Berlin as Readymade

Look! An empire of morning with fleamarket bicycles wobbling under bony arses. The cranes, stork-legged, wandering construction sites where day, a map read backwards, unfolds at the horizon. Footsteps echo on the broken-window boulevards, apes lounging at the foot of Babel in their postcards. Sunrise has been pasted into the halcyon. A banner trails a plane: kultur macht reich! above bronze Marx and Engels in an unmown park, in long beards, visitors from an old world. A bohemian pack is beginning to snarl. Light stills, where books once burned. ‘Beauty is a history lesson we have failed’ they bark, dog-headed, without even fallen angels for company.

In the graffiti-hung galleries, bombs and ideologies have all been dropped.