Among contemporary German authors, one stands out who for years has been able to operate in various forms of expression and does not fit into any category: Thomas Kapielski. His subject is invariably Thomas Kapielski – and how he sees the world, or more precisely the art world, which especially in his literary works in holds up to ridicule in a witty and original manner. In 2010, Kapielski was awarded the Prize of the Literature Houses.

In 1999 Thomas Kapielski gained a greater degree of prominence when, on the occasion of the awarding of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt, he read from his book Baden-Baden. The text deals with the career of the commercially moderately successful artist Thomas Kapielski, who comes into collision with the conventions of the literary scene.

Baden-Baden zeroed in on this scene and left the jury of the most important German-language literary competition baffled. They laughed, but they did not really feel at ease. “The literary scene breaks on the text”, formulated Iris Radisch afterwards, in a somewhat convoluted manner; “it is made not only comical but also ridiculous; the text prattles, blusters, is of a cunning naïveté”.

Those who are not too close to the scene can safely laugh themselves silly while reading Baden-Baden, because the text is very funny, like almost all of Kapielski’s works. Everyday life is the author’s subject, and the odd things that happen to the first-person narrator and Kapielski’s alter ego. The author describes this in a language that often strikes a high note and drifts into the mannered, only then to display his Berlin “lip”.

Kapielski’s written works now comprise more than 25 volumes; in 2009 alone he published Mischwald (i.e., Mixed Forest), Ortskunde. Eine kleine Geosophie (i.e., Local Studies. A Small Geosophy) and Zeitbehälter (i.e., Time Container). Yet he does not see himself as a writer. He sees himself rather as a “retailer”, who runs a company “with departments of music, photography, art, literature, journalism and others”.

Thomas Kapielski was born in 1951 in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After university studies in geography, philology and philosophy, he turned, a “fearless autodidact”, to art as a full-time career and was, beginning in the 1980s, “partner and motor of a network of befriended outsiders”, as Michael Glasmeier writes in the introduction to Kapielski’s works catalogue Vor Einbruch der Nüchternheit (1996) (i.e., Before the Break of Sobriety). The appearances of these “befriended outsiders” at art exhibitions were notorious; they not only drank abundantly of the “vernissage wine” but would also stamp the guest books with a stamp reading “Ditt könn wa och” (Berlin dialect for “We could do that too”).

Supported by Barbara Wien Publishers, where his early books appeared, Kapielski produced over the years a considerable body of work consisting of photography, sculpture, drawings and painting, which was given a synoptic exhibition in 1996 at the Valentin Museum in Munich. By this time, he later wrote, he had already decided to work only in literature. But he could not resist the prospect of exhibiting his complete works. Among the exhibitions were the photography series Entzündete Autoaugen (i.e., Inflamed Eyes), the installation Klorollenriff (i.e., Loo Roll Reef) and the oil painting Ölschinken (i.e., Oil Ham) – a ham painted with oil.

The exhibition opening turned into a farce of Kapielskian dimensions when the museum director said in her opening address that she found “the art here, viewed in this light, pretty crappy” – or so at any rate recalls the artist in his book, published in 1999, Davor kommt noch. Gottesbeweise IX-XIII (i.e., And Before That Comes ....Proofs for the Existence of God, IX-XIII).

In fact, Kapielski, in this akin to the Fluxus movement, cherishes a deep aversion to the high culture scene, whose mechanism operates, in his opinion, according to a simple pattern: “Good art prevails because what we call good is what prevails”. In this way many a charlatan has come to undeserved fame and honor. Kapielski’s critique includes his own work, which he repeatedly analyzes with self-irony and into whose creation process he affords a candid insight: “Depending on demand and market situation, a work has to be created from time to time. If the market roars for ‘etchings’, then, by God, we’ll buy an etcher! In thinking about how I could do things in the easiest way, the most useful ideas occurred to me”.

The self-ironic distance to his own work found its peak up to now in 2006 when Kapielski published his collected works as an inflatable “total air work” (Gesamtluftwerk). “You notice immediately whether an idea is special, a singularly brilliant coup, and this was one!”, he wrote in Anblasen (i.e., Blow). “Alone the symbolic, connotative ambient noise! The overblown – my entire theory of art turns on it. And this good dose of self-doubt. Who is immune to bluff and bubble?” Kapielski does everything he can to warn his audience against bluff and bubble.

But the art scene has struck back mercilessly. Kapielski’s book Mischwald (2009) was published by Suhrkamp, the site of German high culture par excellence. And in 2010 he was awarded the Prize of the Literature Houses: it is given expressly to authors with performance quality.