In the string of untitled actions that the Kippers performed in galleries and bars in Europe and North Africa between 19, the essential character of the relationships between the two characters was formed. The viewer emerges from a Kipper Kids performance with a feeling for the relationship between ordered social rituals and conventions and the festering violence that lies beneath the facade of mannered behavior.
Through actions that at times stress the visual, the visceral, and the violent aspects of social rituals, the British team of Harry and Harry Kipper perform in a fashion that combines the zany theatrics of Spike Jones with a kind of scatological slapstick that is all their own.
KIPPER KIDS SERIES
We perform an absolutely arbitrary series of actions.įor other articles in the series of strange or interesting music characters or albums WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT. “But there's no intentional message in our work. “Our work may be about our own lurking, festering violent impulses,” said von Haselberg in '81, “and perhaps it shows people, in a magnified way, what may lurk beneath their own calm exteriors. They never made many claims for themselves but rather let their often bewildered and sometimes blood-splattered audience try to figure them out. Their career was short (after '82 they went their own ways, only coming together occasionally) but for a while they had high-profile fans from the film and music worlds, and were analysed in academic terms by the arty set. with as much adolescent humour (farting) as serious provocation. One of their famous acts involved a boxer beating himself up. The Kipper Kids were the nexus of a collision of art, slapstick, music, performance and improvisation, often punctuated by seriously bent-outta-shape pop songs. Their connection with the music world came from von Haselberg's marriage to Bette Midler (they've been together since '78) who appeared in a special, and through Routh's marriage to the outrageous performance artist Karen Finley from '81- '87 who came out of the San Francisco punk scene with her music-cum-profane performance art win which she would appear naked, sometimes insert objects into her vagina, address suicide and the Holocaust, and rage over disco beats.
KIPPER KIDS TV
Whatever it was they did, they pulled appreciative audiences in Europe and got themselves on TV specials in the States.
“We actually consume quite a bit of alcohol when we perform,” said von Haselberg. With pancake make-up (“that lends them the air of a debauched Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” said Rolling Stone), they parlayed a violent act which involved whips, broken glass, physical confrontation and sometimes fireworks to shake up their audiences. The Kipper Kids – known individually as Harry and Harry – arrived at exactly the right time when punk brought an anarchic ethos and confrontation onto the frontline of the music game. As von Haselberg once said, “I don't know why people come to our shows, I do think that audiences enjoy being violated, and I don't know what that is. These days they might be clinically diagnosed but the late Seventies they earned a reputation for anarchic art performances which often challenged and confronted audiences. When in their early 20s they met at a drama school in London where their disruptive behaviour and “experimental” acts lead them to being invited to leave. They may have made their reputation in the States and their origins look to be in the European absurdist clown tradition but the duo of Brian Routh and Martin von Haselberg (look they've got their hands down each other's pants!) came together in Britain, Routh “a working class lad” (according to Rolling Stone) and von Haselberg of Argentinian-born German aristocracy. Īs Rolling Stone magazine wrote in 1981 – while calling them “the subversive darlings of the art avant-garde” – “the question is now whether the millions of Americans who lined up to watch the food fight in National Lampoon's Animal House will respond to the Kipper Kids' ritualistic gross-outs”.
KIPPER KIDS PLUS
Imagine the sadistic end of the Three Stooges coupled with anarchic French clowns, a more flatulent spin-off from the surrealism of Monty Python, plus silly voices, protracted skits which seem to have no end or even a point and. This duo who came to attention in America in the late Seventies/early Eighties opened for the Rolling Stones and Public Image Ltd, performed at the Munich Olympics and got their first big break on US television in a CBS show No Holds Barred. But for those who know of them it's more likely, “Do we really have to talk about the Kipper Kids?” The fair-enough question might be “Who the hell are the Kipper Kids?”.
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