Heinrich Dunst: About A B order
Donnerstag, 24. Januar 2013 - 19:00 Uhr
Galerie nächst St. Stephan
In his exhibition in the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Dunst cleverly plays with the tensions between meanings and problems arising from what comes first and what second, from inclusion and exclusion, origin and descent, and understanding and disjunction – in short, the orders of meaning, the act of articulation, and the logic of sense. How do these orders that Dunst is alluding to – while referring again and again to Deleuze and various paradox concepts – come about and what do they relate to?
What role does this “A” that Dunst puts in the first room as a leitmotiv play? Does the letter signify the beginning, opening the first room like a gate, or is it visual positing that initiates further pictorial inscriptions and their variations? Dunst leaves this open, while his gesture provokes further questions. Is this “A” an independent, written sign, a sculptural element, or is it just a space devoid of meaning? Its casual position makes us even more unsure. Does not this “A” that is present and at the same time cut-out and absent reach beyond the opposition between text and image, between mark and sculpture already? Does it not question cultures of understanding and conventions of seeing? Whether regarded as a concept or picture, thing or stencil, sentence or positing, the elementary letter that Heinrich Dunst erects in capital form always refers to its possible translation into another code of understanding and thus to its possible dissolution. Without a doubt, as an image the letter reminds us of its origin in text. As text, it appears enlarged to the size of a picture. As a statue, it becomes a stage. Ultimately, this ambivalent “A” is also a window, a view through, a blank space, emptiness, a fragment.
But more than this, the “A” goes beyond the many different areas of application by bringing itself into play. Playing itself has to do with its priority, its coming first, which it questions through its visible and readable claim. Like in the title “About A B order” written on the partition wall, the “A” dissolves within the “B” that follows it by serving it linguistically. When understood as an article, the first element becomes the servant of the second. This turns the initial hierarchy, and hence the beginning, upside down. It goes to the end, like the visitor who has to leave the exhibition by going through the first room again. The “A” that Dunst shows us as a recurring carrier of meaning is therefore not static, like a thing that only leans. According to its meaning, it is transitive. It refers beyond the place where it is located to another place. It is a capital “A” that indicates the beginning of a transversal: the linking of meaning. As a conceptual element, it marks a beginning that is actually already subsequent and secondary.
Thomas D. Trummer, Mainz, December 17, 2012