MARTIN KIPPENBERGER'S MAGIC always cast a powerful spell over his audience,
sometimes literally putting them under the influence. Not so long ago I invited
him to visit the Yale School of Art, and with extravagant melodrama he struggled
through the early-morning commute to New Haven. Immediately on arrival he
scuttled his scheduled lecture by ambushing the students with a cheering
invitation to head straight for Yale's favorite bar. At the Anchor, they ate
from the breakfast menu and got all liquored up. He held forth, judging the
quick and the dead in the art world; opinions were refueled with every round of
margaritas. Huddled in the Anchor's cramped booths the students must have been
positively charmed, or at least entertained; they stayed on past noon, cutting
classes to drink lunch with Martin. It was after two when the entire staggering
herd returned to the sculpture department, and with a considerable cache of
beer in tow. The Visiting Artist would not be making his round of afternoon
studio visits this day.
Listing only slightly, but in full possession of his intoxicating
splendor, he eased himself into an old avocado and orange recliner and proceeded
to hold court before all those he had singlehandedly converted to boozing at
breakfast. There was a lull in the boisterous conversation as fresh beers were
cracked before snaking their way, hand to hand, through the room. In advance of
everyone taking their first swig Martin's eyes danced with inspiration: he would
sponsor a drawing contest! Standing to announce the tournament his marvelous
imagination and tweaked sense of humor flared: The artist who could make the
most convincing drawing of Frank Sinatra would win a portrait of themselves
drawn by non other than Martin himself. Among his audience were those who
were still young enough to have difficulty conjuring the crooner's precise
features. Gripped pencils, tongues stuck straight out the side of mouths - the
competition to render Old Blue Eyes was underway. It was a furious contest -
that is, as fierce as this gaggle of drunks could manage.
In the end, of course, Martin couldn't decide on the quality of any
single drawing above the others. „You are all just too talented,"
he declared. And then he showed his hand, insisting that he was now obliged
to make individual portraits of every student. No dissent was brooked. As he
began to draw, intimate conversations would grow up around the artist and his
subject. During these ad hoc studio visits Martin summoned a steady level of
affection, aspiration, and spirit the alcohol had not touched. His teaching
style, unfolding on his own terms, was uncanny and quite literally sobering. The
late day passed easily into early evening as Martin finished the last portrait.
On the train back to New York, there would be no stormy, drunken snoring. Martin
slept like a big baby, a gentle smile graces his face. It had been a perfect
day.
Last February, Martin reached me in New York; he was by then
seriously ill with cancer and wished to hear from me. He had taken up residence
in a Viennese hospital. Faxes would be best. I wrote out the bear joke that had
been his favorite, the pig joke that came in second, and recalled those lovable
Sinatra drawings and that warm drunken New Haven afternoon, his appearance with
a surprise guest, Werner Heisenbergs's granddaughter, at a dinner party I once
gave in his honour, and other late evenings that always gave way to early
mornings from Los Angeles to Berlin. In complete denial I told him to get well,
and then assured him how frightfully boring New York has become. He never
responded to my hospital faxes, and because Martin always responded, I knew that
the illness was carrying him toward the end. A few days later, on March 8, I
arrived in Europe, unaware that he had died while I slept on a plane crossing
the Atlantic. At breakfast in my hotel, glancing throught the Herald
Tribune, I learned, that there would be no more perfect days.
The New Haven story verges on a cliché. Martin's Reputation as
the personification of unbridled excess or, as The New York Times
recently put it, the „Madcap Bad Boy of Contemporarty German Art," is
secure. But as always, there is more to the story. As much as art history
fantasizes Kippenberger as the spunky art-world sophomore, his position is too
phenomenally complex to leave it at that. He appeared to us when powerful
enclaves of contemporary German culture were sponsoring a full-scale excavation
of Expressionism. It is an understatement to say that Martin was at odds with
all that. Thinking back to his day at Yale might make this last observation seem
a contradiction, but it is not. From the Paris Bar in Berlin to New York's
Odeon, to the Anchor, he carried on, untamed - like the neo-Expressionists he
held in contempt - but these passages were performances Martin always kept in
quotes. He never mistook having fun ideology. True, he possesses an entertaining
apprecitation of his culture; but more significant, he recognized what it was
about to become. He enjoyed a second sight in this way, a formidable perception
that modern nationalism was at last giving way to the dominion of the next
culture, a culture staggering in its unity. We never really talked about this
seriously (it required a sobriety he would rarely permit), but it was on his
mind, and I can say that he did more than casually ponder it. Simply said, his
pessimistic insight into what the culture would bring forth was one of his most
remarkable gifts.
What now seems to have been predestined for the Europe we know today
was far from transparent in 1983 when Martin painted The Friendly Communist.
Adoring her fetching smile and flirtatious eyes with paint, Martin envisioned a
companion he would have certainly loved to love - whatever her politics. But he
also endowed her comely gaze with ridicule for Reagan's Evil Empire rhetoric.
Cold-war foes would one day thaw and become very, very friendly, even agreeable
in the way Martin understood „friendly." I must say that the
discreet way this portrait freely registers his libido as it ridicules the
superego-strangling cold-war potentates broadcasts a flawless impression of
where Martin's heart was, and where, I believe, his work will finally bargain
for ist place in the history of art. With unfailing consistency his art
negotiates a delicate balance of cultural indicators. On the one hand, there was
always the mirror that could only ever reflect Martin's ego in one iteration or
antoher, from artistic hero, to sexual prowler, to adolescent hoodlum; on the
other was his earnest visualization of the fate of our culture - this was always
less detectable. And it was not only in his paintings where he unfolded this
discriminating equilibrium between inner self and the world out there. He was
effortlessly - shamelessly - kaleidoscopic when he set out to make his art,
gliding from sardonic posters like „Dialog mit der Jugend" to
polymorphic installations in galleries (or as often in bars), to producing rock
bands, to books, to sculpures, to his enterraining hotel stationery drawings, or
those humble self-mocking ready-mades like „Alkoholfolter" („alcohol
torture"). Someone was always mistaking Martin's solo exhibitions for a
cattle-call group show. That pleased him no end.
A decade age, most saw The Friendly Communist through the
interpretive lens that still logs in the reception of his work. And so critics
would have seen an entry in Martin's catalogue of desire, or perhaps something
cynical, but still only surface deep. There is more. This painting is an
expression of Martin's desire, not doubt, but it traces as well his projection
of a culture where post-Communist citizens could make love, not war, in
Euro-Disney hotels paid for by a currency called the Euro. Six years after he
finished this picture the Berlin Wall would fall and Martin's forte for
forecasting late-modern culture could belatedly be acknowledged.
In the same year The Friendly Communist was painted, and
befor Arts magazine was put down, not longer after the departure of Richard
Martin, I wrote a Kippenberger piece that I used to celebrate the artist and
speculate about Donald Kuspit's constipated view of contemporary German art. „Martin
Kippenberger's ... is a wildly different understanding of contemporary German
culture than Kuspit's for Kippenberger seems to know few differences between
cultures. His is the experience not of the (potential for the national) but of
the domination of the universal." Kippenberger, through all his drunken
excess - and he was drunk much of the time, and always excessive - helped us to
glimpse this universal culture, to see what would become. In this he was
brilliant, which may be why Roberta Smith, The New York Times'
stingiest critic, wrote with favor that Martin „is one of the threee or
four best German artists of the postwar period." Well, of course she is
correct, but most appetizing is trying to figure out who the other three are! It
would be a game Martin would wade into assuming he was already on the list.
First there is Beuys, and while Smith loves Richter there are those who would
say Polke, and then could it be Horn? Delicious this game! I can hear Martin
chiming in: once on the list he would care less and less about who the others
happened to be, instead turning his attention to where he would take his place
in history's first draft! Ahhh, Martin.
© Ronald Jones/ARTFORUM