Her impression was that Martin was satisfied with his work. “Very satisfied.”
CLUB ON THE BORDER
Jennersdorf was ideal for Martin: small, manageable, easy to crack. That’s what idyllic places were for, but at the same time, he would lose interest if they got too cozy and comfortable. In Jennersdorf there were enough artists and other people for Martin to challenge and generate some friction with. And so he did, with great delight.
“Martin didn’t exactly make things easy for the other people there,” Elfie said. “They had to suffer.” For example, one night in the Club on the Border, when he told a story that never ended but the others weren’t allowed to start eating until he was through. Again and again he added something, or repeated something, until everybody was thoroughly pissed off.
The Club on the Border was founded in Windisch-Minihof not long before Martin’s arrival. Over the years, many Viennese artists, set designers, musicians, and the like had bought first or second homes there, and they founded the Club to have a place where they could meet, talk, dance, sing, argue, cook together, or (if they were arriving from the city on a Friday night) have someone cook for them. Among the few non-resident members of the club were Michel Würthle and Reinald Nohal from the Paris Bar in Berlin. The old farmhouse on a hill that held the club belonged to Reinhard Knaus, who lived upstairs and managed it. The low Burgenland building with an inner courtyard had been thoroughly renovated, and its beauty came from its simplicity: unfinished floors, unfinished wooden tables, whitewashed walls, wood-burning stoves to cook on and in. Many of the things in the club had been made by artists: the stove by Pichler, the bar by Kocherscheidt, and accompanying barstools designed by Martin, with wooden seats made to look like Alka-Seltzer tablets.
Martin quickly made an ally of Knaus, who became his companion, chauffeur, and all-around assistant, also building the models for Martin’s concrete dwarves with cannons and heaps of cannonballs. Knaus often fetched Martin for lunch, drove him back home, and then fetched him again in the evening, at eight and not a minute later. On Fridays, Martin would sit down with him in the club’s open kitchen and watch him cook. “Martin stuck by Reinhard and backed him up,” Margarete Heck said. And vice versa: “Whenever anyone breathed a word against Martin, Reinhard went wild.” Once, when a judge from the village insulted Martin, Knaus—a very strong man—turned him upside down, carried him out the door, and stuck him head-first into the snow.
One night, the two allies, under Martin’s direction, cooked together in the club: noodle casserole, needless to say. “There was more and more,” ninety portions for thirty people by the time they were done, so everyone had to take some home with them, which they did with less than total enthusiasm: the noodles were rock-hard. At least the appetizers were soft: After Eight mints. Martin also drew a menu for the occasion: a self-portrait with “our today’s great menu” in front of his belly.
I
After choco
II
Vegetable marks not deutsch + oxtail-marrow soupette
III
Mommy’s birthdaywishhappy
with
Insalata seed & sweetbird
IV
Dessert al desserto as usual
encl.: vino in very verrytas
costa cordalis 140, – [1]
Then Martin came up with something that really shattered the peaceful country life of this idyllic artist colony with its tastefully renovated houses and handwritten menus: a helipad in the shape of a giant fried egg on the meadow next to the club. Kurt Kocherscheidt had died of heart failure, after all—not in Jennersdorf, but it might easily have been in Jennersdorf, in which case he would have had to be flown out by helicopter. Some people saw Martin’s landing pad as an affectionate homage to his predecessor, others as the worst possible tastelessness.
Knaus built a model helipad with little lights and all the rest of the paraphernalia. One evening, a model-airplane expert was hired for a test flight, but there was too much wind.
The fried-egg helipad never was built; Merlicek’s and Pichler’s opposition was too vehement. Over our dead bodies, they said. So Martin produced a drawing of a cemetery with two gravestones bearing the names of his antagonists and declared, “OK then, we’ll hire some hit men from Romania, there’s a discount for two—only a thousand marks.” It became a catchphrase in Windisch-Minihof: even today, whenever Pichler gets bossy, someone says, “We better get some Romanians!”
After Kocherscheidt’s death, Pichler was the “big boss,” the “pope,” the undisputed top dog, as everyone called him. But Martin wanted to be the big boss too, as always. The two artists inevitably collided. Opinions differ today about whether their run-ins had a more sporting character or whether their aversion to each other was too intense to be called a game. But one thing is clear: in his seclusion, Martin needed Pichler as a sparring partner worth the effort.
Their artistic views could not have been more different. Fifteen years earlier, in Martin and Oehlen’s “Address to the Brainless,” they had already written off Pichler’s sculptures as “shit.” Pichler represented the noble calling of the Great Artist, holed up in his farmstead in St. Martin an der Raab making unsellable sculptures and structures, which he financed with drawings. “Stereometrically strict cult structures,” as the SDZ put it in a piece on his seventieth birthday:
one individual enclosure after another in an almost stately rhythm, each one with its corresponding materiality and purposeful lighting giving rise to high sculptural qualities, but at the same time attaining a quality of almost sacred ritual in its formal interchange with the objects introduced into it.
Then Martin showed up with his art created out of the banalities of everyday life, his works churned out one after another in just about the least stately rhythm imaginable.
Martin was constantly thinking up new little pranks, insults, and nasty tricks. Who is the most powerful? Who is Number One? Perhaps most importantly: Who is the best-dressed man in the club? Pichler dressed so that everything matched, so Martin went him one better and covered himself head to toe in Burberry plaid: shirt, pants, umbrella, sports coat, hat, and matching Burlington socks. Or he planned to cross out the “St.” and “an der Raab” on the road sign for “St. Martin an der Raab,” where Pichler lived, and add “Kippenberger,” “so that every time he went home he would have to think about me.” When Pichler was preparing for his show at the eminent Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Martin spread the rumor that the Stedelijk’s director, Rudi Fuchs, had died.
Sabine Achleitner, Jörg Schlick’s wife, was at a party at Club on the Border where “you could feel the kind of aggression being directed at Martin”—until finally Pichler threw a pie in his face. “So Martin took it farther, smeared the pie all over his face and had Jörg take his picture, so that he drew the attention to himself and also calmed the aggressivity in the room. Martin inflated it so far that in the end Pichler felt more insulted than him.”
Martin never succeeded in ousting the top dog, even if the Club did split into two camps to some extent, with the younger members siding with him. But he had his fun.
That summer, Martin was preparing for the major, long-planned but postponed “Respective 1997–1976” at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva, where his old friends from Nice, Christian Bernard and Axel Huber, were working. It was a powerful show: Martin filled a whole building with his works, from the lampposts to the allotment gardens (a.k.a. Schreber-gardens). Martin gave Daniel Baumann, the young Geneva curator, his last big interview, for the catalog. Baumann said, “The best thing was to sit next to him and just see how the ideas came out—I sat there open-mouthed: boom-boom-boom, how to lay out the catalog, how to hang the show... It was genius, that energy, that richness.” Martin was doing well that summer: eating a bit healthier for Elfie’s sake, drinking a bit less, spending time outside in the fresh air, swimming, and sometimes walking miles from the studio to the Raffel, so briskly that the mu
ch younger Baumann could barely keep up with him.
Veit Loers—who by then had left Kassel to be the museum director at Mönchengladbach—also came to Jennersdorf to work with Martin, preparing The Eggman and His Outriggers, the major show in the Abteiberg Museum that would open a few days after the Geneva show. Loers was hoping to stay with Martin and Elfie, but Martin sent him to the Raffel: “Museum directors have to spend the night in hotels.” (Loers suspects he was trying to give the hotel some more business.) It was fun anyway: Martin previewed the Medusa pictures in his studio, carrying them past Elfie, Loers, and Hans Weigand (the Vienna artist who was doing the catalog with Martin) “like a ring card girl,” in Loers’s words. In the evenings, the men made inroads into the expensive wine that the Grässlin family had given him for his wedding.
“1996: Returns to the subject of eggs and noodles with renewed interest,” Martin wrote in his artist bio. When Daniel Baumann asked him how he had come up with the idea to make egg pictures, Martin said, “In painting you have to be on the lookout: what windfall is still left that you can paint. Justice has not been done to the egg, justice has not been done to the fried egg, the banana was already taken, by Warhol. So you take a form, it’s always about sharp edges, a square, this and that format, the golden section, but an egg is white and blah, how can you make that into a colorful picture? If you turn it around, this way and that, you’ll come up with something.” He had always suffered under the dictatorship of the square in art and architecture—he always felt it was too angular, cool, perfect, straightforward, and closed-off. The only squares he accepted were checks, like the red checked tablecloths in Italian restaurants: he used them in his Prize Pictures, brightly colored and obviously hand-painted.
Martin spent months working with Hans Weigand to collect egg motifs for the catalog from anywhere and everywhere and then left the catalog’s design up to Weigand. They were planning to do a second book later, about noodles. They met up in the Burgenland, or for lunch at Café Engländer in Vienna, and talked about everything, all the exhibitions—Martin laid into the whole art scene. “Schmalix is worthless!” [2] he shouted across the coffeehouse.
Elfie and Martin took several trips together that year. They went to exhibition openings and to Copenhagen, also to Greece a few times—they wanted to build a house for themselves on Syros. The spartan tower Martin had dreamed of as a bachelor (a room to work in and a room to sleep in) had grown in his mind to a whole house, with a darkroom, studio, kitchen, shady inner courtyard, and rooms of their own for Ivo, August, and Helena. Lukas Baumewerd, the architect who had worked on the large METRO- Net sculptures for Kassel and Münster, was drawing up plans. Martin also wanted to do more work with his Modern Art Museum on Syros: that year he invited Johannes Wohnseifer and Michel Majerus, the young artist from Luxembourg who would die in a plane crash only a few years later. Martin’s Athens gallerist, Eleni Koroneou, said that with Elfie at his side “he was calmer, he felt safe and secure.” “Elfie!” he would cry out when she wasn’t next to him, “Where is my Elfie?”
At an Athens event hosted by Dakis Ioannidis, a major Greek collector, Martin once again appeared as a provocateur: on the podium with such famous artists as Jeff Koons and Joseph Kosuth, he suddenly pulled out a red wooden cellphone and pretended to talk into it, totally seriously, for ten minutes, without anyone trying to stop him. He also criticized Paul McCarthy and complained about his hotel. In the fall he became tired and his back started to ache—from all the work he had been doing, he said. When Martin Prinzhorn met him at Café Engländer shortly before Christmas and was shocked at how terrible he looked, Martin said calmly and with few words that it would all be over soon, he was going to go meet his dead mother on cloud nine. “He was acting very strange and seemed very depressed.”
We celebrated Christmas together again, as he wanted. The family came to him: our sister Tina, with Lisa, Philipp, and Lars; Gabi with Helena. He wanted us to come even though he was in a lot of pain and was tired; he had tests to undergo in the hospital two days before Christmas. Even though he was not in good shape, there was no mercy: the rituals had to be carried out—Christmas tree, presents, turkey, plus the Jennersdorf tour from the Raffel to the Club on the Border. (He had called it “furnishing proof” in our father’s case, when our father had gathered all his energies for one last Christmas shortly before his own death.)
It was Christmas night, 1 a.m. on December 26, when he drew himself leaning on Elfie’s shoulder in the Raffel. The Raffel was his second home, so he had had business cards printed, complete with his office hours (“Mo.–Sa. 12.00–13.30”). It was central located, though not particularly nice, and the farthest thing imaginable from a trendy restaurant: a conference hotel with fake-leather benches and fake plants on columns, the waitresses dressed in black with little white aprons.
The tablecloth drawing doesn’t only show Martin with Elfie: leaning against their table is a chicken ladder with Frau Martha, the waitress, standing on it holding a cigarette box. Next to her is written “Now after 43 minutes the HB” (a brand of cigarettes). Behind Elfie and Martin, who are drawn small, like children, stands the Great Father Kampel, a balloon in each hand: one says “Old but goody,” the other says “No way Nouvelle Cuisine.” Raffel served hearty traditional dishes, just like Martin liked. And when the food didn’t come to the table fast enough, he would march into the kitchen to spur them on.
Old but Goody: Herr Kampel still works in the restaurant every day except Christmas and plans to keep working full-time until he’s ninety (then switch to half-days). He is an old-school Austrian innkeeper with all the polite finesses, down to kissing ladies’ hands. He and Martin adopted each other, as father and son, without the conflicts, complexes, and problems—and the common history—that usually go with that relationship. Reinhard Knaus said that Kampel almost never sat down at the table with the other Club members in all the years he was there, or if he did, it was for five minutes at most. But with Martin he sat for hours, and he also stood up to Martin when his guests couldn’t take any more of his endless speeches. Kampel gave Martin what he wanted: homemade noodle soup and special treatment for being an artist. “I had to be with him all the time,” Kampel said. “He was very grateful for the attention. He needed warmth.”
Sometimes, when he came home from the Raffel at two or three in the morning, Martin went to the studio and painted through the night, and then appeared at the hotel for breakfast the next morning. When he didn’t hike to the Raffel on foot or have Knaus fetch him, he drove his egg wagon. In this isolated setting he needed a vehicle, but he couldn’t drive a car without a license—only a three-wheeler. He got a little Italian vehicle and then, on its cargo bed, had an enormous egg built. That is what he drove through the village, with his theme song blaring from a loudspeaker: “Ding-a-ling-a-ling, Here Comes the Eggman.” (Or AC/DC, or Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries, depending on his mood.) He planned to keep surprise eggs for the village children in a drawer of the big egg, and he wanted to have ads for the Raffel painted on the egg in mirror writing (for rear-view windows), in exchange for the good bordeaux he liked so much. But he was not able to carry out those plans. Elfie’s photograph of the egg wagon in the snow would become the last of Martin’s 178 posters, for steirischer herbst 1997—he arranged it with Jörg Schlick before he died.
The egg wagon in Jennersdorf, 1997
© Elfie Semotan
Martin “was always up for anything fun,” Kampel said. Since Kampel spent a lot of time during the summer at the public pool, where he ran a second restaurant, and since Elfie went swimming every day when she was there, they came up with the idea of a Raffel Relay Race ( Raffel-Staffel in German). The training consisted of drinking Ramazzotti, and Knaus (who didn’t swim) was supposed to pull a bottle of Ramazzotti on a string through the water ahead of the swimmers, like the rabbit in a greyhound race; it would be a hundred-meter race, and the loser would owe the winner a bottle of champagne. But again, it never took plac
e. Still, Kampel often wore the red baseball cap that they had had made for the race.
Kampel has never washed the tablecloth with Martin’s drawing and the food stains still on it, and every time I see him he asks after Helena, because, he says, Martin loved her so much. On the wall, between the plastic flowers and columns, still hangs Martin’s fake Biennale poster, showing him in front of the German Pavilion in Venice in Elfie’s honeymoon photograph. At one point on the night before Martin set out for his last exhibition marathon in January 1997—Zurich, Geneva, Mönchengladbach—he rushed out to the car to get the poster, right away, right now, Knaus had to frame it and hang it. “He left the next day, and he never came back.”
“He was a truly special person,” Ernst Kampel said. “I miss him very much.”
THE END
But time —
But time —
But time.
As a young man, Martin printed these lines by the French singer Gilbert Bécaud in Through Puberty to Success. He often said that he didn’t have much time. “I dont have time to wait eight years to hang in the Ludwig Museum,” he had said; that’s why he had to get attention right away with his extreme behavior. “I always have to work for the present moment because of this short span of time that you have as an individual.”
He didn’t have time because he would die of cancer; he was convinced of that quite early on—an old fortune-teller in Frankfurt had predicted it. One Family One Line: Our mother had breast cancer, our father died of skin cancer, our grandfather died of cancer of the jaw.
“If someone didn’t understand him right away, he just packed up his fliers and left,” says Attila Corbaci, the Viennese restaurant owner. “He had no time for people to request permits or call meetings.” So he did whatever it was and pushed and shoved and got on everyone’s nerves with his impatience. Corbaci was no longer surprised when he heard how quickly Martin had decided to get married: “He was a man who painted a picture in a day, married his wife in a day, lived his life in a day.” In most of the Medusa pictures, Martin painted himself with a naked upper body: the only thing he was wearing was a wristwatch.
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