Grundriß, pars pro toto V 2005

Lothar Baumgarten made this site-specific drawing, Grundriß, pars pro toto V, directly on the wall of this room, using graphite pencil to create a huge diagrammatic work. It’s about language and space, right? The architecture becomes the support for this rather spare drawing, or maybe we should call it writing. Look how the sharp lines of the triangles intersect and divide the wall into sections; and notice how the careful arrangement of words within these shapes gives a sense of depth, like a map of thought. The texture created by the layering of graphite catches the light in a really subtle way, giving each word its own tiny shadow. It’s physical, but it’s also ephemeral; it’s there, but it might not be there for long. Baumgarten used language in a lot of different ways, in his work as a whole, sometimes to evoke forgotten histories, other times to interrogate our assumptions about culture. You might be reminded of the work of someone like Lawrence Weiner, but where Weiner made language into sculpture, Baumgarten used it to map the world. It's all about how we see and how we understand. And maybe how much we *don't* understand.