Martin with Thomas Bayrle at a noodle restaurant in Tokyo
© Helke Bayrle
Martin continued his work in Kassel with different students but the same methods. Again he chose his students by scaring everyone else away: he had just returned from L.A., with jet lag, and thought he was there only to sign the contract, when in fact he was supposed to give his inaugural lecture. So he told jokes for ninety minutes. By the end, the hundred or so listeners were down to six, so he stopped and told them, “OK, you’re my students. Now that you survived that, let’s go get some Italian food.”
“Wow, super!” thought Sven Ahrens, today a gallerist in Cologne. For three semesters he had felt “stalled at the polytechnic, with the motor running but going nowhere. Now we were off.” Ahrens was quickly made the class representative, and the Kassel class had its emblem, too: a waiter’s arm with a napkin draped over it. Again there were homework assignments like “draw what you feel like on the inside.” At one point Martin prescribed a journey into the self, without food or drink—he himself was on a fasting cure when he started teaching in Kassel.
The Kassel students had not only a class trip to New York but also an exhibition of their own that he had arranged with his gallerist David Nolan. They showed their little bronze worms. “Sucking on candies,” Martin called it, “to test out the system by throwing them into the middle of it. They flew to New York as artists and were faced with real little illusion-killers.” “He let us do it,” his student Ina Weber said, “but at the same time he told us, ‘You’re my students, don’t embarrass me!’” He co-financed the catalog, and before they left (he didn’t go that time), he assigned them drawing homework, corrected and signed the results, and handed them back for the students to sell to Nolan for a good price, so that the poor students would have some spending money in New York.
In return for his giving them “comfort and drinks” (as he put it to a journalist), the aspiring artists had to find him information on train connections or go save a scarf he had left behind in a hotel room. After all, the Kassel class’s motto was “Independence.” In place of the usual academic fare, he offered them “confrontation with all sorts of information,” which included going to the movies or soccer matches with them and holding class in an Italian restaurant, a hotel room, a dining car, at the opening of the Bruno Brunnet gallery in the only pedestrian zone in Berlin—anywhere but in school. “He thought the atmosphere there was horrible.” And the point wasn’t to paint as a group, but to talk with each other. “It was always exciting when he was there,” Ahrens said. One time, “Kippenberger’s Delightful Class” (as he called them) showed up for a Great Battleship Tournament against Werner Büttner’s class from Hamburg: high noon in front of the Hochzeitshaus in Hamelin, as announced in the city newspaper, and “Captain Büttner and Captain Kippenberger are expected to attend in person.” Martin was seriously upset that Büttner’s students won.
Ina Weber joined his class as “a great fan, he was a hero of mine.” She later said that the whole course of instruction was “a tug-of-war, a test of strength. Martin was very generous and supportive, but he could also be very cruel. You had to be able to stick it out.”
He bought sausages and mulled wine for the students at the Kassel Christmas market, gave them assignments (they had to sing “The Glow-Worm”), and suddenly announced: “OK, now we’re going to see the head of documenta, to talk about whether I’m taking part.” Jan Hoet’s office was right around the corner, so in they walked, a crowd of eight people, with a “Howdy-do!” As Sven Ahrens described it, “Jan Hoet was extremely scared at first, and then masterful.” The conversation lasted two hours and later filled an entire issue of Sun Breasts Hammer, the journal of the Lord Jim Lodge. “Martin was trying to take the ball right into Hoet’s court, and Hoet kept trying to give it back.” The result: Martin was still not included in documenta IX (1992), but he would make a poster for it. And it ended up being something pretty substantial: a moving, funny self-portrait as an artist.
Martin set up one of his drunken lampposts in front of the neoclassical building on Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, replacing the inscription “Museum Fridericianum” with the word “MELANCHOLY”. The lamppost was bent, with a large teardrop on its crown, and looked like it was bowing its head to the museum or to Walter de Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer, which Martin had set his gaudy lamppost right on top of.
For the sixth documenta, in 1977, de Maria, the American minimalist, had drilled a hole a kilometer deep in Friedrichplatz and filled it with two-inch-wide brass rods attached together. Martin liked to make fun of de Maria’s divalike appearance—for instance, the way he wore a hat and sunglasses so that no one would recognize him but thereby attracted even more attention. He was very proud to have the only photograph of de Maria, who never let himself be photographed—and he made a poster out of it. But he respected the artist’s work. Whenever he was in New York, he told Jutta Koether, he went to see de Maria’s 1979 Broken Kilometer , a sequel to the Kassel piece that was permanently installed there: “I need that, just to take a peek into the room and feel good, then leave. I have no idea what de Maria was really trying to do when he made it.”
He continued de Maria’s work in Kassel with his own methods—documenta visitors couldn’t see Martin’s lamppost any more than they could see de Maria’s underground kilometer, because it wasn’t there. He had placed it there only to take the photograph for the poster.
The documenta IX poster contains everything about Martin as an artist: his irony and melancholy, respect and irreverence, calculation and improvisation, the possibilities and impossibilities, and the juxtaposition of modern popular culture at its most trivial (Martin had found the motif of the drunken lamppost on a joke postcard) with European cultural history (Museum Fridericianum, opened in 1779, is considered the first public museum on the European continent)—a light bulb in front of the Enlightenment. It thematizes both the artist’s solitary existence and the artist’s context in history and contemporary life: the contexts in which he finds himself and into which he inserts himself. It’s all there, everything we know about Martin, including the chutzpah with which he occupied another’s artwork and put the profane right in front of the sublime, confusing the public and annoying the organizers. This poster of a weeping lamppost shows how Martin managed to be “in” and “out” at the same time, participating in the art world and evading it—and also how other people managed to include him and nonetheless exclude him. Finally, the poster is proof of the power of the spoken word: it was only through talking that Martin managed to be allowed onto documenta’s wall of posters at all (even if not into the show itself). “Never give up before it’s too late,” as one of his slogans runs. Without fear of embarrassment or humiliation, he simply charged right up to Jan Hoet’s office and quoted the German equivalent of the saying about the light at the end of the tunnel: “When you think you can’t go on, a little light appears from somewhere.” Martin liked Hoet’s idea of putting a lamppost on the de Maria: “Someone has to protect art,” he laughed. “And art always starts with a light going on somewhere.” (The German term is Erleuchtung, an inspiration or epiphany.)
Being included in documenta was actually Martin’s greatest wish. As mentioned above, he loved to tell the story of how our grandfather had taken him to the first documenta in a stroller, when he was two, in 1955. He was invited in 1986, by Manfred Schneckenburger, but in the end he turned it down because no one got in touch with him after the initial invitation to discuss what he wanted to do. He thought that an invitation would mean involvement with him as an artist. Finally, eleven years later, he was in documenta with his subway entrance—but he died before the opening.
KIPPENBERGER ART ASSOCIATION
“Revises his address book, parting from several friends”: when Martin wrote his artist bio, this was his entry for 1993.
Becomes increasingly convinced that the music world is defunct and the theater is insular. From now on, concentr
ates on recommendations from people previously unknown to him. Is constantly at odds with the art market (which thinks him crazy). Runs the ‘Kippenberger Art Association’ in the Fridericianum in Kassel until 1995.
Veit Loers was the head of the Fridericianum Museum Kunsthalle, an effort, dating from 1988, to give contemporary art a forum in Kassel during documenta’s off years. He invited Martin to exhibit there, and Martin wanted to set up a kind of anti-documenta, but that would have been too expensive. Instead he created an anti-art association, because against Loers’s will, the Kassel Art Association had been moved inside the museum. For two years, Martin used the Kippenberger Art Association to show works by his friends: Uli Strothjohann, Cosima von Bonin, Albert Oehlen, Michael Krebber, Johannes Wohnseifer. He also showed erotica from his collection. He had given up teaching by then.
COME ON, JUPP, LET’S SPLIT THE PIE
In the same artist bio, Martin described his student days as follows: “1972: Starts educating himself at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Breaks off his studies after sixteen semesters.” Of all Martin’s father figures, models, and teachers, Rudolf Hausner, his professor in Hamburg, was doubtless the least important. Sigmar Polke played a much bigger role; Martin had known him for a long time when he came to teach at the academy toward the end of Martin’s time there, and Albert Oehlen and Georg Herold had already studied with him. “Even though I was not one of his students, I followed him around everywhere.” He saw Polke in bars and restaurants, not in the school. They were both regulars at the Ganz.
Polke, as cofounder of “capitalist realism,” had taken on the real world (with themes like “Office Party” or “Weekend House”) in a period when abstraction still ruled in art, and he did so in a style that took up “ Bäckerblume aesthetics,” [2] as Werner Büttner put it. Postwar German art had seldom seen so much trash, so much irony, and such variety. Polke was the great liberator of postwar German art and, at twelve years older than Martin, a leading figure for him. When Martin was given a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the fact that Polke had also exhibited there that was one reason Martin thought it was “great,” and it was also a special challenge: “It doubles the risk, of course, you better not show shit.” No distance was too far to travel to see a Polke show. And in 1990, when Martin already had quite a name for himself, he told Heliod Spiekermann, full of pride, “Polke said hi to me!”
An American critic once called Martin “a child of Duchamp and a student of Polke.” But despite Polke’s importance to Martin as an artist, he played a much more ambiguous role for him as a person. Known in the seventies as a “party terror” (in curator Bice Curiger’s words) and “an epicurean radicalinski” (Sven Ahrens), Polke grew more and more hostile in his later years and could sometimes be downright poisonous. “He’s vicious now and then,” Martin could report from personal experience. When they met in Cologne after both of them had moved there, Martin expressed his admiration for Polke, who brushed him off and showed his contempt for the younger man. Polke in person was as humorless as his pictures were witty (although by the eighties, in Curiger’s view, Polke “was finished with irony,” too). There was a love-hate relationship between Martin and Polke.
With Beuys it was different. What Martin liked about Beuys, the über-father, were precisely his personal qualities: his warmth, humor, generosity, melancholy, pedagogical engagement, and, not least, the fact that he was a family man. An English critic wrote, with reference to Martin’s Tate Modern show in 2006, that Martin hated Beuys; nothing could be further from the truth. Along with Fassbinder, whose intensity in even the longest movies Martin so admired, Beuys was for Martin the great exception in German art. And, he said, “I’ll be an exception someday, too. The others can’t keep up with that speed of life.”
“Warhol and Beuys were Martin’s two important models,” in Gisela Capitain’s view: they had pushed back the boundaries of art, or moved past them altogether, and shown that being an artist meant much more than standing in your studio hard at work in front of an easel. In addition, neither was competition for Martin, a fact he especially appreciated. Warhol and Beuys embodied the seventies, he thought, while he embodied the eighties. As Veit Loers, the curator, said, Martin’s “ambition was to be Beuys’s successor.”
“Come on, Jupp,” Martin said to Beuys once (according to Meuser), “let’s split the pie.” Meuser said, “He loved him. Except for the shamanism, that didn’t mean a thing to Martin.”
Joseph Beuys, like Martin, stood behind his art with his whole being—he just put it out there and brashly said, That’s how it is. He made people pay attention to contemporary art and the figure of the artist like no one else in postwar Germany; he was the first artist to become famous outside of artist circles. And Beuys bought his famous hats in London, along with all his clothes, from shirts to shoes, only the finest quality. He liked to drive Cadillacs and Bentleys occasionally. —These were also things that Martin liked about him, of course.
By the late seventies, Beuys was the best-known German artist and also the one whose work fetched the highest prices. He was the first German given a solo show by New York’s Guggenheim Museum (although Beuys had an ambivalent relationship to America, much like Martin’s). There was no getting around Beuys for a young German artist, especially one who loved publicity and self-presentation as much as Martin did.
Beuys, Warhol, and Bruce Nauman were “the bellwethers, the superstars” that Martin criticized Jan Hoet’s documenta for not including—even though Martin had no patience for Nauman’s privacy and avoidance of public appearances (“he never sets foot outside his little house”). Warhol and Beuys put themselves out in the world, “with love,” too, as Martin emphasized. “You have to have an artist who conveys that, but he also has to be ready to show himself in public. Like Mr. Picasso, he stepped into the bullring and let everybody gape at him and did it with love.”
Martin referred to Beuys over and over again. His poster for the Forum Kunst Rottweil exhibit in 1982 had depicted him in a Beuys-style felt suit. The Darmstadt Landesmuseum had the most important collection of Beuys’s work at the time, and Beuys had famously had himself photographed there in front of a dinosaur skeleton, so Martin’s invitation for his show there depicted Martin in front of a (smaller) pair of antlers. The Darmstadt curator, Johann-Karl Schmidt, interpreted Martin’s message like this: “I am the little Beuys. I am the next Beuys. I am the parodic Beuys.”
In 1972, at a panel discussion at Kunstring Folkwang, someone accused Beuys of talking about everything under the sun except art, and Beuys replied, “But everything under the sun is art!” [3] At a time when everyone at the Düsseldorf Academy “was kept miles away from anything concrete,” as Meuser knew from personal experience, “where Informel was king, and then Minimalism,” Beuys the Fluxus artist was the man who opened the doors and the windows.
Beuys had also made his own life the foundation of his art; his works were, in fact, much more autobiographical, more private, than Martin’s. Martin didn’t have any patience for the messianic element in Beuys or for his political involvement with the Green Party (he was one of its cofounders in 1979). Martin had his feet too firmly planted on the ground for anything mythical or magical; but he liked how the Master used earthly materials, like margarine, or stuck a light bulb into a lemon and called it a “Capri Battery.” Or that Beuys supposedly once told his student Blinky Palermo (an artist Martin also admired), “Throw away your pipe, it’ll make your paintings better,” since in the teacher’s opinion the student had something about him that was too stocky and complacent, “like a real pipe-smoker.” It was a piece of instruction that could have come from Martin. He didn’t agree with Beuys’s view that every person is an artist, but he no doubt appreciated that Beuys took the side of the applicants rejected from the academy, occupied the academy offices with them, and had to leave the academy as a result.
Artfan asked Martin what his relationship was to Beuys, and he gave a very detaile
d answer:
He was a man with an aura, and I was in the very last generation. I met him here and there over the years. We had our little jokes. Little private jokes. One time he came to the academy in Hamburg and went through my absolutely dumbest pieces and then discussed them with me in private. And then scolded me. That must have been one of the worst hours of his life. But on the other hand there were sympathies that lasted many many years. I was always the good-for-nothing, that’s how I felt. I mean, he was the super-being. If you haven’t spent time with someone like that, it’s impossible to understand. To see something of his appearance, his sweetness, his humor, it was really something. He was born the same year as my father, from the same part of the world, there were a lot of parallels. Today I’m a bit more critical of him but he put out so much power, so much material, the thousands and millions of mistakes too that he made out in the open just as publicly available as the rest, it was all very public.... I saw his kids growing up, from documenta to documenta, when they’d turn up. They kept getting bigger. They used to be so tiny.
There were other contemporaries who influenced and inspired Martin, of course. Dieter Roth, for example, a friend of Michel Würthle’s who was also a restless spirit, constantly changing addresses and bringing together his life and his art. “This endless creativity in Roth, it influenced Martin,” Max Hetzler said. “He measured himself against Roth’s hyper-productivity.” Gerhard Richter’s elegant personal appearance impressed Martin in his early years; he didn’t understand Richter’s paintings, as he later said himself, “but I liked them, and they took me a few steps farther along my own path.” Later, Martin felt that Richter was making things too easy on himself.
Picasso, the epitome of the modern artist in our childhood, interested Martin as a person—as the art star of the 20th century. He measured himself against Picasso’s fame and productivity, while also making fun of Picasso’s vanity by copying his famous pose in underwear. But as an artist, Picabia was more important for him. A French Dadaist and colleague of Duchamp’s (whose ready-mades were, of course, an enormous influence on Martin), Picabia was a master of bad taste far ahead of his time. As an “artist’s artist,” he is considered an important forerunner of Pop Art: he worked from photographs and other models and constantly changed his style (Impressionist, Cubist, Dadaist, orphic, ironic, Surrealist, erotic, realistic, Informel), but not out of insecurity. “I am always completely convinced by everything I’m doing,” he said. The critic David Hickey wrote of Picabia that he left no stone unturned, no rule unbroken, no boundary uncrossed, and that he did not take any style for granted. Picabia himself once said, “The head is round so that thinking can change direction.” And “I hope I can someday write on the wall of my house: ‘Artist in every area.’”
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