Richard Hawkins, “Soft yet Weirdly Ways,” 2020

Dear Bruce, Spring has arrived and, like every year, I inwardly morph into a slender deer and nibble the soft, clean leaves sprouting all around me. Such a wonder! Last week, the tree in front of my kitchen window was bare, and now it’s bright green, its fresh leaves wafting back and forth in the cold wind. I can’t stop myself from caressing them when I walk by.

I’ve been to Vienna for a few days; I needed to get out of Berlin and spend some time in a city where the sidewalks aren’t littered with everything from dog shit to discarded refrigerators, and where I don’t have to climb over slumped-down bodies when entering a subway station. That it has come to this says something unflattering about either Berlin or me – I’m afraid it’s the latter, since I believe that Berlin has always been this way. (I remember hauling a refrigerator – one with a friendly note attached: “funktioniert noch!” [still working] – to the fourth floor of my unrenovated Altbauwohnung.) Nowadays, I have a desire for rather conventional beauty (in cities, in people, in landscapes), and this seems only to grow with age. Should the opportunity arise, I would leave Berlin in a heartbeat and move to Italy or the pages of Homes & Gardens.

Richard Hawkins, “Blood Everywhere,” 2024

Vienna worked just fine in that respect, baroque gardens and all, and I’ve seen, among other shows, Richard Hawkins’s retrospective, “Potentialities,” at Kunsthalle Wien (now up at Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover). It’s a big and exciting show, often weird and funny (the ceramic pieces !), and sometimes touching (Hawkins working through Forrest Bess’s cosmology, for example). There’s this beautiful thing he does with male nipples: isolating them, creating a two-nipples-and-a-face triangle which renders them voluminous, fe-male, and totally sexy. I share his taste in male actors. (No Ryan Gosling here!) However, if in Christine Breillat’s La Barbe Bleue “homosexual is when they’re in love,” in Richard’s work, homosexual is when they rip each other’s heads off. I’ve seen the zombie heads before (Johnny Depp, digital blood dripping from the stump of his neck), and now there’s an updated AI-generated, looped video version of Timothée Chalamet rotting from the inside out, starting with his dewy eyes. (Great soundtrack, though!) I know you’re friends with Richard and we all had been colleagues at one point. What’s the desire to see the very thing you revere and adore falling to bloody pieces? I couldn’t help thinking that if a straight artist would zombify, say, Sydney Sweeney in the same way, it would read very differently. The artist would be accused of misogyny. (Going back to Barbe Bleue: When the young wife enters the forbidden room where her husband keeps her murdered predecessors, the floor is covered in blood that apparently never dries. It’s a marker, but of what?)

Curious of your thoughts on this. I attach a snapshot from the Helmut Lang exhibition at MAK in Vienna from the seating chart of a runway show, or, as he prefers to call them, séance de travail. xo a

“Helmut Lang: Séance de Travail 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive,” (detail), MAK, Wien, 2026

Annette Weisser is an artist and author.

Image credit: 1+2 Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, 3 photo Annette Weisser