Lothar Baumgarten Seven Sounds / Seven Circles KUB 09.02

Baumgar ten’s later work depar ted more specifically from his 18month
sojourn with the Yanomami people in the Upper Orinoco
Region in the years 1978 – 80. With the shift from fantasmatic
projection to real, lived experiences, Baumgarten investigated how
ethnographic material – and photography in particular – was to be
presented. Baumgarten began taking photographs of the Yanomami
after living among them for eight months, and he has presented the
ensuing images in diverse formats. Produced in collaboration with
the typographer Walter Nikkels, publications such as Makunaíma
(1987) and Tierra de los Perros Mudos (1985) experiment with
the hybrid relationship between image and text as a way of problematizing
the myth of photography’s autonomy and objectivity.
In the mid-1990s, the politics of identity became increasingly
aligned with what Hal Foster termed the “artist as ethnographer” as
a paradigm for contemporary art. Yet for Baumgarten ethnography
is not simply a methodology to be applied to a contemporary social
issue. That is, the physical experience of space remains crucial for
his work’s presentation. His projects at the Fridericianum in Kassel
(1982) and at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (1985 – 88) used the
neoclassical dome and glass panel ceiling of these two buildings as
support, while the inscribed names of native populations and their
achievements were made to resonate in these so-called “universal”
spaces of culture. Here the physical site of intervention (the museum)
was inextricably tied to the site of the work’s critical effect (the
history of ethnocentrism).
For his current exhibition Seven Sounds / Seven Circles at
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Baumgarten’s point of departure is Denning’s
Point, a heavily wooded and overgrown peninsula on the east bank
of the Hudson River. Part one of the exhibition includes three slide
projections with images of this wasteland, former site of the Denning’s
Point Brick Works Company. In the course of viewing the 404 slides,
the visitor will discern the dynamics of growth and change made
visible through the vegetation’s abstract compositions and also
notice the subtle traces of industr y still scattered throughout the
area. The exhibition’s second part includes seven sound pieces,
each one hour in length, and similarly recorded on the peninsula.
Presented in discrete spaces and under varied lighting conditions,
these “phonic sculptures” provide an expansive sense of site
through their atmospheric presence and unexpected merging of
sound patterns, both natural and cultural. Indeed, what Baumgarten
describes as a “dramatic dialogue between culture and nature”
speaks to the ongoing coexistence of the two in this region, while
the work’s instantiation pushes the limits of our expectations of
what we think we can hear. Kaira Cabañas
KUB0902_HeftEin_Baumgarten_gzd.indd 11 06.03.2009 12:39:25 Uhr