It opened in 1993 with a “show” by Hubert Kiecol—who else? Kiecol didn’t even need to make any of his little concrete sculptures; there were Kiecols standing around already. For the opening and the openings that followed, Christopher Wool scattered signposts around the unkempt island, Jörg Schlick put up stickers, Lukas Baumewerd produced a computer simulation of the finished museum (complete with cafeteria), Uli Strothjohann filled in a hole in the ground, Christopher Williams showed avant-garde movies about slaughterhouses at an open-air cinema in Ermoupolis, and Cosima von Bonin served a meal of spaghetti in macaroni on a long table—every show needs an opening-night dinner, after all, and Martin invited Christopher Williams, Heimo Zobernig, Stephen Prina, and Michael Majerus. Martin had asked the young gallerist Burkhard Riemschneider who he thought was his most talented artist, and when Riemschneider said Majerus, Martin added him to the exhibition list on the spot. He got to spend a week on Syros with his girlfriend.
Museum Kippenberger: MOMAS on Syros
© Lukas Baumewerd
MOMAS was an excuse, of course, to have parties with friends—every opening another Anti-Sahara Program after weeks of moderation, a transition back to Germany. They were relatively intimate gatherings: other than Martin, the Würthles, and the artists themselves, only a few visitors came from Athens for the openings.
There was a big party on the island in September 1993, though: Michel’s fiftieth birthday. It was the perfect opportunity for Martin to christen his subway station before a large audience. Again, a local piece of construction was the start of the piece, in this case an ornate railing in a field. If the Museum was a constructive misunderstanding, the subway entrance was one of his much-loved incomprehensible constructions: an entrance that led nowhere, consisting of nothing but a short flight of stairs down to a gate with the Lord Jim logo on it (breasts, hammer, sun), built by a local contractor, with the railing up above. A subway entrance without a subway, but nevertheless, two years later, it would link up with an exit on the other side of the world, in the mud and scree of Dawson City in the Yukon in Canada, even more isolated than Syros, where Reinald Nohal, Michel Würthle’s partner from the Paris Bar, ran a hotel, the Bunkhouse Hostel, and where Oswald Wiener and his wife also lived several months a year. This time, due to the icy temperatures, the entrance would be made of wood, not concrete. Gisela Capitain helped paint the gate, which wasn’t quite finished—they had traveled together, first visiting a collector couple in California. She later said the opening was hilarious: a stage was built that the whole village could dance on, the cowboys rode out of the forests to celebrate, and a ribbon was cut. Martin explained his work at great length to the young reporter from the Klondike Sun who had come to cover the event, and who had never written about art in his life. They all sat at the bar that night, where Martin made more drawings.
“It was very nice, in a personal sense,” the Cologne photographer Albrecht Fuchs said later; Martin had summoned him to Dawson City for the occasion. Together they visited Indians and took pictures of Martin in front of “Guggieville,” which Martin already planned to use as a poster for the Guggenheim Museum—unfortunately, he never had an exhibit there.
Fuchs photographed Martin like Buster Keaton in a Caspar David Friedrich pose, wearing a flat boater hat and a long coat. Martin’s most important model for his “METRO- Net ” subway system was in fact Keaton’s movie The Frozen North, in which Keaton guards a fake subway exit in the snowy arctic wasteland. Martin had not a little in common with the melancholy comedian and drinker. The Swiss curator Daniel Baumann remembers Martin as sad—“his sadness was very moving”—and the saddest thing, Baumann said, was how he put on a jacket, “like Buster Keaton.”
The Dawson City station would be followed by others in L.A., Kassel, and Münster; stations were also planned for Normandy and Tokyo, and one would appear in Venice after Martin’s death. Martin opened the first station, on Syros, in 1993, the same year that the internet took off: for the first time, anyone could download a web browser with graphic capabilities for free. The internet was open to all; Martin’s network was the opposite: real and ideal, an ironic utopia, “condensing and fusing the continents together through the imagination” as one critic put it. “The whole thing is useless, but not meaningless.”
ART NEEDS TO HANG
Meanwhile, in Cologne, a new generation of gallerists had sprung up: Schipper, Buchholz, Ungers, and especially Christian Nagel. Just as Hetzler had set the tone in Cologne in the early eighties, Nagel did in the early nineties.
Nagel had run the Christoph Dürr Gallery in Munich with Matthias Buck in the late eighties, where Martin had shown several times. Both gallerists were very young—Nagel was still studying art history—but they thought Martin’s work was interesting, and when they asked him if he wanted to do something with them, “he was on board right away. He didn’t even know us.” He got to know them fast. When they met in Cologne he spent three straight nights talking with Nagel: “we talked, talked, talked, who liked what, how to run a gallery—he said we should start a newspaper, define our own era, the best thing would be no more openings, no invitations, just a handful of interested people, we definitely had to show Krebber....”
Munich is the only major German city where Martin never lived. Though Martin’s good friend Uschi Welter had moved there, the slick chi-chi scene was too much for him. Once, when he was sitting with Nagel at a café on Maximilianstrasse and saw a car drive into another car, he clapped—and when the people around him threatened to beat him up, he applauded even louder. “That was the spirit of Munich, he felt: everyone drives a BMW, everything is expensive, but none of it is really good.” Martin went further in his No Problem exhibition at the Dürr gallery when he showed, on a loden-covered pedestal, a T-shirt with “Pas de problemes from the Côte d’Azur” printed on it. Price: six thousand marks. “It was sensational, no one understood how a T-shirt could cost so much money.” It was in Munich, where everyone always dressed to the nines, that Martin bought himself a complete Burberry outfit in a Burberry store and wore it for a few successful performances.
Nagel left Munich for Cologne in 1990, starting a second camp. Alongside the commercial hedonists of the eighties—the Hetzler artists—there were now the unwieldy, political, institution-critical artists of the nineties: the Nagel artists. Martin, of course, simply crossed the line between the two sides. He was already friends with Nagel, who was Karola Grässlin’s boyfriend; he had shown up at Nagel’s door more than once. “Martin took Nagel under his wing,” Peter Pakesch said. “Nagel had a kind of intelligence that Martin was very sympathetic toward.” Martin had fights with Nagel—for example, over the fact that Nagel only wanted to show art about art—but at the same time bought from him: both works by artists from Martin’s circle that Nagel represented (Michael Krebber, Cosima von Bonin, Merlin Carpenter) and works by other artists, such as the Americans Louise Lawler and Andrea Fraser. Martin was always interested in new approaches: “He wasn’t phobic about Contextual Art,” the critic Isabelle Graw said. “In fact he explicitly supported some of its formulations.” When the aluminum smiley faces that Martin had bought from Fraser kept falling off the wall, he told her, “Art has to hang.” She used the phrase later as the title of a performance in the Nagel Gallery after Martin’s death, in which she imitated one of his infamous appearances and told jokes and provocations for half an hour. Her appearance went over in two very different ways: some in the audience took it as an homage, others as a settling of accounts.
The mood had changed in Cologne by the time Nagel moved there. In 1990, Graw and Stefan Germer founded Texte zur Kunst (Texts on Art), a journal that reflected as much as it shaped the new climate in Cologne. Everything became much more heady, heavy, academic, theoretical, political, and politically correct, a turn strongly supported by the corresponding shift in the United States. Diedrich Diederichsen and Jutta Koether are still among its regular contributors and Martin Prinzhorn is its Vienna correspond
ent. For the first issue of the magazine, it was clear to Graw (as she herself says) that she should ask Martin to make the first of the artist-editions she would use to finance the journal. He did it immediately and with pleasure: Ricky Model: From Head to Gullet. [1] Cologne was becoming more and more like a village: more rigid, more claustrophobic. Everything was too close—there was no escape, no private life, no secrets.
I JUST HAVE TO GET THROUGH THIS YEAR
In 1991, Martin reached a new turning point. As he told the Artfan interviewer, “I have to change certain defined structures in my life, totally change them, so that I can take things in, new things, too, see them differently. And I need to get rid of almost everything I have so I can get at other things.... I just have to get through this year, I mean with my health. But if I survive this year, boomtown.”
His doctors had told him very clearly how serious his liver problems were and how dangerous it was to keep drinking. He had not yet officially separated from Gabi Hirsch, but it must have been clear to him by then that Project Family was not going to work out, or maybe had already failed. The prices his art was fetching were in the basement, if it was selling at all; the Hetzler group had drifted apart; the art scene was a vacuum, with Berlin not yet what Cologne no longer was. He didn’t know where his home was. To console himself, he described himself as the hero of a bygone era: “They’ll say about me that I was the eighties, and that’s important to me.”
He made this comment in 1991, in his interview with Jutta Koether that appeared in the catalog for the SFMOMA exhibition. The whole interview reads like an accounting of his life as an artist: a manifesto and confession. He gave other interviews as well around that time, as though reflection and contemplation were more appropriate forms of expression for this period than producing art itself. Never before had he spoken publicly about such private matters. It was more than just capturing a moment in Martin’s melancholy mood—it was a long-term project, initiated and financed by Martin himself, with various interviews taking place over a six-month period: a few in Cologne’s Café Central, one in his Frankfurt cider bar, one with Diedrich Diederichsen on a train between the two cities. Martin had sought out Jutta Koether because he admired her work: she had conducted a lot of interviews with film people and musicians. Martin had known her for ten years, he trusted her but had the necessary distance—and she was a woman. “I had the feeling,” she later said, “that he was a bit desperate at the time and just wanted to talk to someone.”
It was never intended to be a typical interview—journalist asks, artist answers—rather, as Koether said, “a self-display, meandering from one topic to the next as a way of showing his method, his way of working and thinking.” It was an open-ended conversation, and neither of them would know in advance which way it would go. The transcript was shortened, reordered, and otherwise edited, but not smoothed out; Martin’s voice is on the page, his cryptic way of jumping around while he talked. “This distinctive way of talking is like the line of my paintbrush,” he said. Martin himself changed almost nothing from the transcript, leaving in even very personal passages.
Koether felt that she was the “sounding board” in this experiment:
What I thought was interesting was this extremely voluble talking, this desire to communicate so much, expressed in such an unusual, nonstandard, scrambled, crazy way. For me, you couldn’t understand Kippenberger’s way of talking in terms of words or statements, but as part of a performance, almost like a concert. I was the audience at this performance, and to begin with I had to stick it out myself.
Martin asked her over and over again in the interview what would happen with it, whether anything would come of it, “because I know that it won’t work with me next year, so I have to know that something will happen with it.” Something did happen with it: it was published in book form for the SFMOMA exhibition, and an excerpt was published in Texts on Art. Koether recalls that the excerpt “caused an unbelievable shitstorm. You just cannot imagine how much I was criticized over it.” One critic (who later, after Martin’s death, wrote a very long, positive essay about Martin) was so angry that he lectured her about it for a whole night. The Berlin scene, in particular, attacked her for letting someone like Martin just talk, giving him so much space without pushing back. “That went on for a few years. Only after his death did people start saying, ‘Oh, what a fantastic interview!’”
EVERYTHING’S IN THERE
Taschen’s monograph about Martin was published in 1991, and Martin used it to spread his fame far beyond the art collectors and cognoscenti. It contributed greatly to his popularity, especially among younger artists and art fans and far beyond Germany, even in countries where he had rarely or never exhibited (for instance, Britain or Georgia).
The editor was Angelika Muthesius, later Taschen’s wife. Burkhard Riemschneider, the young art historian who worked with Gisela Capitain at the time, was responsible for the texts and documentation. Riemschneider, who today runs a gallery in Berlin with his former coworker Tim Neuger, remembers working with Martin as being very straightforward and uncomplicated. Martin encouraged him to write the introductory text himself: he was sick of all the professional art writers. Then they put together the artist bio at the end of the volume in a couple of hours one morning at Café Central, using Baselitz’s CV as a model. The result was like a parody of an Important Artist Biography.
In fact, the whole book was a bit too didactic for Martin’s taste. Works using the same motif were always grouped together, for example. On the other hand, he was excited to have a picture book so different from the books he produced himself: a real coffee-table book for a broad audience. “Everything’s in there so that any old train conductor can understand it. It brings something to a close, a book like that, but it also destroys you.”
In November of that same year, Martin showed that he wasn’t a coffee-table-book artist after all. He opened the Heavy Fella [2] show at the Cologne Art Association, his most radical statement on art, authorship, the aura of the work of art, and the art business. Merlin Carpenter had been assigned to paint pictures after motifs from Martin’s work, and Martin said that the paintings were “too good,” so he had Wilhelm Schürmann photograph them and then destroyed the paintings. The photographs hung framed on the wall while the originals, torn and crumpled, filled a dumpster that Martin exhibited in the same room.
Some responded enthusiastically: Rudolf Zwirner liked “how radically he pursued this anti-attitude against the bourgeois idea of culture and cultural production and the whole apparatus around it.” Others wondered if Martin had maneuvered himself into a corner.
Martin after the opening of his Heavy Fella show in Cologne, 1991. This speech lasted ca. 150 minutes.
THIS IS TO A CERTAIN EXTENT UNBEARABLE
Martin had had enough of Cologne, and vice versa. He was tired of his little Bermuda Triangle of bars, cafés, and galleries; he said in 1991 that he spent the evenings at home with Gabi and Helena more and more often, “although I don’t really belong at home, but nothing is pulling me out the door either.” Domestic life was not the answer, but he often didn’t know where else to go.
Meanwhile, many people were starting to find Martin’s performances and provocations too formulaic and ritualized. They were annoyed by the jokes, which increasingly came across as sad more than funny, so they avoided him. “Even the people who always defended him,” Diedrich Diederichsen said, “tried to get out of going to his endless performances at the opening parties.” Speeches that once would have lasted fifteen minutes now went on for two hours; even Werner Büttner says they were “torture.”
People were exhausted from the eighties, too, and with increasing age and worsening health they simply couldn’t keep up with the endless drinking. Alcohol no longer pepped Martin up—by that point it tended to make him aggressive. “At the end,” Charline von Heyl said, “alcohol was not his friend. The last years were mainly about struggle and survival.”
The more famou
s Martin grew and the more attention he attracted, the more pressure he felt. The adventurous agility of the early years was largely gone: “The strain keeps getting worse,” Martin said.
WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE TO GO,
GO TO THE NO
Martin wrote in his artist bio for the year 1992: “Moves further and further away from the art world; lives and works in the Black Forest.” He had done something he otherwise never did—returned to a place he had already left behind. After his time in Frankfurt and the intensive work with his students, he knew he didn’t want to move back to Cologne. When you don’t know where to go, go to the no , he titled one of his pictures.
Ten years had passed since he last lived in Sankt Georgen, though he had visited often and continued to send mountains of postcards there from all over the world. The Grässlin family had diligently collected his work. At one point, when they didn’t want to or couldn’t buy his works for a while, he painted a series especially for them and called it The Unbought Pictures : a smaller example of every series and motif that they didn’t have in their collection.
Karola had finished her art history studies and headed the Daxler Art Space in Munich. Sabine, after her culinary education on Lake Constance, was a cook in Munich before returning to the Black Forest to run the marketing department of the family business. Sabine’s daughter, Katharina, was no longer a screaming baby but a teenager: she fought bitterly with Martin over which TV shows to watch and cursed him as an “occupier,” a “terrorist.” He wanted to decide everything, and when he had no other choice he retreated downstairs to watch TV with Grandma. She was over ninety years old by that point and had become even more bitterly set in her ways, but she had continued to set a place at the table for Martin long after he had left. The Eggman song—and only the Eggman himself—could still make her laugh.
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