he convinced them to come along, not go to New York as they had planned. He said the show was on in Berlin now. Where he was. The fact was, he didn’t want to go to Berlin alone.
Thomas Wachweger knew what was what the first time he saw Martin—or rather, heard him. (“He couldn’t stand me either at first,” Martin later wrote in a catalog.) It was in the cafeteria of the Hamburg Academy of Art in Lerchenfeld. Even when it was full, everyone could always hear Martin—he led the conversations and was always surrounded by people. “His big mouth was his greatest weapon,” Gil Funccius says, “his entree.” For him, the cafeteria and the Ganz on Grindel Lane were stage, living room, and workspace in one. “Have some fun, drink some beer, meet some people”: that is how his friend, fellow student, and housemate Jochen Krüger described the course of study. The academy was small and easy to get a handle on; students often met in the cafeteria for breakfast in the morning and boozed there at night too. Their meal program included beer.
“Where do you go to school? At U of Cafeteria?” was a favorite saying at the time. But it was only half true. He once got a letter from the Lübeck district court addressed to “Mr. Martin Kippenberger, Worker,” and he kept the envelope until the end of his life. He was, in fact, a hard worker to the very end. He gave one of his pictures the title Work Until Everything’s Cleared Up.
When Ina Barfuss remembers Martin, she hears four slaps so hard they sound like fireworks. They were in the same class, taught by the Vienna artist Rudolf Hausner, who painted only his so-called Adam pictures and almost never showed his face at the academy: “he would swing by once a semester, deliver some Viennese nonsense, and disappear again.” He had an assistant, nicknamed Plato because of his bald head, who also didn’t like showing up to class. On this particular day he was hours late, but Martin wanted to show him some work and discuss it anyway. Martin wasn’t just there for fun: he really did want to learn something there, especially different techniques (lithography, etching, bookbinding—he took the most varied courses he could). So the assistant received a few thunderous slaps from his student: “Left, right, left, right, I’ve been waiting for you! It was like a movie,” Barfuss recalled.
Martin “always wanted to prove that he could really do something, despite everything: You might say I’m a do-nothing, a good-for-nothing, but I’ll show you! ” He called one of his first large series of self-portraits, using photographs of himself from each year of his life to make a collection of postage stamps to mark his twenty-first birthday, One of You – Among You – With You : explicitly staking his claim to belong.
Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger were a couple of years older than Martin. They had begun their studies in the sixties and were more experienced; they had already had some success and—this was very important to Martin—knew Sigmar Polke. They were kindred spirits: Thomas’s parents were also divorced, and he had also hated school and suffered from being sent away to boarding school. “He’s smart,” Wachweger’s father, a judge, said of Martin. “Smarter than you.” In Thomas’s view, Martin had above all “an extreme emotional intelligence: he could feel what was inside another person right away, and immediately imitate it.”
Thomas and Ina were what they still are (and something relatively rare at the time): a stable couple. Like a little family. Other people found it bourgeois and “square,” and some tried to break up their relationship, but not Martin. He sometimes told Thomas that he envied him for not having to look for a woman anymore. Martin changed girlfriends more often than sheets, which wasn’t a big deal since a lot of other people were doing the same thing, but he also went to the movies and saw Dr. Zhivago over and over again: Wachweger says Martin was in love with Lara.
Martin forced himself on them, or at least that’s how they saw it at first: that he was pushy. But then they became friends after all. They went out to bars together. Sometimes he would drop by every day, and if they weren’t home he would leave a message, card, or letter. He ate at their house at least once a week and always wanted stuffed cabbage—nothing else was allowed. He usually brought someone else along with him, for instance, our father: “to show him that it is in fact possible to survive as an artist.”
Together with Thomas, Ina, and Achim Duchow, he met Sigmar Polke: in Martin’s view the great artist of the seventies. Martin often traveled from Hamburg to Düsseldorf to visit Polke and lived in the country with him in 1974: “it was very funny, lots of hippies, music, drugs, and dark beer.” When Polke became a professor in Hamburg, Martin stuck by his side and once even went with Polke, Ina, Thomas, and Duchow to Berlin for a week. Polke gave him an assignment: “Take photos of drunk people.” Martin later made a poster out of one picture, showing Martin with a camera in front of his belly and his pants pulled down, and Polke in the background with his pants unbuttoned. A lot of people resented Martin for working his way into the star’s inner circle like that.
But at that time they still went around together—“they were unstoppable,” Gil Funccius said. Beer and words flowed in torrents; Polke’s sharp tongue impressed Martin. Martin’s admiration for Polke’s humor, irony, confidence, and artistic impudence and lack of inhibition never wavered, though he did, like many people, come to find Polke as a person more and more difficult, even vicious. Near the end of his life, some six months before he died, Martin told a friend that Hamburg in general and Polke in particular had ruined him by giving him the idea of turning his own life into art, “throwing one’s physical, bodily existence onto the scales. We had to, back then, at the price of destroying ourselves.” But by then, in 1996, Martin felt it was too late to change course.
ALL YOU EVER DO IS MOVE, CHILD!
Thomas Wachweger and Ina Barfuss were happy when Martin came over to visit, but they certainly never wanted to live with him. “He was too dictatorial. Everyone else had to be subordinate.”
In his first years in Hamburg, he constantly moved apartments—whenever he had finally finished renovating one place, he moved on to the next. “All you ever do is move, child!” our mother wrote to him. His answer:
To find your own milieu you need to gather a lot of different life experiences. Every apartment—every roommate—is a step in that proccess. — Whenever you realize that theres no more room to move, no way to develop, you have to move out. Every change is a new beginning, and it all ends up being a development. Progress. People don’t only invest financially, its more important psychologically— thats what I’m after.
At some point he ended up in a shared apartment at Zippelhaus 3, across from the Speicherstadt warehouse district. Today the hundred-year-old office building with its magnificent art nouveau facade has been splendidly restored, and it houses “Kandinsky—Market Leading Merchandise,” but at the time it was a dilapidated repurposed industrial building housing nothing but art students. “It’s important for me to come into as much contact as I can with people who can take me somewhere with them, who can carry me away.... Human contacts in a limited space are advantageous, since I only need to go to the next room or the next floor and already the relationship or whatever I’m involved in takes another step forward.” The good thing about the Zippelhaus apartment, for him, was that everyone there was so different, doing something different: “painting, photography, writing, filmmaking. Everyone shares their technical knowledge with everyone else.”
His best friend there was Jochen Krüger, or “Joey,” an art student from Bremerhaven. He was skeptical when Martin introduced himself, “with his red leather pants, red hair, and a red Coca-Cola can in front of his face.” Jochen was no groupie of the type Martin was already collecting: he had no interest in laying himself at Martin’s feet. He was a stubbornly independent artist, if anything rather aloof, with a dry, north-German sense of humor—just what Martin liked about him. He was one of the first artists whose work Martin showed.
Martin brought to his Zippelhaus room a professional art cabinet with drawers for graphic work, all his colored pencils, and a Rolodex where he noted down, in neat, beautiful handwriting, the addresses of all the attractive women he met. And there were many, especially tall blondes. Almost every morning, when Joey was having breakfast in the common room, “another naked young woman came gamboling out of Martin’s room.”
Life in the building took its easygoing course;