyone went their own way—and the group developed a dynamic of its own, which sometimes included conflict with the other classmates. Sometimes Rehberger caught himself thinking exactly the way Martin thought, “and then I had to wonder, do I really believe that? He was an incredible whirlpool. It was torture sometimes, trying to strike the right balance between the group and myself.” He didn’t want to do what some of the others did: give up their selves and only do what Martin thought was funny and good. But he didn’t want to throw in the towel and run away either: “I was too curious. It really did offer incredibly much . . . I liked Martin, I liked being around him.” Especially when they were traveling somewhere together, “he could be supernice, totally like a father.”

  Martin enjoyed being a father figure and taking students under his wing, and he didn’t always understand it when they wanted to have their own experiences without him. Even as a child, he used to call himself “Dad” and always liked taking care of others—on his own terms. He outfitted his godson, our half-brother Moritz, at Brooks Brothers in New York, and gave our nephew Philipp a taste of the world in Cologne by buying him expensive sunglasses, ordering him oysters, and sending him to a whorehouse.

  “It made him proud to show us around New York as his class,” Rehberger said. “He liked that he was our Daddy.” He invited them to take part in his life—at least in his artist-life—and interfered in their private lives in return, “thinking about everyone’s life and making suggestions, both good and bad.” He told Rehberger, for example, that he had to break up with his girlfriend or else he would never be a good artist. When he didn’t, Martin “kept the pressure on for weeks.” Martin crossed the same line around others that he had drawn around himself to protect his own private life.

  The students liked that he was interested in them, truly interested. Such a close relationship was rare. As Valeria Heisenberg called it, “mutual exploitation.” Maybe it was too close. “There was no distance.”

  THE HOT TOUR

  Martin’s most devoted student, Matthias Schaufler, who made a policy of submission and devo
tion (as a classmate put it), asked Martin to give him a particularly hard assignment, and so he did: walk across Africa. The “Hot Tour” was a continuation of the “Magical Mystery Tour,” except this time, Martin didn’t suffer through it himself—he had a representative do it. “But I wouldn’t do it to Schaufler if I wasn’t willing to do it myself.” He sent the slight, shy student, raised in a Pietist family in the Swabian Alps, off on a thousand-mile trek through Tanzania and Zaire; the journey ended up being almost twice as long. Schaufler had postcards from the “William Holden Company” in his backpack that he had to send to Germany, pre-addressed and preprinted with sayings like “In Search of the Happy End of Franz Kafka,” “How many times has Germany won the World Cup and who invented Mickey Mouse,” or (in English) “Watch it! All animals are dangerous!”

  Martin explained the William Holden Company by saying, “An artist should be curious about the world, a kind of research traveler.” The name referred to the Hollywood star who had appeared in several Billy Wilder films and himself owned a safari club in Africa. Holden was a romantic and tragic figure, a hard drinker and heartthrob, who had died, ten years before Martin went to L.A., of the consequences of a drunken fall; his body was found days later. “I don’t really know why,” Holden had said once, “but danger has always been an important thing in my life—to see how far I could lean without falling, how fast I could go without cracking up.”

  Matthias Schaufler was on the road for three months—June to September 1991—and his travel report, reworked by Martin, was exhibited that same year in the Wewerka & Weiss gallery along with pictures by the African artist Chéri Samba, from Zaire, whom Martin first heard about from Michel Würthle.

  Martin wasn’t a teacher who gave lectures and afterward felt drained and exhausted. “It wasn’t a professorial passing-on of knowledge,” Thomas Bayrle said, “but an exchange, a give and take.” Martin was an artist, not a pedagogue: he wanted something from his students, too, and he got it. He made their works his own—his students drew and painted and made sculptures for him. Adam Kuczynski, for example, made a series of watercolors, each showing a book with a magnifying glass resting on top, as Merlin Carpenter had also done for his first show in Hamburg. (Kuczynski now works as a doctor in London.) Rehberger built sculptures for Martin’s exhibition at the Pompidou Centre (brooms on carpets); Andreas Höhne and Tatjana Steiner added things to Martin’s paintings. He was not a master who expected his pupils to imitate his style; he wanted them to work for him, in his spirit, but in their own way. “That was something you could handle only if you had the right stuff yourself, intellectually,” in Bayrle’s view. “For others, for the people who internalized it too much, it was a dangerous game.”

  He didn’t say that the best artist in his class would get a show at Forum Stadtpark in Graz—he took the students to Styria, everyone went to the casino together, and “poor Bleich-Rossi had to hand each of us a thousand marks in cash,” Rehberger said. “Whoever lost the money fastest—it ended up being Tatjana Steiner—got the exhibition. It was a kind of performance piece of Martin’s.” The curator Elisabeth Fiedler interpreted the action like this: “He didn’t want to give preference to anyone, so he made a game out of it.”

  Rehberger said that he didn’t feel exploited—he thought it was fun. “It was clear from the beginning that we would be making work for him. That was part of the education, and it was also important to get a handle on this whole question of authenticity, of authorship.” What does the artist do himself, what do others do for him, and how does he integrate the two? Martin shook their image of the artist to the core. In addition, Rehberger said, Martin was very generous, going out on the town with them, buying them meals and drinks, and sharing his knowledge and his contacts with them. “So it was fine to give a little back.”

  Aki Bleich-Rossi in Graz was only one of the many gallerists Martin introduced them to. In New York, for example, they met Leo Castelli, Andrea Rosen, and David Nolan. His goal was not to give his students sales opportunities or launch their careers as much as to show them, as promised, the art world as a real place. He was doing the opposite of what most art schools do when they create a protected space in which their students can explore without any thought to exhibitions. Valeria Heisenberg said, “He challenged us to work more consciously, reflect more, be more self-aware. He was very critical of everything romantic and ineffable and always resisted the idea that there was anything you couldn’t talk about.”

  Martin told his students, “I can’t make a masterpiece every day.” That was one of his most important lessons, says Rehberger, who is himself now a professor and prorector at the Städelschule, “the fact that quality emerges from an oeuvre, from an interaction, not just from an individual work.” Martin also taught him a certain amount of defiance, “that you have to never throw in the towel, but always keep going, keep scrambling and pushing on.” And always keep a certain mistrust of yourself; bet on discomfort; don’t relax when you think you’ve found something good; don’t always continue along the safe track, but look for new paths. “That you don’t say I always put green on top and blue on the bottom, because it works so well, but instead you’re suspicious of green on top and blue on the bottom and try to get a handle on what it’s really about by putting orange on top and pink on the bottom. That you always approach your own work differently every time.”

  Martin didn’t influence only the students. He left his traces at the Städelschule, too, Thomas Bayrle thinks: “He brought dynamic thinking, the courage to try collage as a form of art and of life.” After two semesters, though, Martin’s time as a guest professor was up. He would have liked to keep teaching in Frankfurt—he liked being with young people and influenced many young artists. “He opened their minds,” his New York gallerist Janelle Reiring said, “precisely by being so open himself and because there were no sacred cows for him: he called every rule and every fact into question.” But Kaspar König, the head of the Städelschule, had no interest in keeping him on. Bärbel Grässlin had noticed Martin and König “suspiciously eyeing each other” in Frankfurt; with their huge egos and need to take charge of everything, they were too similar to like each other.

  König was a real down-to-earth character, ten years older than Martin, who had left school to apprentice with Rudolf Zwirner and was known as the curator of several important shows: West-Art in Cologne (1979), from here in Düsseldorf (1984), and Sculpture Projects in Münster (1987). He had once called Martin’s art “party-basement painting” and never included him in his exhibitions. But they were two of a kind, and König was as serious about art as Martin. Before he came to Frankfurt, he had taught “Art and the Public” in Düsseldorf—exactly Martin’s specialty. Martin said to Jutta Koether in 1991 that “Kasper is the best” museum person “in Germany. Because he really travels around and looks at lots and lots of things. At least he has the information he needs to turn it into something.” Similarly, Max Hetzler said that “Martin didn’t despise König,” unlike so many other curators, “because he knew that he wasn’t corrupt.” Today, König is director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, and in the end he did invite Martin to show work at a sculpture exhibition in Münster—in 1997; Martin did not live to see the opening. Bärbel Grässlin saw the invitation as a “late atonement.”

  KIPPENBERGER’S DELIGHTFUL CLASS

  Martin’s Frankfurt students hardly noticed when the official semester was over—the instruction had never been limited to school, and the students continued to travel with their teacher to his openings. Martin kept his Hedderichstrasse apartment, too. “When Martin was in town,” Rehberger said, “you got a call at 10 a.m. saying where you needed to be at 11, usually the cider bar, then you talked until 2:30, Martin had his midday nap at 3, but by then you had already made plans where to meet that evening, so at 6 or 7 you met up again out somewhere, or went to his place and cooked together.”

  In fact, the crowd of students only grew, since students from Kassel joined and mi
ngled with the students from Frankfurt. Martin taught one more semester, Winter 1991–92, at the polytechnic ( Gesamthochschule ) in Kassel, and this time it was a professor who invited him, since so many other teachers were about to retire or had just retired. Why not? Kassel was hardly an elite academic institution—it was a polytechnic—and Kassel itself was strange enough to be interesting: a capital of contemporary art every five years, for documenta, and a provincial wasteland in between. It was a hybrid location, but with good train connections, and not far from Frankfurt, where Martin continued to live when he wasn’t in Cologne or somewhere else.

  While teaching in Frankfurt, he continued to travel constantly; Bayrle said he would hop into a train to Cologne at five in the afternoon and sometimes came back to Frankfurt that same night—“and if he missed the last train, he would get someone to drive him.” All while squeezing in a few days in Graz or Vienna, a side trip to Kassel, an exhibition in New York, a stay in Syros. . . “He always had to be jumping back and forth between four or five places. It was like a transportation hub with shipping containers being transferred from one train to the next.” Bayrle used the well-known image from Einstein’s theory of relativity to explain Martin’s overcoming of space and time: “Several trains are passing each other at the same time but at different speeds. That’s how he overtook time itself. Actually, he was as fast as the stock market: when it closes in Hong Kong, it opens in Frankfurt.” As a result, Bayrle wasn’t surprised in the least when Martin showed up one day in precisely the noodle bar in Tokyo where Bayrle was sitting with his wife, “and Tokyo has thousands of noodle shops.” The first thing Martin said was exactly what the Bayrles had just been thinking: “The owner looks like Bill Clinton.”