Johann Dieter Wassmann
Encyclopedia
Johann Dieter Wassmann is a fictitious artist and sewerage engineer, purportedly from Leipzig, Germany. He is the creation of the American-born artist and writer Jeff Wassmann
.
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. 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. 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.
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
.
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. 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
. 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. This type of artistic intervention is known as culture jamming
.
2003. Since that time, the artist has created a rival institution vying to have the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann repatriated to Germany: MuseumZeitraum Leipzig. 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,
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.
Jeff Wassmann
Jeff Wassmann is an American artist and writer, currently living in Melbourne, Australia. Wassmann's work incorporates assemblage, photography, web-based new media and aspects of culture jamming.- Early life :...
.
Background
According to his fictitious biography, Johann Dieter Wassmann was born in Leipzig, Germany, where he witnessed the industrial revolutionIndustrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...
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
Cosmology
Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...
and time, the artist challenges the viewer to share in the conflicts and anxieties of this ubiquitous thinker. A pivotal event in the author's narrative is Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Leipzig
Battle of Leipzig
The Battle of Leipzig or Battle of the Nations, on 16–19 October 1813, was fought by the coalition armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden against the French army of Napoleon. Napoleon's army also contained Polish and Italian troops as well as Germans from the Confederation of the Rhine...
(1813), recalled first-hand by the character's father, August. 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
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
's notion of suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literary works of fiction...
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.
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
Infectious disease
Infectious diseases, also known as communicable diseases, contagious diseases or transmissible diseases comprise clinically evident illness resulting from the infection, presence and growth of pathogenic biological agents in an individual host organism...
in cities including Hanover, Göteborg, Dresden, Mexico City and Sydney. As a lecturer at the University of Leipzig
University of Leipzig
The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...
, he encouraged students to fully explore the creative process, concerned as he was at the decline of liberal education
Liberal education
A Liberal education is a system or course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free human being. It is based on the medieval concept of the liberal arts or, more commonly now, the liberalism of the Age of Enlightenment...
. 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
Assemblage (art)
Assemblage is an artistic process. In the visual arts, it consists of making three-dimensional or two-dimensional artistic compositions by putting together found objects...
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
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
, using both a bulky glass-plate view camera
View camera
The view camera is a type of camera first developed in the era of the Daguerreotype and still in use today, though with many refinements. It comprises a flexible bellows which forms a light-tight seal between two adjustable standards, one of which holds a lens, and the other a viewfinder or a...
, 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
Charles Marville
-Biography:Charles Marville was the pseudonym of Charles François Bossu , a French photographer who mainly photographed architecture and landscapes. He used both paper and glass negatives...
, and the lyrical melancholy of Eugène Atget
Eugène Atget
Eugène Atget was a French photographer noted for his photographs documenting the architecture and street scenes of Paris....
in the early 20th century. As a predecessor to his fellow countrymen Heinrich Zille
Heinrich Zille
Rudolf Heinrich Zille , German illustrator and photographer, was born in Radeburg near Dresden, as the son of watchmaker Johann Traugott Zill and Ernestine Louise...
and August Sander
August Sander
August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander's first book Face of our Time was published in 1929...
, Wassmann discreetly anticipated what vast potential the photographic arts held for the modernist era.
His friendship with the German physicist Max Planck
Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS, was a German physicist who actualized the quantum physics, initiating a revolution in natural science and philosophy. He is regarded as the founder of the quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.-Life and career:Planck came...
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
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
, installation
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
, Constructivism
Constructivism (art)
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th...
, Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
and Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
.
Historical perspective
Wassmann is part of a long history of artistic pseudonyms and hoaxes. Rrose SélavyRrose Sélavy
Rrose Sélavy, or Rose Sélavy, was one of the pseudonyms of artist Marcel Duchamp. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie", which translates to English as "eros, that's life". It has also been read as "arroser la vie" .Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by...
was just one of the pseudonyms used by the artist Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
. In Wassmann's (the contemporary artist's) adopted home of Australia, Ern Malley
Ern Malley
Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. The poet, and his entire body of work, were created in one day in 1944 by writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart as a hoax on Max Harris, Angry Penguins, the modernist magazine he...
was the creation of writers James McAuley
James McAuley
James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism.-Life and career:...
and Harold Stewart
Harold Stewart
Harold Frederick Stewart was an Australian poet and oriental scholar. He is chiefly remembered as the enigmatic other half of Ern Malley.Stewart's work has been associated with James McAuley and A. D...
. The 1944 Ern Malley affair, as it is known, remains Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. In the late 1990s, the artist Walid Raad
Walid Raad
Walid Raad is a contemporary media artist. The Atlas Group is a fictional collective, the work of which is produced by 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
Rohan Kriwaczek
Rohan Kriwaczek is a British writer, composer and violinist of part-Austrian descent. A former student of Peter Maxwell Davies, Oliver Knussen and Judith Weir, and prolific creator of classical works, scores for theatre, TV, and radio, he has become best known as "England's foremost authority on...
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
Prairie lights
Prairie Lights is an independent bookstore in downtown Iowa City, Iowa, founded in 1978, by Jim Harris.-History:The store's original location was a space on South Linn Street...
Books in Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City is a city in Johnson County, State of Iowa. As of the 2010 Census, the city had a total population of about 67,862, making it the sixth-largest city in the state. Iowa City is the county seat of Johnson County and home to the University of Iowa...
. 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. This type of artistic intervention is known as culture jamming
Culture jamming
Culture jamming, coined in 1984, denotes a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.Culture...
.
Legacy and influence
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 FestivalMelbourne International Arts Festival
Melbourne Festival is a celebration of dance, theatre, music, visual arts, multimedia, outdoor and free events held for 17 days each October in a number of venues across Melbourne, Australia.-History:...
2003. Since that time, the artist has created a rival institution vying to have the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann repatriated to Germany: MuseumZeitraum Leipzig. 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
AdWords
Google AdWords is Google's main advertising product and main source of revenue. Google's total advertising revenues were USD$28 billion in 2010. AdWords offers pay-per-click advertising, cost-per-thousand advertising, and site-targeted advertising for text, banner, and rich-media ads. The 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
Art in America
Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...
's Washington, D.C. correspondent, James Mahoney, has written,
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.