Together with Finsternis gekreuzter Schatten, Pilgrim is one of the two photographs by the conceptual artista Lothar Baumgarten (Rheinsberg, Germany, 1944-Berlin, 2018) in the Banco de España Collection. He produced this image in 1969, when he had not yet finished his Fine Arts studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. A pupil of Joseph Beuys for a year, his beginnings were strongly influenced by his readings of Claude Lévi-Strauss. His father was in fact an anthropologist, so he was accompanied from an early age by an abundance of critical literature on ethnography and anthropology. The questioning both of languages and of disciplines for two-dimensional and three-dimensional representation, the opposition between nature and culture and the rejection of the art market imbued these early works, characterised by the production of ephemeral sculptures that remain in existence only in the form of photographic documents. At that time, this was a political stratagem of not making objects that could be sold.

A year before producing Pilgrim, Lothar Baumgarten anticipated what would later be called “institutional critique” in the 81 slides that make up his piece Unsettled Objects (1968-1969). Baumgarten had made a selection of the artifacts held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, a museum set up in the nineteenth century, and had photographed them in order to project his images in a palimpsest-like chain by means of a carousel projector. The German artist was making it evident how western museums choose, keep and present objects belonging to cultures which they taxonomise as belonging to the “other”, generating supposedly objective methods of study with disciplines like ethnology and anthropology. Unsettled Objects was the first piece in which Baumgarten juxtaposed text and image. The words over the images clash with the scientific taxonomies that have been used since the Enlightenment to create a colonial narrative of “the other”, a displacement that transforms utilitarian items into aesthetic objects and incomprehensible forms enclosed in a display case. Such a narrative is questioned in a piece like Pilgrim, which takes us back to what Foucault in The Order of Things called popular taxonomies, individual methods of organisation free of consensus.

In these pieces, Baumgarten was already pointing forward to his later career as an ethnological and anthropological artist, although here the journey (let us recall his sojourn of almost two years with the Yanamami Indians of the Amazon jungle of Venezuela in the 1970s) was a metaphorical simulacrum in which he took pictures in the back garden of his house in a forest near the Rhine. The German artist used found objects which he modified slightly to make his own sculptures. In the case of Pilgrim (1969), he used a small toy fawn, a European deer, which he modified by crowning it with a blurred element that might appear to be a tropical plant or a huge moth. In this way, he used a very visible and almost inoffensive trick to question the theoretical objectivity of photography. In this series, finished in 1972 and entitled Kultur-Natur, Manipulierte Realität, he sought to fuse the two objects. Here this leads us to interpret that this small pilgrim is a mythological animal, a winged mammal walking towards a holy place in an act of devotion and spiritual belief.

As Baumgarten himself has stated, “ethnographic accumulation, the collection of greatly coveted rarities, gives visible form to the desire for power, which is achieved through the adaptation and manipulation of the foreign. This addiction to capturing the unknown through appropriation became programmatic under colonialism. Isolated and stylised as museological fetishes, these objects have all too often been reduced to little more than their aesthetic surplus value. To the sounds of dubious applause, they eke out an exotic existence as relics of poorly understood or misunderstood sunken worlds. The desire for knowledge and control led to an unsuspected series of activities and ways of ordering these ethnographic artifacts, some of which I present as representative of the historical activities of museological practice.”

Isabel Tejeda