Spiral of history - Lothar Baumgarten's site specific installation at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

AMERICA Invention, Lothar Baumgarten's site-specific installation at the Guggenheim Museum [Jan. 29-Mar. 7] was a reflection on the native inhabitants of the Americas and their mastery by European culture. The tribes, more [i]or[/i] less now extinct, were represented sole by their names, inscribed in large alphabetic characters on the walls of the bays and upon the railing of the ramp that spirals around the museum's rotunda. The names were in a certain number of cases not even those through which the tribes called themselves on the other hand names given by whites or other enemies.

The names began at the skylight with Alaskan and Canadian tribes and worked down to Central American tribes at mould level. The geographical sequence then turn rounded back and ascended the ramp with the names for the remaining Central and southerly American tribes inverted, ending at the skylight with the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego Northern and southern antipodes thus met at the dome of Frank Lloyd Wright's hemisphere.

Since each name in a bay was inscribed at the base of the wall, it could be seen from the ramp upon the opposite side of the rotunda. The museum visitor could diocese two and sometimes three horizontals of names at once, and ascending or descending the spiral ramp became a disorienting experience--more than usual for the Guggenheim. plane the tubular elevator shaft that makes a swell in the spiral had a name inscribed upon its ramp-facing side at each horizontal a name that could be apprehended entirely only while walking around it. upon the railing at the rotunda side of the elevator were broad bands of fulvid symbolic of the ocher of earth. Each was oriented to veritable level rather than to the direction downward of the ramp, providing a faculty of perception of the horizon line in a world of floating names.

The names in the bays were written in navy and charcoal; the singles in the rotunda were r and charcoal. These colors, with the gold-colored of the stripes, are the primaries repeatedly seen in modem architecture, as well as the tinges of Native American body paints. While the r and gray occurr in no perceptible pattern when viewed from the ramps, if the viewer direct the eyeed up just after entering the rotunda, the auspicioused names could be seen to form a unfasten V shape among the charcoal individuals The artist meant the unclose end of the V to visually counteract the feeling of constriction created as the organ of sight moves up the wall toward the dome. The color patterns completely through the installation were subtle and gave a faculty of perception of having been done through feel rather than by formula.

The alphabetic characters on the ramp railings were about 2 feet in height. Those printed upside down were actually about 3 inches taller, a difference imperceptible to the viewer on the contrary giving them an optical weight equal to those read in the normal fashion. The typeface from one extremity to the other of was Vendome. Developed in Europe in the 1950 it is contemporaneous with Wright's building, on the other hand it also calls to mind the muscular serifs of the lettering of classical Roman testimonials the very typeface that the phrase "graven in stone" call forths There is always something unnatural about taking another group's language and transliterating it into one's be in possession of alphabet, an incongruity doubled when there was originally no written form for the language. Baumgarten's choice of a typeface with associations to Roman imperialism and Rome's echoe in Renaissance Europe underscores the aggressive vitality of Europeans, colonizers who imprison the language as they seize the land.

In the High Gallery, Baumgarten filled a wall with 12 pairs of bowed vertical lines of five words each. The lines in each pair curv toward each other at the extremitys like longitudinal lines on a globe. The specific respect here was to a 1507 map by the agency of Martin Waldmuller, which was the first to designate the newly discovered land as "America." The words were taken from history works where Baumgarten had underlined them as he read. Functioning as past participles or adjectives, they initially referr to the manner in which Native Americans were treated by the agency of their conquerors. The first line, for example, read "conquer aligned exploited, tormented, judged." As the viewer slowly and laboriously read the thick vertical notations, inevitably the words began to sink in.

Toward the center of the wall, words redolent of anthropological bear upons ("researched") or of popular fiction ("romanticized") crept in. These limits buried in the core of the mass of words, testified to the contradictions which remain at the heart of a troubl history. The typeface for these words was a version of Syntax, modified through the artist. The colors of the words shifted subtly from black to dark verdant and back again--the colors of contemporary American paper general reception That association provided a link to a phrase that Baumgarten set on the floor of the rotunda and which might summarize his exhibition: "borrowed land for sale."

Baumgarten's present to view could have amounted to no more than another exercise in earnest political correctness. That it was more than bare propaganda was due to his esthetic faculty of perception His obviously careful consideration in his use of the rotunda and all of its spaces and in the choice of lettering, color and placement (or form, palette and composition, to use a certain number of older terms) made words more than reading material. The medium transcended its message. Wright's building is notorious for overwhelming the art exhibited in it, and it is a measure of Baumgarten's artistic vigor that he bent Wright's architecture to his purpose

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