Lothar Baumgarten is a German conceptual artist, sculptor and installation artist, based in New York and Dusseldorf. He attended the Staatliche Akademie für bildende Künste, Karlsruhe (1968) and the Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1969–71), where he studied for a year under Joseph...
[more]Lothar Baumgarten is a German conceptual artist, sculptor and installation artist, based in New York and Dusseldorf.
He attended the Staatliche Akademie für bildende Künste, Karlsruhe (1968) and the Staatlichen Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1969–71), where he studied for a year under Joseph Beuys. Baumgarten is known for his sculptures with ecological themes, drawn primarily from his travels among Native North and South Americans. His anthropological investigations have also found expression in films, books, photographs and writings. His reflections on the historica lproblems associated with colonialism arguably found better expression in site-specific works using words, such as the wall painting Monument for the South American Indian Nations (1982), installed at Documenta 7, Kassel. In this he mounted the names of Native South Americans around the circular base of a skylight in the Museum Fredericianum in Kassel. This and other works drew attention to the inscription of colonial power through re-naming. This approach was given a different colonial context in Accès aux quais (tableaux parisiens) (exh. Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris, 1985–6; destr.), in which Baumgarten displayed a Métro line map, the names of the stations altered to refer to French colonial activity. America Invention, displayed at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1993 again used names of tribes and symbolic colours inscribed upon the museum's walls. In the 1997 DocumentaX in Kassel, Baumgarten exhibited the archives of his stay with the Yanomani, anthropological photographs that raise questions concerning Western perception of tribal life and relate Baumgarten's efforts to the tradition of Kulturkritik in German thought.
Bibliography
Paul Usherwood: ‘Lothar Baumgarten', A.Mthly, 176, (May 1994), pp. 25–6
Politics, Poetics: Documenta X, The Book (exh. cat., Kassel,Mus. Fredericianum, 1997)
JOHN-PAUL STONARD
10 December 2000
Copyright material reproduced courtesy of Oxford University Press, New York
>>My work is not a question of strategy or mode of opinion. Rather it is based on principles, guided by intuition. Measurement and proportion are the instruments of my thought and, a grammar which reflects the elementary spatial relationships and a rational sense of timing and emphasis are fundamental to my artistic practice. It is about the sensual qualities embebbed in the body of space, its materialization and form. My work is not about installation or concept arts: it is art that does not ignore its architectural context. The work takes material form by integrating given structures into a complex whole and by creating a canon of references among individual, site-specific elements. This dynamic is a dialectic in which a critical discourse with contemporary culture unfolds within an architectural framework. The content becomes the form. My critical approach does not intend to offer autobiographical solutions to universal problems. I believe art should encourage us to question the status quo and the structures that allow it to persist.<<
(artist quote from the website of the Hamburger Kunsthalle)
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