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