Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen
Kunstfrühling 05 - Kooperationen
in coopereration with Peter Machajdík
27.02. - 28.03.2005
Documents of the possible
Art is an invention of possibilities. Dirk Dietrich Hennig shows us that
this invention and constant reformulation does not only refer to color and
composition, to the design of artistic materials. He is a retrospective
inventor of possibilities, a conceptual artist who looks for traces and lays
trails and thus takes the game of possibilities to the extreme. For him, the
focus is not so much on color and plastic materials, but on transforming
history into stories and artifacts. He is a researcher and inventor,
storyteller and artist at the same time. His passion is the game of hide
and seek, but then, well hidden in various roles, he becomes a revealer: as
curator of a "special exhibition of orthopedic rarities" to point out the
forgotten story of the ape-man Mario Tombarell; As a treasure hunter
doing local research, he reconstructed the story of "Hinrich von Hagen's
treasure in Lake Aasee," and on the side he worked as a biographer and
bibliographer of the historian Jaap van Hoofstraat (1910-1998), whose
criminological "Brief report on the missing second Jacob painting by
Rembrandt van Rijn" he published.
It was therefore also foreseeable what would happen when Dirk
Dietrich Hennig came to Worpswede in 2003 as a Barkenhoff scholarship
holder: He roamed through moors and museums, flea markets and
archives, and within a short time he was able to come up with a new
revelation: In the truest sense of the word, right up to tracking down the
body, he dug up the Hungarian-German composer and photographer
Gustav Szathmáry, who had a love affair with Paula Modersohn-Becker
and a friendship with Rainer Maria Rilke. Hennig unfolded Szathmáry's life
in stories and finds that condense into history, and snatched the
forgotten man from the past. Or did he plant him there?
The fact that Szathmáry bears clear resemblance to the busy
scholarship holder in the photographs that were found is no more
surprising than the fact that Jaap van Hoofstraat's dtv paperback entitled
"Original and Fake. Conversations in the Area of Cultural Research"
(Munich 1976) is appa-rently only verifiable in a single copy.
In Worpswede, Hennig not only found the story of Gustav Szathmáry,
but also met the German-Slovak composer and fellow Barkenhoff
scholarship holder Peter Machajdík, to whom we owe the sensitive
reconstruction of Szathmáry's compositions, which were recorded in the
Budapest Opera in the 1950s and now complement Hennig's
archaeological ensemble with a sound experience.
Anyone who looks too deeply into Dirk Dietrich Hennig's historical grab
bag will quickly become dizzy. For example, it becomes clear that Hennig's
historian role model Jaap van Hoofstraat not only discussed the question
"What is wrong?" in detail, but was also the founder of the "Institute for
Historical Interventions", which designed a poetics of historical possi-
bilities. Our artist turns out to be its employee and Poeta Laureatus. He is
thus in the tradition of forensic investigators and postmodernists, who
use history as a resource for sensual play with possibilities. In 1993, "False
Documents" was the name of a real reader with postmodern texts from
the USA. Ten years later, the lexicon "Invented Art", an "encyclopedia of
fictitious artists", was published in Germany. If this volume should one
day see a second edition, Dirk Dietrich Hennig will have a say. Until then,
we will remain excited about new results from the "Institute for Historical
Interventions", because the historical and artistic possibilities are -
infinitely - numerous.
Dr. Rainer Stamm / Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum Bremen
