Bodmer_Publication

East: that representations of the “other” produced from a dominant perspective
(located in a colonial power, for example) are often ideologically misleading,
but frequently also produce concrete knowledge of considerable value. 31
5. At the Borders of the Repertoire
Recourse to Humboldt has corroborated the suspicion that the opposition of
art and science does not serve us well in dealing with Bodmer 32 – a negative result
that reduces the value of much extant Bodmer criticism somewhat. As soon as one
recognizes that the aesthetic here is an integral component of cognition (in this
instance: the representation of the “other”), it becomes impossible to denounce it
automatically as a distortion of the object of representation, as tends to happen
where terms such as aestheticization or romanticization are employed.
But there is more. A very positive evaluation of Bodmer and his works as a whole
will apparently not accommodate the representations of “savages” that do not stop
short of demonizing them. Here, Bodmer appears to adhere to a negative stereotype
that was repeatedly used in his period and afterwards as a means of propaganda,
in order to subjugate, displace, and kill the “primitive.” It is difficult to
argue against such a charge where it is leveled, for example, at the late pictures
produced in collaboration with Millet. 33 The illustrations to the Travels present
a different case. Here, we find demonization in a battle scene (Tableau 42) and in
several images with religious / ritual content (Tableau 18). In the former, it results
from the experience of being threatened, it is no more than the standard means
to differentiate oneself from the threatening “other.” The other prints suggest
a different interpretation that leads one back to Humboldt’s Kosmos one last time.
The whole trajectory of that work is characterized by the attempt to see a world
that many previous Christian centuries had primarily seen as a fallen one, as magnificent
or even as an ordered whole almost worthy of adoration and worship. 34
This is a secular perspective that can, however, merge into a new religiousness,
generally conceived. The point is that it has great problems with traditional forms
and contents of religion and that, even with the best will, it reaches its own limits
and has problems representing them. A glance at the religious art of the period
discloses such problems above all where it slips into sentimentality. Alongside
the sentimental, however, one also finds demonizations that may, but need not,
be used with propagandistic intent. This brings one already into the vicinity of
Bodmer’s plates, and it is not far to a strong suspicion that in those plates he is
altogether a child of his period: that he attempts to capture religious / ritual
subjects with strategies which we would today regard as insufficient, and that he
does so because the repertoire of his times did not offer him any better means.
This failure, if it is one, however, only constitutes the backdrop before which
Bodmer’s ability to produce a Humboldtian fusion of Genuss and Einsicht, of
aesthetic pleasure and positive knowledge, appears all the more impressive.
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