“Never give up before it’s too late” is a line in “Ciao Mega Art Baby,” a poem that Martin put on all the guests’ tables at the opening for the Geneva exhibition in January 1997 and that the museum director bound as a little booklet and gave to Martin’s friends at his burial two months later. He called one of his early pictures Work Until Everything’s Cleared Up, and that is exactly what he did. “Cirrhosis of the liver is no excuse for bad art” is another line from his poem.
At the end, everything went quickly. There was an opening in Zurich at Birgit Küng’s on January 28, marking the end of a year-long exhibition project: Albert Oehlen presents Martin Kippenberger. Martin Kippenberger presents Noodles. Noodles represent the end of Fettstrasse 7a. The invitation showed a plate of spaghetti bolognese. Two days later, on January 30, when he already was in a lot of pain and could barely walk, Kippenberger sans peine (“Kippenberger Made Easy” but literally “Painless Kippenberger”) opened in Geneva; on February 1, The Eggman and His Outriggers opened in Mönchengladbach, near the Dutch border by Düsseldorf.
Martin “really pulled himself together” for the construction of that exhibition, the museum director Veit Loers said. He didn’t talk much but still cracked jokes. Daniel Buchholz, shocked like many people to see Martin grown so small and sitting in a wheelchair at the opening, asked him what had happened. “Don’t drink so much and don’t smoke so much. Not worth it,” Martin answered—with a cigarette in his hand, even in the museum. “Hey, tall girl,” he greeted Andrea Stappert, “how’s the air up there?” Then he rolled with her through the show and into the Spiderman Studio, where he had his picture taken in the wheelchair. He told everyone who asked that he was having back troubles. When Anna Grässlin looked over at him at one point during the meal after the opening, he rolled his eyes upward and pointed up at Heaven.
“Cant mak it,” Martin wrote in his egg book in shaky handwriting on that February 1, to a museum employee who was in the hospital and had asked for a signed catalog, “tomorrow in the hospital too.” On March 7, he was dead.
Martin had always bounced back and was never sick. Johannes Wohnseifer couldn’t believe that he would die: “I had such faith that nothing would happen to him.” He’d had headaches or toothaches or stomachaches, of course, but just took aspirin, got up, and went back to work. He didn’t get sick because he didn’t want to get sick, which was also why he went on his cures so regularly: so that he could keep going. He was afraid of getting really sick, of being helpless, and also of going to the doctor and finding out the truth. The only medical treatment he got regularly was from Heliod Spiekermann, his dentist, which may have been out of vanity more than anything else.
Martin always revealed his weaknesses and injuries, his “Alcohol Torture” (to use the title of one of his early self-portraits) and bloated belly—he exposed them, turned them into art. As an artist, he held the reins himself. He put off as long as he could the need to give them up—he was horrified at the prospect, since he knew what it would mean. “Super-Childhood,” as he put it in one of his songs, “Back to the Super-Childhood.” He said to Jutta Koether:
I have seen it, the summit of super-childhood. When my father died of cancer, he was just like my baby. And I’ll die of cancer the same way. I don’t know if cancer is more pleasant than being run over by a bus. I don’t know yet how it feels inside. I don’t insist on having it long and dirty, but my father also thought he’d survive. It took him six years, with all these heart attacks, and whatever else goes with it—and beat it! And, of course, you are there all the time. And suddenly he can dress himself, at Christmas, by way of exception. Just to furnish proof. It’s about proof. In that I’m quite similar to my father.
For Beuys, according to his biographer Heiner Stachelhaus, death was a “mythical event, a magical ritual.” For Martin it was something to get through as quickly and unobtrusively as he could. “The moment he got to the hospital,” Elfie said, “he gave up.”
Hospital, school, jail, army—for Martin, they were all the same, institutions that rob you of your freedom. He sometimes put apartments and museums in the same category. That was why he always tried to avoid institutions and authorities, why he always behaved well (as he saw it), at least well enough not to end up in jail. That would have been a “creeping death”: “Say 20 years, no life, no rights, no nothing, it’s the worst thing anyone could wish on you.” As a result, he was always polite to the police: “I never do anything that’s not allowed.” He could never handle “bureaucracy,” as he called it, “not with cars or planes or electronic devices. So I keep quiet. Or find someone to start the motor or screw in the light bulb.” He never officially left the church for the same reason: “I toe all the lines so that no one will catch me. So as far as my file goes, too, I’m a dear boy.” He wanted to make it to Heaven after all. Just not Hell. That would be even worse than a life sentence. No one comes back from Hell.
Then, at the end of his life, he ended up where he never wanted to be: in a closed institution. At the AKH general hospital in Vienna, his worst nightmares came true and, deathly ill, he was criticized, reprimanded, ordered around. The cleaning lady kicked his wife out of his room; the caregiver was nowhere to be found; the nurses were hidden away in their room at the farthest end of the hallway. They had no interest in starting a motor for him, screwing in a light bulb, easing his pain. They helped grouchily and reluctantly, if at all. When a visitor wanted to lift Martin into his wheelchair and needed help, they said, “he was already out today.” Then, when he got back from his trip to the smoking room (he smoked to the end, even when he could barely hold the cigarette), too late for the dinner he couldn’t eat anyway, they scolded him like he was a first-grader again. What he always demanded and often gave others, respect, was denied him at the AKH.
His liver had poisoned his body. He was confused and crystal clear at the same time—sometimes aggressive but still always concerned about others. When our sister Bine came to visit him, the most important thing for him was to find out where she was staying, to make sure that she didn’t have to go to a hotel but could stay in his and Elfie’s apartment. Past and present, fantasy and reality blurred together: “They’ve stuck me in a haunted-house ride,” he said, after he was sent for another MRI, and he described exhibitions he had seen in the more or less distant past as though he had just been there.
He knew that no one could help him there, that no one could cure him anymore, so there was only one thing he wanted: “to go home,” like E.T., whom he had so often felt like in his life. On a high floor of the hospital ward he thought he was in a New York skyscraper and that it was time to go downstairs to the hotel bar. “Get me out of here,” he begged everyone who visited him. Even when he had tubes in him, he tried to run away. So they tied him down.
Ten days after his death, at the posthumous awarding of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, his Medusa exhibition opened at the Berlin Academy of Arts. The critic Dieter Bachmann described Géricault’s painting as a wake: “Does the catastrophe he is painting lie behind him or ahead of him?” Martin looked in his Medusa pictures the way he looked while he was dying in the hospital. The catalog presented another, happier picture: Elfie’s photos of their honeymoon, his dance with the pigeons. Pictures of a Happy End.
Martin chose his last resting place: when he came to Jennersdorf he told his stepsons, August and Ivo, that he wanted to be buried up on the top of the hill there, in the small village cemetery where their father was already buried. A few years earlier, Martin had spoken of his own death notice and funeral as part of his art, of his total body of work, along with the painting and sculpture and dance, wondering “whether it would add up to a respectable Kippenberger or not.” He cared how the public would react—“what expressions people would have on their faces”—who would cry and who wouldn’t. He imagined his funeral as a day of reckoning.
But when the time actually approached he didn’t have the strength—and maybe didn’t even want—to stage-manage hi
s own burial the way our father had. It was a ghastly day, gloomy and freezing cold, and a silent funeral: no ceremony, no music, no funeral sermon. At some point we set out for the cemetery, the church bells tolled, and when they stopped it was even more silent than before. Heimo Zobernig captured it all on film, in place of the movie he had wanted to make with Martin. Karel Schampers, the director of the Rotterdam Museum, spoke a few words at the grave, and then the line of waiting friends filed past, “like a penitent’s pilgrimage,” Isabelle Graw said. Werner Büttner said later, “We waited, frozen stiff and morbid, to walk past the grave.” Eventually it got to be too much for the gravediggers. Dressed in scruffy rags like caricatures of themselves, they decided it was taking too long—it was Friday afternoon, they wanted to go home and eat their roast pork—so they started shoveling dirt into the grave in the middle of the funeral. Quitting time, they said. An argument started, it almost came to blows, and only the prospect of an additional special fee calmed them down.
Everyone said afterward that it was as if Martin had scripted it. As though he had taken the reins one last time, played a little joke, shocked his audience, and had his fun. Then everyone went to the Raffel for the wake.
In his speech by the grave, Karel Schampers recalled the words on Martin’s Opinion Picture: Spiral from 1985. “Embarrassment” is written in the middle of the picture, and around it “indecisiveness, politeness, mess, inanity, security, gaiety, eternity, freedom of expression, insecurity, humanity, clarity, triviality, unity, willingness to take risks.” “That is Martin all over,” Schampers said, “so basic and yet so vulnerable.”
[ 1 ] On “Insalata seed & sweetbird,” the pun on “cost” refers to Costa Cordalis, a Greek-German singer; 140,– shillings was a little under $15.
[ 2 ] Hubert Schmalix, Austrian artist. The original German is cleverer: “ Schmalix mal nix .”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE ART OF BEING A PERSON
Martin once reflected on what it might mean to be old. He wanted to grow old and was convinced that he would, despite his fear that he would die young: “My chips are on seventy-two years.” He imagined how he would sit in a café in Italy as an old man telling stories about his life. He enjoyed the peaceful picture for a moment, and then his doubts came back: “But then no one believes you and you’re alone again.”
Those were always the issues with him: Belief. Struggle. And being alone.
He told Diedrich Diederichsen in an interview for the book B that as a boy in boarding school he had once stood all alone on a hilltop, howling; he had once again been “jerking off so that the bed shook” and his schoolmates had tattled, and he’d gotten a thrashing, and it was “really going like shit” for him. “Then a lightning flash came and I thought: Don’t worry about it, you’re one of the chosen.... Since then it’s easy to deal with everything, no problems with anybody.... Since then I’ve been above it all. Sounds stupid but that’s how it is.” A few years later, Martin told another story of his childhood to people around the pool at a Greek collector’s house: once, when his sisters had tormented and spanked him yet again, he saw a light, and on the next day his mother had told his sisters to leave Martin alone. Nothing ever happened to him after that.
He had his camouflage outfit, and as a result he was a free man.
He believed in himself and in art from the beginning—as a child he thought he would become a famous artist; as a teenager he thought he’d make millions. This belief gave him the strength to work like a man possessed and to get up again every time he was knocked down. His enormous self-confidence seemed to give him the sense of being on a mission, according to Angelika Margull, his friend from the Berlin days. Other friends from those early years—when Martin had not yet produced much in the way of visible works of art—put it in the same terms: they believed in him. From the start.
And Martin expected them to. “If you take two aspirin and are constantly saying ‘It’s not working, it’s not working!’ then of course it won’t work.” Martin liked believing in things too, from the herbal medicine a healer prescribed for him (“one drink for the heart, another for the kidneys, another for the liver, another for the spleen, another for the brain—I had to build a whole bar”), to “soul drops” (a German health product made from green walnuts), to Tarot cards. And in people: “Because they make such beautiful things. Make such beautiful mistakes.” Belief, for him, was love—and love was belief, in life as in art. “There was an almost religious side to him,” Barbara Straka said: “If you’re not with me you’re against me.” That was the source of his crushing disappointment whenever he felt that someone wasn’t believing in him. He always said, “They don’t love me.”
And so he furnished “proof” for everyone who doubted him—and there were a lot of those people in his lifetime. Vast quantities of proof: pictures, cards, posters, exhibitions, appearances, books, sculptures, editions, and records, for a start.
He himself believed in art and loved it, “I mean really, from the heart, I love art with all my heart. That will never change no matter how idiotic it gets, I’ll only have to put it on a higher and higher pedestal.” Albert Oehlen said, “He loves art like no one else—he likes it and likes to make it. I think that’s why he puts on ninety exhibitions, because he wants to be working every minute.” In one of his last shows, Nada Arugula, he called himself Martin Kunst Kippenberger—Martin Art Kippenberger. He left no inheritance behind except art: no manor house, no trust fund, no stock portfolio. Even on his grave there is art: his friend Hubert Kiecol, the sculptor, who had previously made our father’s gravestone with Martin, designed a simple stele out of pale stone, classical and modern at the same time. There is only one word or number on each of the four sides: Martin Kippenberger 1953 1997.
“I am Salvador Dalí the divine,” the Spanish artist used to declare. I am a human being, Martin proclaimed with every one of his works and performances. One of You – Among You – With You.
He didn’t want to be God. He preferred to play the part of an imp. For him, the artist is not a solitary genius pursuing his divine gift—Sigmar Polke had already mocked that idea in 1969: “Higher beings order me to paint the top right corner black!” Martin often didn’t even hold the brush himself.
Of course he wanted to end up on Parnassus—he thought he belonged there. But he wanted to get there his own way: keeping both feet on the ground. Playing all kinds of jokes on and with himself and everything else in the world.
Martin sought the heights among earthly valleys and degradations; he found beauty in garbage. One of his most romantic self-portraits shows him on a New York street corner, sitting elegantly on a sofa surrounded by garbage bags that had been left out on the street. “The morality always takes care of itself,” wrote F. T. Vischer, the nineteenth-century Swabian professor of aesthetics whose book Auch Einer Martin and Jörg Schlick reprinted in Broken Neon . The quotation continues:
A real fellow seeks and strives and does not complain about it but is happy in the unhappiness of the rising but never arriving line of life. That is the highest floor we can reach. But everything else, the dog shit on the ground floor of life—that’s what we’re talking about... We are born to seek, to unravel knots, to see the world from a worm’s eye point of view.
Bath mats, oatmeal flakes, Opel-Manta driver jokes: these were the materials of Martin’s art. The American critic Stephen Ellis said about him that “he brings the junk that society churns out to our attention with the pride of a cat dragging the carcass of a mouse into the living room.” For many critics, even now, this material is too banal to qualify as art. But in my view, his art is only as banal as life itself is—exactly as dirty and ridiculous and elemental. Another reason why Martin turned EuroPallets into a whole series of sculptures—the Rest Center for Mothers pieces and Design for Administration Building for Rest Center for Mothers —was that our mother had been killed by a EuroPallet that the truck driver hadn’t fastened properly.
Quite early
on, Martin turned Beuys’s maxim, “Every human being is an artist,” upside down: “Persistent analysis has resulted in the finding that every artist is a human being,” he wrote on a postcard from Italy in 1981. He gave a picture from that year the same title: Every Artist Is a Human Being. The picture shows an artist painting on the naked body of a man who is hanging above the canvas as though crucified. His portrait of Harald Juhnke from that period is called The Art of Being a Person : Juhnke was an entertainer and heavy drinker who always put his pleasures and sorrows on public display.
“I don’t know a single bad person,” Martin told Joachim Lottmann in an interview. “There aren’t any. There are no good people or bad people. They’re always both together.” That was why he always held up a criticial mirror to the self-proclaimed good people and why he always included himself as the target of the ironic critiques he directed at others.
Wols and Blinky Palermo “knew they were big, but that is a hard cross to bear,” Martin said. To be an artist was not to be God, but more like his son, who was also human. And that means to suffer (Martin liked to make people suffer). He nailed a wooden Fred the Frog to the “Artist Cross,” its tongue sticking out of its mouth, with a beer stein in one hand and a fried egg in the other.
He knew that pleasure and suffering were not far apart: “What is the difference between Casanova and Jesus?” he wrote under the crucified frog. “The look on their faces when it goes in.” Martin wasn’t a martyr, or at least never wanted to be—he loved eating his noodles and drinking his wine. But for him there was no such thing as art without suffering. “He has never offered himself up,” he said about Gerhard Richter. “He doesn’t know any altar, only techniques.”
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