Eulogy for Dirk Dietrich Hennig Sabine Maria Schmidt on the Main Prize / Paula Modersohn-Becker Prize 2014, Worpswede “For years, Dirk Dietrich Hennig has worked with a fictional character in his art. This character is the artist Jean Guillaume Ferrée, whom he invented. The jury was impressed by how Hennig uses this figure to address important events in contemporary history and the constraints of the art system that extend into our present day.” This brief summary deliberately capitulates to the ever-increasing and more elaborate complexity of the artist's work. And it's somewhat unfortunate that it already hints at a key aspect of his work. Since 1998, Dirk Dietrich Hennig has consistently pursued an artistic approach that engages with historiography, the mechanisms of revisionist historical revisionism, and the mechanisms of the art system and the art market. What Hennig developed over the years is a strategy of "historical intervention" that intervenes in art history by establishing fictional personalities embodied and represented by him. Initially, and for as long as possible, the authorship and the revelation of this fictionalization were deliberately concealed. As a side project to his work, he founded the "Cupere Institute for Historical Interventions," which provides a parallel theoretical foundation and reflection on his own practice. Hennig enriched art history with various fictional artist personalities: George Cup & Steve Elliott, a German-American artist duo who co- founded American Minimal Art; Gustav Szathmáry, a German- Hungarian composer and photographer from the second half of the 19th century, who, as Paula's former lover, was honored with exhibitions at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen and the Roselius Museum in Worpswede; and Jean Guillaume Ferrée, a French Nouveau Réalista. Hennig not only left us his oeuvre and numerous exhibition documentations, but also numerous biographical photographs, publications, and newspaper articles. In 1974, the magazine "Bunte" announced his death (suicide or accident?), which other art magazines also reported on and speculated about. What distinguishes Hennig's work is not only the creative inventiveness of new works that could have been created at another time, and the finesse of their construction, but also their perfect historical embedding. However, Hennig is less concerned with the problem of fakes and art forgeries, or working under pseudonyms, which also has a long tradition, but rather with a pointed critique of institutions and a critique of naive historical belief. One could also describe his practice as cultural hacking. (For, as Foucault argued, whoever holds power can also determine what is true, good, and beautiful. "History" is radically subjectivized with Hennig's fictional biographies, and the artist is rediscovered as a storyteller, wrote art critic Justin Hoffmann.) Famous artists do not have normal biographies. Thus, Hennig also re-enacts the mythologizing of artists, intertwining biographical dramaturgies and fantasies in real contexts. Cup is accused of murdering his artistic partner and sentenced to life imprisonment. Szathmáry is recovered from the Worpswede bog as a bog body, and Ferré suffers from a neurological condition: retrograde temporary amnesia. The artist's works brought together in this exhibition, including the "Diorama," only fully reveal themselves with this biographical context. For the fictional Ferré, they are manifestations of his own life, following sudden lapses of complete memory. And, on a metaphorical level, through the theme of "existential reassurance," they also offer commentary on the significance of historical constructions in Hennig's work. Does art history need to be rewritten? Why have so many groups of works by artists been neglected for so long? Does the focus on newly discovered artistic personalities change our perspective on the corresponding art movements? What new connections emerge? Yes, of course, art history, and especially the history of the art world, must be rewritten time and again. However, it must be said again and again. Sabine Maria Schmidt, September 2014, Düsseldorf / Bremen © dirkdietrichhennig.com 2024