Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  Andi Stutz was a good friend of Martin’s—formerly a psychiatric nurse and thus used to dealing with difficult people. He turned to manufacturing fine silk handkerchiefs and ties, including one with a motif of one of Martin’s lampposts; Stutz liked to cook for Martin, drink with him, and collect his works.

  Finally, there was Birgit Küng, the gallerist, who also liked to drink but who ate less and less. (She died in 2005.) He liked it when she mothered him and cooked for him; for her, according to Brunner, Martin was “God: her favorite artist, the most important artist in her gallery. She always lit up whenever he was there or even when she heard his name.” He could visit her whenever he wanted, no matter how things were going with him; she also let him exhibit and curate at Art Space Fettstrasse 7a, her gallery with Albert Oehlen, named after Art Space in Hamburg and the address of Albert Oehlen’s and Werner Büttner’s studios.

  Now, Martin had found in the Hugglers another family—father, mother, and three children—in an open household. He paid court to the whole family, inviting them all out for caviar, drawing their Christmas cards for them (a dog carrying a Christmas tree in his paw), and giving them drawings as presents (a picture with rocks, since the Japanese have rock gardens, and a little feather on the sofa, “for the parents of the little turtledove”). When Kazu was in Tokyo and he was in Switzerland, he felt that he had to look after her sisters—in his own way. He met up with Anna, Kazu’s older sister, and raked her boyfriend over the coals; he went out with Joshi, Kazu’s thirteen-year-old sister, and her friends, “and he hacked the boys to pieces.” He also wanted to paint a family portrait: Anna with a Jewish star, since she had the nose for it (they said); Joshi with a Peruvian hat, since he thought she looked Peruvian; Kazu from behind; the mother another way (that the family no longer recalls); the father naked.

  Kazu’s father was probably the most skeptical in the family of this potential in-law. Martin was “an unusual man, hard to grasp, hard to understand, but strangely charming,” Peter Huggler said. When his wife reminded him that he used to laugh himself silly over Martin’s antics, he said that Martin’s speeches were wonderful, and the stories he told were very funny. It impressed the banker that Martin could stand up and talk for two or three hours straight. “Fidel Castro can do that, too. But Castro is very boring. Martin was a kind of Fidel Castro of the art world, minus the Marxism.”

  Kazu’s mother, though, was the most important figure for Martin among Kazu’s relatives. He adored her, and she adored him as both an artist and a person. She was an elegant, stylish woman from an aristocratic background—related to the Japanese imperial family, as Martin proudly told people—and at the same time warm, unaffected, and open. She took care of him, cooked for him while he sat in the kitchen with her, and calmed him down.

  Minchie Huggler knew what people were talking about when they said he was an embarrassment: “But it never embarrassed me. There was always truth in what he said.” Still, she admits, her German was not good enough to understand a lot of what he was saying, for example when he talked about her marriage. “Mommy,” Kazu told her, “it’s better if you don’t understand.”

  Martin was at a dinner at their house once with a group of people—bankers, investment people, and the like, talking about politics and business. “That probably bored him,” Kazu said. So he stood up, and Kazu cringed (“Now what?!”). Kazu’s delicate, extremely traditional Japanese grandmother (whom Martin had taught to play mau-mau in Tokyo) rebuked her for making a fuss, and then Martin invited the whole group to stand up and sing, which they actually did: the whole table, even Madame Butterfly (as Martin called one of the toupeed ladies), held hands and sang “Glow-Worm.” Minchie remembers the song as “quite moving”: “Shine, little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer / Shine, little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer / Lead us lest too far we wander / Love’s sweet voice is calling yonder / Shine, little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer / Shine, little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer / Light the path below, above / And lead us on to love.” “It was very beautiful,” Kazu said, “everyone enjoyed it.” They didn’t know what to think of it, exactly, and were a bit embarrassed but also amused.

  “He played with us a lot,” Minchie Huggler said. Martin often admonished her for being too serious: “You have no sense of play! You need to play. Play, play! You need to be sillier.”

  She thought it was too late for that: “I am a finance daughter.”

  But an artist, he told her, had to be able to play.

  He only got angry once, according to Minchie. It was when she asked him about his message as an artist. What do you mean message, he’d said, he didn’t have a message. But you are only on this earth for a limited time, she’d replied, at some point you’ll die and you should leave a lasting message behind. Martin got terribly angry and screamed at Kazu in her room: “Your mother! She’s saying bad things about me!”

  A GIANT AT REST

  Martin went to see Kazu in Tokyo for three months in the winter of 1994-95. He stayed in the family home, which stood as though fallen from outer space between the skyscrapers and faced inward to an enchanted garden in the courtyard. It was built in the twenties—not especially old, but still one of the oldest houses in the center of Tokyo.

  It was not the first time that Martin had been to Japan. He had come for two weeks in 1991 with Uli Strothjohann: a printshop had invited them to work there and given them lots of money and a show at the end. Martin made cold-point engravings and a very expensive artist book ( One Flew Over the Canarybirds Nest ), and Uli made latex pictures. They didn’t see much of the city—they worked all day and otherwise felt a bit like the Bill Murray character in Lost in Translation. Even Martin, who usually had something to say about everything, was speechless when he ordered spaghetti and saw what arrived on his plate. He was not doing well when he moved to Tokyo to be with Kazu. A fortune-teller in Frankfurt had suggested he might have cancer, but that wasn’t enough to get him to go see a doctor. His hands were red from alcohol to an extent that could not be ignored, his feet so swollen that he couldn’t wear normal shoes—Gisela Capitain had to send him felt slippers.

  Kazu had laid down the rules: that she “could not take care of him as a foreigner in my country with all of his usual energy and personality... I have to work, and you have to work.” Martin settled into her mother’s writing room and drew while Kazu worked in the library. The house was near a lively neighborhood with lots of bars, restaurants, and stores. For lunch they went to a schnitzel place where they had Japanese-style schnitzel: breaded and fried, with very finely chopped cabbage, rice and miso soup, and a small bottle of sake. Then back to the house for his afternoon nap, more work, and out again in the evening, but not for too long. “It was a nice rhythm.” They had dinner at a traditional restaurant, the Crane, sitting at the counter and eating fish, and then moved on to an old lady’s tiny jazz bar that was usually empty. He drew in some of the bars and in one miniscule karaoke bar sang “My Way,” big and loud, Martin-style, in his hat and coat. The Japanese clapped and thought it was great; Martin was in tears as he sang.

  He seemed “calm” to her in Tokyo, “calm in a beautiful way.” They drove to the ocean, to her traditional, straw-roofed house. “He probably liked not understanding anything, just sitting there and observing.” Martin had said in the Artfan interview that it was an advantage not to speak a language or to speak it badly: “You can pop into a café and not hear any of the shit being whined all around you unless you want to listen and try hard. You hear fragments and make a little rhyme out of them. You are in an isolation but with lots of people, I always need lots of people around me.”

  He sometimes managed a made-up Japanese of his own, by copying what he heard. “What he could do well was order: ‘One sake!’”

  It didn’t bother the Japanese that he was sitting so quietly in the corner, “they don’t say much themselves, after all.” Kazu believes that if he had understood everything he would have gotten more worked up; if he had been able t
o communicate, the whole stay in Japan would have been more dramatic. But he couldn’t express himself. “So he was like a giant at rest. And so they respected him. They probably knew that you really shouldn’t wake this man up. He was in a quiet phase.”

  Even when they got engaged, they did so quietly and without a big celebration. Martin had already imagined the wedding party: it would take place in Japan, where couples always got gifts of money in an envelope, two hundred dollars minimum, and he would invite “everybody.”

  He thought Kazu looked beautiful when she wore a kimono. On the other hand, he made fun of the tea ceremony she studied and attended in her kimono. He thought the whole fuss and ultra-respectfulness was exaggerated. And it was too expensive. “Come on, you don’t need to pay that much for a tea bag!”

  After a few weeks, the idyll began to crumble. At first Martin had liked sitting and drawing in the schnitzel restaurant, but “it just wasn’t working any more. Martin started acting up again, he was dissatisfied and aggressive. At some point it just wasn’t enough for him. Everything was too perfect.” Perhaps it was their idyllic coupledom, perhaps the boredom that took hold of him everywhere eventually and made him move on down his highway, perhaps he realized that his dream was about to collapse, or perhaps he felt that Kazu in Japan was too Japanese for him (“from another planet”) and too concerned with her own friends and social obligations within the imperial family. He was jealous when she went skiing with the Japanese prince; he couldn’t stand her friends. The only one of them he liked was Aki, a gallerist with an excellent knowledge of Japanese culture, who was very fat, very tall, and very gay, “very conspicuous for a Japanese man.” He was the son of a famous sumo wrestler who had died young, and he was “hypernervous, hypersensitive, highly intelligent.” He arranged to get Martin Japanese comic books as models for his paintings.

  Martin felt neglected, and Kazu felt overwhelmed. She told him that he was expecting too much from her. “Eventually it couldn’t go on. Then there was nothing to do except run away. Leave him sitting in the restaurant and run out the door.” She went out with him at night less and less often.

  So Martin found himself staying at home in the evening with Kazu’s housekeeper—he thought she was great, and he knew she would always be there. Toshko, almost eighty, was a tiny woman who had once been the family’s governess and spoke perfect English and French, having worked at the Japanese embassy in Bern, Switzerland. Martin liked sitting at the big kitchen table with her with the TV on while she was cooking. Once, when he said that he’d like her to make him coq au vin, “it was the coq-au-vin record, every night for two straight weeks. But he didn’t say anything. He thought it was funny.”

  Martin continued to draw—in earnest, Gisela Capitain said, “like a man possessed and with absolute intensity.” He had a hundred and fifty drawings by the end, and he faxed them all to Zurich. “It was endless, they came rolling out of the fax machine like toilet paper,” Minchie Huggler said. (Martin promised a drawing each as presents to Minchie and her husband, and Peter Huggler picked the exact one that Martin himself thought was the best, which made him insanely angry: it took him a day to get over the fact that “now he’s gone and taken the best one!”)

  Martin called the show of his drawings at the Borgmann Capitain Gallery Beyond the Beyond , and, Capitain said, “people came in droves, it was like everyone saw the light, even museum people suddenly felt called upon to say that he was a real artist. The whole city was talking about it, Benedikt Taschen bought twenty drawings.” After years of doldrums, Martin had the feeling that “the floodgates were opened.”

  In retrospect, Martin’s stay in Tokyo seemed like an experiment to Kazu and she wonders how she could have lasted as long as she did. After the experiment failed, he returned to Germany depressed and in despair. Three glasses were enough to get Martin drunk—he wasn’t used to it any more. Capitain put him in a taxi to the Hotel Chelsea. Soon afterward he traveled to Essen to see his friend Meese, who handed him off to Meuser in Düsseldorf after a few days when he couldn’t take it any longer. Meuser’s wife, Nanette, said she wanted him not to drink alcohol in the mornings, and Martin said, “That’s what I want, too.”

  Germany in winter wasn’t exactly designed to cheer him up: “so many gray barbarians here,” he wrote to Kazu in Tokyo.

  Martin went back to Sankt Georgen; he and Kazu wrote to each other, and in Zurich they spent a little more time together. Eventually Martin told her that he didn’t want to wait any longer, she had to decide—and so she did. They were both sad. He gave Kazu his engagement ring and said she should tie a black ribbon around both rings and put them in a box he had given her once. And so, bound with a mourning ribbon, they lay there as in a coffin. For the second time, Martin had to carry to the grave his attempt to start a family.

  [ 1 ] Kippenberger commissioned a large wooden bust of Richard von Weizsäcker, Germany’s president, then photographed it and sawed it into slats of different lengths, a reference to the slats produced by Georg Herold in the early 1980s. Little photographs of the destroyed bust, in plastic cases, dangled from each slat like keyrings.

  [ 2 ] Sometimes translated Heavy Lad ; the original title is Heavy Burschi . “Heavy” here has the sense of “not easygoing” rather than “overweight”; Burschi is dialect for “fellow, little guy, lad.” The title plays on an earlier work, Heavy Mädel : Mädel means “girl,” and “ Heavy Mädel ” sounds almost exactly like “heavy metal.” A Heavy Burschi , then, is the male counterpart of a Heavy Mädel .

  [ 3 ] The German is “ Schlüpfer-Stürmer ,” literally “panty stormer” but in this case also suggesting Der Stürmer , a Nazi propaganda weekly

  CHAPTER TEN

  JENNERSDORF

  We All Need Somebody To Lean On : that’s what Martin called his 1986 show at Christian Nagel’s in Munich. Bronze broomsticks leaning against the wall.

  Ten years later, he drew himself as half-boy (with crew cut), half-old-man, leaning on his wife’s shoulder with his arm around her, pencil in his hand. It was a self-portrait on a tablecloth, made in his new regular hangout, the restaurant at the Hotel Raffel in his new home, Jennersdorf. The owner said Martin drew it at 1 a.m. on Christmas night. A couple of days earlier was the first time Martin’s new friends had seen him without him cracking any jokes: he was just back from the doctor, who had sent him to the hospital for further tests two days before Christmas. They told him they didn’t find anything, but six weeks later, at a hospital in Vienna, came the official diagnosis: liver cancer, cirrhosis, hepatitis.

  He was always craving: drugs, alcohol, love, cigarettes, recognition, good art. He was full of longing, an addictive personality. “Addiction [ Sucht ] is just searching [ suchen ],” he said in the interview with Jutta Koether. He was always searching for people who wanted the same thing he did: “something better.”

  On a sticker that Martin put up all over Berlin in the late seventies, especially in the bar toilets, was his photograph and address with the words “Man Seeking Woman.” It was more than just a good joke: he actually was seeking a woman, a home. And in the end, he found her. Maybe he knew that he no longer had time to seek—it was time to find.

  “Women are goddesses,” Martin said in a 1992 interview, even if he treated them often enough as the opposite. “They are above us in the hierarchy. Who do you see sitting on a bench in the park? Old women. There are no old men. It’s the women who survive, not us.”

  Now he had found his goddess: beautiful, intelligent, charming, and successful, an experienced woman who loved to cook and cooked well, someone he was proud of. When Martin was young, his girlfriends were always older than he was, but the older he got, the younger they got. This time it was different: Elfie Semotan was twelve years older than Martin and the mother of two sons, Ivo (21) and August (13). “She’s 53, I was born in ’53!” For Martin, it was a sign. She had already been married to an artist: Kurt Kocherscheidt, who had died at 49 after years with a serious heart ailment
. This time, when Michel Würthle came up to Martin with his favorite phrase, a running gag between the two—“Fucked yet today?”—Martin answered, “I don’t fuck, I love.”

  Martin and Elfie met at Michel’s fiftieth birthday party on Syros. Her husband had been an old friend of Michel’s from Vienna; he had died nine months earlier, after the last of a series of heart operations. Elfie, who had become well known for her fashion and advertising photography, had promised to be the photographer at Michel’s party. Martin was the only one there she avoided. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in him, but the whole fuss around him got on her nerves: “Everyone bowed down to him so piously and laughed at all his jokes, I thought I sure didn’t need to join in.” And he noticed. At some point he came up to her and asked if she wouldn’t mind taking his picture too. He so liked having his picture taken.

  That was in 1993. Two years later, they saw each other again at Club an der Grenze (Club on the Border), at an opening for one of Michel’s shows in the Burgenland. “Where’s the widow?” Martin asked, and when he saw her, while a club member was in the middle of a speech, he took her hand and kissed it and said, “Ah, you’re here, too, how lovely.”

  He gave another long, meandering speech of his own that night. Most of the people quickly fled; only a few loyal listeners stuck it out, such as Michel, and Elfie. At one point Martin climbed off the table and said to Elfie, “Please, come here, sit with me.” “He was drunk and tired, but he told me the most wonderful things: what he wanted to do, how he’d do it, our whole life together. It was unbelievably seductive. The most poetic thing I have ever heard in my life, how he imagined our lives together. It was an idea that developed very quickly, this possibility.”