IF YOU WANT TO GO FAST, GO SLOW.
This is my mantra, I told Davide.
Then Davide shared his mantra with me:
HOW TO FIND THE MOONEY TO MOVE TO BERLIN.
Two mantras. One moves by slowing down. The other requires a bank account.
I was about to say something.
Eastern philosophy suggests that every problem has at least 5 solutions.
So I wrote to him:
TOP 10 WAYS TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM:
OPTION 1: Seduce Julia Stoschek.
OPTION 2: Find a billionaire with terrible taste. Become his taste, then change it.
OPTION 3: Sell your future Berlin retrospective before your first Berlin exhibition.
OPTION 4: Marry a wealthy female collector from the Emirates. Riyadh is a good place to start.
OPTION 5: Find a collector who wants to live forever. Sell him the rights to your afterlife.
OPTION 6: Seduce a wealthy intellectual widow. Inherit her fortune. Finally, become the artist you were always meant to be.
OPTION 7: Become so expensive that poverty can no longer afford you.
OPTION 8: Fall in love with a woman who owns half of Berlin but hates art. Take the money. Educate her later.
OPTION 9: Convince a bank that your debt is a conceptual artwork.
OPTION 10: If u want to go fast – go slow.
BONUS OPTION 11: Move to Berlin. Become legend. Legends never pay rent.
BONUS OPTION 12: Marry me, in 2030 I’ll be so rich, my astrologer says. Make me a child, then divorce me, and you’ll own half my fortune.
Then he wrote to me: hahahahaha PORCODIO!!!
Then I realised this could become a manifesto.
I had been inspired since morning.
Then he mentioned Dio – God.
This encouraged me.
I continued adding solutions.
OPTION 13: Invent a religion. Charge for salvation. The soul is immaterial.
The invoice is not.
OPTION 14: Start a cult for rich people who are afraid to die. Membership is non-refundable.
OPTION 15: Invent a disease – a Virus only contemporary art can cure. Charge the collectors.
OPTION 16: Become someone a muse. You can do this because of your beauty, your Venus in Pisces, your Rohini Moon. Send an invoice every month for services rendered as a muse.
OPTION 17: Invent a new colour. Sell the exclusive rights to the Gulf.
OPTION 18: Find a collector who fears death more than bad taste. Marry accordingly.
OPTION 19: Sell your future. Keep the deposit.
OPTION 20: Find God. Ask for a production budget.
OPTION 21: The world is ending. Open a gallery.
Then I stopped.
When I read back everything I had written to him, it sounded good.
Like Kurt Vonnegut had opened a tax haven for failed artists, while Anne Carson was doing the bookkeeping.
Short. Dangerous. Dead serious
I went to take a shower.
Forty minutes under boiling water. I almost became cooked like steamed macaroni.
The heat raised my internal temperature sufficiently for me to write something important. Something relevant. A manifesto for all the artists who wish to move to Berlin.
If Davide hadn’t been so generous as to share his mantra with me, this manifesto might never have existed.
Therefore, half the credit goes to Davide Allieri.
The other half goes to my future husband, who will be very rich when he marries me, and considerably less rich when he divorces me after I become wealthy in 2030.
Then I sat down at my computer and wrote a guide for poor and talented artists who want to move to Berlin.
MANIFESTO FOR POOR ARTISTS WHO WANT TO MOVE TO BERLIN
For those who have made poverty part of the method.
For those who say I need space to work when they mean I need money to live.
For those travelling to Berlin with one suitcase, three unfinished projects and an inexplicable confidence in the future.
This manifesto is free of charge.
20 SOLUTIONS :
1. MOVE TO BERLIN.
Become so expensive that poverty can no longer afford you. Make your CV longer than your bank statement.
2. INVENT A COLOUR.
Give it a name that cannot be translated.
Sell the rights to the Gulf.
The colour is not important. The agreement is.
3. BECOME A MUSE.
The muse has traditionally been the person in the room whose labour is not included in the budget.
Correct this historical error.
Invoice monthly.
4. MARRY RICH.
This is not an aesthetic position.
It is an arrangement concerning the distribution of risk.
The arrangement may be temporary. The electricity company is not interested in temporality.
5. APPLY FOR RESIDENCIES.
The institution asks for evidence of a practice.
You submit the practice.
The institution asks for evidence of its future development.
You submit the future.
The institution declines.
You now possess evidence of institutional exclusion. Whether this constitutes a practice remains an open question.
6. PRESERVE YOUR INDEPENDENCE.
First, establish the conditions under which independence is possible.
Then remove the conditions.
Observe how quickly independence begins to resemble a luxury product.
7. WHEN ASKED WHAT YOU DO, DO NOT ANSWER WITH A VERB.
Verbs suggest employment.
Say: I am developing a long-term interdisciplinary practice.
This sentence has the advantage of being true even when nothing is happening.
Especially then.
8. STUDY THE GEOGRAPHY OF ACCESS.
A city consists of streets, buildings and the invisible distances between people who can enter a room and people who cannot.
Learn the distances.
They are often more expensive than the buildings.
9. DEVELOP AN AURA.
If you have no money, at least have an aura.
An aura is useful when the work is not yet visible.
It is less useful when the landlord arrives.
10. IF YOU WANT TO GO FAST, GO SLOW.
This is a theory of time.
Rent is a theory of consequences.
Neither has been disproved.
11. MAKE AT LEAST ONE WORK ABOUT CAPITALISM.
Capitalism will recognise itself. It may even buy the work.
The work should be critical. The sale need not be.
Ask what it costs to oppose a system that determines the price of opposition.
The institution purchases the work.
The work criticises the institution.
The institution displays the criticism.
Everyone agrees that the contradiction is productive.
The artist asks whether the fee includes production costs.
A silence follows.
This is the part of the work that cannot be reproduced.
12. SELL THE ABSENCE.
If the work is not there, explain that its absence is constitutive.
If the money is not there, the situation is no longer conceptual.
13. LEARN THE LANGUAGE OF SUPPORT.
Visibility.
Exchange.
Opportunity.
Professional development.
These are words that can circulate without money changing hands.
Learn to recognise the moment when a noun is being offered in place of a payment.
14. DO NOT CONFUSE PRECARITY WITH FREEDOM.
Freedom is the ability to refuse.
Precarity is the condition in which refusal has a price you cannot afford.
The two are frequently exhibited together.
15. UNDERSTAND THAT TALENT IS NOT A FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT.
It produces no guaranteed return.
It cannot be used as collateral.
It does not exempt its owner from the laws of the housing market.
This is why talent is so frequently described as a gift.
A gift is something one can be expected to give away.
16. KEEP A RECORD OF YOUR LIFE.
One document records your achievements.
Another records your transactions.
Do not confuse them.
The first is a CV.
The second is the material conditions under which the first became possible.
17. WAIT FOR THE WORK TO BECOME LEGIBLE.
If it is misunderstood, time may help.
If time does not help, the work may require another context.
If no context arrives, the artist may become historical.
History has a curious relationship with payment.
It often arrives after the person who needed it.
18. MONEY CANNOT BUY TALENT.
This statement is correct.
Money can, however, purchase the time in which talent develops.
It can purchase a room in which to work, the equipment with which to work, childcare, healthcare, food, sleep.
It can purchase the possibility of refusing a bad opportunity.
The distinction between talent and money is therefore philosophically sound.
Its practical consequences are less elegant.
19. WOMEN ARTISTS: CONSIDER MARRIAGE.
Marriage is not a funding body.
It has no application deadline, although it may have other deadlines.
Its resources may be substantial.
Its conditions of access are rarely published.
Alternatively, become so successful that your financial arrangements cease to be mistaken for an explanation of your work.
Ideally, achieve both.
20. BECOME A LEGEND.
A legend is an artist whose material conditions have been successfully removed from the biography.
The rent remains.
At a certain point, the biography begins to function as an economic fiction.
The artist is described as having needed nothing.
The rent has disappeared from the story.
The people who paid it have disappeared too.
This is how the legend becomes self-sufficient.
Not by eliminating dependence.
By eliminating its evidence.
A NOTE ON REPRODUCTION
This manifesto may be reproduced, translated, performed, misread or used by artists attempting to relocate to Berlin.
No permission is required.
No fee is required.
These two conditions should not be confused.
The first concerns intellectual property.
The second concerns the present economic situation of the author.
No guarantee of success is offered.
Success is not a deliverable.
WISHES
May you receive funding before you have exhausted the capacity to apply for it.
May the institution understand the work before the work becomes obsolete.
May your landlord accept the distinction between artistic value and market value.
May you find a way to live that does not require you to explain, every morning, why you are still doing this.
May the conditions of its production be survivable.
May marriage remain a possibility rather than an economic necessity.
If all else fails, become a legend.
And if you become a legend, may the people who made your life possible remain in the story.
Good luck with your career.
The problem was never that you were poor and talented.
The problem was that talent was expected to compensate for poverty.
It cannot.
It has other work to do.