Dear Bruce,

The first rainstorm of the season is tugging at the leaves still strong enough to put up a fight. Summer is over, and the past few weeks have been good, spent at sufficient distance to catastrophic climate events further south, where wildfires roared in Greece and Italy. Only a dip into the Mediterranean, at about 28° water temperature, threw me back into the by now familiar cognitive split between “I like this!” and “This is not normal!” The reason my son and I travelled to the Côte d’Azur at all was his wish to visit Monaco, which I had promised to fulfill in exchange for a complaint-free week of hiking in the Italian alps. He’s a luxury car enthusiast and, apparently, Monaco is the place to go. (He and his friends go car-spotting very much the same way ornithologists go bird-watching.) While he planted himself in front of the Casino de Monte-Carlo with a bunch of other kids on the same mission, taking cellphone pics of the parade of half a million euro and more on four impeccably polished wheels, I strolled over to Hauser & Wirth to see the Annie Leibovitz show because there wasn’t much else for me to do. The gallery is housed in a three-story underground building with a spectacular (what else!) skylight – certainly making the most of its plot, which must have been bought for an astronomical land price. Leibovitz’s photographs fell into two distinct categories: portraits of the culturally relevant (among them Salman Rushdie, David Hockney, Cindy Sherman, or my beloved Patti Smith), and those of celebrities (e.g., Monaco’s royal family, as well as a very pregnant Melania Trump posing on the gangway of her husband’s private jet) who were willing to pay the photographer’s fee.

Among the first group, a portrait of Agnes Martin from 1999 touched my heart. Taken in the bedroom of her modest New Mexico house, Martin faces the camera with the unguarded openness of a child, or a madwoman. Unlike most of Leibovitz’s photographs in the show, this one isn’t artful. It’s stripped of any pretense or vanity both in front and behind the camera. This elderly, slightly overweight woman putting her brush to a canvas, I thought, is at the beginning of a value chain that produces places like the one I’m standing in. There was a time in my life when this absurdity made me furious; now it almost made me want to cry. When I reemerged to the ground level, I held the mental image of Martin in that modest bedroom against the McLaren, Maybach, Lamborghini, and Ferrari showrooms, which my son made me visit to take his pictures, like a protective charm.

In your last letter, you asked me whether I remembered the times when “nobody was interested in contemporary art.” In response, I would like to tell you about a dream I had a few nights ago. (Bear with me!) I’m in a museum that is showing a major group exhibition, the floors are packed with visitors. I don’t pay attention to the glossy, high-end sculptures and the huge LED screens that emit a flickering light. I’m rushing through this setting, which feels entirely familiar, looking for my own room, because apparently, I live inside the museum. In a corner of one of the exhibition halls, there is a performance going on: The artist is contorting his body dramatically in complete silence. Suddenly, the audience squeals. As I come closer to see what happened, it turns out the artist has vomited on a small rug. Everyone is shocked, but I know that this is part of the performance. He will puke on his little carpet at set times every day for the duration of the show, and the barf will dry into an elaborate pattern on the fabric. I hurry on, and finally I find my room: It’s a tiny, windowless space with built-in furniture, and all the surfaces are dirty-white, like an Absalon cell that is actually inhabited. Relieved, I shut the door behind me. My only concern now is to keep all these people out, and to that end I carry a key ring with keys of all sizes. I go through one key after another, but none fits, until I realize that the shape of the lock is constantly changing. I start to panic. Then I wake up.

Absalon imagined plugging his cellules into the urban landscape, free for everyone to use. Yet to my knowledge, they are only shown within the confines of art institutions. In this dream, however, I took him up on his offer, squatter-style. Perhaps this connects to the notion of burrowing, which you brought up at the end of your letter: “So art will become (again) a thing lunar and going bump in the night, if we’re lucky. Something burrowing, burrowed.” (I assume you weren’t thinking of burrowing inside the museum.)

I do share the urge to close the door on a business that either treats artworks as stock or, at the other end of the spectrum, as visual footnotes to the curator’s Gegenwartsanalyse. (Latest case in point: “Global Fascisms” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. I felt a strong urge to release the paintings into the wild.) But while I would prefer to live inside Agnes Martin’s bedroom, far from the art world’s empty theatrics, my dream self isn’t yet ready to give up on the hope of making a home inside art’s institutions, literally and figuratively. I’m not completely comfortable with going back to an ideal of art as the last resort for “queers of every stripe, freaks, cutters, those with suicidal ideation issues.” For isn’t this romanticizing a situation that previous generations of artists sought to change?

You express hope that the falling apart of everything (I think what you refer to is the alliance of contemporary art, fashion, and celebrity culture) will return art to obscurity, and – in my interpretation – will allow it to recover from the spectacle that my subconsciousness funneled into the image of the barf artist. (I’m not sure whether he’s the counterpart of the hunger artist or just its latest update – replacing anorexia with bulimia, more in tune with the cultural moment!) But do you really want to go back to the paradigm of the starving artist? Isn’t it worth fighting for artists to get compensated for the value we create? In this context, my room inside the museum takes on a new meaning. In Berlin, decades of struggles for affordable studio space led to the creation of the very successful Berliner Atelierprogramm, currently under attack by the new conservative administration. Same applies to the obligatory fee (FABiK) paid to artists for participation in exhibitions, which was only introduced in 2016. (It has been secured for now, after much public protest against the announced cancellation). These cuts wouldn’t have saved the city a ton of money, but going after art and culture sends a clear signal: Sorry guys, the priorities have changed! (The new priority being military defense, obviously.)

When I read the last paragraph of your letter, my mind performed that strange operation: It created a bifurcation in which leg A operates under the premise that things will go on unchanged, except for art losing its dominance in contemporary culture. Leg B operates under the premise that destruction – war – is imminent: the falling apart of everything. To now permanently hold these two options in mind has a debilitating effect. The plead for fair compensation, for “a place at the table,” especially in Berlin with its long history of successfully marketing its creative class, as well as, more recently, the intense debate over free speech re the war on Gaza, the fight against the rollback of gender-sensitive language, of cultural policies aimed at anti-discrimination, all relate to A, as they follow a familiar pattern. These struggles rely on a future that is predictable, a future in which basic human needs are of no concern.

What relates to B? I don’t know. During the early days of the war against Ukraine, in March 2022, I attended a panel organized by CCA Berlin, titled Ukrainian Dispatch: Solidarity as Cultural Practice during Wartime. The artist Nikita Kadan reported on how the Kyiv art community quickly turned exhibition spaces into bomb shelters. I vividly remember his urgent call for NATO air raid defense systems, which, at the time, chancellor Olaf Scholz wasn’t ready to approve. (We were sending 5,000 helmets instead.) Conversely, in Germany, many bunker structures from WW2 had, since the 1990s, been turned into cultural spaces. I guess these spaces will come in handy when we huddle together in a city under attack, or as cooling centers during the heatwaves to come, burrowing, burrowed.

Last year, Amelie von Wulffen published the essay “Des Pudels Kern” in conjunction with her solo show “I Think We Did A Great Job” at Galerie Barbara Weiss (now Trautwein & Herleth). She writes that while taking her poodle for a walk, she sometimes imagines a nuclear attack on Berlin. She continues:

But everything is still there, as real and as peaceful as ever. I want to document it in paintings, and I’ve been asking myself whether the current situation, the unease that many people are feeling at the moment, is similar to what gave rise to the Neue Sachlichkeit of the twenties and thirties. Did the urgent need to paint pictures of houseplants, a glass of water, the view from the window or one’s own face emerges from a general sense of being under threat? [1]

I was surprised then that she dared to express in writing what I only allowed myself to imagine during sleepless nights. And while I don’t feel the need to document what is still here, real and peaceful as ever, I’m often struck by a sensation that what I’m looking at (a scene at an opening, or at a restaurant, or at a busy train station) is already part of a bygone past. It’s an eerie feeling. And yet I go on, like everyone else, under premise A – not least because I’m a mother.

I’m sorry this letter took such a pessimistic turn. Let’s not think of famous last words quite yet and instead imagine saxophones in the sky. But when the Russian mega-yachts start to leave their harbor, someone at Hauser & Wirth should perhaps close that skylight.

XO Annette