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  KIPPENBERGER

  The Artist and His Families

  SUSANNE KIPPENBERGER

  Translated from the German by Damion Searls

  Foreword by John Wray

  Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families

  Susanne Kippenberger

  This edition published by J&L Books.

  Copyright © 2011 J&L Books and Susanne Kippenberger

  Translation © 2011 Damion Searls

  www.JandLbooks.org

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address: [email protected]

  This e-book is not intended to be a facsimile of the original print edition but rather a rendering of the original print edition in a digital manner that respects the textual and visual qualities of the original within the limitations of the e-book file formats and readers at the time of its production: February 2012.

  Kippenberger: Der Künstler und seine Familien

  Copyright © 2007 BV Berlin Verlag GmbH.

  For Texts and Pictures by Kippenberger © Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. All rights reserved.

  The images left uncredited are due to the fact that, despite intensive effort, the Publisher was unable to determine copyright.

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  ISBN 978-0-9829642-5-5

  1. Kippenberger, Martin, 1953 – 1997

  2. Artists – Germany – Biography

  First English Ebook Edition

  For my sisters,

  Bine, Tina, and Babs,

  and for Helena

  FOREWORD

  ON UNDENIABILITY

  Martin Kippenberger left a mark on my life twice, once as an artist, once as an ordinary man, without the two of us ever meeting. Unlike most of the medium-sized army of people who count themselves among his admirers these days, he was a person to me first—as a member, however attenuated, of my extended family—and as an artist only later. But it was as an artist that he marked me permanently.

  Kurt Kocherscheidt, a well-regarded Austrian painter and my mother’s cousin once removed, had been dead for four years when I learned that his widow, the photographer Elfie Semotan, had married again. Elfie’s new husband, known to me at the time only by his last name, Kippenberger, (also an artist, apparently, and a heavy drinker, and—worst of all!—a German) was bound to be viewed somewhat critically by my family in general, and by my Aunt Elsa, Kurt’s mother, especially. Aunt Elsa, then in her seventies, didn’t think much of this new husband’s art, and the rest of us duly took our cue from her. Those members of my family who’d actually met this interloper reported that he was a loudmouth; the one concrete description of his work that reached my ears featured a frog nailed to a cross. You didn’t have to be a churchgoer (which my Aunt Elsa was to the end) to consider this a questionable aesthetic choice. I was living in New York City by then, a typically self-preoccupied twenty-four-year-old, far from my Austrian family. I filed the frog-crucifier away under Other People’s Business and focused my attention on paying the rent.

  The 1990s were the years of Martin Kippenberger’s ascendancy, however, and I couldn’t help but notice—at first with indifference, then with a kind of semiconscious annoyance—that attention was being paid to his career, the kind of international, blue-chip attention that my uncle Kurt had been slow to receive. By that time I was working at the Paula Cooper Gallery in SoHo and was superficially acquainted with Kippenberger’s art, at least to the extent of knowing that there was more to him than visual one-liners. I was aware of the prodigal extent of his output, and of its remarkable variety, because there was no way at that point not to be aware of it. Every piece that I saw—all in reproduction as yet, in Artforum or Frieze or Parkett —seemed to be the work of a completely different person.

  I should have been prepared, then, for the retrospective that arrived at Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst in 2003, but the truth is that it flabbergasted me. I visited it three times in one week, and it’s still on my mind nearly a decade later. It served as an object lesson for me in, among other things, the extent to which a person can be wrong. I’d been wrong about Kippenberger: that much quickly became clear. There have been any number of artists whose artmaking has been similarly irreducible to a single approach or medium—Marcel Duchamp, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman—but none, at least that I know of, has demanded so emphatically to be judged on the totality of his or her life’s achievement. Context is crucial to appreciating Kippenberger’s art, and context is what, at long last, the MuMoK retrospective supplied.

  At the periphery of my vision, as I went from room to room, from the early gray-scale paintings to the installations to the drawings on hotel stationery to the excruciatingly virtuosic self-portraits, a form began to coalesce—a kind of aesthetic and emotional afterimage, hulking and soundless—that disappeared if I looked at it directly. Self-subverting, ironic, and even flippant as many of the individual pieces seemed, the animus behind the body of work was austere and deliberate and (it seemed to me) boundlessly sad. Seen all together, Kippenberger’s work was so human that it hurt to think about. Gifted as he undoubtedly was, his art appeared to have been made in the face of—and, sometimes, directly out of—his weakness and his fallibility, which may explain why it affected me so deeply. Dissembling as it often came across (and occasionally was, most likely), I’d never encountered art that seemed more naked. And I haven’t in the antic decade since.

  Susanne Kippenberger has managed to look directly, it seems to me, at what I could see only out of the corner of my eye, and she has described it with indefatigable calm. The Martin Kippenberger who emerges in the following pages may be recognizable as the man who satirized (and marketed) himself so unflinchingly, but we come to know him as a great deal else besides. No artistic self-invention, however extravagant, is ever sui generis, which is a part of what makes artists’ biographies necessary. The straightforward tone of this book is a useful corrective to its subject’s infamous extroversion and bluster, which cast an often harsh light on certain sides of his character while obscuring many others. Like a host of other artists, from Joseph Beuys to Andy Warhol to Jeff Koons, Kippenberger’s persona was arguably his central creation, and it’s a credit to Susanne that she transmits this clearly without allowing Kippenberger’s version of Kippenberger to smother all the fascinating others. She has certain advantages, of course, being the artist’s sister. Maybe no one but a sister could have managed it.

  It’s an embarrassment to me now, my family’s knee-jerk and essentially defensive dismissal of a body of work that we were in ignorance of; and I imagine that all those (and there were more than a few) who reacted to Martin Kippenberger’s art with prim indifference during his lifetime must feel as abashed as I do. It’s ironic, of course, that I should be writing an introduction to this remarkable book, given the smug tenacity of my own resistance. But maybe that’s also fitting. Martin Kippenberger’s work broke down my resistance through mechanisms that remain largely mysterious to me: his brilliance played a role, of course, and his wit, and his shamelessness, and his relentless energy. But the true key lies elsewhere, in something much harder to put into words. I’ve tried to summarize it, but I can’t do it justice, least of all in a single expression. The closest I can seem to get is undeniability.

  — John Wray

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  Martin Kippenberger spoke and wrote in a very, very irregular German and my translations in this book keep its idiosyncracies: crazy spelling, m
ade-up words, and so on. (Translations of quotes by other people likewise use nonstandard English to represent nonstandard German.) I would like to acknowledge and thank the translators who have tackled Kippenbergerese before me, in particular the uncredited translators of the chronology “Martin Kippenberger: Life and Work” (in Kippenberger, Taschen 1997, reprinted in Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, MOCA 2008, pp. 349–52); the uncredited translator of Kippenberger’s 1991 interview with Jutta Koether (in Martin Kippenberger: I Had a Vision, SFMOMA 1991, excerpts reprinted in Problem Perspective, pp. 310–340); Micah Magee (translator of the 1991 Artfan interview published in English as Picture a Moon, Shining in the Sky: Conversation with Martin Kippenberger, Starship 2007, rev. ed. 2010); and Ishbel Flett (translator of the catalog section of Uwe Koch, Annotated Catalogue Raisonné of the Books of Martin Kippenberger: 1977–1997, D.A.P. 2003). I consulted these translations and used them where possible, sometimes modified.

  The titles of Kippenberger’s works, exhibitions, and books present a different challenge, with their concise poetry, humor, and cultural references. Many of the titles have been translated before, sometimes in multiple ways, not always capturing their meaning and nuance; some of the titles were originally in English, and in those cases I kept them as Kippenberger wrote them (for example, One Flew Over the Canarybirds Nest or The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” not translating/correcting “Happy End” to “Happy Ending”). My thanks to Gisela Capitain, Regina Fiorito, and Lisa Franzen, from Galerie Gisela Capitain and the Martin Kippenberger Estate, for their help with translating the titles; I also found Diedrich Diederichsen’s essay “The Poor Man’s Sports Car Descending a Staircase: Kippenberger as Sculptor” as translated by James Gussen ( Problem Perspective, pp. 118–56) helpful for several titles.

  All the footnotes in this book are by the translator, not the author.

  INTRODUCTION

  MY BIG BROTHER

  He was my big brother. My protector, my ally, my hero. Whenever I got into a fight with my sister, I only had to yell “Maaaartin, Bine is...” and there’d be something, a “Cologne Cathedral” (Martin yanking poor Bine up by the ears until she was dizzy) or an Indian burn. He wrote me letters like this from his boarding school in the Black Forest: “Dear Sanni, How are you? I think about you every day. Are you baking cake yet? Don’t snack so much, you’ll get a tummy ache. Do you brush your tiny teeth every night? I hope so.” He was ten at the time; I was six. Now I’m 54, ten years older than my brother was when he died.

  It was on March 7, 1997. Almost exactly the same people came to Burgenland for his funeral as had celebrated his marriage with Elfie Semotan there a year before.

  He was so looking forward to 1997—it was going to be his year, his big breakthrough at last. A “Respective” in the Geneva Museum in January, then a few days later the opening of The Eggman and His Outriggers in Mönchengladbach, his first solo show at a German museum since 1986. In March, the Käthe Kollwitz Prize and an exhibition of his Raft of the Medusa cycle at the Berlin Academy of Arts, then documenta in June, and the sculpture exhibition in Münster—but he didn’t get to see those. Hepatitis, cirrhosis, liver cancer: six weeks after the diagnosis, he was dead.

  Is it possible, advisable, permissible to write about someone so close to you? My first reaction, when asked if I could imagine writing about my brother, was No! No no no.

  Yes.

  Martin Kippenberger is a public figure. A pop star, a brand name, a classic contemporary artist. He is written about, spoken of, and judged. Newspapers and magazines that kept deadly silent at best about him while he was alive now praise him. And he—who let nothing escape comment—can no longer say anything. Night and day (especially night), he used to manage his image as an artist, but now he has lost control. That is what he was most afraid of.

  He shows up as a character in novels, there is a hotel suite named after him, a play, a restaurant, a guinea pig (at least one). You can buy him as a notepad. Ben Becker dedicated a song to him: “Kippy” on the album We’re Taking Off. His early death has turned him into a legend, especially for younger people—a kind of James Dean of contemporary German art. A devil for some, a god for others. The picture of the human being is fading away.

  The picture we have of the artist, on the other hand, seems to be growing clearer and clearer. His work began to be taken seriously only after his death; now that it is finished, it can be viewed in peace, and connections within his body of work can be discovered and explored. Martin produced at such a pace that there was barely time to glance at his work when he was living. Now he has platforms he could once only dream of: the Venice Biennale, the Tate in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., the Museo Picasso in Malaga, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But posthumous fame was exactly what he wasn’t interested in. He wanted to experience and enjoy the success that he, in his opinion, deserved. He believed in himself from the beginning, in himself and in art.

  People terrified of him while he was alive now say that Martin is no longer here to get in the way of his art. The shock of his sudden death was a wake-up call for those who had only seen the humor, not the seriousness behind it—and who couldn’t even laugh at that. Zdenek Felix, former director of the Hamburg Deichtorhallen, holds the humorlessness of German museum directors partly responsible for the fact that, between 1986 and 1997, Martin had solo shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hirshhorn in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, but not one in a German museum. “He was too early,” says Tanja Grunert, the gallerist, “Martin was always too early.”

  There are many different pictures of Martin Kippenberger, both public and private. He drew and painted lots of them himself, constantly had his picture taken, and put himself on display in bars and museums, at exhibitions and parties. He was often described as cynical, but he was a great moralist and humanist. In Berlin in the late seventies he was known as an impresario of punk and hard rock in the Kreuzberg club S.O.36, but in his studio he preferred to listen to the oldies: Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra. “My Way.”

  He is sometimes described as an autodidact, but he learned his craft at the Academy of Arts in Hamburg, and broke off his studies only when they got to be too boring. No, he wasn’t an autodidact; he was a self-made man. He created himself rather than waiting to be discovered. “He was his own best salesman,” said the gallerist Bärbel Grässlin. But not everyone was buying: “He was not a good person,” the obituary in taz cruelly said.

  For Martin everything, even his name, expressed his vision. As a boy, he was always allowed to ride on St. Martin’s horse during the St. Martin’s Day processions, and like the saint, he shared everything he had. Money, success, and influence; his sense of fun, his art, and his worries. When things were going badly for him, he got mean.

  He knew how to hit home. “He saw through people like an x-ray,” a girlfriend says, and found all their weak points. He attacked the bad and defended the good the way a lioness guards her cubs. There were people who hated him and people who loved him in the burning depths of their hearts—the innkeeper’s daughter in Austria no less than the rich collector. Ever since Martin’s death, people have quoted his line: “I work hard so that people can say: Kippenberger was a good time.” And he usually was a good time, but woe to anyone around him when he wasn’t.

  The image of the jolly entertainer masks the shadows underneath, and the fact that he worked himself to death creating this image and his work. “When you face an abyss,” he wrote on one of his pictures, “don’t be surprised to find you can fly.” His wild artist’s life seems thrilling from a distance to fans. He himself called it “insanely strenuous to be on the road with absolutely no private life.” Still, that’s what he did a lot of the time—lived as fast as a driver on the autobahn. Then, for a few days or a week, he would stay with friends or acquaintances who made him feel looked after and cared for. He wouldn’t constantly have to show
off, but could show his weak side too, and be quiet.

  In the early years he was constantly pulling down his pants, but few people ever saw him truly naked. How can I strip him bare now that he’s dead, and reveal his vulnerability, his fear, his doubts?

  The picture of him we need to draw is more complex than either his enemies or his fans would like. As complex as his art. Who was my brother? An anarchist and a gentleman, one of the boys and a friend to women, big brother and little brother, a sole provider who was anything but solitary—yet perhaps, in the end, solitary after all. He attacked and undermined the art scene while playing along within it; he was someone who “simultaneously rejected and thoroughly celebrated the role of the artist,” as Diedrich Diederichsen said.

  He was always something of a Rumpelstiltskin. He bounced through the art world as a collector, painter, impresario, museum director, installation artist, graphic artist, dealer, photographer, braggart, teacher, and puller of strings. For him, that was the freedom of art: to constantly overstep boundaries, including the limits of good taste. “Embarrassment has no limits.” His rituals for getting under people’s skin (the endless, pointless jokes; the swaggering, macho songs sung in groups that pointedly excluded women) were all tests: What are people willing to put up with, and when will they start to rebel? Do they know a joke when they see one?

  The more horrible something was, the more he liked it as material for his art, from a flokati rug to Harald Juhnke, from a bath mat in front of the toilet to politics to Santa Claus. One critic said that Immendorff brought the German battlefields to the international art world, while Kippenberger brought German everyday life.

  As he openly admitted himself, he made “kitsch” now and then. Rent Electricity Gas (the title of one of his shows) needed to be paid. He wanted to live well. The rhyme “ Nicht sparen—Taxi fahren ” (Don’t save money, take a taxi) was one of his favorite sayings. He never saved; he invested all his money in life and art, not bank accounts and prestigious purchases. He only got himself a BMW once, when he went to Los Angeles. In Hollywood, he thought, you have to flaunt it. He wanted the biggest BMW, with a chauffeur, of course, and when he could only get the second biggest, he glued the missing cylinders on the back, as top hats (“cylinder” and “top hat” are the same word in German). Martin arranged and reframed everything, from matchboxes to invitations to hotel rooms, leaving his mark everywhere. Walter Grond called it “kippenbergerizing the world.”