Dirk Dietrich Hennig
by Kristina Tieke
in: artist KUNSTMAGAZIN, Issue 101, Bremen 2014
In April 2010, Tate Modern screened George Cup and Steve Elliott's
1974 animation "The Connection Between Form and Sound #21" as
part of its experimental film series "The Square, the Line and the
Light."(1) The three-minute work—part of an extensive series of 8mm
films—interprets the relationship between music and movement in the
tradition of early abstract film. The Centre Pompidou adopted the
London program under the title "Architectures de film" and presented
Cup and Elliott's work in January 2011.(2) The two artists had been
successfully elevated to international prominence.
Their shared history dates back to the 1950s, when both studied at
the Art Students League and were among the leading figures of the
New York art scene. A striking photograph from 1962 shows George
Cup in conversation with Andy Warhol: smiling, smoking, and wearing a
dark suit and tie. “An asshole, but a handsome one,” Warhol is often
quoted as saying. As co-founders of Minimal Art, Cup and Elliott were
said to have been represented in the collections of the Whitney
Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum, among others,
with light objects, paintings, and artists' books, before Cup was
convicted of his partner's murder in 1986 and imprisoned for two
decades. “As a consequence, the oeuvre of these two artists […] was
almost completely erased,” states the website of the George Cup
Research Center New York/Hanover, which documents the duo's career
through interviews, short films, and a complete catalogue raisonné. (3)
But Cup and Elliott are fictional characters; their biography is a work of
fiction. The Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou, however, have
indeed exhibited their work.
Dirk Dietrich Hennig calls his strategy of smuggling fictitious artists
and their oeuvres into art history "historical intervention," a practice he
pursues with a meticulous attention to detail that makes his
manipulations difficult to discern. Because the invented sources
inevitably give rise to authentic sources over time, and because the
egalitarian structure of the internet with its digital databases makes any
kind of historical attribution seem plausible, the figures once implanted
by Hennig lead a virulent, self-validating existence of their own. In this
way, the fictional Slovenian poet Victor N. Gaspari found his way into a
Slovenian travel guide.(4) The case of the murderer Alphons Erhard
Schlitz, who, according to Hennig, allegedly killed five girls named
Paula on the Worpswede/Bremen railway line, becomes the basis of a
historical novel by Hans Garbaden, "based on true events."(5) And the
Internet Movie Database lists the music of composer Gustav Szathmáry
(1867-1907), whom Hennig endowed with a tragic life and a love affair
with Paula Modersohn-Becker, as the soundtrack of the Portuguese
short film "Flor e Eclipse" (2013).(6) Fact and fiction enter into a
symbiotic relationship.
The cultural critique that characterizes Hennig's historical
interventions is revealed when they are exposed. Once uncovered, the
manipulations reveal crucial information about the art world. They
reveal which criteria of originality and authenticity are currently decisive,
and which expectations and curatorial constraints dominate the system.
The trend of exhibiting artists outside the mainstream or discovering
them posthumously has been evident for some time. Massimiliano
Gioni's 2013 Venice Biennale was merely the spectacular culmination of
a development that retrospectively grants self-taught artists, shamans,
and social outsiders a place on the art world's Olympus. This desire to
revise art history also seems to be fueled by a moral impetus. A time in
which the art market is booming with all its ugly side effects, in which
giants like Koons and Hirst effectively utilize marketing mechanisms,
and major gallery owners have to answer in court for fraudulent
speculation, inevitably gives rise to a counter-movement: the
rehabilitation of the unsuccessful, the disenfranchised, the forgotten.
Dirk Dietrich Hennig's affinity for self-taught artists, chronically ill or
innocently convicted criminals thus reflects the spirit of the times.
Hennig often appears in the role of their advocates, biographers, or
literary executors, as curator of the CIFG (Institute for Historical
Interventions), as well as director of the George Cup Research Center.
At the same time, however, he slips into the roles of his protégés as if
under a cloak of invisibility. He embodies his protagonists in
photographs, poses as a model for their painted self-portraits or life-size
sculptural doppelgangers. He is, to use Gérard Genette's literary theory,
an intradiegetic character, a narrator who lives within the narrated world
of his creations. This led the art historian Roland Meyer, in his
catalogue essay for the exhibition "Made in Germany Two," in which
Hennig was represented in 2012, to the diagnosis: "The artist Dirk
Dietrich Hennig has been working on his own invisibility for years. He
hardly appears as the author of his own works."
But this assessment is no longer tenable. Firstly, because the
deceptions are so cleverly designed that they reveal their true nature as
fakes—if not through thorough research, then certainly in the context of
an exhibition—and Hennig himself as the perpetrator. Secondly,
because once his heroes are exposed, he doesn't simply abandon
them. Since 2003, he has regularly given his protagonist, Jean
Guillaume Ferrée, fabulous opportunities to shine, despite the fact that
his origins are already widely known. As part of "Made in Germany
Two," Hennig created the monumental installation "Centre Hospitalier
Spécialisé" (2012) at the Kestner Society in Hanover. It's a
reconstruction of the psychiatric hospital where the Belgian Ferrée was
allegedly housed for a time in the 1960s and 70s. Retrograde
temporary agnosia, a particular form of memory loss, appears to have
necessitated therapy and led Ferrée to reassure himself of his
surroundings through models and collages. Thus, the hospital cell
reappears within the installation as a meticulously crafted architectural
kit—a mise en abyme, the prelude to endless repetitions and a
metaphor for the abyss of illness. That Ferrée could not escape it is
documented by a wealth of archival material: doctors' letters,
newspaper covers, magazines, and finally, the news of his suicide.
For his concept of Jean Guillaume Ferrée and the consistency with
which he masterfully addresses contemporary history and the art world
through his example, Hennig has just received the 2014 Paula
Modersohn-Becker Art Prize. The exhibition at the Große Kunstschau
Worpswede, created to mark the occasion, emphatically situates the
self-taught Ferrée as an artist situated between Fluxus and Art Brut. A
gigantic peep-show box, in the tradition of the paper theaters that
emerged in the 19th century, transports viewers into a theatrical world
of bizarre industrial buildings and urban canyons. Human figures pile up
like trash, grinning, laughing, staring at us; bands of clouds loom over
the scene. A vortex seems to engulf this paper multiverse, before
whose force everything capitulates. The creative act itself appears
almost compulsive, a futile attempt by Ferrée to impose structure and
order upon the chaos.
In Worpswede, Hennig places the transport crates in which the art
was packed alongside his exhibits: massive wooden structures,
carefully patinaed, their inscriptions, stickers, and signatures revealing
places and times. They bear witness to an odyssey of mythical
proportions. They reinforce the feeling that Dirk Dietrich Hennig is a
time traveler. Like Woody Allen's film protagonist "Zelig," who adapts to
his surroundings like a chameleon and thus becomes a participant in
pivotal historical events, Hennig insinuates himself into contemporary
history. Fluxus, Minimal Art, and early Expressionism can be his artistic
home just as much as the 19th century, into which his next project will
lead him. He thus counters the utopia of the avant-garde, its optimistic
notion of progress, with a strategy of retrospection, proving himself to
be remarkably relevant.
A changed relationship to history, which is not understood as a
binding narrative but rather as a coexistence of many equally valid
histories that can be reconstructed and deconstructed, but also
supplemented and continued, characterizes many artists of the younger
generation. The author Heinz Schütz speaks of an “mnestic recourse,”
an artistic practice under the sign of memory.(7) The reflection on the
past as a reaction to a capitalist world pathologically oriented toward
innovation, progression, and growth may also legitimize this
“retromania” in socio-political terms. However, such considerations are
not paramount when looking at the work of Dirk Dietrich Hennig, born in
1967. Here, someone with chutzpah takes the liberty of drawing on the
existing arsenal. Collage, assemblage, readymade, light experiments,
model making, slide projection—in the choice of medium and
technique, the pleasure principle seems to reign supreme. How else
can one explain that his exhibits appear so authentic and auratic at the
same time? Yesterday comes alive in today.
1 http://expcinema.com/site/en/tate-modern-square-line-and-light
2 https://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/cTAG9p/rKaBnK7
3 http://www.georgecupresearchcenter.com
4 See Klaus Schameitat, Slovenia. Between the Alps, the Adriatic and the Pannonian
Lowlands. Berlin: Trescher 2012, p. 213.
5 http://www.altona.info/2010/03/26/premierelesung-paulas-tochter-ein-historischer-
kriminalfall-aus-bremen-und-worpswede/
6 http://www.imdb.com/name/nm6800522/
7 Heinz Schütz, Beyond Utopia and Apocalypse? In: Kunstforum international. Vol. 123
(1993), p. 64.
