Kippenberger Read online

  He wanted to be a St. Martin, sharing his cloak: “Everyone needs a nice warm corner of the world. We’re all looking for that. If I’m political at all then I’m a socialist: here’s some cash, there’s some cash, here’s some food.” When he had enough money, he wanted to take people out to eat every night and buy art without restraint. He sometimes seemed like a Robin Hood, giving to those who had little—he never passed a beggar on the street without giving him something—while ripping off the rich. Martin thought the owner of the Daxer art space in Munich was an idiot, for example, and so always stayed at the Four Seasons at his expense, left him with his girlfriend’s phone bill (3,000 marks), and ordered the most expensive materials for his catalog there: deckle-edged paper, glossy photographs, silver dust jacket.

  Then again, Martin never followed rules, not even his own, so he liked to spend poor gallerists’ money just as much. One day, without any warning, Jes Petersen in Berlin got a bill for stickers Martin had ordered for his series of events Through Puberty to Success . When Martin designed the poster for the new multiples store that the young Cologne gallerists Daniel Buchholz and Esther Schipper were opening—and he absolutely insisted on doing it—it was supposed to be as cheap as possible since the gallerists were broke, but every idea Martin had made it more and more expensive.

  THE ARMORY SHOW

  In November 1979, Kippenberger’s Office put on its most important operation: the group show 1st Extraordinary Event in Image and Sound on the Theme of Our Time: Misery. Ina Barfuss, Werner Büttner, Walter Dahn, Georg Herold, Kippenberger, Jochen Krüger, Meuser, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen, Brigitta Rohrbach, and Thomas Wachweger took part and Mania D., Luxus (“Luxury”), White Russia, Mittagspause (“Lunch Break”), and Syph provided the music at the glittering opening, which cost ten marks admission. “Various punk groups played that night for up to two hundred people at times, most of them paying customers,” Werner Büttner wrote. “Everyone was in a good mood. There was only one incident: a phone got torn out of the wall, and someone who was obviously innocent got ruffled up a bit over it by the master of the house.”

  The critic from the Berlin Morgenpost noted that “Only two of the people showing work are professional artists; the rest are cooks, waiters, or plumbers.” Not for long. To Jutta Koether, the Misery show was the Armory Show of its time for young German artists, especially painters: “Almost everyone whose name we know today debuted there,” she wrote in the journal Artscribe. The show’s title, “ Elend ” in German, didn’t take any thought—Martin found it in the newspaper:

  Elendt Painting Ltd., 1 Berlin 26, 58 Brodersenstrasse, Object: Display of paintings and tapestries of all types as well as dealing in paints, lacquers, wallpaper, floor coverings of all sorts... Painter Uwe Elendt, owner and manager.

  The show soon gave rise to two sequels. The first, Extraordinary Event in Image and Sound: Action Piss-Crutch—Secret Servicing the Neighbors, took place on April 3, 1980, in the Hamburg Artists House. Then came Fingers for Germany , in Immendorff’s studio in Düsseldorf in the fall, with the concert in a bar called Ratinger Hof. Martin was a regular there too. Carmel Knoebel, wife of the artist Imi Knoebel, had undertaken an artistically inspired “demolition” and radically redesigned the bar from scratch in 1977. Markus Oehlen, who had studied at the Düsseldorf Academy right around the corner, played there with his band, Mittagspause, and Joseph Beuys’s class met there.

  S.O.36

  What Ratinger Hof was in Düsseldorf, S.O.36 was in Berlin. The place itself couldn’t have been uglier: a long tunnel lit with cold fluorescent lights and furnished with heaped-up fridges, bar tables, and beer cans, otherwise an empty space just waiting to get filled. That, as Martin explained later, “was the decisive thing about the club: the challenge of the black space. People didn’t just want to hear great music or be shown an interesting exhibit, not at all, really the most important thing for everyone there was to cross this black space, they wanted just to get across it through the hall to the stage where there was light, no matter what we had there!”

  In front of S.O.36

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  He didn’t found the club, as is often said—he just took it over and made it his own. Achim Schächtele and two buddies had started it; the name was taken from the postal code, since Schächtele, from the Neukölln district (and one of the few native Berliners on the scene at the time), had worked for the post office himself, at the telephone exchange. He had also imported leather jackets from London. He was actually looking for a movie theater. There used to be one in the Oranienstrasse space that became S.O.36 and then a penny arcade, but when he found it, there were just rats. Schächtele and his friends cleaned the place up and built walls for bathrooms out of stone from buildings the city was tearing down in the area (“demolition redevelopment,” as it was known at the time). The club opened on August 13, 1978, the seventeenth anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, with eleven punk bands and free butter cream pie.

  Martin was a regular from the beginning. He seemed like a hard worker to Schächtele when he came rattling up on his moped with a cap on his head that reminded some people of Tyrol and others of the East German leader Erich Honecker (it also served as a protective helmet in S.O.36, where beer cans were always flying through the air). “I thought he was a worker, straight from his shift,” Schächtele later said. “I didn’t understand him at all at first. I thought That’s someone like us .” Not for long. Martin never liked being just a spectator, so he jumped onstage, tore the mike out of the musician’s hand, sang, shrieked, covered himself with shaving cream, threw salt shakers. The bouncers wanted to throw Martin out, but already the short, compact, straightforward Schächtele did what he would so often do again: step in, protect Martin, and let him do what he wanted.

  Martin wanted a stage for himself and his events that was more public, and more extreme, than Kippenberger’s Office. He also wanted to throw himself a big birthday party. So he besieged Achim Schächtele, hung around Schächtele’s apartment, “and never got off our backs. He slept under the table. We thought: What is he doing here, he has a nice place of his own! We didn’t even have a bath.”

  Only after Schächtele was out of commission for a few weeks due to hepatitis, which kept the club closed and desperately in need of money, did Martin prevail. He bought out one of the club’s owners who was looking to sell and celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday (a year late) for two straight days at the club, with a printed program and an accompanying book, of course— 1/4 Century Kippenberger, From Impression to Expression . The book was printed by Verlag Pikasso’s Erben (Picasso’s Heirs Press) in Berlin/Paris, another of Martin’s fronts, and consisted of empty pages and childhood photos you could glue in: Martin as clown, little Martin with a hat on his head and a beer bottle in his hand, young Martin’s drawings (a can opener; John Lennon and Yoko Ono), Martin as hippie in a bedouin coat in Essen-Frillendorf, Martin with long hair, Martin holding a coffee machine up high in his hand, Martin as Turkish cleaning lady, Martin in front of the Berlin Wall.

  The poster for Martin’s 25th birthday was put up all over Berlin. The halo of words reads: “Squanderer – Long-time-painter – Ringleader – Host – Bringer – Introducer – Voyeur – Poser.” The caption: “ 1/4 Century Kippenberger / as one of you, among you, with you.”

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  An English New Wave group played at the party and Tabea Blumenschein’s movie The Dollar Princess was premiered with Martin’s music, along with “Kippenberger Junior: Video, Normal 8, Triple Sound and Light Show, Dancing, Fun” and our father’s “Kippenberger Senior: Aboveground/Belowground and Zandvoort an Zee (Double Projection).” Posters announcing the show were hung throughout the city, which showed Martin being hugged by a bum and beaming idiotically, with words radiating out from his face like sunbeams: “Squanderer—Longtime painter—Ringleader—Host—Bringer—Intr
oducer—Voyeur—Poser.”

  And so it kept going at S.O.36. Martin was always there, greeting the visitors, who danced, pissed (sometimes against the paintings), and of course made music. Along with German groups like Mittagspause, PVC, and DIN A Testbild, bands from around the world played there; a man named Zensor (German for “censor”) went around with a tray selling records you couldn’t get anywhere else; there was TV (Muhammad Ali’s boxing match), photography (Jim Rakete taking pictures, for instance), fighting, drinking, punching, and painting. Middendorf, with Fetting, painted a sunset onto the wall that was gone two weeks later and projected movies of sunsets to go with it, movies he had shot from the window of Kippenberger’s Office. Bernd Zimmer’s Subway, m 1/10 sec., in front of the Warsaw Bridge was shown for one day only. Gerhard Rühm came by, Martin presented his zine sehr gut, very good and movies he had found at a flea market, and Martin, Ina Barfuss, and Thomas Wachweger showed “Buonas Dias” (a pun on “hello” in Spanish and “Dias,” the German word for slides), “but after fifteen minutes no one was paying any attention,” Helmut Middendorf said. “No one took things all that seriously.”

  In Through Puberty to Success Martin reprinted an English article called “Want to Be Your Dachshund” that described a night there:

  Iggy Pop staggered into West Berlin’s Klub S.O.36 recently to see the Warm Jets who were with the drummer from Tangerine Dream and Anglo-saxophonist Bob Summer.

  During the last number a guy called Kipper Bergen started goose-stepping round the stage in a Tyrolean goatherder’s outfit.

  Deutschland’s Andy Warhol as Bergen is known in certain artistic quarters, was attempting to exorcise his nation’s Hitler guilt complex by parodying the Third Reich’s European adventures. After this little overcompensation he decided to strip to the sensuous rhythms of The Warm Jets who saw someone push Bergen into a bemused audience.

  Unpreturbed Mr. Bergen clambered back on stage and pleaded to be beaten up. Paul Ballance, being the obliging rock singer he is, duly whipped the man’s naked buttocks. At which point the Ig exited rapidly.

  YES SIR, I CAN BOOGIE

  “On Sunday we heard a music piece by Joseph Hiden,” Martin wrote from boarding school at age nine. “It was loud at the begining and then soft later. I liked it alot.”

  “I have no sense of music,” he said thirty years later.

  He couldn’t even play the recorder, though he did learn how to plonk on the piano. “Flohwalzer” [3] was about the only piece any of us could play; when our sister Tina broke her arm and was happy because that meant she didn’t have to go to her piano lessons, the experiment in music instruction for the Kippenberger children came to an end. If there was anything, there was singing—not well, but loud—especially at Christmastime, on birthdays, and in church. From our parents’ point of view, music was there to be danced to.

  “He was absolutely clueless about music,” according to Jim Rakete, the Berlin photographer who became famous as a Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave) producer. “But his chutzpah in going at it, and the way he acted like a wild animal onstage!” It’s precisely because he was clueless that Martin drummed, sang, and produced and staged music. He called it his “principle of embarrassment, the do-it-even-more system. Don’t be ashamed of doing something stupid, do something else really stupid.”

  Martin and his friends were not the first. Above all, there were the Dadaists, the great artistic revolutionaries who also did everything: painting, literature, sculpture, music, dance. They were angry and loud, funny and spontaneous, absurdist and deeply political, and no other twentieth-century movement had as much in common with what Martin and company were doing. Its guiding principle was to overstep boundaries; its preeminent form was collage. They turned the banal into their most important material, they worked in groups, they played with language, and they turned every exhibition into a statement, a concept.

  “Music is nice / How should it go? / The louder / The better,” Martin wrote in Through Puberty to Success He could throw himself into music more playfully than into any other medium, and used music to let off steam, all live. He went wild on the strings of his air guitars, flailed away on the drums at the Ratinger Hof with childish delight, sang the words to Joseph Beuys’s Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah No No No No No in a deep voice—in a way, the title was the motto of Martin’s life. He had three versions of the song, in fact: one for grown-ups, one for children, and one universal version.

  He certainly didn’t invent punk, or bring it to Berlin, as is sometimes said. Punk had been there a long time. But Martin gave it a platform at S.O.36 and jumped up onstage with it. What did punk mean to him? “Nothing,” according to Albert Oehlen. Or not as music: what interested him was the attitude. “That you do what you want,” said Gisela Capitain. That you break all the rules and cross all the boundaries, especially the bounds of good taste. What he liked was the intensity of the shows, how wild and anarchic the punks were, and that the music was chaotic and didn’t last long. “We play waste-sound,” Martin said about his own band, Luxus, consisting of him and Achim Schächtele, the filmmaker Eric Mitchell, and the artist Christine Hahn, who also played so-called “art rock” at S.O.36 as the drummer of her artist band, Static. Luxus declared war on the common image of the artist as shabby ascetic. The band existed for only one record and was never intended to last any longer.

  Records were as much a part of artistic production as invitations, posters, and catalogs. As Albert Oehlen wrote in the catalog for Truth Is Work , “To the obnoxious question ‘Mr. Oehlen, you’ve made a record but you can’t sing at all, why did you do it?’ there is only one answer: ‘I can make a record anyway.’”

  The music scene at the time was more brash, bold, and free than the art scene. It was also a part of life and of what it meant to be alive, not shut away in museum basements. That may be another reason Martin liked music so much: he fit in better in that world, the world of pop stars and rock stars, than in the serious, dignified art world of his day. Working in a group, being surrounded by groupies, the fast pace, the loud shows, the divalike behavior, what we call “star quality” in general: it was all natural and accepted in the music world. “Martin onstage was always bigger than whatever he was onstage for,” Jim Rakete says. “There was something so sleek about him, something—it wasn’t just being brash—it was something subversive and deeply intelligent.” With his unbelievable self-confidence, unchecked energy, and cocky slogans, “it was like he knew the world,” Sven-Åke Johansson said. It is also significant that Martin’s most important critics, and the ones most well-disposed to him, came from the music scene: Diedrich Diederichsen and Jutta Koether, who both worked for Spex magazine. The art critics preferred to ignore him or tear him down.

  They also seemed less than pleased with the close relationship between the music and art worlds. In 1988, one writer for the American magazine Art News seemed quite irritated by the fact the German contemporary art struck him as similar to rock and roll: he found so many allusions to music in their works that it seemed to him the music was the soundtrack to the art. He said that the expressive Moritzplatz painters “burst onto the scene simultaneously, like a new sound,” but regretted that all he could see were boy bands: “One might say that up until now, new German art has not produced even one female lead singer.”

  “When you’re young,” in Sven-Åke Johansson’s view, “you need a band. You can’t go it alone.” So the artists the Stuttgart gallerist Max Hetzler took on in 1980-81 were called “the Hetzler Boys” and preferred to appear as a group, with Martin as the leader. The Hetzler Boys also did make actual music: singing together became a regular part of their art-opening and dinner-party ritual. “Glühwürmchen” (The Glow-Worm) by Paul Lincke was an old standby; “Glück auf,” the old miner’s song named after the old-fashioned miner’s greeting, came out around midnight; “Ding-a-ling-a-ling, Here Comes the Eggman” was Martin’s theme song. [4] Later, when Martin had students in Kassel, part of the lesson plan
was to make them sing in public at the Christmas market: practicing performance art, practicing the embarrassment principle.

  Music, for Martin, was another way to express himself and communicate—an especially good way, given his extreme emotionality and physicality. Martin’s wife Elfie Semotan said he “was not someone you had a philosophical discussion with. He never really talked about things at all, he just did them. Martin was proof of the idea that you don’t think with your head, you think with your whole body.”

  As a 21-year-old student in Hamburg, when he got his first stereo system, “50-watt speakers and an amplifier with a radio, headphones, and record player,” he was thrilled: “All right man, let’s go!! The stereo moves me, lets me dance, changes my mood for the better, and promotes my creativity.” He would dance, write, and draw to Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and the Rolling Stones, and he always cleaned the house accompanied by “musick” (as he liked to spell it). “I’ll probably never be an intellectual.” For as long as he lived, he would always paint to music, and even years after painting a picture he would know “exactly what music was playing” when he painted it.

  It was his music that horrified friends like Oehlen and Diederichsen. Not only did Martin have no clue about music, he had no taste, as he himself knew. According to the gallerist Friedrich Petzel, Martin’s taste in music was horrendous—Petzel had to listen to “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” by Simply Red for weeks on end while putting together the multiples installation in Gisela Capitain’s Cologne gallery, “eight beats for six weeks.” Martin’s American assistant Jory Felice said that “he could get excited by terrible pop music”: Wilson Philips (“Hold On”), the Traveling Wilburys (“Handle With Care”)—“emotional kitsch.” Martin called people like himself “crooner addicts,” hooked on songs like “My Way,” “Bang-Bang,” and “Yuppi Du,” all songs that he himself sang on his Greatest Hits record. He loved Lee Marvin, whose hit “(Ah-eeee was born under a) Wandering Star” was probably the only song Martin knew by heart, as he once admitted. In Albert Oehlen’s words, he had “a woman’s taste” in music, not least because he could listen to his favorite songs a hundred times in a row, “which men normally can’t do.” He played Leonard Cohen to excess and would listen to the soundtrack to The Bodyguard over and over again in his studio in the Black Forest, singing along with Whitney Houston.