Factual Inventions - Invented Facts by Frank Thorsten Moll in: Artvalue, Berlin 2012 Two young men dressed in dark clothing stand on the flat roof of a high-rise building. The scene would be considered banal were it not for the fact that each of them is holding a black passe-partout in front of their face with their right hand. They peer through the black- bordered squares, as if preparing a shot for a photograph or a film. Their gaze meets the viewer's directly, lending it a challenging quality. The passe-partouts lift their faces out of the casual scenery of a typical big-city scene, giving their personalities a fictional and enigmatic quality. Who are these two men? According to the caption of the photograph, taken in New York in 1976, the two men are George Cup and Steve Elliott, two artists of German descent. The catalogue text for the 2007 exhibition "Blacked Out. George Cup & Steve Elliott. Retrospective" provides the curious reader with further information, which can be pieced together to form a fascinating story. As an artist duo, the two—originally from Northern Germany—plunged into the vibrant New York of the 1970s, where they quickly became major influences on the art scene. With their then-extremely progressive minimalist approach to art and their public persona as a gay couple, they became a projection screen for all sorts of public fantasies. Even Andy Warhol, among many other stars of the art world still well- known today, insisted on being counted among their acquaintances. However, the sudden death of Steve Elliott, described as introverted and extremely hardworking, and the arrest of the extroverted George Cup, known for his violent outbursts, brought the duo's meteoric rise to an abrupt end. Major museums and private collectors sold their works and wanted nothing more to do with them. In retrospect, it seems as if their work had never truly existed. For Cup, who was only rehabilitated in 2007, the first retrospective exhibition of his work in Germany that same year came too late, as he died just a few months before its opening. Even the summary of this tragic art thriller sounds so unbelievable that one is tempted to say that no writer in the world could have invented this story. A mistake, as will be shown! This is, in fact, a retrospective conceived as an artistic project, whose main characters, Cup and Elliott, spring from the realm of fiction. It was invented by the conceptual artist Dirk Dietrich Hennig (born 1967), who has been undertaking such "historical interventions" since 1998. Hennig creates all the exhibits for an exhibition, as well as the accompanying narratives, which he usually supports with elaborate institutional constructions, such as archives and entire estates. The newspaper articles, reviews, and essays he often reprints or displays to support his narrative are written and designed with such meticulous care and attention to historical detail that he ultimately creates an almost perfect forgery. His fictions become facts, and the natural distinction blurs in a web of interventions. However, to succumb to the temptation of reducing Dirk Dietrich Hennig's work solely to the dimension of fakery would overlook the true explosive power of his art. Through his exhibition concepts, which bring the work and biographies of fictional artists to life, he defends himself against two powerful strategies of art history: biographical interpretation and the glorification of the individual artist. These strategies are always employed when the aim is to establish some form of authorship within art history itself. To this end, art history frequently employs biographical analysis, which directly links an artist's life to their work and combines this with the elevation of the individual artist to a genius, godlike creator. Hennig's weapon against these well-known and widely criticized strategies lies in the aforementioned exposure of these strategies through their mischievous exaggeration. For him, biographical analysis becomes a masterfully disguised deception. He reveals the elevation of the individual artist through the deliberate exaggeration of familiar modernist artist tropes—thus, his artists are either criminalized or described as mentally ill, as in the case of Jean Guillaume Ferrée—another fictional artist whom he situates within the milieu of Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme. Hennig's weapon against these well-known and widely criticized strategies lies in the exposure, as described above, of their mischievous exaggeration. Jean Guillaume Ferrée (1926-1974) is the focus of the work “Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé” (2012), an elaborate installation currently on display in the group exhibition Made in Germany Two at the Kestner Gallery. The installation, which can be seen at the Esellschaft (Hanover), consists of a reconstruction of a rear facade, a corridor, and two rooms of the psychiatric hospital where Ferrée is said to have been repeatedly admitted between 1962 and 1974. The reason for his admission was a rare and difficult-to-treat form of retrograde temporary amnesia. Documents exhibited in another part of the installation provide eloquent information about this, written in the typical style of the period. His birthplace and the psychiatric clinic itself, which forms the narrative framework of the installation, appear as models for visitors to view. With his fictional artist identities, Hennig invites reflection not only on the status of the image but also on the role of the fictional artist. Unlike in art, the invented artist is a widespread phenomenon in literature. The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists [i] is brimming with stories of artists from literary figures such as Honoré de Balzac, whose inventions created role models for their contemporaries and thus inspired the artistic work of other real artists. Pablo Picasso, as well as Paul Cézanne, are said to have been so captivated by Balzac's character of the artist Frenhofer from the story "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1925) that they changed their styles. Virginia Woolf's protagonist Lily Briscoe from "To the Lighthouse" (1927) is still used today to illuminate the social position of women. Fictional artists can therefore obviously have just as far-reaching an impact as real ones. With his work, Hennig has shown that the probably naive connection between author and work can no longer go unquestioned. Despite all his criticism of the existing structures, however, Hennig does not completely reject them. He himself appears multiple times in his installations, lending his portrait to the respective artist. In doing so, he creates a network of references, constantly posing new riddles for the viewer. "Who exactly is this Jean Guillaume Ferrée?" gives way to the question, "Who exactly is this Dirk Dietrich Hennig?" And what aspects of each artist are present in the work of the other? At this point, Hennig plays his trump card. His art not only reveals the structures and mechanisms of the art system by disrupting its smooth operation with subtle interventions, but also, through the musealization of fictional artists, exposes the power of the museum, which, in the musealization of the world, has invented a universal technology capable of transforming anything and anyone into something. He resists this technology by employing the strategies of musealization himself, so as not to be transformed into something by it. [i] Koen Brams, Invented Art. An encyclopedia of fictional artists from 1605 to the present day, Frankfurt am Main, 2002 © dirkdietrichhennig.com 2025