Martin Kippenberger always went too far. Going too far was what the German artist did, in art and in life. It was said he once bought a dilapidated petrol station in Brazil and renamed it Gas Station Martin Boormann, after the Nazi war criminal. It was also rumoured that he installed a telephone line, with the greeting "Boormann... Gaz" on the answerphone. He certainly had a photograph taken of the service station, which he blew up to wall size for an installation.

He painted a grim portrait of Joseph Beuys's mother, and of himself as Christ crucified. He opened an art museum in an unused abbatoir on a Greek island, and built entrances to fake subway stations in the Yukon, in Leipzig and in a Greek field. He made "architectural models" out of stacks of wooden transport pallets, as designs for fictitious administration blocks for Rest Centres for Recuperating Mothers. His own mother, sick with incurable cancer, had been killed in a traffic accident when a truck loaded with pallets shed its load on the car in which she was travelling.

The important thing about Kippenberger is that his attentions are two lines, parallel lines. The one thing is that he is trying to entertain people and trying to shock people, all his work is that. He wants to really invent and with every piece to make something new and to be real avant-garde. All day long and with all of his heart he really does believe in nothing else but in art. He doesn't define it, his father was an artist, he is an artist and his friends are artists. I think he never asked himself why because he has no choice, he is an artist. He's very, I wouldn't say naive, but it's absolutely clear, there's no question about it. Other artists maybe ask themselves if art is finished or they are finished. He never asks himself that. As a motive for modem art he thought that social life could be motive enough. And this can show up as banality or however we find it. And if you look at the subjects he uses you start asking yourself what's behind it, how does he choose this thing, how does he select this subject then you find behind that a moral attitude a judgment.