Dear Patron,
Today I am sharing some photographs of me and Jorg from my Berlin Archive from 2013 and Part I of my essay describing my time there !
Berlin Archive Part I
I started spending time in Berlin in the Spring of 2010. I’d heard Berlin was to the 21st century, what Paris was to the 20th – the epicenter of the avant-garde– and I wanted to experience “history.” Looking back, I might have been just another NYU student studying abroad. And in the summers that followed, I mostly spent time with a bunch of hedonistic nepo-babies (trust-fund-babies back then) attempting to approximate the glory days of a bygone era– though I am not sure which era that was. Seduced by the allure of cheap rent, large warehouse space, and extreme gay sex, artists were flocking to the city to live some kind of Patti-Smith dream. It was iconic. And so was I.
If I’m being honest, the arrogantly-minimalist and overly-conceptual German art I encountered in Berlin bored me – how many times can we redefine “the presence of absence”? But the city night-life was off the charts and “queerness” (gay sex) was at its center. European teenagers came to Berlin to party, American 20-somethings flew overnight just to go to Berghain, especially in the summer. The city became so popular that AirBerlin opened direct flights from JFK to the capital city in 2011. But by October 2017, the company went bankrupt and getting there became difficult. That was the year I declared Berlin OVER, at least for me.
I have not been back since.
But by the end of that first Spring in 2010, Berlin had a stranglehold on me. I'm not sure what it was. Perhaps it was the sense of freedom. I was very far from home. Or maybe it was the feeling that being an artist was possible -- the cost of living was so low it was easy to live there. Or maybe it was just the overall queerness of the city, the openness to gay sex. I started spending summers there in 2011, first doing a photo artist residency, then securing enough grant money and free living accommodations, sometimes trading photographs for rent, to work on my project. And in the summer of 2013, the summer before I went back to MFA school, the summer I made these photographs of Jorg, armed with the 60 year-old seagull camera I had purchased in China in the Summer of 2009, and no less than 3 different gay dating apps on my iphone, I met and photographed a lot of naked men.
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See you next week,
Matthew
