Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  FORTY YEARS OF GRATITUDE

  The climax of Martin’s second period in the Black Forest was February 25, 1993: his fortieth birthday. Martin had always put on big public parties for his birthday, even though for him, as he once said, every day was a birthday: causing a ruckus, putting himself in the center, and giving gifts to himself and others. He always staged big events for his major birthdays—giving himself a sheet of stamps for his twenty-first; a huge party with a catalog for his twenty-fifth ( 1/4 Century Kippenberger ); the catalog Farewell to the Youth Bonus for his thirtieth.

  “Farewell to the Youth Bonus!” Catalog for Martin’s 30th birthday. In front of the family house in Frillendorf with the four sisters in the background

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  He never put on anything like his fortieth, though. The invitations read, “On the occasion of henceforth forty years of gratitude, Martin Kippenberger cordially invites you to a celebration in Sankt Georgen, February 24-25.” It sounded harmless enough, but it was “murderous,” as Anna Grässlin put it: a three-day orgy of drinking and excess. It went late into the night of February 24 at Nachtcafé, continued the next morning with a buffet at the Grässlins’, surrounded by Martin’s works, proceeded to a studio visit that afternoon and a viewing of his show at the Döbele exhibition space, and then went on to dinner and dancing that night, and the hair of the dog the next morning at Café Kammerer.

  At one point, all hundred guests were gathered together for a group photograph—Martin in front and many of the guests, as requested, in folk costume (Karola Grässlin even wore her great-grandmother’s original outfit, complete with a Black Forest Bollenhut hat). Martin titled the picture Say Cheese! and used it on the invitations for his exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. He had gathered around him many of the people who had been important to him over those forty years: Michel Würthle next to him in front, Cosima von Bonin, Gisela Capitain, Lukas Baumewerd, Albert Oehlen, Friedrich Petzel, Michael Krebber, Sven-Åke Johansson, Charline von Heyl, Jörg Schlick, Meuser, Sabine Achleitner, Sven Ahrens, Hubert Kiecol, Uli Strothjohann, Petra Schilcher, Helmut Seiler, Uschi Welter, Birgit Küng, Christian Nagel, Johann Widauer, Andrea Stappert, Tobias Rehberger, Martin Prinzhorn, Esther Schipper, Matthias Schaufler, Dr. Peters, Gundel Gelbert, Hans Böhning, Roberto Ohrt, Markus Oehlen, Gabi Dziuba, Nicole Hackert, Heliod Spiekermann, the whole Grässlin family, Nicole Neufert, Veit Loers, Johannes Wohnseifer, and from our family Petra, Babs, Bine, and Moritz.

  40th birthday in St. Georgen

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  Martin was overjoyed to have everyone there and to get a mountain of presents—he was always as happy as a little child about presents. Sabine Grässlin gave him a Hunger Family made of marzipan (a reference to Martin’s Hunger Family works), and the guests received presents, too: signed slices of birch (a reference to Martin’s birch forest installations). Martin put many of the photographs from the big event into the catalog he made for the Grässlin collection ( We Always Thought Kippenberger Was Great ), including one that he captioned “M.K. birthday breakfast 1993 (so that he isn’t all alone).” The only thing he was in a bad mood about were the people who hadn’t attended. “The fortieth birthday was mandatory,” Gisela Capitain later said; Rüdiger Carl couldn’t come, for example, because he was playing a show that night, and Martin held it against him for years. In fact, “the fortieth birthday was real torture,” Veit Loers later said. It was the pinnacle of Martin’s Zwangsbeglücktertum , or enforcing of mandatory good cheer. Bärbel Grässlin, as the oldest family member present, had to stay at the restaurant to the end on the night of the dinner and dancing, because the owner was afraid of what might happen. And with good reason. He phoned Mother Grässlin in a rage the next day to demand payment for damages: the guests had acted up and gotten violent, and the parquet floors were ruined from broken glasses and stubbed-out cigarettes. Mother Grässlin listened calmly, but when the hotelier added that they had left condoms lying around everywhere in the bathroom, she apparently said, “Well, then it couldn’t have been our party, they don’t use them,” and hung up. She still had to pay to replace the floors.

  “Martin’s fortieth birthday was a gigantic, epic mania of self-dramatization,” Burkhard Riemschneider said. “I’ve never been through anything like it,” said Elisabeth Fiedler from Graz. Others felt they had been through such things only too often and preferred to stay home: Peter Pakesch, for example, since “the huge parties got on my nerves.” Isabelle Graw and Merlin Carpenter also refrained from attending. As Graw said,

  because we didn’t like that kind of group pressure any more, it had always been a bit much, really. These rituals always had something oppressively stagnant about them—they weren’t fun any more, they had turned into something compulsive and depressing. And I hated being constantly reduced to a sex object.

  Riemschneider said that Martin’s fortieth birthday “took to an extreme what he had already constantly acted out in Cologne. It had a certain redundancy.”

  Playing mau-mau in the Paris Bar, Christmas 1995: Martin with his niece Elena

  © Kippenberger Family

  By the end of his time in Sankt Georgen, the peace and quiet that had originally sparked Martin’s creativity put a damper on it. He painted only a handful of pictures in 1995; by then he knew every bar and street corner. “It’s boring here,” he wrote to his girlfriend Kazu Huggler, “I get bored + then I have to deal with the everpresent boredom too. Boring or rude arguments spoil the everyday life that I really do take seriously.”

  Most of the people who visited Martin certainly couldn’t comprehend how he had lasted so long in that bourgeois backwater (as they saw it). In 1995, after the Cologne photographer Albrecht Fuchs saw him in Sankt Georgen to take some pictures, someone asked him back in Cologne: “What, is he still alive?” “For a lot of people,” Fuchs said, “Martin was such a Cologne-in-the-eighties figure. He was off people’s radar.” When Martin found a new place to live in the Burgenland, he packed up his things immediately—“lickety-split” as Anna Grässlin said. He wanted the Grässlins to continue to pay the studio’s rent, so he could keep the Kafka piece there, but the family decided not to. Thomas Grässlin felt that “it hurt Martin’s feelings. He was dejected.”

  FRANCE

  In 1993, Martin invited Roberto Ohrt, a freelance curator, to join him in putting together a show at the Pompidou Centre, Candidature à une retrospective (Application for a Retrospective). There was an official curator at the Pompidou who had invited him: Fabrice Hergott. The French didn’t have the best impression of the two German artists, seeing them as rather macho.

  The main point of contention was what Ohrt called the “backbone of the show”: a long glass display case extending through all three exhibition halls in the museum, filled with all kinds of printed matter. Fifty feet of books, postcards, things Martin copied or alluded to—“the materials and ideas were laid out,” Ohrt said, “to make his work transparent, but at the same time still mysterious.” The museum felt that the public needed to be warned before entering that Martin had included his collection of erotica: “The public is hereby informed that certain works presented in the Kippenberger exhibition may offend the sensibilities of young visitors. —The administration.” Or, as Martin wrote in the catalog: “Children Beware This Man.”

  The opening-night dinner took place at the restaurant run by Martin’s “Chinaman,” as he called his friend Davé. They had met through Jenny Capitain back during Martin’s earlier stay in Paris, when Davé was still working in his parents’ restaurant. Now he and his sister had a restaurant of their own, and it had become the place to meet for the fashion world. Martin knew that Davé was always there—he worked seven days a week, 365 days a year. Martin felt welcomed by Davé, he could talk to him, and he even lived in his apartment while the exhibition was being put up. Martin liked Davé’s cooking and, perhaps more importa
ntly, Davé’s readings of Martin’s tarot cards: he called Davé’s style of telling fortunes “fine, truly fine.” Davé predicted a splendid future for Martin and was firmly convinced that Martin had something great within him: “Kippi was a true visionary. If he had been a banker, he would have been a great banker.”

  Martin also had Sylvana Lorenz read the cards for him, though her predictions were sometimes more negative than Davé’s. Lorenz was Martin’s Parisian gallerist and the wife of the BMW executive Günter Lorenz, although Martin probably liked her better as a fortune-teller than as a gallerist. He had shown work with her several times, individually or as part of the Hetzler group.

  At the same time as his Pompidou show, Martin showed his Kaspar paintings at Samia Saouma’s gallery. It was hardly a commercial success: “It was very difficult to place Martin’s work in Paris,” she said. “A lot of people thought he was too German.”

  What especially intrigued Martin about Paris, aside from the museums, were the big cafés and bistros: he liked to go to La Coupole, and he bought a table, chair, glass, and coffee cup from Café Flore. He was less interested in French artists—he understood their language as little as they did his sense of humor. Still, Martin did have a fan club in France, at the Villa Arson in Nice. Its director, Christian Bernard, had met Martin in 1985 and was a very intellectual Frenchman: “a delicate soul who never drank a sip of beer,” as Günter Lorenz said. The driving force behind the Villa was a Swiss man, Axel Huber, who knew Martin from Berlin. He was responsible for taking care of the artists there and was a curator, an artist, and a fan of Martin’s. Meuser called the Villa “architecturally a kind of cross between Corbusier and gravel pit.”

  Martin showed his first exhibition at the Villa in 1987, with Albert and Markus Oehlen and Werner Büttner: Family Program, “where their art would relate to each other,” Martin said. Later, he showed solo work, including his Social Pasta pieces, Snow White’s Coffin, lampposts, and candleholders. He worked at Villa Arson, taught there, and drank a lot there, too. “It was tough at the Villa,” Werner Büttner said, “a week of heavy drinking.” For a couple of years, in the opinion of the Viennese artist Hans Weigand, Villa Arson was one of the best locations in Europe: Herold, Kiecol, Schlick, McCarthy, Kelley, and Jason Rhoades, everyone was there. “The moment Axel Huber left, it all collapsed like a hot soufflé.”

  WE ALWAYS THOUGHT

  KIPPENBERGER WAS GREAT

  When the Swiss artist Urs Fischer, who was twenty years younger than Martin, was studying art in Amsterdam in 1993, he and a classmate would stay up all night with Martin’s monographs: “Kippenberger was a hero to us. The stories circulating about him were like Christopher Columbus’s reports from the New World,” he wrote in the Tate Gallery’s journal. Whether the stories were true or just legends didn’t make any difference to Fischer—for him they were as important as Martin’s work. “Kippenberger incarnated an unreproducible model, a kind of knight or superhero . . . everyone wants to emulate, though you cannot exactly copy him.” It was only a few years later that he lost some of this luster.

  A split developed in the nineties. Martin’s fans kept growing in number, especially among younger artists, and he won more international recognition. His international shows seemed to follow each other nonstop: Put your Eye in your Mouth at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and his Tiefes Kehlchen (Deep Throat) installation at the Vienna Festival Week, both in 1991; Candidature à une rétrospective at the Pompidou in 1993; The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika ” at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 1994, with full-page reviews in the major Dutch newspapers; Directions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 1995; Kafka again in 1996, this time in Copenhagen; and finally the large “Respective” that filled the building at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva in 1997. 1997 was also the year when Martin was finally invited to documenta—by a Frenchwoman, Cathérine David, a woman, a foreigner, and an intellectual! During the same period, though, most museum people and critics in Germany ignored Martin at best and heaped abuse upon him at worst.

  When the old West Germany came to an end in 1989, it meant the party was over in Germany as a whole. In addition, West Germany’s center of power was along the Rhine; now Berlin was in charge, and Berlin hated Martin. Humor was verboten, and everything had to be not only political but also politically correct. The view of the critics seemed to be that after the violence against foreigners in Rostock and Hoyerswerda in the early nineties, and the torching of a synagogue in Lübeck, Germany’s image was endangered enough without a Rhineland clown like Kippenberger.

  When Josef Strau, a Rhineland artist, moved to Berlin after the fall of the Wall, he was shocked at the level of hatred that the political-artistic bohemians there directed at Cologne. Cologne was demonized as the epitome of the Enemy, and, as Strau wrote in the 2006 catalog for the American show Make Your Own Life about Cologne as an art center, it “[stood] for all evil [and was] perceived as the place of old-fashioned hierarchical structures, artist-authorship power-attitude, commercialism, anti-political art, anti-PC, male brotherhoods displaying open anti-feminism—altogether the place of the most reactionary art system.”

  If this city of evildoers had a Head Mephistopheles, it was Martin Kippenberger: no longer the King of Cologne, but rather “the King of the Cologne mafia,” as Marius Babias labeled him. It was as though they had been waiting to come out of the woodwork and batter him with the club of morality—an artist who didn’t follow the ideological rules and who had repeatedly attacked liberal self-congratulation, unreflective do-gooderism, and bourgeois hypocrisy with works like War Bad. Even his humor was taboo.

  The hatred directed at Martin had a history going back to the late seventies and early eighties, when Martin still lived in Berlin and “the whole Kreuzberg scene was a thorn in people’s sides,” according to Uli Strothjohann, who himself lived in Berlin at the time. They didn’t like that Martin refused to toe any group’s line, zoomed through the streets on a moped in a suit, played punk music and boogie-woogie at S.O.36, and ran a dive in Kreuzberg while being a regular at establishments like the Paris Bar and Fofi’s in Charlottenburg. “They had it in for him from the start.”

  The Berlin establishment had just as little sympathy for Martin as an artist. He was excluded from the two major generational exhibitions in the Martin Gropius Building— Zeitgeist and Metropolis —and the established gallerists didn’t care for him any more than the curators. As of 2010, no Berlin museum owned a single work by him.

  Martin had already written off Berlin, especially after the fall and subsequent complete eradication of the Wall. He was angry that Berlin, which in his day had showed the wounds of the past more openly than any other city, had now wiped out its own history as though it had never been. How could Berlin just tear down such an important monument? Martin couldn’t understand it: “stone by little stone, that’s so German,” he told Marius Babias in an interview for Artscribe . “History is something you need to feel. First they weren’t Nazis, then they weren’t Communists. So what are they?” In his opinion, the Wall needed to be preserved. “We don’t need exvacations like in Greece—in this country history happens at your front door.”

  In 1991, at Literature House Berlin, the journal Texts on Art published an issue that contained a long excerpt from Martin’s conversation with Jutta Koether—a quote from the interview was even on the cover. This was the very journal dedicated to the identity politics, multiculturalism, and anti-racism of contemporary American art. “People hated us,” Isabelle Graw said. “Kippenberger was like a red flag in front of their faces.”

  Later that year, he appeared in the small Wewerka & Weiss gallery in the Wilmersdorf area of Berlin with his—or at least his representative’s—Africa campaign: the William Holden Company show, which only confirmed all the prejudices of his enemies in Berlin. Hadn’t Martin abused his student by sending him across Africa? Martin sat at the table, forced the women there to ki
ss him on the lips, signed books, and had a comment for everyone.

  The witch-hunt was really on by the time the Brandenburg Art Association in Potsdam showed the Grässlin family’s Kippenberger collection in 1994. The day of reckoning had arrived, and all the debts were paid off: even those who had kept a timid silence before now dared to speak up, because they knew they had nothing to fear. The critics from the FAZ and the taz were united in their Kippenberger-bashing.

  “Panty-Raider” was the headline of Harald Fricke’s article in the journal Concrete on the occasion of “the red-carpet treatment he received” in Potsdam. [3] While Uli Strothjohann calls these attacks “left-wing-fascist,” Harald Fricke labeled Martin’s mottos, pictures, and attitudes as “right-wing-anarchist,” portraying Martin as a misogynist, Nazi, porn star, racist, and cynic who liked nothing better than to eat linguini and mozzarella salad in Italian restaurants (fashionable dishes that Martin held in the deepest contempt). The article presented Martin as a fraud trying to milk Potsdam dry and said that the Grässlins (“Kippenberger’s steady customers since the mid-eighties”) had “paid for an expensive catalog,” too . Fricke called Kippenberger “a German allotment gardener” and a child of the Helmut Kohl era: “Kohl took power at the same time the ‘Hetzler Boys’ achieved their breakthrough in the art market.” Fricke’s conclusion: “His painting is a stockpile of banalities from seventies Karstadt culture.”

  “Kippenberger doesn’t hurt anyone in Potsdam any more” wrote the same author in the taz about the Potsdam exhibition. “He has outlived himself. Not with his provocation-pictures and dented sculptures, which in large part he has assistants paint, build, or find, but in his anti-attitude toward history. The wild and crazy eighties seem just as hopelessly far removed from the nineties as the middle-class fifties. And Kippenberger is the concierge in the social housing project on the outskirts of Cologne.”