Artist: Lothar Baumgarten
The exhibition ACROSS presents a series of early black-and-white photographs by German artist Lothar Baumgarten (1944–2018), whose work since the 1970s can be read as a subtle yet consistent questioning of dichotomous conceptual pairings such as culture versus nature, or the self versus the foreign/the other. Baumgarten’s films, objects, installations, photographs, texts, murals, and site-specific works explore questions of nature, its ontology and cultural coding. The works dialectically deconstruct established ways of thinking and seeing of the so-called Western world, in particular its (Eurocentric) view of the autochthonous, indigenous cultures of North and South America.
Baumgarten at times draws on the visual rhetorical techniques and methodologies of ethnology and anthropology, but he always redirects the gaze from the subject being observed to the systems and conditions of perception and representation, classification and cultural codification that precede the observation and which are often subliminally inscribed. The image subject and medial as well as cultural, semiotic framing are interrelated; they maintain a complex, reciprocal relationship. From a contemporary standpoint, Baumgarten’s inherent artistic critique of signs and modes of representation may be regarded as an intuitive anticipating of questions concerning image ethics and politics that are explored today under post-colonial auspices. Baumgarten, whose work was represented multuiple times at documenta (1972, ’82, ’92, ’97) and who exhibited in the German Pavilion at the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984, spent eighteen months in 1978/79 with two tribes of the Yãnomãmɨ, an indigenous ethnic group living along the upper reaches of the Orinoco river on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. At the time, the ethnic group was still largely untouched and non-sedentary, but has since become increasingly marginalized and threatened.
The series of photographs presented here, which Baumgarten took in 1979 with the Yãnomãmi Kashorawë-theri, is entitled Makunaíma (River Crossing) and is accompanied by the subtitle Ihr Besitz ist nicht größer als die Kraft ihrer Schultern (Their possessions are no greater than the strength of their shoulders), a poetic description of the Yãnomãmi’s way of life. Taken in only a few minutes, the black-and-white photographs are evidence of a visual language that can be attributed to a unique, highly situational form of participatory observation, which does not stylize or objectify the protagonists as others, instead they appear all too human and poignant, going about their everyday activities, in this case the arduous, dangerous crossing of a river, in a way that engages the viewer.
“The River Crossing sequence, a series of fifteen silver gelatin prints, taken in two and a half minutes, is an example in my work of ethnographic-documentary photography. It was only made possible by an awareness of the circumstances of life on the ground and the willingness to open oneself up to them. (...) The series shows not only all the factual ethnographic aspects but also the photographer’s state of mind and says a great deal about the nature of his presence and acceptance during the documentation. Present is a reflecting on one’s own position, while the melancholy of the observation stems from the ambivalence of always having to make a new choice, just like the aspect of waiting never changes, as well as what remains undecided as a burdensome, time-devouring element, coupled with a yearning to understand the complexity of every circumstance. It was and is essential that form and content, beginning and end complete a circle. The answer often lies in the inconspicuous.” (Lothar Baumgarten)
Contrary to a rigid conception of indigenous societies, the Yãnomãmɨ are not depicted here as simply the other, their environment not merely as an abstract wilderness; instead Baumgarten endeavors to present an alternative narrative rooted in lived experience, in stark contrast to scientific-, classification-, or administrative-based forms of representation. The artist’s situational and participatory form of photography focuses on a “state of inner equilibrium,” on the circumstances of direct experience. Baumgarten is not concerned with simply collecting images, but invariably with the momentum of situational awareness and sensitivity, with “the sense of immediacy in actualizing one’s own perception, with creating images and the complexity of expression in their materialization and form.”
Nature, the conception of wilderness, is not presented and instrumentalized here as a threatening entity in order to legitimize one’s own sovereign concept of culture—as a counter-image to culture. Rather, Baumgarten’s situational imagery allows viewers, indeed one could almost say it requires them to discover themselves as viewers who are not only emotionally impacted visually across spatial and, even more so, temporal distances, but who are also involved in the imagery in a deeply relational and empathetic way—as human counterparts—and to recognize themselves.
Text: David Komary
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