A "Caren Eliot-Retrospektive" had been announced to take place in Wiesbaden on Thursday, April 20th 2000 e.V.. The Karen/Caren Eliot(s) behind this event also set up a web site <http://www.neoismus.de>. The page <http://www.neoismus.de/nib.htm> informs that further Neoist events were/are planned to take place in Frankfurt, April 28th 2000 and finally in Wiesbaden, November 24th-26th 2000. The latter is being announced as "2. Neoistischer Weltkongreß" with the participants "Graf Haufen, Stewart Home, SaschaBuettner, Luther Blisset, A.B., Artware, AAA, Oliver Marchart, Günter Jacob, Regina Behrendt, Karen Eliot, MGC".

SaschaBuettner decided to attend the April 20th "Caren Eliot-Retrospektive" opening and travelled by train to Wiesbaden. He could find out the non-Eliot identities, addresses and phone numbers of the person involved (Florian Cramer) fairly easily. To make things a bit less obvious on his side, Buettner decided to spice up the exhibition opening with some Neoist irritainment, continuing his practice of attending APTs and public Neoist events under mock identities. Since the exhibition flyer chiefly consisted of plagiarized statements from Oliver Marchart's book "Neoismus", Vienna: Edition Selene, 1997, his idea was to stage an appearance of it famous author in Wiesbaden and persuade Luther Blissett (a.k.a. Stiletto) to attend the show as "Oliver Marchart". According to the plan, "Oliver Marchart" should be accompanied by "Stefan Römer" (a.k.a. Buettner), a critic of the German hip arts magazine "Texte zur Kunst" and author of a book on fakes in conceptual art.

Since, Luther Blissett was unfortunately not able to join SaschaBuettner, Buettner a.k.a. Stefan Römer opted for a "Godot" game as an ersatz tactics. On his way to Wiesbaden, he called up Caren Eliot/Florian Cramer, introducing himself as Stefan Römer and announcing that he and Oliver Marchart - who just had lectured in Berlin - would come to the opening. When Eliot asked Buettner where he had her address from, he explained that the information had been handed over from Oliver Marchart (who was travelling separately by car, accompanied by a friend from Austria - and who was well connected in the Neoist underground).

When Buettner arrived in Wiesbaden after 8 p.m. when the opening had already begun. It was a 30 minutes walk from Wiesbaden main station to the Via Publica gallery, Taunusstraße going straight through the center of the city. Buettner, who intended to plagiarize the fluxus artist behaviour of using Wiesbaden as a recreational resort against lung sickness (practiced by Nam June Paik - and by Benjamin Patterson who still lives in the city), had accomodated himself in a cheap bar/hotel in the Wiesbaden suburbs, a perfect resort for not being spotted by exhibition visitors in the following two days. Unlike other hotels and bed & breakfasts in Germany - particularly in South Western Germany - this one required no IDs for checking in, perhaps an explanation why the Wiesbaden area used to be the favourite resort of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists.

Buettner arrived at Taunusstraße around 9 p.m. when it turned out that there was no gallery or exhibition at the address he had been given. Was it all a big Neoist prank? The situation promised to become interesting. In a phone call with Caren Eliot's girlfriend at home, Buettner/Römer learned that the house number had been mixed up on some invitations. Shorty after, Eliot/Cramer came along the street and accompanied Buettner/Römer to Via Publica.

Memories from the Exhibition

This section of the report was written five weeks after the opening. Via Publica was the first floor of a temporarily deserted office building, a loft-like space of approximately ten by ten meters. A column in the middle of the room featured some blurry b/w photographs (or b/w xeroxes of photographs) subtitled with the names and dates of 'actual' and 'fictitious' Neoist APT fests. Another exhibition object, placed on top of a lower pillar was a metal suitcase; built into the suitcase was an imitation of a timebomb with a LED countdown. Hanging on the wall right next to the entrance were blow-ups of police records and advisory material concerning bombings. A large canvas displayed sound wave forms in fiber curves. In addition, the exhibition featured a number of primitivist COBRA/Dubuffet-style paintings.

"Stefan Römer" drank some of the champaign offered and introduced himself to Caren Eliot, as embodied by FlorianCramer^? and Heinrich Dubel. Their conversation circled around when Oliver Marchart would turn up later in the evening - he and his friend had got into holiday traffic jams on the autobahn -, about the importance of political standpoints in contemporary art and how Neoism fits into this picture, who these Neoists actually were and what Neoism actually was (after all, Stefan Römer was no expert on this topic and needed some help from those involved), and whether "Texte zur Kunst" would, with its political agenda and in the light of the trouble of having relocated from Cologne to Berlin (Stefan Römer knew all the gory details), cover the exhibition. It turned out that the "Second Neoist World Congress" planned by Caren Eliot is likely to be renamed because "Neoism" doesn't really fit her intentions of networking the arts, pop culture and political activism.

After about half an hour of conversation, Stefan Römer introduced himself to Donna Klemm, owner and runner of the Wiesbaden-based "artware" distribution service. She said that she couldn't get much from the exhibition because the people who had made it didn't know very much about Neoism, were not connected to its network, and because it was a conventional exhibition after all. Römer's and Klemm's discussion focussed on how such an exhibition could be made more Neoist; Klemm said that Neoists like SaschaBuettner/Istvan Kantor wouldn't hesitate to come over and stage disruptive actions on such an event. Römer argued that more subliminal interventions could perhaps also change the character of the event.

At 10:30 p.m., Römer left Via Publica, drifting through Wiesbaden for the search of some acceptable cheap food, didn't find any, and took the 11:45 p.m. train to his hotel in the suburbs. His attempts to call/contact Ben Patterson in the next two days didn't succeed.

-- SaschaBuettner - 15 Jun 2005