Lothar Baumgarten’s Imaginary Amazon: A Game of “Us” Versus “Them”

Abstract

LOTHAR BAUMGARTEN’S IMAGINARY AMAZON: A GAME OF “US” VERSUS “THEM” Joseph R. Hartman Graduate Student Southern Methodist University Palms, Broccoli, and Landscape Photography in the Americas Beginning in the late 1960s, German artist Lothar Baumgarten produced photographs of tropical environments made from local European marketvegetables shot at close range.1 These ephemeral rainforests of broccoli and kale playfully undermined the static constructions by which the West – namely Europe and the United States – has historically imagined South American peoples and environments.2 Baumgarten’s imaginary thickets of dinner greens expose and explore binary constructs, such as nature and culture, other and I.3 Through a play of names, forms, and illusions, his work demonstrates that the Amazonian ecosystem has long served Western observers as a realm of the “other” - a natural, feral place separate from the urban sphere of European-style culture. This essay concentrates on Baumgarten’s early photographs, miniature environments, and later site-specific interventions, so to uncloak the psychological, historical, and aesthetic dimensions of the artist’s oeuvre. Baumgarten’s art, this essay argues, toys with and disturbs the viewer’s ability to shift her or his perception through a range of visual and nominal devices, similar to the way that Western societies have historically constructed static meanings for the jungle and the peoples who inhabit it. In Baumgarten’s hands, nature becomes “seemingly strange.”4 The artist interweaves notions of “us” and “them,” “nature” and “culture,” in order to lay bare the psychological impulses behind written and visual representations of distant peoples, places, and things in the Western tradition. Baumgarten’s art, in particular , deconstructs histories of colonialism and European encounters with American ecosystems and indigenous communities. Baumgarten’s 1968 photograph Tropen Palmen serves as an entry point onto this dialogue between nature, culture, and otherness in the Western imagination (Figure 1). With the title “Tropical Palms,” the artist creates a scene for the mind’s eye. These verdant trees evoke a tropical environment on the other side of the globe, far from the artist’s native Germany. The frame, light, and camera angle in this photograph further manifest the mirage of an exotic, non-Western place.5 Following pictorial traditions of travel illustration and survey photography, Baumgarten’s blackand -white photograph features a cluster of sultry trees on a horizontal C 2016 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/tla.12069 23 The Latin Americanist, March 2016 Figure 1. Lothar Baumgarten, Tropen Palmen, photograph, 1968. C Lothar Baumgarten; VBK, Wien, 2015. plain. In search of historic models, one might compare this image to the seventeenth-century paintings of colonial Brazil created by Dutch artist Franz Post, in which palms frame nearly every scene.6 Or, in consideration of Baumgarten’s photographic medium, one thinks of late-nineteenthcentury landscape photographs of the Brazilian countryside, like those taken by the French-Brazilian, Rio de Janeiro born artist and inventor Marc Ferrez.7 Similar to Baumgarten’s composition, Ferrez often framed his photographs with a cluster of tropical trees, generally palms. This technique appears in a late-nineteenth-century panorama shot of the Guanabara Bay, a famous haven near the city of Rio (Figure 2). On the flattened surface of the black-and-white photograph, the iconic Sugarloaf Mountain of the bay stands juxtaposed and scaled against a massive royal palm tree. Here, tree and mountain stand in parity as biologic monuments to the Brazilian ecosystem. At the bottom of the picture frame, a cluster of smaller palms and tropical trees creates an arboreal mirror for the jagged mountain range across the bay. Images like this circulated widely at the time in the form of postcards. With local and international audiences, Ferrez’s photography defined modern Brazil from both an inside and outside perspective. Ferrez took such photographs of the Brazilian environment as part of a Geological Commission spearheaded by the Canadian-American Charles Frederick Hartt. Ferrez’s landscape photography, then, takes on an additional valence when considered in light of the wider practice of American survey photography in the nineteenth century. Anglo-Saxon 24 Joseph R. Hartman Figure 2. Marc Ferrez, Coastal View, photograph, 1860s-1880s. Courtesy of The J. Paul...