Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn
Lothar Baumgarten: The Seen and the Unseen by Anne Rorimer
? P31 in Der Jguar Kann niemals seine Flecke verlieren (The Jaguar Can Never Lose its Sports, 1970), a solitary music stand in a swampy forest supports a close-up black-and-white photograph of spotted fur, which, positioned like a musical score, plays upon representation’s capacity to invert fact and fiction within its own parameters. Approximately, the title is based on a Brazilian saying that correlations with ‘you are what you are.’ These works capture what the artist refers to as the ‘psyche of things’, which resides in complex, unspoken understandings that produce a kind of ‘silent enigma’ arising from processes of perceptual association. Elaborating on his early works, in which objects in lieu of linguistic elements are connotatively employed.
? P47 the work of Lothar Baumgarten fulfils the artist’s “desire to anchor an aesthetic dialectical praxis in the social and political conditions” of the present by “making an analytical, effort to free the historically and socially based reality from the imposed myths cloaking it.” Baumgarten achieves this goal through the cohesion of architecture and language at the point where linguistic sign systems are conjoin with an existing site so that each given space might be understood from alternative historical and cultural points of view within an overall social perspective. Because of their capacity to perform at once as abstract configuration and cultural symbol, linguistic elements serve both formally and representationally in Baumgarten’s aesthetic production to link the visible, material aspects of the work with those invisible factors that contribute to seeing the larger picture. Using letters, words or texts as a window onto intangible but forcible realities, he avoids the creation of free-floating, commercially viable objects that do not critically evince their own situation within contemporary Western culture.
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