ABRAHAM DAVID CHRISTIAN

ABRAHAM DAVID CHRISTIAN
DIE SPRACHE DES MENSCHEN | THE LANGUAGE OF MAN


Ein – Bildungen
P e t e r F r i e s e

The first time I visited Abraham David Christian in Düsseldorf, he showed me a small stone relief from Gandh—ara (Pakistan)
depicting, at its centre, a Buddha sitting cross-legged, flanked to the left and right by kneeling secondary figures in a setting
framed by two columns (see ill. page 40). The object, evidently a fragment from a larger sculptural or architectural context,
seemed surprisingly familiar to me. Although I was seeing the evenly carved face of the enlightened Buddha, the manner
in which he was clothed and the drapery of his tunic-like robe for the first time, I felt a strange sense of recognition.
Even the poses of the two figures kneeling alongside him and, finally, the framing columns – their shafts displaying a distinct
“entasis,” i. e. convexity of form – struck me as anything but “strange.” Was I just imagining this feeling of acquaintance?
I began to wonder at my own faculty of perception, my ability to “grasp” something I had never seen before so
quickly. Abraham, for his part, wasn’t surprised in the least, but told me of other depictive images he had seen in the
course of his travels in the Middle and Far East, of Indian princes seated on their horses like the Roman emperor Marcus
Aurelius, of Buddhist figures which seemed entirely in correspondence with the Greek ideal of beauty. And in fact, there
must have been remarkable influences and permeations going on far to the east of the Imperium Romanum, currents certain
to have made themselves felt in many areas of ancient society aside from the forms of art and architecture visible to
us today. Nevertheless, the latter provide sufficient evidence of something the artist and I talked and finally argued about
in the course of the afternoon. We were both well aware that the early contact between the Indian cultural region and Occidental/
Hellenic forms of thought and expression was something exceedingly special and that an investigation into the why
and wherefore of these encounters would be quite worthwhile.
As opposed to the precipitate assumption one might arrive at on the wings of critical impetus, Gandh—ara is not a case
of forced assimilation but – astonishingly – of subtle influences and interpenetrations happening along the Silk Road,
which already existed in Classical Antiquity. The artworks that have come down to us are, in effect, concretions, visible materializations
of these complex processes. It was clear to both of us that economic interests, perhaps even certain individual
patrons’ craving for admiration, had formed the basis for these remarkable hybrids and permeations. Yet our conversation
did not revolve around chauvinism or even the supposed “superiority” of Western cultural concepts, but rather around
the fundamental openness to influence, the possibility of lasting transcultural encounters then and now. It was none other
than the increasingly popular Buddhist art of the time that served as the vehicle for the transport of many such antique
Mediterranean motifs to such remote regions as Central Asia and the Far East. Ultimately, we agreed that in this small relief
we had conspicuous proof – anchored, as it was, in history itself – of the possibility of mutual approximations and contacts
between differing world systems and cultural concepts. Following close on the heels of this insight, however, was the
sobering realization that it could by no means serve to anticipate a solution to civilizational problems. Rather, Gandh—ara represented
only one of many historical chances for a hybrid culture, opportunities thwarted in most cases by history itself.
Compared with the entirely different kind of influences and permeations occurring shortly after 1900 in the studios of
Picasso and, as time went on, many other European artists, the antique relief belonging to Abraham David Christian is a
quieter manifestation. It does not bear eloquent witness to avant-garde dynamic, challenges, rejections, dissolutions, or
new inventions, but occasions pause for reflection as well as a sense of amazement. As we now know, Picasso’s radical
artistic aversion from central perspective, from European corporal proportions and spatial concepts would not have been
conceivable without his clear orientation towards the African conception of form. The conscious employment of a canon of
form and proportion based on elementary simplifications and geometrizations set a precedent for artistic decisions made
around 1900 and later. The artists of the time are sure to have been quite aware that, in the spirit of the avant-garde, they
had come closer to the spirit (and the spirits) of Africa. They found their antetypes in ethnological museums or, ideally, set
out on travels themselves, in search of things strange and – for European standards – novel. But what appears in their
works in all distinctness was long suppressed by art history or deliberately and repeatedly passed off as the ingenious
achievement of individual creative subjects operating solely “from within themselves.” In order to comprehend Cubism in
particular and so-called Primitivism in general as art-historical phenomena, we must no longer take recourse to the hazardous
construction of a metaphysically founded “Weltkünstlertum” as was still the case in 1984 in the New York MOMA
exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art. As a means of emphasizing the value particularly of European artistic concepts,
there was much talk at that time of an “affinity of poetic spirit” (William Rubin) common to all artists, and the serious assertion
that Picasso, for example, would have found his way to his famous forms even without African influences, virtually
“from within himself.” In the meantime, however, it is permissible to address influences, artistic assimilations, and conscious
adoptions openly without diminishing the artistic value of the respective concept but – on the contrary – emphasizing
its trans-cultural viability and its ability to engage in dialog. The manner in which the formal vocabulary of “antetypes”
has made its way into an artist’s work, the way in which something already existing in other cultures is translated, transformed,
and ultimately reformulated in a new context raises highly interesting questions as to method. For if we leave the
concept of “uniqueness” behind, it soon becomes clear that artists never create anything absolutely “new,” as many representatives
of modern art would have had us believe, but that they take up threads where others before them have left off.
Not only external similarities come about as a result, but also – quite possibly – respectful critical interaction, approximation,
even cautious contact. The transformations taking place in an artist’s work in the context of such an approach, however,
truly have nothing to do with the unreflecting “copying” or blind “quotation” of pleasing models. They are indicative,
rather, of subtle processes of approximation, inclusion, and ultimately, in the figurative sense, “Ein-Bildung,”1 which are well
worth in-depth consideration.
The fact that, of all objects, I came across the aforementioned relief when I visited Abraham David Christian can serve
to lead our train of thought to Christian himself and his stance as an artist. A person with domiciles and studios in New
York, Düsseldorf, and Hayama (Japan), he travels the entire world, almost like a lone nomad driven again and again to
change his surroundings. Questioned about the reasons for this permanent mobility, he begins – surprisingly – to speak of
self-experience, as though his primary concern was to find his way to himself by approximating the foreign. That strikes us
initially as a contradiction, or as the simple equation of self-experience with “xeno-experience.” Yet when we learn that, in
travelling and leading his life on several continents, his primary concern is with developing receptivity for that which is different
and other, the contradiction begins to dissolve. For receptivity certainly does not mean “acquisition,” nor is it associated
with any necessity of understanding, describing, and explaining the different/other at all events and in one’s own
terms. As opposed to appropriation, receptivity can sooner be defined as the cautious capability of allowing the different/
other to resonate within oneself, virtually to let it in, without assimilating it. If permitted to enter entirely freely, it can
leave behind an impression, achieve “Ein-Bildung” in a person and change him. If this idea strikes us initially as a romantic
counter-project to a post-colonial experience of the world determined increasingly by assimilation on the one hand and unsolvable
conflicts on the other, i.e. as something highly “unrealistic” from the artistic point of view, it proves itself in the
end to be quite a negotiable path. After all, it is the path Abraham David Christian has been treading successfully now for
more than three decades. Alternatively, we could say that his works are concretions of an actively practiced attitude of receptivity
for the different/other, and that they are like counter-images to the polarizations presently splitting the globe.
Christian’s entire oeuvre is determined by cautious approximation of – and, ultimately, knowledge of and respect for –
foreign cultures and their forms of creative expression. Yet his artistic work can in no way be classified as a documentation
of what he has seen and experienced in foreign lands. He is not a travel writer but the sculptor and author of autonomous,
quite difficult-to-classify sculptures and drawings, working in a fashion that could almost be referred to as anachronistic.
It cannot be denied, even at first sight: While these sculptural images made primarily of paper are not copies or direct
quotations, in their plain coloration and formation they are reminiscent of everyday objects and ancient symbolic forms at
the same time. Yet we soon notice that the similarities and subtle echoes we ascertained just a moment ago do not nearly
suffice to attach “meaning” in the sense of linear recognition, classification, and description in precise terms.
For most viewers, the experience of Christian’s works is presumably similar to what I went through when I saw the relief
from Gandh—ara for the first time: We are likely to have braced ourselves for confrontation with works that embody the
different or other, the never-before-seen. Instead we are confused by the remarkable familiarity elusively present in most
of the forms. We really believe we have seen something like this before, we think we can remember something specific, but
ultimately cannot put our finger on what it could have been. As we view these forms, our command of language usually
puts us in the position of descriptively employing such terms as cone, cylinder, pyramid, disc, or block. Even more strongly
associative designations, more or less consciously charged with cultural meaning – for example “tower,” “column,” “bowl,”
“shrine,” or “dome” – can also be applied to the sculptures and are entirely well capable of precisely characterizing one or
another of the forms. But these words always apply only to a small proportion of what is visible and never to the sculpture
in its entirety. There is always a great deal left over, a major aspect that defies description or identification. And when we
finally begin to introduce expressions generally connotative of something sacral or grand – such as “pagoda,” “temple,”
“altar,” or “shrine” – we must ultimately admit that, more than anything else, our tremendous abilities to associate and
analogize are what have led us to take recourse to such terminology – and that in most cases we have gone too far in the
process. Abraham David Christian’s sculptures are not images of temples, shrines, or altars; they are objects which evoke
such images within us. In a very subtle manner, they nudge conceptions already existing within us and, for that reason, despite
their ambiguity, they do not appear strange to us but, in a remarkable way, familiar from the very start.
“Er-Innern”. The German word “Erinnern” (to remember), when hyphenated, becomes wonderfully equivocal, no longer
merely signifying a thing actually experienced some time previously and temporarily retrieved from storage for the sake of
reconfirmation. Now it also means recourse to “inner” images, images already existing within us. Not “archetypes,” but
rather those images which, in a highly impressive manner, once succeeded in becoming a permanent “Ein-Bildung” within
us and are also capable of changing through the momentum of memory. Jochen Gerz once said that true images are those
which are not images at all. By that he meant conceptions, memories, longings, i. e. all of the images no longer or not yet
congealed in external images.
It is in recourse to precisely those “inner” images that the works of Abraham David Christian crystallize. The pictorial
language that characterizes them is open, equivocal, and points in several directions at once; it is the result of the artist’s
above-described receptivity as well as his specific manner of proceeding. In his sculptures, Christian processes images –
the inner images distilled from countless impressions and accumulated by his memory – to become unmistakable works
which are “cosmopolitan” in the best sense of the word. Without ever coming even close to all-assimilating “ethno art” or
easily marketable “stylistic pluralism,” himself anything but a fare dodger on the “archetypal” train that – in Western art –
left the station long ago, he succeeds in rediscovering something of the universal formal language apparently often existing
in many cultures at the same time. His journeys are thus followed again and again by the production of strangely equivocal
sculptural images ultimately capable of corresponding with the aforementioned images already present within the
viewer. As Michel Serres once wrote, “We can only keep a culture and a way of thinking alive if we feed them with something
other than themselves.” By “feed” he did not mean a form of ingestion but the process of receptivity, allowing something
to enter so freely as to “fall” into oneself, and become an “Ein-Bildung”.
The work of Abraham David Christian is conspicuous evidence of an artistic stance which is aware of this premise and
has absorbed it in a manner both sensitive and highly impressive.






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