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.”
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