Meanwhile, Marius Babias described Martin in the city magazine Zitty as “a society man somewhat advanced in years, for a jet set bored by just one event after another”; as “a bellwether for a herd of sheep with delusions of avant-gardeur” who “managed to have a mediocre career with his ‘underground’ attitudes. The adolescent muscleman threatened to go under in the theory mess of the late eighties, but the Cologne circle around Christian Nagel, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Jutta Koether continued to stand up for the reprobate.” Babias continued his scolding in the pages of Junge Welt (the official paper of the German socialist youth movement until 1989):
This champion of shocking the bourgeoisie has long since turned bourgeois himself, overtaken by reality. Granted, his career, based on provocations aimed against already marginal groups, remains merely average—true to the artist’s motto, “I want to be the best of the second-rate.” Serious German museums continue to refrain from including Kippenberger in their retrospectives.
Fricke had called the curator of the Potsdam show, Christoph Tannert (an East Berliner and by then head of the Bethanien international artist house in Kreuzberg), a “Zampano of the East” after the itinerant strongman in Fellini’s La Strada ; Babias called him “the latest ticket-collector in Kippenberger’s peep show.... Tannert now expects the Potsdam public to put up with Kippenberger’s late-pubescent erections.”
Andreas Quappe summarized him as follows in the Neue Zeit from East Berlin:
With Kippenberger it is always and only ever about Kippenberger. He remains a major artist of the eighties, an entertainer for yuppies who are sick of feeling awkward. A narcissus.... The painter first caused a real sensation when he had someone else work for him: in 1981, when a billboard painter painted the Dear Painter, Paint For Me cycle following his designs. A man in secure financial circumstances can obviously afford such investments in his career.
The press outside Berlin, too, which usually preferred to ignore Martin’s shows, took the opportunity to proclaim, with a visible sense of relief, that the party was over. “In retrospect, Kippenberger’s call to hedonism reads like the economic news from the eighties,” Annette Tietenberg wrote in the FAZ. “But since luxury, extravagance, and waste have taken a downturn since then, so too has the appeal of perpetual puberty. Even art isn’t all milk and honey any more.” As an artist, Kippenberger was passé, Tietenberg wrote, and he should take a break, for his own sake and that of the public.
“Kippenberger’s clowning plays a cynical game with the values of social and political propriety,” Sabine Vogel reprimanded in the Week. In the eighties, she wrote:
artists such as Kippenberger stood boldly on tables and bars and undertook excessive boozing and carousing while singing dirty songs. No sexism was too ordinary for this yuppie-existentialism to turn into an impudent bon mot, no racism too malicious, no anti-antifascism too close to the truth.... Today, in any case, none of that looks quite as fun as it used to. By the end of the eighties, the fun turned serious and people put away childish things: there was the rise of AIDS, and the fall of the Wall, and now adolescent macho games from conceited boys who never grow up, like Kippenberger, only suggest more jackass behavior in store. Present-day reality has overtaken the avant-garde of taboo-breaking artists.... The fall of the Wall has transformed how we look at Kippenberger’s works in particular. There is good and bad again. And good and evil. Since the recent debates about granting foreigners asylum, a photographed gravestone for “Our Little Bimbo” the dog is no longer just a dumb boyish prank. Since dumb German boys have started vandalizing [Jewish] cemeteries again, and had a good time with violence against foreigners, Kippenberger’s sticker “J.A.F.” for “Jesus Against Fascism” isn’t funny anymore. The rude gestures of irresponsibility in Kippenberger’s chilled-out helluva-guy works have gone flat.
Outraged at this witch-hunt, Roberto Ohrt, the curator of Martin’s Pompidou show, published a response in the (leftist) newspaper Die Beute (The Spoils). Under the headline “Only Other People Ever Go To Whorehouses,” he accused the critics of moral self-satisfaction and humorlessness, “unbelievable assumptions and flagrantly inverting the truth.... These supposedly leftist critics feel, not unjustly, that Kippenberger is talking directly to them when he unmasks their self-righteous moralizing.”
The criticism may have reached its high point around the Potsdam exhibition—Martin was never again on the receiving end of such unanimously hateful blows—but it never stopped altogether during his lifetime. Even artists in his circle were tarnished with guilt by association: his former student Tobias Rehberger, for example, said in a 1996 interview that “editors sent critics to my show and they wrote scathing reviews because there was this connection to Kippenberger.” When the Berlin Academy of the Arts decided in 1996 to award Martin the Käthe Kollwitz Prize—a decision that Christoph Tannert saw as “a kind of invitation to come home”—Fricke wrote in the taz that he was flabbergasted to see someone receive the honor who, in 1982, “had drawn starving Africans on a sheet of paper in a kind of Käthe Kollwitz parody and written ‘They say Blacks have longer ones—not true!’ underneath as a kind of commentary.” When Martin received the prize posthumously, shortly after his death, Fricke wrote in his obituary in the taz, “He was not a good person.”
SERIOUSLY UNSERIOUS
“Cheerful and relaxed, curious and unconceited”: this was Martin as Christoph Tannert saw him during the construction of the exhibition in Potsdam. The curator was the same age as Martin and had lived in Berlin at the same time—on the other side of the Wall. He had become a fan of Martin’s as a member of the Prenzlauer Berg art scene: “For me he was a punk, the way I would have wanted to be—functioning outside the system, between the systems.” He liked the combination of Martin’s snotty analyses of the West and his having his photograph taken with a soldier guarding the Wall in East Berlin, or in front of a Thirty Years of East Germany billboard. “To be seriously unserious was really alternative for us. Fun was absolutely alien in the GDR.” As a result, the Prenzlauer Berg scene especially enjoyed Martin’s slogans, some of which, Tannert said, took on whole new meanings in the society of scarcity in the East. “We use natural fart heating,” for example: “In a place where we had barely the absolute necessities, we liked seeing someone spread the fun with a cheerful/ironic aperçu like that.” And they felt validated and energized by the fact that musicians, performers, filmmakers, and artists appeared together at S.O.36: “In Prenzlauer Berg we were cooperating the same way.”
Tannert said that he didn’t experience much of a culture shock after the fall of the Wall, like so many of his peers did, because he had always had the feeling that the West had its own dark side—dingy Kreuzberg streets and courtyards, for example, which he knew from Martin’s photographs. Even the tattered copy of Martin’s book Women that Tannert had found somewhere was thrilling: “It wasn’t tacky like most of what came out of the East, but also not spic and span like stuff from the West—it was different. A book like that would not have been possible in the GDR: photographers at the time were harrassed if they didn’t take crisp, clear photos, and they certainly weren’t admitted into the Art Union. To see an artist in the West irritate people with these blurry, shaky photos and strange angles confirmed that I was on the right track: that it was really about making conscious conceptual decisions.”
Even if some of Tannert’s interpretations at the time turned out to be based on projection (“I realized that he didn’t care about the GDR, the same way he didn’t care about anything else”), he was glad to see Martin’s post-1989 openness toward East ern Germany, as it was now known: an alien land on German soil.
Martin was interested in everything different, he made fun of it and told jokes too but not as arrogantly as the other West Germans. The nooks and crannies of all this radical change were interesting to him—he wanted to know about it—while many West Germans only performed their pity about the fact that we in the GDR had had to live in such conditions. H
e wanted to learn about the contexts, he asked and he listened. And didn’t go around demanding approval either, acting like he had gone through exactly what the East Germans had. Not at all. The difference was totally clear to him. But there was still this interaction with the other side on completely equal footing.
Johannes Wohnseifer remembers Martin as being depressed during this period, as telling him that he couldn’t bear to look at all his old work again. It was certainly a strange re-encounter with the past: more than ten years before, he had fled Berlin for the Black Forest, and now he was coming back with work the Grässlins had collected there. The whole thing may have seemed too backward-looking for him, too closed-off. Anna Grässlin, on the other hand, says he was “enthusiastic” about the exhibition and in good spirits.
Tannert remembers especially Martin’s humor, as well as his enthusiasm, during the construction of the exhibition in the enormous old granary. In fact, spending time with Tannert—someone for whom many of the old pieces were new—may have been precisely what Martin found refreshing and encouraging. “Here, you know this one?” Martin would say, pulling one piece after another out of the crate, and they would enjoy it together—the crucified frog, for example.
Martin and the frog he had carved and crucified
© Sammlung Widauer
The Grässlins’ Kippenberger collection had never been fully shown, with all the early small pictures and late large ones, the Rest Center for Mothers pieces, the birch forest, the collages, the bath mats, the Hunger Family. Certainly not in the East. But that was precisely the place for it, in Tannert’s view. Friedrich Meschede of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) in Berlin had arranged it, along with Gisela Capitain; the show took place in a country that for decades had had a single artistic direction imposed on its people, socialist realism, which Martin in turn had referred to stylistically and thematically over and over again, in works like Likeable Communist Woman, Two Proletarian Inventresses on the Way to the Inventors’ Congress, and Cultural Peasant at Work Repairing Her Tractor. Tannert had experienced socialist realism as “fully moralizing, never ironic, never self-reflexive, downright Protestant in its purity,” so “it was absolutely essential for me to show, precisely in the former GDR, that a realistic perspective could be different.”
For Christoph Tannert the show was a personal triumph.
For the critics it was an insult.
For many of its visitors it was an irritation. One woman from the Potsdam Ministry was outraged at the artist’s gall, showing wooden transportation pallets as Rest Center for Mothers pieces. And then this dirty artist had had Joop, the flashy perfume manufacturer who was in the process of rediscovering his Potsdam roots, design the posters—“ornamental nonsense,” as Tannert described them.
For Martin it was an occasion to run wild with Michel Würthle on the night of the opening, after not having drunk a drop during the construction. He had come to a point where he no longer knew where and how to keep going.
YOU ARE MY WIFE
He stood in the doorway, took a deep breath, and sighed: “Wonnebergstrasse [literally “Merrymount Street”]! What a beautiful name!”
Minchie Huggler says that she will never forget that moment. “I liked him from the very beginning.”
She was a beautiful Japanese woman— Japonaise, as Martin called her—who lived in Zurich, the wife of a successful Swiss banker and mother of three daughters. She was working with Fram Katigawa, a gallerist, to provide public art for Tachikawa, a gigantic, bleak new district on the outskirts of Tokyo. “It was so sad there that we had to give it some poetry.” And she had discovered poetry in one of Martin’s sculptures: a lamppost in the form of a Santa Claus with a rod. No sooner had she said she was interested in it than Martin and Gisela Capitain showed up at her lovely dream-house. Minchie made sushi and took Martin to the station when he had to leave urgently after the meal. They spoke English with each other since she didn’t speak German—though she did, to Martin’s great delight, speak Swiss German: her Swiss mother-in-law had insisted on it. He thought that was great, and he kept making her say things for him in her Japanese/English/Swiss-German sing-song voice.
He liked her from the start.
This was in 1993. At the same time, since Zurich is a small town, Martin met Minchie’s beautiful daughter Kazu at the house of his friend Andi Stutz, a silk manufacturer. Kazu was sitting next to Martin at dinner, and the first thing he did was build a little sculpture out of the schnitzel, salad, and tomato sauce lying on her plate. He was “charming” to her, she says; he told her her high forehead reminded him of Romy Schneider.
Martin told another story to his friends in Austria: on the night he met Kazu, he was apparently so drunk that his head dropped face-first into a bowl of goulash, and when he looked up, she was just walking past, and he said, “You are my wife.”
Kazu didn’t know who Martin was. But she was intrigued, and inspired, and a bit afraid.
“Then I went back to Japan and was unhappy again.”
Kazu had lived in Japan until she was eleven: a happy childhood, she said, before the move to Switzerland. “If you only grow up in Tokyo, you never learn to communicate. Ask a Japanese what he thinks of something and he’ll say ‘I don’t know,’ and everyone will think that’s normal.” At school, she said, everything was learned by rote, “and it was very hard to stand up and express your own opinion.” Kazu returned to Japan after high school in Switzerland, to live in her family home “and get to know the culture.” She studied Japanese art history and aesthetics, specializing in kimonos. She remembers herself as being “young and always sad.”
A year later, Martin was sitting with Minchie Huggler and Jacqueline Burckhardt, co-editor of the art magazine Parkett, at the Kronenhalle restaurant in Zurich, and it came out that Minchie was Kazu’s mother. She encouraged him to contact her daughter, and he had her write her daughter’s address in his passport, on the page that already had Japanese stamps. Burckhardt suggested that he was much too old for Kazu, wasn’t he? Martin just stuck his tongue out at her: no problem, he said, “my girlfriends are always at least fifteen years younger than me.” They drank very good red wine at the meal, and eventually the conversation drifted. Martin announced that he wanted to marry Kazu and have Minchie as a beloved mother.
He wrote to Kazu from Syros, in April 1994. A fax came back with a poem from her that he tore up because he thought someone was playing a joke on him: according to Kazu, Martin “thought that the poem was so beautiful, it couldn’t have been written by a woman.” No matter how many jokes he played on others, he couldn’t stand feeling like someone was playing one on him. The correspondence with Kazu continued nonetheless. Martin flew to Tokyo, and the moment he stepped out of the taxi, she said, she felt for the first time like she was in over her head. “I thought: Oh God, a man like that, how will I ever be able to handle him? He was such a big man, it was almost a little scary.”
Martin with Kazu Huggler in Tokyo, 1995
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
There is a photograph of the two of them in a Japanese courtyard: Martin, tall and looking very German in a hat and a heavy winter overcoat, has his arm around Kazu, looking very Japanese: sixteen years younger, short, very petite in her kimono, with her black hair pulled tightly back. They look almost like father and daughter.
She called him “my barbarian.”
He called her “my little feather.”
He had come for a few weeks at first. They got engaged, saw each other again in Switzerland, and traveled together to Syros—“for a vacation,” Martin announced. In fact, what she needed was a vacation from him, and she went swimming in the sea with Michel Würthle’s daughter as often as she could. “Being with Martin was un-be-liev-a-bly stressful.” Their trip to Madrid “was the most stressful week of my life. I thought every morning that I was going to die. It was torture, the endless drinking, and you weren’t allowed to go home.” They w
ere always in company, with large groups, and always, she felt, “there was this pressure—everyone was waiting for him to stand up and put on another show.” The next morning, as always, he would get up punctually, “but physically he was totally at his limit.”
Minchie Huggler and her daughter both say that that is what they learned from Martin: to be there no matter what shape you’re in, and to never give up. “That’s what he demonstrated to the end.”
In Zurich, Martin had a little family circle. Jacqueline Burckhardt and Bice Curiger from Parkett were there, as well as the Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss, who appreciated Martin’s art and his humor as much as he did theirs. They recall him as “insanely fun and inspiring. He had such a refreshing way of looking at all the expressions of the time, whether art, film, or everyday life—he had something to say about everything, even a couple of chairs, that was witty, accurate, and entertaining.” As Swiss, they weren’t used to someone letting fly so directly at people and things, and they liked his confrontational approach, which struck them as extremely German: “this culture of conflict, this merciless way of treating each other—in Switzerland everything is always expressed diplomatically and in a balanced way.” On the other hand, his anarchy and anti-authoritarian behavior didn’t fit the image of the German in the least.
The art dealer and collector Thomas Ammann and his partner This Brunner also lived in Zurich. Brunner ran the only repertory cinema in Zurich, and Martin and Kazu stayed for a while in his guest apartment. Martin had made a drawing for him once, WC Fields at Brunner’s Bar (Brunner himself never drank but admired the notorious drinker, provocateur, and coiner of snappy phrases as much as Martin did.)
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