#THE KIPPER KIDS SERIES#

These days, outrageous behavior on stage is a performance commonplace, from standup comedy to heavy-metal music. However, like the neo-folkie bands that flourished in the psychedelic ’60s, the Kippers’ idea seemed to work better when they were bucking the cultural tide. Now, after a period of relative inactivity, including almost ten years’ absence from the New York scene, they have brought their essentially unchanged act into a freewheeling ’80s situation that would appear to be more congenial to their work. Such antics were at most taboo-threatening, as when they burst baggies of realistic-looking fake excrement over their jockstrap-clad rears, and at least amusing in their acting-out of messy-children-at-play (i.e., slinging paint, spitting up partially chewed food, etc.), but their “forbidden” behavior had great shock value at the time. Nonsensical nuttiness was the Dadaesque raison d’être of this Los Angeles-based duo when they practiced their acts of infantile aggression in the serious Conceptual art context of the mid ’70s. Brian Routh and Martin von Haselberg) are the original bad boys of performance art. Routh was married three times: to net.art pioneer Nina Sobell from 1975 to 1981, to performance artist Karen Finley from 1981 to 1987, and to digital artist Patricia Wells.The Kipper Kids (a.k.a. They have one daughter together, actress Sophie von Haselberg. Von Haselberg has been married to Bette Midler since 1984. Theatre In Trance – Rainer Werner Fassbinde

#THE KIPPER KIDS SERIES#

Later, Martin von Haselberg created a series of large photographic images made into inflatable sculptural shapes titled Floatulents. The Kipper Kids also performed a song in the 1991 comedy film The Addams Family: ' Playmates' which can be heard in the film and on its soundtrack. First aired on Valentine's Day, 1989, 'I See England, I See France, I See Maddie's Netherworld' featured The Kipper Kids as a pair of gravediggers in a surreal dream sequence.

Another television appearance came during the fifth season of ABC's Moonlighting. They also were seen as characters in the 1982 film Forbidden Zone and the 1989 film UHF. Von Haselberg made a number of films at the American Film Institute with Routh in the lead role: Quiet Lives (1991), People Are No Damn Good (1991) and Your Turn To Roll It #54 (1992). Kippers, while the Kids also appeared in a 1982 project for HBO executive-produced by von Haselberg, The Mondo Beyondo Show, a one time presentation for performance artists (including a pre- Stomp Yes/No People, La La La Human Steps, Bill Irwin, Paul Zaloom and others) hosted by Bette Midler's Mondo Beyondo character. For HBO they produced Mum's Magic Mulch, and for Cinemax, K.O. The Kipper Kids made two projects for television. Japanese rituals, English music hall, Viennese Actionism, and the work of Samuel Beckett were amongst their influences. Examples are 'Tea Ceremony' (1972) a Japanese tea ceremony-inspired piece and 'Boxing Ceremony' (1972) in which one performer beats himself until bloodied whilst the other acts as referee. Routh and von Haselberg created elaborate but purposely low-tech installations in which they would perform 'ceremonies' using mostly found objects. Quoting from an announcement for the Berkeley Art Museum: 'Through actions that at times stress the visual, 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 Milligan with a scatological slapstick that is all their own'. The two Harry Kippers, 8 October 1979, at Hallwalls in Buffalo, NY. They reunited as The Kipper Kids in 2018 to perform the song ' Mah Nà Mah Nà' for the album Dr. Their final performance together was at the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, in 2003. In 1982, they stopped actively collaborating. The Kipper Kids moved to Los Angeles in 1975 and became associated with the early years of punk. In 1974, David Ross, later director of the Whitney Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, saw them in performance at Gallerie Rudolf Zwirner in Cologne and invited them to do some shows in California.

įrom 1971 to 1975, most of their performances took place in Europe. Later, they dropped the name Alf and decided to call each other Harry and make their characters identical.

They were originally called Harry and Alf Kipper and had two distinctly different characters. Upon being expelled from the school on the claim of 'too experimental', they began working as a touring act. While attending East 15 Acting School, Martin von Haselberg and Brian Routh invented a character they called Harry Kipper.

The kipper kids