The wild life that seemed so exciting from the outside was itself, as he said, “insanely stressful: life on the move all the time with absolutely no private life.... I’ve always done art, that was my private life, in a way. And so I missed out on a lot, let’s say my Holy Spirit in me made me do it.” He couldn’t cut off his ear every day, he said once. But he managed to do it on a lot more days than most people.
Jutta Koether suggested in her conversation with him that by influencing other artists he made them into Kippenbergers, to some extent. Martin answered, “I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone. See it’s very stressful... I’ve gotten used to it, physically, the way I treat myself. No matter how hard it gets I can handle it, more or less. Later it’s a gigantic effort to even stay alive, never mind still have fun with thinking and working.”
“It sounds idiotic,” Albert Oehlen said, “but in a way he sacrificed himself for the art world,” so that others wouldn’t have to go to these extremes themselves. Albert painted him as Mahatma Gandhi back in 1984—to emphasize, he said, the message of human kindness in Martin’s work. Susan Sontag wrote about “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer”; Wolfgang Max Faust turned that into “The Artist as Exemplary Alcoholic” in his article about Martin, as though alcohol were not also part of suffering.
As an artist, Martin himself said, he was a salesman—in other words, someone who constantly travels around, knocks on strange doors, asks to be let in, and tries to convince people. Someone who sells his wares—or doesn’t. Even when someone slams the door in the salesman’s face, he has to keep moving and try again to get in somewhere else. It is a stressful life, a lonely business. Martin described art once as a “One-Man-Business.” He had a lot of support, from friends, colleagues, gallerists, his family, and his substitute families—he spun his net in all directions. But in the end, the spider sits in his net alone, like the Spiderman in his studio, whose mouth is open in fear as though he himself is caught in a net. When the curator Daniel Baumann asked Martin at the end of his life whether he was a loner, Martin answered, “I’ve become one.”
He was not just a sales rep but a representative as such: a proxy, a substitute. He portrayed himself in his Medusa pictures taking on the suffering of every single person on the raft. That is how the collector Wilhelm Schürmann saw him: “We would have been too scared to live that.” Thomas Bayrle said, “We all try to make sure it doesn’t cost us our own skin. Most artists still cling to self-protectiveness.” One of Martin’s Picture Titles for Artists to Borrow runs: Go ahead and keep painting, just don’t hurt yourself.
Martin chose a frog as an alter ego—a creature that disgusts a lot of people but which, as every child knows from fairy tales, might turn out to be a prince. You just have to believe in it. Martin’s whole art was to see the frog as a prince suffering for his beliefs and simultaneously as a frog, a comic figure in shorts, a drinker sticking out his tongue.
Peter Pakesch thought Martin’s “switching back and forth between a game and an almost religious seriousness was one of his greatest strengths.” Or, as Martin said in the Artfan interview, “I always say I haven’t decided yet whether I’m Jesus, God, or the Holy Spirit, but I’m defnitely destined for something good. If Michael Landon can be an angel on earth, what am I. In presentation or reality.”
He simply could not understand why the Austrian Catholic church got so outraged over Fred the Frog on the Artist Cross, with the archbishop calling it blasphemous. Martin thought the real insult was the Jesus kitsch that the carver cranked out the rest of the time, not the frog he made following Martin’s instructions.
The church was the only organization Martin belonged to, and he set great store in the fact that he never left it. He wanted to go to Heaven in the end. That doesn’t mean that he went to church on Sunday—he preferred fortune-tellers to preachers. But he wanted to believe. If he couldn’t believe in God—and his time at a pious boarding school had probably driven that out of him—then he would believe all the more in what he called prophecy: in creation, in something higher, which for him was nonetheless something human. “Let’s talk about higher things,” he told Jutta Koether. “Higher things, those are very decisive. What we mean by love and affection and security. Warmth, is that the overarching concept?”
No, he wasn’t making fun of the man on the cross, only of what people did with him. The Holy Family fascinated him, of course, and the father-son relationship was always a burning issue for him—both his own relationship with his father and others’ relationships with theirs (Preller’s, Krebber’s, Nagel’s, Schreber’s). And let us not forget mothers. He held it against the church that they left out the mother. He had no patience for the Immaculate Conception: “We all come from the mother’s womb, and fathers all stick it in.” Nothing was ever spotless, and he thought you shouldn’t try to wash the spots away or cover them up. “How would I ever cope with a brown room?” he asked in one of his sayings. “Not by whitewashing it.”
“To be good without sin, doesn’t happen,” Martin said. “That’s how you grow.” The theme and motive force of his work is seeing mistakes not as crippling failures but as productive strengths. With Büttner and Oehlen, he made “Broadening Knowledge through Failure” into his mission. Wilfried Dickhoff describes the fundamental idea of Martin’s work as “affirming the world as error.”
Celebrating human flaws: Martin praised our mother for the noodle casseroles he so loved by saying, “She can’t cook, but she does it right.” Rather than sweeping his own mistakes and weaknesses under the carpet, he put them up on display, turning the sweatiness of his feet into an edition of shrink-wrapped socks, his alcoholism into paintings, his braggadocio into posters, his inability to speak French into a movie.
Andy Warhol once said, “Anybody can make a good movie, but if you consciously try to do a bad movie, that’s like making a good bad movie.” Every exhibition, Martin thought, should contain bad pictures, too, so that the good ones would be easier to recognize and in order to provoke controversies, not just silent worship. “Lüpertz like Knoebel is just about perfect. That’s what’s miserable,” he said to Jutta Koether in their interview. “If everything’s good it doesn’t count. For some reason God above in the beginning decided differently, didn’t he: there should be both good and evil! But you don’t find dialectical approaches in art any more.” For him, art didn’t arise from ability. Some people were amazed to discover after his death that he really knew how to draw, how to paint! But ability was what he was most afraid of.
The world of pure beauty and harmony bored him—he wanted people to have something to look at, for a long time, and in his opinion the best way to accomplish that was through aggression, something that catches the eye. That is what he told Karel Schampers, director of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Content, color, form—the artist has lots of ways to hurt people. “But my aggression is never destructive, I have a positive attitude, I see it as proof of engagement. I want to unmask double standards and false hopes.”
That was also why he trumpeted other people’s weakness, sticking his finger in open wounds and really twisting it around. It wasn’t nice. But it was meant well: work in the service of truth. Peter Pakesch put Martin in the same category as the philosophers of the Enlightenment: “He wanted to make people better.” Pakesch felt that “there was great despair about the condition of the world. To have hope, on the one hand, that there could be a better world, but to be smart enough on the other hand to realize that it wasn’t working out that way—that’s what produces the ‘cynicism’ that is actually moral. He made very high demands: on himself, on others, on art, on society.”
Not Knowing Why but Knowing What For was the title of one of Martin’s pictures. He reacted angrily when Minchie Huggler asked him what his artistic message was—“I don’t have one!” He wasn’t a messiah, he said, “I’m the nice, fat uncle.” Or “I am St. Martin,” a saint who showed his humanity with modest means, by sharing what he wore with a
nother. Werner Büttner described Martin’s work as “a gigantic hymn to human kindness.” Martin lovingly took in whatever was left behind, had failed, or gone wrong. His melancholy yet comic painting of a Ford Capri sitting abandoned on the street at night in the snow is called No Capri. “The aura of something gone terribly wrong dominates his work,” according to Nilas Maak in the FAZ, “and it is Kippenberger’s art to extract an inimitable good mood from these ruins.”
He wanted to heal the art of his time, not heal himself. Martin never took a vacation. “Kippenberger was always on duty,” Gisela Capitain said. Even on his honeymoon. One of his favorite sayings was “Life is no holiday.” And he wrote in his book Joints I , “I don’t give a shit whether art or I suffer more, because a tile isn’t scared of shit: it just sticks where it’s put.” Martin was Protestant through and through in his discipline and sense of duty, including his duty to make sure people were having a good time. As Bärbel Grässlin said, “However he felt, he still shined his shoes and put on his hat and went out. Even in despair he was the class clown.”
On Martin’s tenth birthday, our father wanted him to have “a lot of time”: among all the pens and colored pencils and drawing paper and the easel and camera and long pants he got, that seemed to our father “the most important birthday present that God above has given you: the time you still have, in which you can do something, and should.” He had no choice. He was born an artist. As he said in an interview, “All that matters is that you not defend yourself, on the contrary, that you go along with it, that saves you a huge amount of energy, just obey your genes so that you can develop freely and get wilder and have fun.”
He thought that by the time you were thirty, you needed to have made it as an artist enough to support yourself with your work, but when an interviewer asked him if you should give up on art if you haven’t reached that point by thirty, Martin answered, “No, then you need to work in order to pay for your art and the ideas in your head.... Just don’t suffer and say ‘Nobody loves me.’”
Even when he was dying, Martin didn’t complain. In Zurich, a few weeks before his death, Birgit Küng made a meal for him on the occasion of his last show with her—one of her her “magical country meals” that he loved so much. “He was as happy about it as ever,” This Brunner said. “It was so clear that he was sick, he was extremely depressed—but not whiny. He was still cheerful.”
Michel Würthle called him brave: “tremendously brave.” Because over and over, when he was depressed, “he pulled himself up out of the shitpile by his own bootstraps.” It was always a struggle. “You have to haul yourself over the coals,” Martin said. “It’s a lonely job.” Jutta Koether said that she admired his persistence: “This idea that you have to struggle for what you want in the world, through continuous hard work. That you can’t abdicate responsibility and say it’s someone else’s fault, or God’s fault, or whatever. That you can’t withdraw into private things and say, ‘OK, time for a vacation,’ or, ‘Now I’ll let myself be depressed.’ That you always try to get over it.”
“It’s an incredible attitude,” his New York gallerist Janelle Reiling said, “to think that you can do whatever you want. That if you want something you just go ahead and do it and don’t bitch and moan if it doesn’t work out.” During an exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York, when Martin was supposed to sign copies of his catalog at the art bookstore Printed Matter, he asked if they thought a lot of people would come; they told him probably not. He turned the gloomy afternoon into an event where he would not only sign each catalog but also draw a real little drawing in every one. Soon the line stretched almost out the door.
He used to say, “The spark of hope doesn’t come in the mail.” But equally naturally, he didn’t repress his doubts—he put them on show. He not only experienced exclusion, he constantly provoked it. He knew that others’ dislike would only give him more energy. “You need your tender loving care, and you can’t let yourself get sucked in. Success is the deadliest thing for an artist or his art.” That was one of the things he explicitly liked so much about the other Hetzler artists: that none of them rested on his laurels. “They all doubt themselves.”
His artistic policy was to believe: to accept not only himself but the whole world, as it is, and “to take action accordingly.” With Martin, the concrete was always metaphysical and metaphorical—and vice versa. So this was how he described the difficult, overgrown path by the foundries through a landscape that wasn’t one, around the ugly house where he was staying in Andalusia:
To follow the right path was always, even in the good old days, embellished with rough patches. Thank God I never avoided paying my tithe to the church, so sometimes on my walks I find sculptures on the hard (as long as it’s not raining) path, put there from Above (or sometimes not from Above). The bulldozer-driver on the edge of the garbage dump understands his craft: he actually built me a real giant ramp out of clay & and a photobackdrop hill for free & without obligation.
That was also why he seized on anything he found by the roadside, without delay or hesitation, or scruples. If it lay along his path it must be meant for him. “Make good use of chance,” he wrote in Joints I , “it never comes back.”
Living in the here and now also meant that he was never interested in posthumous fame. He wanted to make money—a lot of money—so that he could turn around and spend it again for a life in the service of art. He wanted success, even if it was dangerous, and wanted it right away so he could enjoy it. And he paid the price. In Florence, he was thrown out of the Villa Romana once for arguing too violently against a critic who thought that an artist should be happy to become famous after his death. “That’s such nonsense,” Martin answered. “It’s such an effort to do anything as an artist.” It annoyed him whenever someone said that an artist survives in his work: “No one survives. We’re not clever enough to survive. Everyone dies. Life always ends with death.”
He knew that posthumous canonization meant being made harmless. Today, collectors snap up his work at monstrous prices, even the Americans who wanted nothing to do with him when he was alive: “The pigs of yesterday are the ham of tomorrow,” he prophesied in his very first book, al Vostro servizio. In today’s booming art market, Martin is hotly sought after as a painter, especially a painter of self-portraits—but the rest of his work, unmanageable and often ugly as it is, has receded into the background.
What remains is a domesticated Kippenberger—Kippenberger without the embarrassment. But without embarrassment there’s no Kippenberger left. The critic Patrick Frey wrote about Martin that “the experience of embarrassment is painful, lacking any noble greatness or sublimity, which is precisely why that pain can be turned into gladness.” The Austrian writer Walter Grond, who wrote for Martin as well as about him, remarked that “ Peinlichkeit, or embarrassment, contains Pein, torment, but torment is not just pain, anguish, and sorrow, it is also punishment and effort. Embarrassment contains the search for the meaning of suffering.”
Kippenberger sans peine was the title of his “Respective 1997-1976” in Geneva that opened six weeks before his death. He longed for a life without pain and suffering himself: he called one of his paintings For a Life without a Dentist, having suffered his share of agony in the dentist’s chair. But he also knew how you ended up if you led such a life: toothless.
In his book Café Central, Martin described a dream he had once about peanut doodles forming words on a pink particleboard table. “As far as I can remember there were sentences like: ‘Today you don’t need to clean your fingernails any more! Starting tomorrow you will never run out of toilet paper again! Starting the day after tomorrow, cavities are no longer an issue! Starting the day after the day after tomorrow, everyone will like what you do! Starting the day after the day after the day after tomorrow, everyone will also like what you don’t do!’”
Art, he thought, should hurt. Life did too, after all. Whenever things got too cozy, he made sure to make them uncomfortable: he mov
ed to a new city where he had to start over, or made sculptures as a slap in the face to people who had just gotten used to his paintings. Whenever a painting got too pretty, he spray-painted letters on it or plastered it with stickers like “I love no go home.” He stuck a torn-out, incomplete quotation from Paul Valéry on one of his photographs: “a sun that only he has. Rembrandt knows that the flesh is filth that the light makes golden.”
In 1981, in the program for his appearance at Café Einstein, he wrote, “Jesus the scamp really only confused all of us.” An outraged Berlin man, one Curt Pinkert, sent him a letter afterward, which Martin happily printed in his Bankruptcy Book : “Doesn’t every great spirit have to confuse his existing environment first if he wants to achieve success?”
“We’re spreading confusion,” Martin explained once. “But fundamentally, we don’t intend confusion at all, only the truth.” For him, the truth could only be reached through humor—without humor, pathos would be merely pathetic, even kitschy. He used his humor to launch an assault against all forms of mendacity, whether Alpine-style Christian kitsch, political self-righteousness, or art-world hypocrisy.
Martin titled his painting of the Guggenheim Museum The Modern House of Believing or Not. If art for him was a matter of faith—and it remained that to the end—it was nonetheless a religion without haloes and incense. He brought art out of the sacred halls of the museum and into the Italian restaurant, because for him art was as ordinary as noodle casserole, as fundamental as eating and drinking. People didn’t have to get down on their knees and worship art—they should grapple with it, with all the necessary seriousness, humor, and respect. One of his last exhibitions was called Please Don’t Sit on the Pictures ; the multiple for the 1997 documenta was called Watch Yourself into the Show and consisted of cast-lead soles for attendees’ shoes, since they usually raced past the works of art. “If anyone says that a painting was painted too fast, you can reply that they looked at it too fast,” Vincent van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo.
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