Lothar Baumgarten Seven Sounds / Seven Circles KUB 09.02

Lothar Baumgarten
Accès aux Quais
Tableaux Parisiens | 19 85 – 8 6
Summary
Lothar Baumgarten’s projects consistently probe the logic that
structures Western thought and systems of representation – self/
other, seer/seen, and nature/culture – in order to work on the
discursive and contextual sites of its inscription. In the late 1960s,
alongside his studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Baumgarten
began to engage the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
A guiding methodological thread throughout Lévi-Strauss’s writing
was the nature/culture opposition, toward which Baumgarten’s
ar tistic practice also initially turned. Rather than depar t to a far-
off land, Baumgarten explored the validity of the opposition – the
seeming mutual exclusivity of its terms – quite literally in his own
backyard, in a small triangle of forest located near the Rhine River.
Thus began Baumgarten’s early artistic experiments with
ephemeral material arrangements realized in outdoor settings.
He found or slightly modified the existing environment, making a
mimetic condition perceptible: a hose signifies a snake but also
a branch in Äskulap (1971); shoetrees signify mushrooms or lilies
in Verlorene Früchte (1969). Due to the temporal constraint on the
works’ existence, they were photographed and subsequently
named Culture-Nature, Manipulated Reality (1968 – 72). These
activities and the thoughts that inform them culminated in the
16 mm film The Origin of the Night (1973 – 78), an “exotic” tropical
journey ultimately revealed to be situated along the Rhine.
10 11 KUB-Programm 09.02 Lothar Baumgarten
KUB0902_HeftEin_Baumgarten_gzd.indd 10 06.03.2009 12:39:25 Uhr