9 und Eine Art Einzige; Gagosian Gallery Berlin

Hans-Christian Dany, Martin Ebner, Ariane Müller
STARSHIP

Having been invited by Gagosian Gallery, Berlin, for a show, we decided to reprint a text published for the first time 24 years ago in a then famous Matthes & Seitz reader.
Oswald Wiener's 'Eine Art Einzige' is a complex text using the social and literary figure of the dandy to talk about historical and contemporary attempts to artificially model people by limiting communication. It's a discourse on science, which he accuses to pursue the goal to dissolve people into standardized parts of observable behaviour. The attitude of the dandy to escape standardization by affirmation is shown as a powerful conservative attempt fitting a society asking for persons without giving them any possibilities to change set forms of communication, language, movement or art.

Oswald Wiener wrote in another text (on K. Bayer) that communication on content can not be forced so that in order to give it a direction you can only use formal methods, that can be always neutralised by adequate understandings. Adding: this is no resignation but hope.

STARSHIP, for the show at the Gagosian Gallery, Berlin, decided to reprint the text, which has been a sort of basis for the latest issues of STARSHIP magazine on Darkening and The Year we have been nowhere. We decided to wrap it into a new cover that explicitly says why we are interested in the text to not further any misunderstanding or possible misreading like that we are interested in the dandy.
The issues covers the floor of the gallery. By distributing them to people willing to pick them up from the floor our basis may dissolve into people, yet nobody knows if it will be read. But perhaps sometime (later).