›dear_friends‹ was an email column. At least that is what I called it at the time. As in: »Sorry, can’t make it tonight – gotta finish the new column…« For a few years, I sporadically wrote these really (really!) long emails to an ever-expanding group of people. Anybody could sign up to receive these emails through my website. I had this somewhat loopy (yet really earnest) idea that through the act of signing up people would consent to me thinking of them as my friend from now on. I was weirdly obsessed with ›friendship‹ at the time. Let me rephrase that: I felt really lonely at the time. I had just moved back to Berlin from Los Angeles. Everybody is lonely in Los Angeles. That’s kind of their thing. Maybe that’s why they talk so much to each other. I loved that so much. Small talk has a bad rep. I think it’s amazing. Also, because people are so lonely in Los Angeles, they constantly introduce you. And even if we had just met a few minutes ago, they would say: »This is my friend Max from Berlin…«. Nobody does that in Berlin. I’m not sure why. It can’t just be about being cool. It’s probably part of it… the whole detached thing: winter, cheekbones, Ketamine, Techno. But that can’t be all. It’s crazy scary to introduce somebody you just met as your friend. What if the person you just introduced as a friend goes: »Ex-cuse meee?!? I don’t even know you bitch! Don’t you have any real friends?« And then your friends would probably leave with that new person, because they are obviously so much more fun and you’ve always been a bit of a drag and also you got really shitty skin. Publicly announcing somebody as a friend, that full on JL Austin speech act thing, when sounds produced by a human throat modify the reality in which the owner of said throat exists: a stranger, a colleague or an acquaintance – speech act: Do you Max want to be introduced by this random stranger who just asked you for lighter as a friend? Yes I do. Tada. With the power invested in me by the nebulous social contract, I pronounce you friend and friend. It’s… wild. Because there’s not that much… language to negotiate and acknowledge the status of friendship. Or… that’s what I thought about at the time. I felt like… after a certain age, it’s no longer socially accepted to ask somebody: »Hey, I really like you… I like spending time with you and the crazy ideas you have… I like the way I feel around you and how our minds work, when we hang out. Do you want to be my friend?« Asking something like that, as an adult… well, maybe it is actually a bit of a gendered issue, maybe this is a particularly male adult problem… but anyway… I often felt asking somebody if they would want to be your friend might in itself already be an argument for why they wouldn’t want that. Because you’re… just a bit much. Needy. The stench of desperation. You know that stupid movie trope, when somebody accidentally calls somebody their boy*/girl*friend, without having had the talk. And it’s a whole big thing and really embarrassing and maybe it’s all over now because it turns out the other person assumed you were just fucking and… I don’t know… maybe that doesn’t really happen outside of movies, in which plot is driven by conflict. But still, calling somebody a friend for the first time can be… scary. So you just have to risk it and hope for the best. And then there’s the whole issue – not sure if that’s an art world thing – when you run into people in a very specific context, openings, gallery dinners, performances, lectures and you have this really amazing conversation about the thing that provides the context and you feel like you clicked somehow, like: this person seems really lovely, maybe it could be nice to hang out again without some kind of context, as in: privately (if such a thing still exists) and then it turns out, they were never interested in that, they thought of you as an opportunity. While you felt you were bonding they were actually just… networking.

Well… that’s kind of what the column was supposed to be about. I tried to write these essays on friendship. And they turned really long and really loopy, because… I guess I was secretly or subconsciously writing these columns to ask (in a very convoluted way) some very specific people in life: Do you want to be my friend? Because I really liked them and didn’t know if they thought of me at all. And because I had just graduated from art school and I was really broke (not: charming second hand designer clothes young artist-broke, not knowing how to pay the rent- broke) but had a lot of time, I thought: maybe this could be an artistic practice. Writing. It was the only thing I could afford to do at the time. So in retrospect, it also feels like I wrote these columns to teach myself how to write. Because nobody commissioned these texts, nobody asked for them, there were no deadlines and no fees, and in the beginning I even assumed that nobody would read them anyway so I felt like I could do whatever I want. I was really into lists and comically rigorous structuring at the time. And into New York School poetry. And collage. And Wayne Koestenbaum. So… the whole thing went off the rails pretty quickly, in terms of… uhm… form. Most of these emails aren’t about friendship at all.

They are about a million different things. I guess in a way, dear_friends became equivalent to a studio practice during a time in my life when I neither had a studio nor a stable practice.