Kippenberger Read online

  He farted at the table with important museum people—yet with Mrs. Grässlin in the Black Forest he behaved impeccably. Johannes Wohnseifer, Martin’s last assistant, worshipped Martin’s good manners, his “natural authority.” Many people experienced his excessive lifestyle in Cologne and Berlin, Vienna and Madrid, but not his periodic retreats to the Black Forest, or a Greek island, or Lake Constance, to carry out his “Sahara Program.” Every year he went to a spa for several weeks, where he ate only dry bread and drank only fruit juice and water. Afterward he could plunge back into his excessive life.

  I wouldn’t call these contradictions—I would call them extremes. F. Scott Fitzgerald, another heavy drinker and romantic, described it this way in his autobiographical essay “The Crack-Up”: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That was the intelligence Martin Kippenberger had, he who had never graduated high school. He always wanted everything—to have his cake and eat it too. I is another was the title of a major exhibition in which Martin was represented with several of his self-portraits, but “I am I,” is what he would have said, “and I am many.”

  This book is not the full truth. It does not aim for completeness or uninterrupted intimacy, and certainly not for art-historical classification and interpretation. It does not fulfill the chronicler’s duty to cover everything. It is a portrait, not a biography. But everything here is true—is a truth, but not merely my truth. It is the result of numerous conversations with family, friends, museum curators, gallerists, artists, and critics. Truth Is Work [1] was the title of his exhibition with Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen in the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the city where we grew up. This book sets out to understand how he became who he was—how the Kippenberger System operated. And also to remember a time when the collectors who now pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a self-portrait wouldn’t have taken it for a fraction of that sum.

  “Is the boy normal?!” his teacher asked, horrified, when faced with this child who did not see the world like a child—a nine-year-old with the wit and humor of an adult who still hadn’t learned his times tables and had never learned to write properly. He would rather look out the window than at the blackboard. “Martin, Our Artist” was written on the kitchen wall in our house when he was a boy. He never had to play the artist, which is why he could play with the role of the artist. What can art and the artist do, and what should they do: that was the guiding thread of his life. He tried out every possible artist role; he took the famous line from Beuys, “Every human being is an artist,” and flipped it on its head: “Every artist is a human being.”

  No, he was never normal. He burned like the cigarettes he seldom failed to have in his hand. “Howdy-do!” he said in the morning to the retirees at the Äppelwoi cider bar in Sachsenhausen, and with another “Howdy-do!” he stood in the door of Bärbel Grässlin’s gallery a few hours later, looking for someone to join him for lunch. “Howdy-do!” he yelled into the telephone in the evening—after his afternoon nap, which was sacred—and so it went on: eating noodles, having a good time, working, and dancing until dawn. At 7 a.m. he was standing ramrod straight in the Hotel Chelsea in Cologne, saying his hellos in Chinese. He had already danced a little jig around the cleaning lady, and now he greeted the Chinese hotel guests, hands folded across his breast, bowing to each one. They may not have thought it was funny, but he did. A few hours later he was back at work.

  The people with him laughed and suffered. Anyone who went out with him at night knew there was no way they would get to bed—Martin was merciless.

  He could never bear to be alone, except maybe during his afternoon naps or when he was painting. Big Apartment, Never Home is the title of one of his pictures. As soon as he moved somewhere—and he was constantly moving from one city to another: Hamburg, Berlin, Florence, Stuttgart, Sankt Georgen, Cologne, Vienna, Seville, Carmona, Teneriffe, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and the Burgenland—he immediately sought out the local bar that would become his living room, dining room, office, museum, studio, and stage. His hometown headquarters was the Paris Bar. Its owner, Michel Würthle, was his best friend.

  His hanging around in cafés was actually all about “communication, communication, communication,” according to Gisela Capitain, his gallerist and executor. The “Spiderman,” as he once portrayed himself, spun his nets everywhere, day and night: “Martin was always on duty.” Truth Is Work: that was another boundary he crossed—the one between life and work, between himself and others. “On the whole and plain for everyone to see I’m basically a living vehicle.” Every party was both a stage for his performances and a source of raw material for his new works. That is why it is so hard to answer the question of who my brother was. The person cannot be separated from the artist—he turned almost his whole life into art. Many people could not distinguish between the artist and the person, but still, it is important to avoid simplifying his art by seeing it merely as reflecting his life. (Anyone who thinks they can reconstruct the stations of Martin’s biography with his drawings of hotels falls right into his trap: he drew pictures on the stationery of many more hotels than he actually stayed in.) The art was not a reflection of his life, it was his life.

  He was an only son with four sisters; a boy who was not like other boys, who painted and cried and would rather play cards than play with cars (this would later bring in a fortune as an adult). He was the only one of us children who enthusiastically took part in our father’s staged photographs, but at the same time he never took direction. He coquettishly struck a pose, arms flung around a lamppost and one foot pointing up in the air behind him. His eyes sparkled in the photos the way they always did: enjoying himself, giving off sparks of energy. He was like that from the beginning: funny and charming, difficult and uncomfortable, cocky and uninhibited and free.

  Again and again he got into fights with his family. He suffered when our parents sent him to boarding school; he never felt sufficiently loved, acknowledged, and supported. But he was always attached to them. This terror to the bourgeoisie was a family man through and through; the enfant terrible rushing around the world also cherished the family traditions. Our mother died young, and he gave his daughter her name; our father’s signet ring with the family coat of arms never left Martin’s finger. He always insisted that we all celebrate Christmas together and clung tightly to the rituals: there had to be presents and a big Christmas tree and turkey dinner—and no question about who would get the drumstick. He even came along to church sometimes; he never officially left the church. He hated routine and tried something new with every exhibition project, yet he needed rituals the way a drunkard needs lampposts.

  He always said he wanted a large family of his own, but he couldn’t handle life as a paterfamilias for long after his daughter was born.

  Martin never lived in a pure artistic sphere. He brought us, his thoroughly unglamorous family, everywhere—to tea with Rudolf Augstein, publisher of the news magazine Der Spiegel, when we were still practically children; to luxury hotels in Geneva, where he got us free rooms; to the wild party celebrating his opening at the Pompidou Centre. “Are you coming?” read the invitation, and woe to those who didn’t. He would feel as hurt as a little boy. He had our mother stay in his substance abuse halfway house, and showed work with our father.

  The enfant terrible really was a child his whole life, one who gathered families around him: friends, collectors, landlords and landladies, fans. He could beam with pleasure, sulk, run rampant, lose his temper, and be unfair, like a child—but then, the next day or next year, own up to it like a man and publicly apologize. He threw himself at our grandmother during a summer vacation once—through a glass door that he was too excited to notice—and would later throw himself into ideas and projects the same way, sometimes causing as much pain as the broken glass did back then.

  He could be greedy, jealous, and egocentric, but also proud, of himself
and of many other people, of their art, their craft, their cooking. He didn’t just brag about himself. And he wanted presents like a child, too. For his fortieth birthday, an orgy of spending and dissipation, he wanted a Carrera slot-car racetrack; he would stand under the Christmas tree with shining eyes. “Childhood never really ends,” he said in an interview with artist Jutta Koether.

  He was extremely intelligent but never an intellectual. He read the Bild tabloid and Mickey Mouse comics, not Roland Barthes and James Joyce. He drew his material from popular culture. He let someone else read Kafka and tell him about it, the way he let others travel and draw and build sculptures for him. He would discover things lightning-fast, seize on ideas, and assimilate them. If there was something he couldn’t do in the morning, he would show people that he had learned to do it by the afternoon: make etchings, play the accordion, speak Dutch. It wasn’t real Dutch, of course, but it sure sounded like Dutch.

  “Think today, done tomorrow” was one of his most well-known sayings. It was only half true. His major projects, such as The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” percolated for a long time before they were ready. One year he would paint three or four pictures; the next year, forty or fifty.

  He overflowed with ideas that no one else had, or if someone else did have them, he simply appropriated them, whether they came from Picasso or his students or his daughter, Helena. He was as generous in taking as he was in giving, and he always demanded from others what he himself offered: everything. “You had to take care not to turn into a Kippenberger slave,” Bärbel Grässlin said.

  He wanted fries and croquettes served at the opening of his exhibition at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam because that’s what we ate on our summer vacations in Holland, every night for six weeks. The museum would have preferred tomatoes and mozzarella but Martin had nothing but contempt for such things. He hated the prevailing fashions—postmodern architecture, arugula, shoulder pads, video art. Whatever was “in” was “out” for him—good only for material. Political correctness disgusted him. He built postmodern houses out of plywood and glued lighters all over them, or produced a multiple for documenta: a white plate with a big hole in the middle, “ Ciao rucola mozzarella tomate con spaghettini secco e vino al dente. ”

  He likewise discarded his hippie look early and cut his hair short, put on a tie—unheard-of in Kreuzberg in the seventies—and wore only the finest suits and most expensive shoes, even in the studio. Clothes, too, were a costume. He wanted to be a walking contradiction to everything people expected from a crazy artist. Aside from that, he liked to look good, at his best like the Austrian actor Helmut Berger. He loved to hear people remark on his similarity to Visconti’s leading man. He would have loved to be famous as a movie star, or a poet. Opera and theater didn’t interest him. But movies! He knew the Hollywood classics by heart, even years after he’d seen them, and could recall scenes in the most minute detail. “Anyone who saw him in action, ranting and raging, swinging his mic onstage at 5 a.m., could see his genuine, abiding star quality, a charisma which happened to have been diverted into the art world,” said the obituary in the Independent.

  In his worst periods he looked like a shabby artist: unwashed, drunk, and fat. So he pulled his underpants up over his belly like Picasso, stuck out his paunch, had a photo taken, and turned it into an exhibition poster, or a painting, or a calendar. Every weakness became a strength when transformed into art, even if the pain remained. When punks beat him up in Berlin, he had his picture taken with his bandaged head, swollen face, and crooked nose, and later painted himself like that, too. He titled it Dialogue with the Youth, part of a triptych called Berlin by Night, and he also used it as an admission ticket; he loved repurposing things as many times as he could.

  He was a child of the Ruhr District, the industrial center of Germany that gave him his directness, fast pace, and dry humor. He liked how people there interacted with each other naturally and honestly. They were raw and unsentimental, always aboveboard, never stuck-up. He was an absolute master of the notes on the social keyboard, but he didn’t divide people into important and unimportant. When his neighbor, a good, honest photographer, didn’t understand Martin’s art, Martin explained it to him seriously and in detail. He met everyone at eye level, whether millionaires or children, neither looking up at them nor looking down on them. That is why children loved him so much. They also often understood his humor better than the critics and curators, and didn’t automatically feel offended by his outrageous sayings and provocations, which, in his friend Meuser’s view, were “just his way of saying, ‘Hello, so who are you?’”

  He liked to quote Goethe and our mother: “From my darling mother my cheerful disposition and fondness for telling stories.” From her also came his generosity, social conscience, and pleasure in meeting new people no matter where they came from—the ability to see what was special about others no matter what form it took. From our father he inherited artistic talent, a tendency to excess, lack of inhibition, and love of enjoying himself, self-presentation, staging scenes. Artist Thomas Wachweger coined a word, Zwangsbeglücker (someone who forces others to have fun), that fit both father and son.

  He was full of longing. He craved drugs, then alcohol; recognition and attention; love, TV, and noodle casserole. Martin asked lots of mothers to cook him our mother’s noodle casserole, and of course turned it into art, too. Kippenberger in the Noodle Casserole Yes Please! was the title of one of his first exhibitions, in Berlin. “Addiction [ Sucht ] is just searching [ suchen ],” he explained to Jutta Koether in an interview. “I reject everything and keep searching for the right thing.”

  “Man Seeking Woman,” along with his photograph and address, was printed on the sticker the size of a visiting card that he put up all over Berlin in the seventies. It was more than a good joke—behind the irony was a deeper seriousness. He called one of his catalogs Homesick Highway 90, and on the title page was a picture of him with our father crammed into a photo booth. Homesickness and wanderlust; longing for a place to call home and running away to be free of all ties, obligations, and labels; the desire for peace and quiet and the restless curiosity and dread of boredom; the paradox of wanting to be recognized, wanting to belong, but not wanting to be pigeonholed. That was his lifelong struggle.

  Self-portrait in friendship book, 1966

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  In the sixties, little girls used to stick glittery roses, pussy willows, and forget-me-nots into friendship books and copy out little didactic verses alongside: “Be like the violet in the grass / modest and pure in her proper station, / Don’t be like the prideful rose / always wanting admiration.” My brother drew a caricature in my album of German chancellor Kiesinger (“big”) on the left, de Gaulle (“bigger”) in the middle, and on the right, at the top, on a victory podium and with a wide grin on his face, a beaming man with elephant ears and a crew cut: unmistakably Martin. His little poem: “Love is like an EVAG city bus / It makes you wait and doesn’t care / And when at last it hurries by / The driver yells ‘Full!’ and leaves you there / Your [and then in a heart:] big brother, Martin.”

  Everything about Martin is here: the humor, the mockery, the irony (directed at himself, too). His poking fun at pretense and his lack of respect for power, along with his own ambition and boastfulness. His linking the banal with the elevated, and kippenbergerizing an existing rhyme with a personal detail (“EVAG” stands for Essener Verkehrs AG, the Essen transit authority). The longing for love, and the fear of being excluded from love and remaining alone. The draftsmanship, the tenderness, and the pride he had in being a big brother.

  [ 1 ] A rhyme in German: Wahrheit ist Arbeit.

  CHAPTER ONE

  PARENTS AND CHILDHOOD

  “He was running away.”

  The answer came before I even asked the question: How did it happen that he went and stayed with you when he was so young, just nine years old? His fir
st long trip away from home, going with total strangers all the way from deep in the Ruhr on the western edge of Germany to deep in the Bavarian Forest in the east, near the Czech border—what was that like?

  “He couldn’t wait,” she says.

  He wasn’t coming to see her—he was leaving where he was.

  Our parents and Wiltrud Roser barely knew each other. Our mother had written a letter to the artist just six months earlier, the first of many that would travel from Essen to Cham. “Dear Wiltrud!” she started the letter—to a woman she didn’t know, and didn’t know anything about except that she illustrated beautiful children’s books. All she knew was Waldemar, Roser’s illustrated dog.) “I’m addressing you by your first name because it’s right either way: I don’t know if you’re a Miss Roser or Mrs. Roser, and you’d be offended (actually you probably wouldn’t be, but you might be) if I wrote the wrong one.” Our mother definitely didn’t want that, since she wanted something else from this stranger: a picture. She wanted to surprise our father for Christmas with a family portrait just like the one in Waldemar. He might well have come up with the same idea himself—“that happens to us a lot, that we plan the same surprises for each other”—and if so, Wiltrud should say yes to her and no to him.