vienna won’t be grasped. at least not without completely immersing oneself (take care!). this city, where hardly a difference is made between cardinal virtues and mortal sins, proves a mystery even to the professional. an overview, or even just the hope of an overall picture, is not granted to anyone. the levels of interaction have always been complex. the foundations of the ground rules, not really known to anyone, appear to be rooted in acting indirectly. the only thing remaining, therefore, is to approach in several steps, to follow chains of association: from molto brutto to graf to west, from weiler to gaube to brandl, from café anzengruber to weigand to pettibon ...and then: hardly any of those having left their mark on vienna wanted to do so. vienna appropriates in hindsight. whoever wants to approach the inscribing deliberately, had better go for local politics, tender art-in-architecture projects, knowing that the ever precarious circumstances will take care of a sufficient number of submissions.and anyway, which artist would want that? to represent a city, instead of flooding the world as a whole. the places of yearning or, as may be, of exile, have always been berlin, new york, or l.a., or ...it remains to be found out how these axes have come about, who formed a self-image under what circumstances, took the authority to disregard the secret rulebook, in order, whether being happy about it or not, to be inscribed into the regulations in hindsight.in a series of stations, vienna waits for you – take care concentrates artists’ states of being or of arriving from the outside, across the generations, just as it does their strategies vis-à-vis “working from here” vs. “getting out of here.”(mm)