One of the leading figures on the art scene over the last three decades – Lothar Baumgarten has participated four times at Documenta in Kassel and has had numerous solo shows in museums around the world – from the very beginning his preferred field of action has involved drawing on the practices used by anthropologists for observing "other" civilizations. Over the years, in line with developments in anthropology, he has observed forms of otherness and what is submerged in the Western world. Between 1978 and 1980 Baumgarten spent 18 months in a Yanomàmi village in southern Venezuela, an experience which has deeply informed his work. Sensitive to the exhibition spaces, in his installations critical investigation acquires a poetic dimension and black and white photos coexist with written text on the walls.
Invited to Documenta VII at Kassel in 1982, Baumgarten painted in the neo-Classical spaces of the Museum Fridericianum the names of the indigenous societies of South America. Instead of the usual array of humanistic mottoes or illustrious personages typical of such buildings, he inserted the names of "others", using a blood red colour obtained from a natural dye and adopted for decorative purposes, which explains the origin of the discriminative name ‘Red Indian’ (Monument for the Native Societies of South America).
For the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1984, Baumgarten produced a floor of marble slabs inscribed with the names of the big rivers in the Amazon and Orinoco basins. Devoting such attention to these names in the context of the Venice lagoon suggests a possible reversal of the traditional oppositions between the so-called Old and New Continent and emphasizes the process of naming that has governed the relations between the two continents right from the earliest contacts – the conquistadors attributed to new lands names that were familiar to them without taking account of the pre-existent culture ("América" Señores naturales).
For his solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1993, Baumgarten wrote on the exterior parapets of the Wright spiral the names of the indigenous North American tribes from Alaska to Mexico, and on the interior walls the names of the indigenous South American tribes from the Tierra del Fuego to Guatemala. He also added past participles evoking the violence suffered by these peoples (classified…, decimated…, abandoned…, baptized…). The result is a kind of non-official map of the American continent where what become evident – something also underlined by the non-neutral role exercised by the spaces of the quintessential modern art museum that provided the setting for this piece – are the relations between the construction of the identity of a place and the affirmation of power (America Invention).