Martin Kippenberger
The German artist Martin Kippenberger was prolific to the point of garrulity and wilfully indiscriminate. It seems he could never shut up. Even when a batch of canvases didn't work he still found a way to show them in the gallery: in a skip, flamboyantly trashed. His thoughts - and his half-thoughts - streamed out in torrents of doodles, sketches, posters and books, in makeshift sculptures and performances, in reams of paintings worked up overnight. And as in art, so in life. Kippenberger was hyperactive, irritable, loquacious and so easily bored, it was said, he couldn't stand the tedium of sobriety.
To read the obituaries you would think alcohol had done him in. Dead at 44, tut-tutted one, 'after a terminal battle with disco dancing, indiscriminate fornication and above all drinking'. In fact Kippenberger died of cancer, and punk was emphatically his era. He had a band, founded Berlin's biggest punk club and eventually owned bars in Europe and America. 'I am a travelling salesman,' he declared, as ever pre-empting his critics. But if so, what did he sell? Works that had no distinctive style, which looked as though they could have been made by anyone; ideas (as he insisted); or the notorious legend of St Martin the Drinker?
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:WchosmA14 0IJ:nyartsmagazine.com/index.php%3Foption%3Dco m_content%26task%3Dview%26id%3D2066%26Itemid%3 D164+%22disco+dancing%22%2B%22fornication%22%2 B%22died%22&hl=en&gl=uk&ct=clnk&cd=7
hope this helps happy new year
jan