Kippenberger Read online

  He played boogie-woogie as well as punk at S.O.36—“I’m open to anything”—and in L.A. he had Jory Felice advise him about rap. In fact, at one point he had an idea that he needed to learn about classical music, had Valeria Heisenberg put together a list for him, and bought a shopping bag full of classical CDs. He just probably never listened to them.

  Whether he was writing, singing, dancing, or “making paintee paintee,” it was all the same to Martin—all art. His art. The connecting thread was his self, the artist who saw himself as his medium. “Music,” in Jim Rakete’s words, “was a T-shirt with his face printed on it.” The only thing that mattered was whether it all fit together and “added up to a proper Kippenberger or not.”

  Better Too Much Than Too Little was the title of a 2003 exhibition at Berlin’s NGBK (Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst) about that legendary time in Berlin, when music was the mode of expression and, as Thomas Graetz wrote in the catalog, the run-down world of painting got a shot in the arm from punk. “Painters would hang out at the S.O.36 club in Berlin and, starting in 1978, let the punk groups who played there infect them, so that, spurred on, they could bring impetuous equivalents into the world with their brushes and colors. Even [the older director of the Berlinische Galerie] Eberhard Rothers enthused about their works at the time: rage, lust, verve, zest, beat, rock, vitality!”

  Even though that applies especially to the Moritzplatz painters, not exactly to Martin and his friends, uninterested in being wild painters, the fact remains that music was simply there, everywhere, always, and left its mark on most young painters of the time more than visual art did. And the boundaries were fluid. In one of Markus Oehlen’s performances with Mittagspause at S.O.36, he took a canister of cleaning powder he found backstage, poured it over his drum kit, stood on a ladder, and started scrubbing. His brother Albert sang and put out records and ran—still runs today—his own record label, Leiterwagen (Handcart). Martin invited the Berlin Philharmonic to his events at Café Einstein as well as the teenage punk rocker Ben Becker and his band, the Canary Birds.

  Martin never cared about music as such and rarely went to big concerts; what interested him was always the ensemble, the interaction. For instance, the combination of sound and image that he loved in movies—he practiced it in his studio and liked to make music a part of fashion shows or art openings—or the tension between artist and audience. Friction, resistance, communication: that was his art. Jutta Koether said, “Music for him was always a lubricant.”

  He found kindred spirits in Sven-Åke Johansson and Rüdiger Carl, free-jazz musicians with whom he would collaborate and stay friends until his death. They also crossed boundaries, broke rules, and refused to stick to the laws of harmony and rhythm; instead they made noise, tried to find new forms and structures, and looked to see “what would happen if we moved this thing here or shook that there,” in Johansson’s words. Like Martin, the Danish Johansson made use of everyday objects—traffic signs, corrugated cardboard, wind turbines—and made all of West Berlin sing. His favorite instrument was a phone book, and he could produce entirely new sounds by flipping the pages, throwing it, hitting it, drumming on it, and tearing it. Not to the audience’s undiluted pleasure: as Johansson said, there were riots when they “put on intellectual free music at a punk bar.” “Some rocker pulled the plug out of the RIAS [5] broadcast van,” Rüdiger Carl said, not that the reporter was much happier when it was plugged back in:

  Some kid stoned out of his mind kept climbing up onstage and plucking around on the cello, then the RIAS lady who was sitting in the van with headphones on came out and said what is this shit, it’s unbearable, and meanwhile this idiot kept going. Then one of the gang of bouncers tapped him on the shoulder from behind and hit him in the head, and while he lay on the floor the bouncer took his feet and dragged him through the whole bar like some wild animal he’d shot and threw him out in the street. That was how people did things back then.

  Before it was over, more people were thrown out and took revenge by overturning the broadcast van. Afterward, the show was put out as a record, with a painting by Martin on the cover.

  “Hey, can you only play like that,” Martin asked the free-jazzmen after one of their concerts, “or the right way too?” And so, in 1984, their dance band was born: Night and Day, a swing orchestra founded by Johansson and Carl together with Alexander von Schlippenbach and Jay Oliver to provide music at one of Martin’s openings with Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Night and Day went on to accompany Hetzler Boys openings and play at all sorts of other art events in Europe for ten years. The radical avant-garde musicians were delighted to do exactly what they didn’t want to do—American standards, “songs everyone knows,” as Carl put it, “Broadway and stuff”—but as a concept, and as part of the do-it-on-purpose system, not to mention earning some money too.

  Night and Day recorded a studio album but it was too trite for the head of EMI records, so they put it out themselves, with a cover designed by Martin, of course. The band name was given as the Golden Kot Quartet (Golden Crap Quartet), and photos showed Martin on the drums, Albert Oehlen on piano, Hubert Kiecol on bass, and Günther Förg on saxophone. Neither names nor pictures of the real band members appeared anywhere. “There were serious reviews” and the critics were amazed at how well the four artists could play their instruments.

  When there were no art openings where Night and Day could play, Martin ran around after the band anyway: “suddenly he’d be standing there with polished shoes and two girls,” Rüdiger Carl said. He may have been clueless about music, but “he had it in his bones,” according to Carl.

  “The impressive thing about his dancing,” Albert Oehlen said, “was the musicality of his body language. It came from within.” Martin damaged his body terribly with cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and lack of sleep; he never exercised, and he depicted his body as a shapeless lump in numerous self-portraits—but he was sleek and graceful from head to toe when he danced. He proudly showed off his calves in Austria once: muscles he had not from skiing but from dancing. “I’m clueless about music,” he said, “but I love to dance. Arm in arm, cheek to cheek, it’s heavenly, you don’t even need to go home and go to bed together.”

  His body was the one musical instrument he ever mastered. Jory Felice, Martin’s American assistant, said he was “shocked” the first time he saw Martin dance.

  Especially in the seventies and early eighties, almost every night ended at the disco: the Madhouse in Hamburg, the Jungle in Berlin, the Bear’s Den in St. Georgen. It was the era of buttons that said “Fuck art—let’s dance!”

  At a time when artists tended to be macho, with men standing at the bar and women sitting at the tables, dancing was “one of the few times that the men’s world and the women’s world came together. We all liked it very much,” the gallerist Tanja Grunert said. For Martin, it was a chance to be happy for a moment. He was never alone when he danced—he always had a woman in his arms. His relations with the opposite sex were rarely as harmonious as they were then.

  He almost always danced in a pair, arm in arm, not solo and freestyle, and his specialty was classic music: boogie-woogie, foxtrot, waltz, samba, and rock and roll. With them he did what he always did as an artist: take something that was already there and kippenbergerize it. A young gallerist, Sophia Ungers, described how in a piece called “The Dance of the Kippenberger,” which he assigned her to write. She said he took the rules not as orders but as suggestions, and always varied them: “transforming, defamiliarizing, and appropriating” them. Now wild, now elegant, dancing for him was a form of expression using legs, arms, torso, and face instead of words—a form of communication. “When I dance, people start to think,” he said once.

  “If you gave yourself over to his style,” according to Gisela Capitain, who danced often and especially well with him, “it was always fun and entertaining.” The artist Angelika Margull says that in Berlin the women would line up when
he arrived at the Jungle or shoved the tables aside in the Exile. “He went all out, no man could keep up with him.” She herself—a very tall woman, and somewhat shy, in her own words—felt “so carried away. He gave you the feeling that you were doing the right thing, that he was so loving and tender at that moment.” “That’s when he was sober,” the photographer Jutta Henglein commented. “When he was drunk, it was horrible, he threw you into the air.”

  “Dancing,” in Albert Oehlen’s words, “was a show.” No matter how full the disco was, he always managed to clear the floor with his dance partner before long. He wanted to shine, and if he ended up in only second place, as he did once at a Spex dance contest, he was insulted. Here too, of course, he polarized people: some admired the intensity of his performance and his physical presence, others saw it as provocation.

  And if it was a show, it was an utterly natural one, not rehearsed. His absolute naturalness and lack of inhibition or restraint were on display when he danced, Sophia Ungers says. He didn’t need a real stage or a big audience—he could just as easily dance around the empty Café Central at night with the cleaning lady. At his wedding, Martin danced with his young niece Elena while sitting down—moving from chair to chair—and when he danced with his even younger daughter, Helena, on a table in Rotterdam, it looked like a duel, or like something choreographed without a choreographer. When the artist Rosemarie Trockel watched Helena or our father dance, she said, she recognized Martin: “They dance exactly the same way: knowing that ‘I can do that!’ The same excess is there, the lack of restraint, the sense for movement.”

  DIALOGUE WITH THE YOUTH

  Martin was dancing on the volcano’s edge in Berlin, Achim Schächtele says, and at S.O.36 it erupted. The mix of audiences was explosive. As Helmut Middendorf said, “all the artists, all the music people, and all the no-future people,” gays, addicts, and punks, were there at once, and every so often the mixture exploded. “Beer Too Expensive, Rockers Beat 400 People,” the newspaper report ran: “Because the beer was too expensive for them, 2.50 marks, 35 punk rockers with painted faces stormed a Berlin discotheque, attacked the 400 patrons with clubs, and stole 4,500 marks from the cash register.”

  The most famous fistfight didn’t take place at S.O.36 at all, however. It was at Nollendorfplatz, instigated by Ratten-Jenny (a famous Berlin punk, nicknamed “Rat” because she kept rats as pets) and her gang. They were not just pissed off about the price of beer, but also, in gallerist Bruno Brunnet’s words, “mad at Martin for having bought his way into S.O.36” and for using punk for his own purposes, while at the same time regularly going to chic restaurants like Fofi’s and the Paris Bar. They didn’t like that he did everything you weren’t supposed to do: wear a suit and Tyrolean hat, cut his hair short, use the formal “ Sie ” with people, throw money around. He didn’t play by their rules.

  Ratten-Jenny inside the Punk Club‚ Blockschock‚ in Berlin-Kreuzberg, 1987

  © Jürgen Gässler

  Jutta Henglein, the photographer, described Ratten-Jenny as a “bird-brained Berlin brat—a punk girl with no sense of humor . . . a crazy, disgusting drug addict.” Her gang ambushed Martin at Nollendorfplatz and he was badly injured, especially in the head, but even as he lay bleeding on the ground he couldn’t keep his mouth shut: “Your mothers should have made you finish high school.”

  When Martin wasn’t feeling well—for example, when he’d had too much to drink—he suffered from what Jutta Henglein called “distorted reality.” “He was horrible to people when he was wasted, he picked fights, but then Achim always smoothed things over. Achim was like his bodyguard.” But Achim wasn’t there that night. “Take care that no one beats you up / Or else it’s better not to go out alone” went one of Martin’s poems two years later. Martin must have felt terrible that day, his friends say, especially since he could usually defuse the situations he got himself into, even much more dangerous situations, on his own, with charm and by making fun of himself. “You couldn’t have a real argument with him,” the publisher of Merve Verlag, Peter Gente, said. “Sooner or later he would always come out with a joke, an ironic comment.”

  No sooner did Martin arrive at the hospital—one of the worst in the city—than he picked up the phone, still drunk, and started calling people to come see him. By the following day, Polaroids of his mistreated head were being handed around at Café Einstein. Jutta Henglein was one of the people he called, so that she could take pictures of him. “It was bad,” he could have lost an eye or suffered brain damage. She thinks that he staged the whole to-do about it afterward to save face. “He was absolutely driven to cross lines, plumb depths, and then he was surprised when something happened.”

  Dialogue with the Youth: Martin in the hospital after being beaten up by Ratten-Jenny’s friends, 1979

  © Jutta Henglein

  Later he struck back, but with his own weapons: art, language, and humor. He called the self-portrait of his beaten, bandaged head Dialogue with the Youth and made it part of a trilogy called Berlin by Night. The other two pictures show a swaying man ( Big Apartment, Never Home ) and a rat with an overturned glass ( Codename Hildegard ). His nose would be crooked for the rest of his life, and the scar never went away; nor did the feeling that he was no longer welcome in Berlin.

  There have been so many stories told and written about S.O.36 that you would think the club was open for years. In fact, it was less than a year, and only six months with Martin as co-owner. “It went by in a flash,” Achim Schächtele said, but so intensely that it wasn’t only Max Hetzler who said that six months of S.O.36 “felt like ten years.”

  It closed on June 30, 1979. Either the police shut it down, or there was no more money, or everyone just felt done with it. In any case, Martin staged the grand finale: “Keller-Kaiser Kippenberger” (Basement-Emperor Kippenberger) accepted congratulations on camera from Rolf Eden, the disco king of the Ku’damm, and Valie Export and Ingrid Wiener, among others, appeared for the last show, as did a real llama, which as it happened refused to go onstage.

  Martin was later both proud and amused to hear that S.O.36—the ugliest space in the world—had been turned into a protected landmark. He chalked it up as a success and as proof that content matters more than form: that you can make something out of anything.

  Martin was interviewed for television in his office once, and the bewildered journalist asked Martin what he thought he was doing: what is an artist doing if he doesn’t make art, or at least none you can see and hang on your wall? “Being young,” Martin answered, “being young, being where it’s at. Everywhere it’s at. What it has to do with art? Dunno.”

  “Disco-King Rolf Eden congratulates Basement-Emperor Kippenberger on closing S.O.36” (caption by Martin)

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  PUT YOUR EYE IN YOUR MOUTH

  Really, you read books? I don’t.

  —MK

  And suddenly he was gone. In 1980, without knowing a word of French, he left for Paris: to become a writer, he said. He did everything an aspiring writer along the Seine is supposed to do—found himself a garret room in an old Marais hotel and a café to sit in, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Sartre and de Beauvoir. Now all he had to do was write.

  “It didn’t work out at all,” Martin said fifteen years later. “Four or five good poems came out and that was it. My career as poet and litterateur came to an end and I went back to Berlin.”

  There was no way it could have worked out. How could someone who had never in his life read a novel suddenly write one? A dyslexic who wrote only with difficulty and in block letters, someone used to hurtling around Berlin, someone whose motto was “Think today, done tomorrow”: how could he expect to stay in one place for six months and do nothing but sit in silence and write?

  Maybe it was never supposed to work out, like the plan to go to Florence to become an actor. Max Hetzler, Martin’s gallerist later, thought that this project too was meant in advanc
e to fail so that Martin could work the failure into his art and his artist’s biography. Maybe escaping into the life of a writer was part of a concept of the Total Artist as someone who crosses all boundaries, or who fails. A poser. In any case, Martin could travel to Berlin to open a show and write “Currently he resides in Paris”; could print little sayings (“I’m going to Paris.” “Bah you pig.”) and have Serge de Paris recite these “poemicles” at Café Einstein. Of course he published them, too: in the INP-catalog (“Ist-Nicht-Peinlich” or “Is-Not-Embarrassing”). He wasn’t embarrassed; he never let anything go to waste.

  But even if Martin was never a real writer, he was a man of letters. He simply preferred short forms (his exhibition and painting titles became catchphrases) and speaking rather than writing his literature: for him, it was a performance art, life as a play. His New York gallerist Roland Augustine felt that way when Martin showed up with his students at the gallery and told him, “OK, now take them out to lunch!” “It was a strange kind of drama that you became part of,” Augustine said. Martin did in fact have a literary gift; it just worked better on the stage of daily life than between the covers of a novel. He was better suited to be a character in a novel than a novelist. The critic Renate Puvogel wrote that “his method, of freely and recklessly mixing fragments, quotations, and unprocessed material from art and real life together with invention and personal experience, suggests that he took the life around him itself as a mixture of reality and fiction.”