| Johann Dieter Wassmann (fictional artist) | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 2, 1841 Leipzig, Germany |
| Died | March 18, 1898 Leipzig, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Field | assemblage (art), photography |
| Training | University of Leipzig |
| Influenced | Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Eugène Atget |
Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841–1898) is a fictitious artist and sewerage engineer, purportedly from Leipzig, Germany. He is the creation of the American-born artist and writer Jeff Wassmann.
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According to his fictitious biography, Johann Dieter Wassmann was born in Leipzig, Germany, where he witnessed the industrial revolution rapidly alter the once agrarian, guild-based and perhaps idealised Electorate of Saxony. In portraying his character as fearful of a less humanitarian world, and unsure of the changing roles of science, medicine, religion, education, cosmology and time, the artist challenges the viewer to share in the conflicts and anxieties of this ubiquitous thinker.[1] A pivotal event in the author's narrative is Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Leipzig (1813), recalled first-hand by the character's father, August.[2] The artist uses Napoleon's rise metaphorically to represent the onslaught of the modern era and his defeat at Leipzig as hope all was not lost of the Romantic era.
The construction of Johann Dieter Wassmann trades heavily on the aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notion of suspension of disbelief to justify the use of certain fantastic or non-realistic elements. Coleridge asserts that if the author can bring a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader/viewer will withhold judgement on any improbability that might normally render the story doubtful, a contention the artist is reliant on for his audience to fully engage.[3]
As a sewerage engineer, we are told Johann Dieter Wassmann participated in the development of a more modern and scientific approach to the control of infectious disease in cities including Hanover, Göteborg, Dresden, Mexico City and Sydney. As a lecturer at the University of Leipzig, he encouraged students to fully explore the creative process, concerned as he was at the decline of liberal education. But Wassmann's lasting legacy, we learn, can be seen in his private devotion to his art. (See #Gallery section below.)
In 1881, he set out to combine his father's vocation, carpentry, with objects and images he collected for their real or imaginary essences, creating boxed assemblage works that trace his speculations on an unsettling new world. This body of work builds on the tradition of German wunderkammern and 17th century Dutch perspective boxes.
Throughout the 1890s, he continued to expand the visual vocabulary of these assemblage works, but we are told he also began to experiment with photography, using both a bulky glass-plate view camera, as well as several of the newly developed hand-held roll-film cameras. Over an eight-year period he documented the landscapes, streetscapes, architecture and interiors of eastern Germany, in a style that extended beyond the topographic traditions of the day. These photographic works provide the missing link between the meticulous, but still largely prescriptive street imagery of mid-19th century photographer Charles Marville, and the lyrical melancholy of Eugène Atget in the early 20th century. As a predecessor to his fellow countrymen Heinrich Zille and August Sander, Wassmann discreetly anticipated what vast potential the photographic arts held for the modernist era.
His friendship with the German physicist Max Planck was most influential during these years. Through this association he developed critical theories regarding universal space/time and its application to philosophy, the visual arts and music. On January 6, 1898, Wassmann slipped on ice while boarding a tram in Leipzig; his right leg was crushed, requiring amputation. He died of a streptococcal infection on March 18, 1898, two weeks shy of his 57th birthday.
The fiction allows Wassmann's output to transcend the conceptual and physical boundaries of the art of his time, making him appear a pioneer of German modernism, his work presented as a precursor to the Modern art methods and movements known as assemblage, collage, installation, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism.
Wassmann is part of a long history of artistic pseudonyms and hoaxes. Rrose Sélavy was just one of the pseudonyms used by the artist Marcel Duchamp. In Wassmann's (the contemporary artist's) adopted home of Australia, Ern Malley was the creation of writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The 1944 Ern Malley affair, as it is known, remains Australia's most celebrated literary hoax.[4] In the late 1990s, the artist Walid Raad began constructing elaborate fictions chronicling the contemporary history of his native Lebanon, signing his work The Atlas Group and presenting it as a body of collective scholarship.
More recently, Rohan Kriwaczek created a sensation in 2006 with his publication of An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin (Overlook Press), which purported to trace the lost history of the funerary violin. Shortly before publication, the book was exposed to the New York Times as a hoax by a book buyer at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, Iowa.[5] Wassmann stepped in to confuse matters further by using an additional character, the German curator Sophie Vogt, to defend Kriwaczek in online literary blogs and discussion pages, claiming that as a child in Leipzig, August Wassmann (the character's father) had known one of the funerary violinists Kriwaczek cites, further proof of the funerary violin. Wassmann had been sent an advance copy of the book by the owner of Prairie Lights Books, Jim Harris, allowing him to comment with apparent authority on the book's contents prior to publication.[6] This type of artistic intervention is known as culture jamming.
The character of Johann Dieter Wassmann was launched under the supposed auspices of the fictitious Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C. in the solo exhibition Bleeding Napoleon at the Melbourne International Arts Festival 2003.[7] Since that time, the artist has created a rival institution vying to have the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann repatriated to Germany: MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.[8] The museum also has a fictitious curator, Sophie Vogt, whose name has become well known in Germany's artistic circles through several years of blogging and interventions, as well as her Facebook and MySpace sites.
In the United States, Johann Dieter Wassmann is best known through a long-running Google Adwords campaign in the New York Times. The ads, with politically charged entendres such as The Wassmann Foundation - art & philanthropy - forging a better tomorrow, have received over twelve million page-views in the newspaper's online Arts section. Art in America's Washington, D.C. correspondent, James Mahoney, has written,
| “ | Such visionaries as Herr Wassmann will not only endure, they will prevail, I'm more than certain. | ” |
As the Wassmann Foundation and related characters have evolved, the project has come to function on two distinct levels. Firstly, the artist endeavours to scrutinise the ever-increasing presence of artist, curator and art institution alike, as brands. In establishing both artist and institution as wholly fictitious, the artist is free to explore these roles as pure brand, existent for no other purpose than critical assessment.
On a second, and more crucial level, the project points up a certain paradox created by the proliferation of the world-wide-web: in a mass society, the individual grows in importance, rather than diminishes.
For artists and individuals in what were formerly the planet's outer reaches, Wassmann sees the web as having democratized access to the structures and machinations of power to an extent previously unimagined. He has argued that little more than 20 years after the art world discovered there was an outside and a periphery, they suddenly find it's gone. In a postcolonial/internet age, there is only the center to be fought over and for the artist, the ensuing chaos to decipher. Where once the internet merely informed the political process, Wassmann contends that the internet has developed the immense capability of wholly transforming political process. While projects such as Wassmann's function on a relatively benign level, he believes the realigned power structures they allude to allow individuals outside the arts to masterfully, and often frighteningly, alter the real world irretrievably.[9]