NEU 2005 NEU 2005

Perhaps the best-documented episode in the formation of Crew Radix was the event at the experimental art exhibition "NEU" in 2005, which resulted in the introduction of Berndt Huber to the collective.

Dieter Hoeness' single contribution to the exposition, "Hypersolid, Coefficient 43", a mixed-media work involving a statue of a seated man, had attracted considerable controversy in the press, and following the public opening was surrounded by a modest crowd. After a few seconds, an unidentified burly figure "made his way forward with elbows", stood next to the work, and began without delay to urinate against it. The crowd (and security guards), presuming that Huber was in fact an associate of Hoeness, and somehow involved in the work, looked on.
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DJ NUL, who was also present at the time, was questioned by an attending journalist: he did not know the man either, he said, but proceeded to praise Huber, who had "understood" the work. This reaction was noted and taken up at greater length by the critic Tomas Kreisler, who would later claim in his seminal essay "The New-Coming-To-Terms" that Huber had succeeded in "transcending the voyeuristic passivity of art-as-spectacle" and achieved "a true organic synthesis" [with the work] (Schloss, Issue 49).
Huber's acceptance into the circle was rubber-stamped the following week, when Hoeness referred to him in conversation as "six eleven", in accordance with his practice of assigning cartesian co-ordinates to those individuals whom he formally recognised. (Indeed, during his subsequent period, the distinction between the individual and their numeric representation seems to have become less clear in Hoeness' mind: consider for example the famous interview with Kreisler, during the course of which he affectionately refers to his parents as "those co-efficients", and praises NUL for his "twin divisibility" and "prime factorisation".)