The Grässlin family, 1993 (l. to r.: Martin, Sabine Grässlin, Anna Grässlin, Franco Ubbriaco, Thomas Grässlin, Grandma Haas, Bärbel Grässlin, Bernadette Grässlin, and Rüdiger Carl)
© Grässlin Family
Anna Grässlin was still Anna Grässlin, the good mother. “He could spend hours on end tearing apart Bärbel or Karola,” Johannes Wohnseifer said, “but Anna! He thought she was really cool.” Not surprisingly, Anna remembers Martin as being always in a good mood, not depressed or aggressive. Again she mothered him and tended to him; she usually served his favorites, pasta and noodle casserole. Still, she continued to keep a certain distance from him and didn’t go along with everything.
There was no Sahara Program this time, only the Anti-Sahara. Bloody Marys and vodka apple juices in the café in the morning, or red wine. Often he was the only patron: people didn’t go to cafés in the morning in Sankt Georgen. In the evenings it was red wine and Ramazzotti liqueur at the Italian restaurant whose walls he had filled with his paintings. Sometimes the party continued back at his studio afterward.
He wanted to stop drinking, or at least that’s what he once told Bice Curiger, the co-editor of Parkett, when they were together in a car: “He was looking out the window, it was almost like a monologue: ‘I’m forty now, it’s time for me to become a new person. If you can do that you’re an Olympian. I should stop drinking, but I was just in the Black Forest again and I didn’t manage it.’ You could feel his despair: I should have, but I didn’t... ”
Martin felt like a full member of the family, and it didn’t go well when anyone treated him otherwise. One time, Bärbel Grässlin invited her goddaughter Pia and Pia’s parents, and Martin’s friend Meuser and his wife Nanette Hagstotz, to Frankfurt for Advent. Martin was furious: “Why wasn’t I invited too? I’m part of the family too!” When the American artist duo Clegg and Gutman came to take a large photograph of the whole Grässlin family, Martin absolutely wanted to be in the picture and was incredibly insulted when he wasn’t included. The sons-in-law were not in the portrait either, but that didn’t mean a thing to him. He felt excluded.
He made a family portrait of his own, a lot less formal than the Americans’. Martin called the series Upside Down and Turning Me : panels covered with lead, each one the same height and width as the respective family member.
In other ways it was like a real family: he liked to get into fights with the sisters, for example, about things that no one remembers any more. “It felt like kindergarten sometimes,” Johannes Wohnseifer said. He sometimes brought the sisters to tears, too, making fun of their weight or their ways of talking. Occasionally, he played more serious tricks on them. For example, when he was in Zurich he had a friend call Sankt Georgen and say that the former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, was visiting Germany; he wanted to look at the family collection, on the condition that they remove the works by Förg and serve kosher food. (Günther Förg’s antics in various bars and restaurants had given him the reputation of being a Nazi, and the Grässlin collection had a few of his pieces on the wall.) Everything was made ready for the Israeli dignitary, who of course never showed up.
But no matter what jokes Martin played on them and how annoyed they got, everything was usually fine the next day.
One of the reasons Martin moved back to Sankt Georgen was his large studio there. It was inexpensive: 2,500 square feet in an old woodworking workshop, where Martin also lived, for a thousand marks a month. Sabine paid the rent, and Martin gave her more art.
A photographer, Thomas Berger, had his studio under Martin’s and took a famous picture of Martin peeking through blinds. They talked together a lot—for example, about religion, which meant a lot to Berger. “Martin took it seriously, he didn’t make a joke out of it, but left it open whether he himself was a believer.”
Berger, who was from Baden, in southern Germany, liked Martin’s dry humor and asked him “what he meant by this or that piece. For example, the EuroPallets. I thought it couldn’t really be true, that you could get so much money for something like that. But he always had something to say about it, deep things. He always told me something so that I could think the piece was great.”
Their lifestyles could not have been more different. In the morning, when Berger arrived at his photo studio, Martin sometimes was going to bed and the last guest going home. Martin sometimes threw parties in the studio, and Berger surveyed the damage afterward with amazement: “tables full of empty bottles—I’ve never seen anything like it.” There were also phases when Martin did nothing but work for weeks—followed by periods of drinking through the night. “Other than that I’d have to say he was a quiet neighbor. He was a very friendly person. He just indulged in such excesses.”
This was the period when Martin was working on his Schreber pieces and painting his series of Kasper paintings—“one after the other,” Berger said, “zap zap zap, like piecework.” Kasper was a figure he knew well: the clown from the German version of Punch and Judy shows, who was always trying to beat others with his stick and instead landed the blows on his own head.
THE HAPPY END OF FRANZ KAFKA’S “AMERIKA”
“I’m on a mission,” Martin told Thomas Grässlin while he was working on The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” “I have to carry it out and I don’t have much time.” Martin often said in this period that he had decided to create his masterpiece, and he knew how poor the condition of his liver was. The doctors had been warning him in the strongest possible terms.
Franz Kafka wrote to his girlfriend, Felice, that his novel, which he called by the working title The Missing Person or The Man Who Disappeared , was “heading off into endlessness.” It remained a fragment, but Max Brod, instead of burning the manuscript after Kafka’s death as his friend had requested, published it in 1927. Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle together formed what Brod called “The Trilogy of Loneliness.” Kafka himself may have seen this work as lighter than his others; Martin wrote in the foreword to his book on the Kafka installation, Conversations with Martin Kippenberger, that it was the first time something by Kafka suggested a happy ending.
Martin probably never read the book. But he asked other people to tell him about it, and he seems to have found a kindred spirit in Kafka’s protagonist, Karl, a young man sent away from home by his parents, totally alone in a foreign land. A sixteen-year-old boy who has gotten the maid pregnant and never finished school; funny and optimistic, someone who believes in people and believes that they’re good, no matter how many times they lie to him and betray him; and someone who, in the first paragraph of the novel, discovers freedom—in the shape of the Statue of Liberty—only to learn all too quickly how difficult freedom is. The theme of the book is constant departure, moving around, starting anew over and over again—and, finally, arriving and wanting to be let in. “All welcome!” a poster for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma announces. “Anyone who wants to be an artist , step forward!” Karl reads the sentence again and again: All welcome, so he must be welcome too. Even if he is somewhat disappointed not to get the job he wants, as an engineer, “he kept saying to himself that what mattered wasn’t so much the type of work as one’s ability to stick it out, whatever it might be.” Karl is especially touched that everyone, absolutely everyone, is “so well received and looked after” by the Theater.
Kafka presents the job interviews as grotesque theater, and it is in no way clear whether heaven or hell awaits those who get jobs. The scene is as ambivalent as Martin’s relationship to America itself, and in fact Martin’s idea of America was very close to the image of America Kafka presents in his novel (even though Kafka was never there in person): the mixture of hope and disappointment, apparent openness and ruthless competition, and the focus on the future and lack of a sense of history that especially irritated Martin, a European artist through and through.
Martin worked longer on his Kafka piece than on any other work, and none of his other works is as big and complex: around fifty tab
les with two chairs each, as in a job interview situation, clustered together on a painted soccer field. Martin’s body of work was also put together “into endlessness,” and in Kafka he took up many of his themes, methods, and motifs, his own pieces and the works of other artists. The installation returned to the questions of inclusion and exclusion, power relations, solitude, failure, history, and belief (in yourself, in happiness, in other people). More than anything, it was about communication, both within the work itself and in the way it completes and improves on the work of others. Martin said he wanted to “sort of give Kafka a hand, after the fact. Give him a Happy End. His books always end so full of self-doubt, in death, I wanted to give him a Happy End.”
The installation is intensely colorful but has something oppressive about it, not unlike the trapped hopelessness of Kafka’s other novels. The chairs are empty, and no one is there to sit in them (the museum visitors are not allowed to). In Martin’s concept, viewers are supposed to imagine the conversations that might be taking place at the tables.
The Kafka installation was presumably not originally intended to be so huge, but it grew over time into the summa of Martin’s work. It wasn’t even intended to be an installation: Martin had considered actually writing the book to the end, working “with the best ghostwriters in the world to do it,” or making a movie based on it.
The whole thing started with the furniture he had bought for his apartment in L.A.: used furniture, both classics of modern design and anonymous pieces from flea markets and the Salvation Army. He continued to collect furniture in New York and Europe, acting fast whenever he found something. He and Elisabeth Fiedler found a whole warehouse of obsolete office furniture owned by the state government in Graz. Martin had been interested in furniture for a long time. He had furnished his Office in Berlin with classic Bauhaus pieces. Thus the Kafka piece was, among other things, an encyclopedia of living, of residing: “every decade, everyone has a crystal clear memory of a chair that embodies something for you, you’re right back in that time, it’s like a visual dictionary you drag around with you.” Martin combined the furniture he had bought with artworks left over from other exhibitions, pieces by other artists, and objects built specially for Kafka, many of them by Uli Strothjohann and some by Sven Ahrens.
Kafka cost Martin a fortune but was practically impossible to sell, due to its sheer size. Martin’s New York girlfriend, Tracy Williams, saw it as a response to the crisis in the art market and especially in his own market value: “It’s as if he was saying: OK, you’re not buying anyway, so I’m gonna do something really big.” On the other hand, the Swiss curator Daniel Baumann (who considers the Kafka piece “overvalued and overanalyzed”) said that it was just the trend of the time: “to get through to the international market, you had to show gigantic works.”
When talks began between Martin and Karel Schampers, the director of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, Martin was insistent that he wanted to show the Kafka piece there, because so many emigrants had left for America from the Dutch port city. Karel Schampers was uneasy about the undertaking—Martin did, after all, still have the reputation of being difficult and unpredictable—but it turned out that their collaboration was “extremely pleasant, peaceful, and a lot of fun,” he said. Every day Martin dragged the museum director to lunch at one of the vending-machine restaurants we had loved so much as children in Holland. There was nothing but “garbage to eat” there, in Schampers’s words—everything deep-fried: potatoes, croquettes, meatballs, Indonesian fried rice. Martin also made noodle casserole for Schampers at home once.
The curator was “overwhelmed” by the way Martin installed the show. The soccer field was painted on the floor, “and then he started, and it was like he had a photo in his head of the whole thing. He knew exactly where everything should go, he never had to change a thing. He was totally focused and the whole thing went very quickly.” Schampers was also overwhelmed when a truckload of books showed up between the trucks of furniture. “What are these books,” he asked Martin, “I didn’t order any books.” He didn’t know that Martin had commissioned (and paid for) nine books on the theme of job interviews by his friends, to display on the tables. “That was a nice surprise.”
Martin sent out invitations to Café Loos in Rotterdam for his birthday party, on February 25, 1994. The cards showed the Indian that Wohnseifer had found at the used bookstore in Cologne. The next day was the big exhibition opening, with French fries and croquettes to eat, the authors reading from their books, and the female guests forced to act the part of cheerleaders. Boris Becker and John McEnroe didn’t make it, unfortunately. (The tennis stars were at the same hotel in Rotterdam at the same time—apparently, when Martin started telling his jokes there one evening, Becker yelled at him to sit down and shut up. Martin had invitations to the opening put into all the athletes’ mail slots in the hotel and was disappointed when they didn’t come. The only one who sent his thanks and regrets for not being able to make it was Michael Stich.)
Martin with Michel Würthle in Rotterdam, 1994
© Jannes Linders
The show went almost unnoticed in Germany but received a lot of attention in the Netherlands, with numerous major interviews and reviews, most of them very positive. Only a couple of newspapers complained that there was too much humor in the show and not enough art.
Martin told Jutta Koether, in the interview that would be his contribution to the books for the installation (on Table 17), that giving Kafka a happy ending “is my life’s work.” His assistant, Sven Ahrens, thought “Martin made peace with himself” with the Rotterdam show: “He felt that he had done what he wanted to do.” His masterpiece—as Martin also called it to Schmapers—was complete.
Two years later, the installation was mounted and shown in Copenhagen. Arno Victor Nielsen wrote in the catalog that “Martin Kippenberger’s gigantic office-landscape . . . can be interpreted as a wicked allegory of a hyper-modern society, locked into operations of supervision and control. Everyone is hired, but we have to start to wonder if the price for this universal openness is that no one can escape.”
IT JUST MADE SENSE
Johannes Wohnseifer visited the Black Forest often. There was a small guest bedroom at Martin’s studio, with a replica of Napoleon’s military camp bed to sleep on. They watched a lot of TV together, with the remote in Wohnseifer’s hands and Martin giving orders: “Next! Next!” They watched the news and soccer, and “we got worked up over what garbage everything was” on MTV. They rarely watched a single show from beginning to end.
Martin had another assistant in this period: Sven Ahrens, his student from Kassel, who commuted between Frankfurt and Sankt Georgen. Ahrens could drink a lot of wine, an important qualification for Martin’s companions at Sankt Georgen; he could behave himself, which was important for Martin at the Grässlins’; and he could talk about art. He was good with his hands, which was of practical use for the Kafka project, and he had a car and a driver’s license. “It just made sense.” So Ahrens drove back and forth between Frankfurt, where he was painting, and the Black Forest, where they often just sat in front of Martin’s new pictures with a bottle of red wine and talked about them. In Ahrens’s view, Martin liked his reclusive lifestyle in this period. When he started to feel like there was too much peace and quiet, they permitted themselves little excursions, for example, to Zurich. They stayed for three days and then drove, also on the spur of the moment, to an old hotel in Badenweiler. Martin was a regular there, too, with “his” room, and if another hotel guest was in “his” room, the guest would be transferred to another; Ahrens, meanwhile, slept in a different room every night, on Martin’s recommendation, so that he could try them all out. In this hotel, too, Martin bewitched the sizeable crowd of older ladies, arranged swimming races in the pool, and instigated “Glow-Worm” singalongs, writing the notes of the melody in magic marker on the waiters’ striped shirts.
After two and a half years as Martin’s assistant, Ah
rens had the feeling that it was time to move on. “Everything got to be more or less routine,” he said; Martin’s provocations had gotten to be too mean for him; and so, after another evening when Martin the Punch had made Ahrens his Judy (as Ahrens put it), and taken a fortune off him at pinball and mau-mau to boot, Ahrens got into his car and drove off. First he drove to the highway, where he stopped in a parking lot to sleep and sober up, and then, the next morning, when he had to decide whether to drive back or keep going, he kept going. He had already secretly been preparing to open a gallery in Stuttgart with a friend, Bernd Hammelehle. If he wasn’t a real artist (and Martin had told him he wasn’t), he certainly knew how to deal with artists. At first Martin was offended. Then he started giving him good advice for his new gallery, which Ahrens gratefully declined. “It was a nice, fatherly side of him, but I wanted to run the gallery my way.” At the Art Fair he talked trash about their program (“What shit you guys are showing!”), and then announced, “OK, I’ll give you something!” This didn’t appeal to Ahrens at first, but when Martin faxed him his collaborators’ drawings on hotel stationery, he was enthusiastic.
The show opened at the Hammelehle & Ahrens Gallery in 1995 and was called Not just anybuddies. Ahrens later said it was great honor for him, not only that Martin showed there but that he did it with such pleasure. Many people took it as a slap in the face: how could Kippenberger put on a show like that in an unknown gallery in someone’s living room in Swabia? But Ahrens said that Martin “liked helping me get started in a place that was once so important for him.” They went around together to see the sights and locales he remembered from his Stuttgart days.
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