Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  [ 1 ] The approximate equivalent in German of male “blonde jokes” or “New Jersey jokes.”

  [ 2 ] Bäckerblume is the journalistically lightweight newspaper given away for free in bakeries across Germany, comparable to Metro in the U.S.

  [ 3 ] The German phrase for “everything under the sun” is “God and the world”—Beuys literally said, “But God and the world are art!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  COLOGNE YEARS: THE END

  At the beginning of the economic and political crisis, Max Hetzler returned most of his artists’ archives to them before he moved to Berlin, in effect giving them notice. “Hetzler’s handing out pink slips,” Martin announced at his last show with him, in November 1992. From then on his main gallerist would be Gisela Capitain. Hetzler’s actions deeply wounded Martin, for whom loyalty was always so important. That said, the break was not final, probably because Martin was too loyal to allow it; a few months before his death, he showed his Jacqueline pictures in the Paris gallery run by Hetzler’s wife, Samia Saouma.

  At least since Hetzler’s move to the Ungers building, Martin had felt more at home with Capitain anyway. She originally focused on smaller pieces (drawings, editions, illustrations, multiples), and her gallery was smaller, with a more intimate atmosphere (not least because there was less money involved). Hetzler’s motto was “If it’s small you get nothing at all, Make it large so you can charge.” But big paintings required a bigger infrastructure, more risk, more stress.

  Martin didn’t give up painting—he continued to paint until his death—but in the late eighties he had discovered a new medium, one that fit perfectly with his constant roaming around and, in fact, grew out of it: he started drawing on hotel stationery. Here, too, necessity was the mother of invention: since he was so often traveling to places in the world where he couldn’t get the paper he was used to drawing on, he simply took what he found in his hotel rooms. This gave him a working foundation that had what he always wanted: variety, surprise, a challenge. “Every kind of paper behaves differently with the pen. The result is a kind of dialogue.” Another kind of dialogue resulted from the hotel’s logo and font and his drawing: every one of the pictures turned into a collage. Martin was so excited by his discovery that he had people bring back or send him hotel stationery from all over the world.

  He could draw anywhere—on a Greek sidewalk café, in Capitain’s gallery, at his curator’s kitchen table in St. Louis. Betsy Wright Millard said, “It was like he wouldn’t have known what to do with his hands otherwise.” Now he had drawing as a way to work alone without being alone.

  Martin went to the Gisela Capitain Gallery on Apostelstrasse every day, drank his wine there, drew, told stories, gave advice. Martin had an “exclusivity system,” Capitain said. “If you were there, you were there for him. Completely.” She was Martin’s oldest and closest friend, his favorite dancing partner as well as his gallerist, and he could talk about anything with her, including things he didn’t bring up in public—and there were such things, even though everyone thought he spread his whole life out for everyone to see, at the restaurant table, in his books, and on his canvases.

  Capitain had already handled personal tasks for Martin—leases, bank transactions, correspondence with health insurance companies, communications with his tax adviser. He knew how organized and meticulous she was, and she managed not only his various moves but really his whole life. Even when Hetzler was still officially representing him, Martin had hired Nicole Neufert to run a new incarnation of Kippenberger’s Office (this time really just an office) in Capitain’s gallery’s back room, with its own visiting cards and stationery. Capitain had trained Neufert, preparing the important shows in San Francisco and for the Vienna Festival Week ( Deep Throat ) with her and Uli Strothjohann. When Neufert got sick in the summer of 1992, while Martin was still in Syros, Capitain hired Johannes Wohnseifer as her successor.

  Wohnseifer professionalized the Office. He spent his first few weeks organizing the photographs, slides, and correspondence from recent years; later, they took back all the work Martin had stored in an expensive art shipping company’s warehouse to store it themselves. This material included not only Martin’s unsold works and his own collection (in fact, it was in the early nineties that he seriously started buying and trading other artists’ work) but also his mountains of boxes containing source material.

  For Wohnseifer, it was a “dream job.” A native of Cologne, he was a long-time fan who had been interested in Martin and his work since he was a teenager and had read about him in Twen in 1982 when he was 14. He had all of Martin’s catalogs. He had observed him in the Alter Wartesaal restaurant and disco in Cologne and listened to him at the Broadway—“I had never seen anything like that, an artist working in interaction with others”—and he studied the sketches that Martin left behind on napkins and scraps of paper there. But he had never dared to talk to him.

  When Martin came back from his stay in Syros and first set eyes on Wohnseifer, he was furious: until then he had always found his own assistants, all real firecrackers, and now here was someone just stuck in front of him? When they sat down and started to work—Wohnseifer tense and insecure, Martin surly and in a bad mood—Wohnseifer brought out a photograph he had taken for Martin of an engraving of an Indian chief in the window of the Buchholz antiquarian shop. Wohnseifer had realized that the Indian looked remarkably like Martin. “Then he was suddenly fired up—‘Where’d you get that? Unbelievable! Come on, let’s go, we need to talk.’” First they went to the store, and the engraving was gone, but Buchholz gave him a copy, which Martin would use in 1994 for the invitations to his birthday party in Rotterdam the night before his major opening The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika.” Then they went to a beer garden, where Wohnseifer ordered his usual cola. Martin was highly amused to suddenly have an assistant who never drank alcohol except at openings.

  Despite his worship of Martin (or perhaps because of it), Wohnseifer always kept a certain healthy distance from him and never became one of the groupies who thought they had to do everything Martin did, but even worse. He not only didn’t go drinking with Martin, he also used the formal “ Sie ” with him for a long time, and called him “Mr. Kippenberger” (“for me he was someone worthy of respect”), which Martin liked very much at first, until finally it got to be too ridiculous. Wohnseifer was fourteen years younger than his boss and a gentle, slight, cheerful person; the difference between their temperaments and the distance Wohnseifer maintained resulted, after the difficult beginning, in the most relaxed assistant-relationship of Martin’s life, which lasted until Martin’s death. “We had a lot of fun together,” Wohnseifer said.

  A certain geographical distance was probably good for the relationship, too. They discussed a lot on the phone or by fax while Martin was living in Frankfurt, Sankt Georgen, Tokyo, Syros, and Jennersdorf, and working in Paris or Rotterdam or traveling somewhere else.

  In between, when Martin did come back to Cologne, Wohnseifer was always happy: “We had four or five days of causing a ruckus.” They discussed everything intensely over lunch at Ezio, an Italian restaurant, and Wohnseifer enjoyed the long nights, since there were only a few of them. Sometimes they would sit back down together at four in the morning to take notes and make plans, and Martin would give precise instructions about things Wohnseifer would have to do the next day. “It was extremely concentrated.”

  During these same short visits to Cologne, Martin also discussed sculpture projects with Uli Strothjohann, looked at books at König’s, maybe planned one or two new books there, too, met with friends and with his “favorite collector” (as he called Thomas Borgmann—unlike some collectors, Martin thought, he was a dealer with a real sense of art), visited Gabi and Helena, and ate pasta and talked with Capitain at the Trattoria Toscana. And he always invited himself over for some home cooking at the house of Gundel Gelbert, the used book dealer, and her husband, Hans Böhning; they had started collecting Martin’s
works back in the early eighties. He felt at home there—they were a pleasant change from the many pretentious denizens of the art scene. He also got someone to drive him out to the Bergisches Land (often overnight) to visit his dentist Heliod Spiekermann, her husband Hubertus, and their daughters in their idyllic, isolated house. He was spoiled in the maternal atmosphere there and by the housekeeper as well, whom he asked for a peeled soft-boiled egg in the mornings, in a glass, with chives, and fresh squeezed orange juice. Her reaction: “Mister Kippenberger is a real gentleman.” All the solicitous care he received didn’t stop him from wanting to seduce the young daughter, however.

  Unlike most of his assistants, Wohnseifer rarely painted, drew, or built sculptures for Martin; most of his duties concerned organizing the various exhibitions. After Krebber had lifted Martin out of a depressive moment once with the comment “Art is an allotment garden,” Schrebergarten in German, Martin was interested in the history of the Schrebers: the strict father, who had invented that type of gardening and after whom it was named, and his gifted, sensitive son, Daniel Paul Schreber, who took refuge in insanity. Wohnseifer had to get Martin a copy of Daniel Paul Schreber’s book, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, in which Martin found lots of wonderful sentences and phrases that he had printed and cast in plexiglass. Then they assembled pictures together: Martin squirted paint onto the canvas with a caulking syringe, Wohnseifer blindly pulled the plexiglass sayings out of a cardboard box (“each one was as good as the next anyway”), and they affixed them to the picture. Only when it was time to put one on the forehead of a portrait of Schreber did Martin say, “now we need an especially good one,” but Wohnseifer reached into the box blind again—and ended up with an especially good one: “This is to a certain extent unbearable.”

  “That was a great aspect of working with Martin,” Wohnseifer later said. “This balance: allowing in chance, but still knowing exactly what he wanted.”

  SYROS

  He had to get away—from Cologne, from Frankfurt, from Sankt Georgen; from the art business, the ever-increasing pressure, the alcohol. The farther away, the better. And so Martin headed off to the edge of Europe, a small, hard-to-reach Greek island in the Cyclades that had nothing to offer but work and weeds, ruins and comfort. In the globalized art market, with every place like everywhere else, Syros managed to be somewhere different: in the middle of nowhere. Starting in the early nineties, Martin spent a couple of months a year there with Michel and Catherine Würthle.

  “Between stubby laurel bushes” and “chunks de stone,” he wrote in a letter, he had the emptiness he needed, the emptiness “that is open to so many things.” He could experience on Syros “the changing acupuncture from coming there + flying warmth—little lightning bolts of good mood beams, an adorable jellyfish hugging you unmoist roughguy frontfan + last of all 1x/wk kidfishsticks fried with lemon + a little Heinz ketchup.”

  When Michel told his wife for the first time, in 1991, that Martin was coming, she was “terrified. I thought now we’d have to go out every night and booze and cause a scandal.” But when he stepped off the little plane beaming, she was disarmed. They would end up having a lot of fun together. Martin was happy to drink milk while on Syros.

  Catherine knew the wild life only too well, having spent most of the seventies and eighties with Michel in Berlin. After the birth of their daughter, Carolina, she returned to her native Greece to spend most of the year in the house on Syros with her mother next door, and Michel came whenever he could get away from the Paris Bar. Martin stayed in their little guest house in the large field, drove with Catherine when she took her daughter to school in the village in the morning and opened her small store, sat in the café, Greco, with its view of the port, and drew on hotel stationery. In the studio back at their guest house, he painted, including the large series of self-portraits Handpainted Pictures. There was lunch at two, the big event of the day: “What’s for lunch?” Martin always asked Catherine. “There’ll be something.” “Yeah, but what, what?” he pestered her before going back to his room so as not to spoil the surprise after all. When they had chickpea stew, she let him “put his little hot dogs on the plate too.”

  In the afternoon, a siesta and then more painting; in the evening, they watched videos, often one after another, or went to the taverna, where Martin had the overcooked camping spaghetti he so dearly loved. At night, mau-mau with Michel, sessions sometimes lasting until the next day and into the following night: “it was a lot of fun, but also a matter of honor, a real wrestling match.” The stakes were usually drawings, “and Martin insisted that the debts be paid.” He encouraged both Michel and Catherine to draw and paint.

  Whenever someone visited them, “Martin was charming,” Michel said. “The more ordinary the person, the better he got along with them”—for example, the farmers from next door, who didn’t know any more English or German than Martin knew Greek. Helmut Middendorf, who often visited Martin in Athens, said that in situations like that, Martin “didn’t need all that self-display performance nonsense. In Berlin and Cologne it was like they flipped a switch to turn him on and he had to give them the Martin.” In Syros, on the other hand, even phone calls bothered him. He considered building a monk’s tower in white on the Würthles’ land: a simple building with a room to sleep in and a room to work in, modeled on the pigeon towers on the island of Tinos. “Fantasies of solitude,” Michel said.

  Catherine was lively and loved to laugh as much as Martin; their daughter Carolina “adored him, he always treated her like a little lady, brought her presents.” Michel puttered around in the fields, where new houses and patios were constantly springing up; Martin gave him a Ferrari tractor for his fiftieth birthday. Martin even joined Michel on his boat, though he didn’t like it: he needed people, not an ocean, and longed for civilization in nature. “When we landed in a solitary bay with no taverna, it was terrible!” Michel said. All three of them drank little in that period, though they smoked all the more to make up for it (Catherine died of lung cancer in 2005). “He looked as healthy as a baby,” Michel said. “The days could be really peaceful—and then there’d be another madhouse.” Martin started drinking heavily a couple of times: once when he was preparing his exhibition for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, another time when Catherine told him that the red splotches on his neck came from drinking. “He didn’t want to hear a thing about alcohol,” and for ten days he didn’t speak a word to Catherine, only drank.

  Things were wilder during their trips to Athens. “There he caused more of his little scandals,” as Michel put it, careening through the city insulting artists and collectors. He told one collector, the first time they met, that if it were up to him he would throw his whole collection into the garbage. Eleni Koroneou, the gallerist, was afraid that Martin was scaring off a potential client. “But the collector liked it, better than all the brown-nosers.” A few months later, he bought several of Martin’s pictures.

  Martin had another of his substitute families with Eleni Koroneou; her daughter, Alexandra (Martin promised the twelve-year-old that he would marry her when she turned eighteen, and she liked that, “it wouldn’t be boring!”); Eleni’s husband, Helmut Middendorf, Martin’s colleague from the Berlin days; and Eleni’s parents. They were part of the group Martin liked to eat noodles with on the patio. He especially liked that Eleni’s father looked like Picasso. He put on two shows with the Athens gallerist— Handpainted Pictures and Made in Syros —and at one of the openings he introduced her by saying, “This is Eleni, the wife of the only German artist who has discovered the color blue.” An hour earlier, he had been wandering around the old town buying kitschy souvenirs and gluing them to a table in the gallery. Middendorf crawled the bars with Martin and after three days needed a week to recover, “but I’ve never met anyone I had so much fun with. No one came close. As an artist, either.” Even at the bars, Martin drew: another self-portrait, naked, from behind, on a barstool, with “Only waiting for a girl” written on it. The next
morning at eight he was standing on Eleni’s doorstep again and asking for beer for breakfast. Once they were at a party where drunk people were jumping into the pool, and Martin told her, “If you do it, too, you’re not my gallerist any more.” “He could be very conservative,” Koroneou said. “Etiquette mattered to him.”

  On Syros he launched two of his biggest projects: his Museum of Modern Art and his subway stations. As early as 1988 he had planned to take a year at some point and “have no exhibitions and take a break.” Now, on a distant Greek island, he had a better idea: to put on exhibitions almost without art, with practically no public audience (certainly without the art-world crowd), with only a few friends, by running a museum that was merely the idea of a museum. It had nothing to do with the art market—in fact, his MOMAS (Museum of Modern Art Syros) was his statement against the globalized art business.

  “All there is is garbage,” Martin said once, “and the beauty in the garbage.” He had found Greece overflowing with both—for example, an unfinished slaughterhouse stuck on a hill, a concrete skeleton, suggesting, if you saw it from a distance, a columned hall as antique as it was modern. It was almost sublime, “but then,” as the American artist Stephen Prina said, “it doesn‘t look right. For most people it would have been a failed building, but for Martin it was a monument to Western civilization. He saw the Acropolis in what it was.” And he turned this useless ruin, this failed meat factory, into a museum without walls and almost without art, a museum of possibilities that remained open to everything.