Lothar Baumgarten's work was recently the subject of a monographic exhibition at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). The exhibition included variations on a number of well-known photographic, graphic and text-based works, reflecting a variety within his practice that is extremely difficult to reduce to a single thematic, or at least one that is manageable in a short text.

Yet there have been aspects of his work (formal aspects, for example) that have been eclipsed by discussions, especially from the 1980s, that have focused exclusively on Baumgarten's longstanding commitment to ethnographic naming relative to indigenous peoples of the New World. This problem of ethnographic naming may now seem somewhat passé, in other words thoroughly expounded, in academic writings as well as in art. Nonetheless, retrospective exhibitions of such recent works of art can have the merit of bringing up discourses that appear to be historical but which, in reality, have developed in important ways. Names, when they refer to indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, continue to be 'unsettled objects', to use Baumgarten's expression;¹ but they are not, or no longer, merely exemplars of acts of colonial erasure, acts of naming and possession. At least in the case of the Northwest Coast, and also in Australia and New Zealand, for example, indigenous names are also, and by now perhaps more so, complicated spaces where speech, culture, language and life converge.

In the last two of his lectures of 1975-76 titled 'Society Must Be Defended', Michel Foucault spoke of the construction of narratives that trace the foundations of a society's customs, beliefs and hierarchical structure to an absolute origin. He identified such constructions as indispensable for the foundation of the bourgeois nation-state, which discovered in historiography a useful way of naturalising its own principles, and referred to this phenomenon as the 'tactical generalisation of historical knowledge'.² It was such tactical generalisations that later resulted in the official narratives that operated as the founding myths of these newly organised nations. But today an older phenomenon seems to be replacing the historiographic impulse, one that was most visible in the context of the recent US election, during which the notion of the 'story' - in this case 'The American Story' - vague and tentative as it is, occupied the centre of political consciousness. In the recent presidential campaigns this notion was endorsed by both the Republican and the Democratic Parties, albeit in radically different form, oscillating between two utopias: that of Dream, and that of Hope. In the first case, the idea was to restore a unity that, as the Republican candidate John McCain proposed, is achievable through the totalisation of the social sphere around the ideals of a largely white, suburban middle-class - hence his statement at the introduction of his vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin in August 2008 that she, the 'hockey mom', is an American story. Hope, Barack Obama's motto, proposed a reinvorigoration of the concept of America as a continuous project of emancipation - from slavery, racism or gender inequality - supported by personal testimonials during the campaigning process, including that of Michelle Obama, his wife. Both formulations of the history of the US resist the historiographic enterprise, and both are underpinned by the need to appeal to the polygenetic idea of the nation of immigrants.

In the contemporary world, the bourgeois nation-state can't continue to define itself as an 'imagined community' unless it abandons myths of birth - of the 'birth of a nation' - and endorses the facts of difference, mobility and displacement inherent in the concept of globalisation.³ From the point of view of a state-sanctioned multiculturalism, such as that of Canada, the national collectivity must relinquish the notion of origin. 'Story' appears thus to designate a purely contingent history, and it may easily seem proof of the sublimation of difference. But this apparently democratising recourse to the notion of story comes along with its own erasures, as the accepted image of the immigrant, with its experiences of displacement, is at odds with the experience of peoples indigenous to the New World, whose displacement has taken place within a palimpsest of cultural, political and belief systems. 'The American Story', in the narrow context here described, is exclusively the saga of the émigré.

The fact that 'The American Story' has failed to elicit widespread indignation on the part of historians may be taken as a sign of our perplexity, if not defeat, at the progressive alienation of fact from history. The word 'story' is there to ensure this alienation, as it opens a space where the individual or even personal chronicle is pitched in opposition to collective narration. In this context, people are no longer represented but acknowledged, and personal histories are accepted as particles from a community without a common narrative. The phenomenon is widespread, and its most illustrious casualty is historical materialism, for in the absence of a narration based on factors that were central to the various guises of historical materialism (social relations of production, culture, or even in the absence of strategically essentialised experiences of ethnicity or race), character threatens to resurface as the buttressing agent of the collectivity.

Indeed, as it has been the case in the past, the notion of character has resurfaced with (and is linked to) the idea of destiny.⁴ In 1997 Russell Gough, a professor of ethics and philosophy at Pepperdine University in California, published a book called Character Is Destiny, in which he argued from a Christian orthodox perspective that character - which he traced to the ethos of the Greeks - is identical with personality and destiny identical with habit. The book probably would have been obscured by the context within which it emerged were it not for the fact that in 2005 Senator John McCain echoed these notions in his book of the same title, where he wrote: 'It is your character, and your character alone that will make your life happy or unhappy. This is all that really passes for destiny. And you choose it.'⁵ But, as Walter Benjamin already put it in 1918 - that is, a few decades before National Socialism confirmed his suspicions - character and destiny coincide only in chiromancy, and happiness is 'what releases the fortunate man from the embroilment of the Fates and from the net of his own fate. Not for nothing does Hölderlin call the blissful gods "fateless".' ⁶

Such refusal to accept correspondences between character and destiny has been echoed, even implicitly, in virtually all critiques of the essentialisation of 'others' - in the critiques of racism and ethnocentrism, in gender studies, postcolonial theory and so on. This tradition of refusal provides an important context for Lothar Baumgarten's work, as it was perhaps one of the most prevalent factors in the scholarship - especially North American ethnography as well as Post-Colonial theory - of the 1980s.

Baumgarten's exhibition at MACBA included a variation on a work titled Unsettled Objects (1993), a collection of photographs that Baumgarten took of a display of ethnographic objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. These photographs were originally presented in 1993 as part of an exhibition titled 'AMERICA Invention' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. ⁷ In the Guggenheim show, the photographs were presented in magazine format, framed by essays (by Hal Foster and others) that presented Baumgarten's work as a timely contribution to the deconstruction of grand récits. In what is perhaps Baumgarten's best-known work in North America, the names of native peoples of the Americas (Apache, Cherokee, Kiowa, Ofo, Yuchi, etc.) were inscribed on the parapet of the museum's rotunda. 'AMERICA Invention' resorted to counter-narratives of voyage, discovery and foundation in an attempt to disrupt heavily sedimented historical and mythical constructions about the 'New World', and by doing so revealed names that, according to Foster, had been written out of the 'official spiral of American history'.⁸

By use of the term 'spiral' Foster made an analogy between the Guggenheim's spiralling rotunda - the 'organicist ideal of Frank Lloyd Wright' - and Alois Riegl's 'screw of time', a concept based on the optical illusion according to which a screw 'turns upward as it bears downward', advancing 'into its future as it returns to its past'.⁹ Baumgarten's inscriptions on the parapet of the rotunda, according to Foster, were a way of forcing an official American history to 'reveal some of the names written out of its narrative' - a point repeated in several of the essays included in the publication.¹⁰ This is, to be sure, an acceptable analogy, as Wright's rotunda was designed to present the museum visitor with a seemingly unbroken experience of history. He or she could revisit the past, in panoramic fashion, while descending towards the present. The contemplation of historical progress, as reflected in artworks of different periods that would be displayed around the rotunda, was thus the primary role of the visitor. With Baumgarten's installation, as the visitor progressed upwards or downwards, he or she was obliged to face an incongruity between the enlightened organicism of the building and the 'others' implicit in the inscribed names.

In an interview made on the occasion of his MACBA exhibition, Baumgarten explains that his works are always placed 'in situ, in the context of the architecture of this particular place and time', operating like 'a music embedded [in] the different architectural speficities of this building'.¹¹ This statement points to a series of works from Baumgarten's immediate artistic milieu - Blinky Palermo's Wand-Objekte (Wall Objects, 1965). These, as Benjamin Buchloh has said, produce 'an intense secularising of the aesthetic experience, a transposing of it into a different social space from that of the spiritual'.¹² Baumgarten, who like Palermo was a student of Joseph Beuys, shared in this rejection of Beuys's shamanic spiritualism. And despite not having the same interest in abstraction as Palermo, Baumgarten's work also seems to relocate earlier utopian models to 'a distinctly different historical context where any utopian dimension is closed'.¹³

In this sense, Baumgarten's inscriptions may be taken as aesthetic artefacts, as things, but with some qualifications. The art historian Donald Preziosi sees the aesthetic artefact ('art') and the commodity as the two poles of modern fetishism. ¹⁴ In the museum, he claims, artefacts and objects oscillate between these two poles.¹⁵ But if we understand 'artefact' as a material 'construct' - as Preziosi does - the names inscribed by Baumgarten are not aesthetic artefacts. As they are obviously not commodities, does this mean that they escape the rule of modern fetishism? Perhaps. And certainly this is part of their point. They escape the rule of modern fetishism by replacing a factual order: the names, including 'America', are presented as facts.

Yet these facts do not necessarily refer to the people they submit by name: they refer, in a rather circular way, to a phenomenology of naming, to a problematics of the contract that needs to guarantee the adequacy of words to what they name, and which is in this case specifically relative to land claims, sovereignty and political autonomy. The name is a fact by virtue of designating what it names as content, that is, as the stable totality that exists under its designation. In the case of the names used by Baumgarten, this totality is an aggregate of people and their cultural, social and political traits and products, precisely described, represented and defined - circumscribed - in each case as a ethnographic object or a contractual subject. Collected at the Guggenheim, the names appeared as facts from an untold history, placed in a radically different context that, as presented by the exhibition's interpreters, gave the illusion of opening a utopian dimension. Devoid of their individual specificities, these collected facts awaited description, ordering and representation, which is to say that they awaited historiography, either in Foucault's sense of 'tactical generalisation of history' or in Gayatri Spivak's sense of 'strategic essentialism'.¹⁶ In other words, as they stood, these inscriptions remained a collection of examples of given names, some self-ascribed and others imposed, typifying a confrontation of colonial subjects and objects.

Together, the building and the names might add up to a 'dialectical image' in Walter Benjamin's words, one in which the names are more likely to problematise the architectural proposition inherent in the building than they are to propose counternarratives of the invention of America. Yet, the building remains so utterly foreign to the names inscribed on it that it is hard to see how or at what point those different histories intersect - unless one considers each museum in which the work is installed (the Fridericianum in Kassel, the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York or MACBA in Barcelona) as an allegory of the modern museum in general, devoid of any specificity. As a counterpart to this we can think of, for instance, Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds's installation Native Hosts (2008). The work is composed of twelve aluminium signs placed around the campus of the University of British Columbia on which the words 'British Columbia' appear mirrored, reading backwards, followed by the phrase 'Today Your Host Is', and completed by the name of a British Columbian Indian Band (Lil'wat, Wet'suwet'en and ten others). As in Baumgarten's work, in Native Hosts the names appear as facts, but this time they are clearly framed by the strange contractual situation within which they have operated in a post-colonial space, where the relationship between names, people and territory needs to be stabilised before the principles of private property can be deployed.

This is an important reason why in the Northwest Coast names of First Nations and Indian Bands have become a highly volatile discursive field, as it is increasingly important for indigenous peoples to disentangle their respective cultural systems from the imperatives of private property, and to denaturalise English and its Roman alphabet as the language in which names are written and spoken. The decision of the Kwakiutl First Nation, for instance, to recently reclaim as their name Kwakwala'wakw (Kwak'wala-speaking-people), participates in this strategy of destabilisation of the colonial ordering. An analogous strategy is found in Australia, where Aboriginal People have fought to give places back their indigenous names.¹⁷ In such counterfactual practices, the name, as an ethnographic fact, has long been overshadowed by the contractual problematic that re-naming is attempting to disrupt: it is not the name in its nominal form, but the act of naming that must be perceived as fact. The problem today may not be so much one of producing an ethical choice between names where one alternative is 'imposed' and the other 'self-ascribed', for the problem runs much deeper, and is relative to the establishing of an official language that arrives with its own law - a legal rather than a just language that is now refused and that must remain incomplete and unstable if it is to succeed in expressing such refusal.

The names listed in Baumgarten's exhibition are indeed facts. But names no longer operate in relation to each other, as if attempting to transcendentalise historical experiences that have become increasingly particular. Each name operates in its own immanence, so to speak (the notion of a Kwak'wala-speaking-people may be a good example of this), as any general experience is always already mediated by a relationship to a conflicting claim. In Edgar Heap of Birds's Native Hosts the conflicting claim is named: British Columbia. Perhaps the name has come to occupy the space of the commodity in modern fetishism, calling, as Benjamin put it in the section on the flâneur in his 1935 essay 'Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century', for an empathy with its soul.18 This fetishism, perhaps, is what is being challenged in this new 'deterritorialisation' - rather than deconstruction - of the name. As facts, these names must bear the traces of the ethnographic and contractual framing, but they must also be figures of resistance to the dissociative power of rhetorical figures such as 'The American Story'.

— Juan A. Gaitán