„In the art world or in art you may live ten years.” We are used to think in decades and like to speak in retrospect about fixed stars, which are supposedly only mirror balls. For the 1980s the name Martin Kippenberger stands at the firmament. No wonder that Lee Marvin’s “Wand’rin’ Star” is the only song that Kippenberger could sing by heart. Even though it was a “little kitsch-programm” his star shines lighter and lighter. It’s obvious, Kippenberger wanted to go to heaven. But maybe it’s only the rocket, that he had in his arse during his lifetime, that shines there above. Or a burning Frankfurter.

Kippenberger torn between searching for himself and the permanent trying to fill a gap. Since the early 1990s till his early death in 1997 Martin Kippenberger had felt the need to give long interviews to friends and strangers. Many of them knew his views from the nightlong pubcrawls, but in the run up to one of his main works “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s America” Kippenberger hustled to a written fixation of his positions. These talks were never meant to be autonomous audio recordings, took place in pubs or even in the train, no wonder that this audio material fell into oblivion.

Together with Kippenberger’s gallery Gisela Capitain and the Estate of Martin Kippenberger Robert Eikmeyer and Thomas Knoefel managed to detect most of these recordings. After long research, classification, conception and postproduction the result is a nearly 60 minutes long Audio CD with 18 tracks, which reveals Kippenberger as somebody, who knows very well that he has not so much time left. Biografical statements mingle with statements on the making of art, colleagues, the end and reflections on Hitler, heaven and hell. Kippenberger “the chosen one” at his best, potent, vulnerable, cynical, melancholic, but always “on the side of a good mood”. A must not only for Kippenberger fans but also those who try to understand his enormous influence on the art since the mid90s.