ABRAHAM DAVID CHRISTIAN

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


Abraham David Christian travels
T h o m a s D e e c k e

“At least I am aware that it was not dark and gloomy
before my eyes. All peoples of the earth have the same right
to my good will.” Georg Forster 1

“It is with care that African history must be reconstructed,
for one begins all too easily to idealize,
allowing oneself to be numbed by fashionable conceptions
of romantic primitivism.” Carl Einstein2

In a room containing Gotthard Graubner’s chromospatial bodies from the Böckmann Collection and the figural group Conversation
by Juan Muñoz from the Lafrenz Collection, the Neues Museum Weserburg also exhibits four sandstone sculptures
of the Khmer from the Stober Collection believed to date from between the 9th and 12th centuries. Many visitors wonder
what idols of the “Early Medieval” period (according to Occidental chronology) are doing in a museum of international
contemporary art when they actually belong in an ethnological museum. Is this a collectors’ whim, or is there some formal
comparative idea at the root of it? Not only ethnological museums but also museums of modern or contemporary art, large
exhibition houses, fine arts societies, and art fairs are showing ever greater interest in the sculptures of Africa, Oceania, or,
for example, those made by the natives of Northwestern America and Canada. What is the reason for this circumstance?
And where does the interest of contemporary artists in collecting African sculpture come from, for example that of the
French artist Arman, who not only collects but also incorporates the objects into his own works in a manner sometimes
highly questionable? Or Georg Baselitz’s passion for special forms of African sculpture, shown quite recently in an exceptional
travelling exhibition?
A few years ago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition entitled Primitivism in 20th Century
Art. Wouldn’t an ethnological museum have provided a more appropriate setting for such a theme? William S. Rubin, the
chief curator of this – the world’s first – modern art museum, staged the show as a means of calling attention to the pathbreaking
and formally decisive influence of the so-called “primitive” arts on the modern arts of the 20th century and of
demonstrating its diverse effects. In view of these multifarious connections and their conscious as well as unconscious influences,
the interest of modern and contemporary artists and their publics in the artworks of anonymous masters of
Africa, Oceania, even South and Northwestern America has grown steadily. Exhibitions of so-called primitive sculpture are
increasing in number. Ethnic art is becoming an exhibition event. To an ever greater extent, however, the artworks of Africa
and Oceania are being divested of their origins and sources and carried off into a sphere of “timeless” artistic exemplariness.
Not surprisingly, many of the dealers and collectors have never been in the respective countries of origin nor are they
interested in the ethnic, mythohistorical, or magical contexts of their objects of art and trade, instead appreciating them
solely for their fascinating form, exoticness, or degree of abstraction.
Is it perhaps the reflection of a lost paradise that the artists and the public seek in the sculptures made by anonymous
residents of the jungle and the savannah? Could it be the sad certainty that, due to the progress of so-called civilization
and cultural assimilation after the model of Europe and the U.S., the world’s last “wild” spots will disappear and the secrets
of their cultures, their emergence and significance, have thus become obsolete? Physically as well as virtually, the farthest
corners of the earth have become accessible and thus subject to the equalizing process of American-dominated culture,
the process we refer to as globalisation. Is it not understandable that some of us have taken to ferreting out the last remaining,
quickly disappearing refuges of originality and naturalness and preserving their relics as the symbol of a longing
recognized as futile? Did we not already long ago rob the corresponding products of our own culture – works evoked by
classical myths and Christian sources – of the faith that breathed life into them and ban them to the museums as artworks?
“What remains will be supplied by artists,” Hölderlin claimed, still wholly in accordance with the Romantic sentiment.
For Hölderlin, artists were still the conveyors of a higher, perhaps divine spirit. With the advent of modernism, however,
God was eliminated from art in our latitudes. Today we would regard any artist who claimed to be a genius fanned by divine
inspirations as a comedy act at best. It is for this reason that Sigmar Polke’s picture Höhere Wesen befahlen: Flamingos
malen (Higher Beings Commanded: Paint Flamingos) is to be understood as an ironic commentary on the “inspirees of Informel,”
the generation of his teachers at the academy who proceeded in the certainty that not they themselves but a
Freud-inspired “Weltgeist” painted from within them.
Even in Africa, the inspirational forces deriving from ethnic and mythological sources are losing their power. The recipients
of these forces – as far as we can tell, artist personalities whose identities have remained anonymous, at least for us
non-Africans – no longer enjoy the recognition of their patrons or believers, because the myths are being supplanted by
civilization‘s “achievements.” The iconographic, inspirational meaning of those artists’ sculptures, along with the sources
of their original formative power, are sinking into oblivion, taking with them the spirit that was a manifestation of life and
life’s significance. These evocations of belief in the transcendental which – in the eyes of the initiate – can be symbolized
in the work of art, will now be manifest “only” in the artworks on display in our museums as relics of a time long past and
long lost, as vague recollections of a paradise slipping further and further from our grasp, its rules no longer known to us,
its rites whisked away to the afterworld by their last guardians. As we know from the once holy pictures and sculptures of
our Occidental Christian faith, by the time the cult objects land in museums they have long since lost their myth-endowing
or myth-consolidating powers, just as they have forfeited their functional value as ritual-oriented “living” objects. They have
lost all but their nostalgic worth for us, and our appreciation is based on their age – their market-value-raising antiquity, evident
in traces of use, aging, or offering. (Incidentally, we prefer our sculptures of Western “civilized” art in much the opposite
condition – restored as closely to their original state as possible.) And they gain new meaning as artworks in the sense
of our modern, form-related, individualizable definitions.
The sculptures of the Khmer in the museum of international contemporary art no longer fulfil their role as relics of an
extinct “great” epoch of a people otherwise unknown to us, except in the scattered cases of visitors knowledgeable on the
subject. They are deprived of their historicity, at best only temporarily. In its place, they gain a different, new quality, capable
of moving the new visitor – the visitor of the present – when artists like Gotthard Graubner place them in the vicinity of
their pictures. It is the pictorial language, as Paul Klee expressed it, a language perhaps universal, though perhaps also
misunderstandable – in the creative sense – or even purposely misunderstood, that makes the timeless and placeless
affinity between Graubner’s pictures or Juan Muñoz’s sculptures and the Khmer idols appear “obvious,” but not causal.
They share a certain physical tension that seems to come from deep inside the Khmer sculptures, rounding and tautening
the bodies with decisive gentleness, that fills the colorful surfaces of Graubner’s chromospatial bodies likewise as though
from within, and lends Muñoz’s sand-embedded sculptures the appearance of being frozen in motion. Despite an appearance
that would be described in the antiquarian context as torso-like, the Khmer sculptures possess a physical intactness
in which, seen from this perspective, we recognize the claim to perfection asserted by idols that – conceived of for eternity –
are ageless. But we recognize it only as a metaphor. And in the confrontation with modern art, the metaphor seems to
grant that art the very same right to timelessness. In these sculptures we sense what has been lost to us: the certainty of
faith manifested in one or many gods, demons or ancestors, that we no longer partake of. What remains is no longer supplied
by the gods, but perhaps by artists?
Abraham David Christian abbreviates his biography to the word “travels;” he does not define himself by way of a
“Heimat” or his geographical origins. He conceives of himself as an alert and curious globe-trotter, as a seeker who – with
the open eyes of a sensitive looker – becomes a finder. Whenever he travels, Christian is interested in the pictorial evocations
of that which is foreign.3 He occasionally collects relics of the same, which he keeps and sometimes shows his
friends. Once he presented part of his collection in his exhibition Die Wege der Welt (The Ways of the World).4 But he clearly
separated the very small bronze votive sculptures of the Shan, a Buddhist people inhabiting the north of Burma, from his
own sculptures, displaying them in a treasure room set up specifically for that purpose so as not to give rise to speculations
as to a discernible formal affinity between his works and theirs. Thus unlike Gotthard Graubner, his interest was not
in a subsequent confirmation of a reflected, fundamental sculptural approach, but in the fascination with a basic attitude
towards the “sacred” object which, in its function as a votive gift, points beyond itself into another, spiritual reality.5
Due not least to a materiality of a wholly different kind, Christian’s sculptures – usually formed of paper and painted,
sometimes then cast in bronze – appear entirely solitary and unmistakable. And although in the Museé Imaginaire they occasionally
evoke visions of the formal vocabulary of Asian sculpture or architecture, these proximities – or even affinities –
cannot be precisely formally substantiated, nor does the term imitation in any way apply. One might just as easily point out
the fact that, by virtue of their reduction, they bear formal resemblance to the sculptures of Brancusi. Christian proceeds in
a manner not unlike that of the young Alberto Giacometti. The latter had become acquainted with the “primitive” sculpture
(as it was still referred to at the time) of Africa and Oceania at a 1923 exhibition in the Parisian Musée des Arts Decoratifs.
Three years later, still very much under the spell of those impressions, he produced his first monumental sculpture, the
Femme-cuillère (Spoon Woman). While this work does not belie the spiritual and formal inspiration Giacometti had taken
from the ethnic models, it is by no means to be regarded as a direct copy. It evidently draws from the fascination radiated
by something recognized as primal – but perhaps also from the unconscious in its surrealistically traumatic distortion.
If the claim weren’t so audacious, Christian’s sculptural work could convey the development of a globally comprehensible
formal language of man. It was not without reason that he named his exhibition Die Sprache des Menschen (The Language
of Man) – after the title of a work of 1981 –, explicitly not speaking of the diversity of languages (in the plural) which
still determine cultural, political, and social reality, despite the reaches of virtual globalisation. “What remains will be supplied
by artists”: Surely we lost Hölderlin’s romantic conviction long ago. Nevertheless, it seems Christian will not give up
the hope that what remains can perhaps be supplied only by artists. Who else is there?


1 Georg Forster in: Johann Reinhold Forster’s Reise um die Welt während der Jahre 1772–1775, beschrieben und herausgegeben von
dessen Sohn und Reisegefährten Georg Forster, Berlin, 1784.
2 Carl Einstein, Afrikanische Plastik, Berlin, 1921, Orbis Pictus Volume 7.
3 Also see: Thomas Deecke, “Abraham David Christian. Das Fremde” in: Künstler. Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst, no. 37, Munich 1997.
4 Votive figures from Burma (Myanmar) in: Abraham David Christian. Die Wege der Welt,
Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg, 2000, n. p.
5 In 1981/82 Christian produced a series of nearly life-size sculptures which he entitled – quite misleadingly – Der heilige Mensch (The Holy
Man); see: Thomas Deecke, “Abraham David Christian,” op. cit., Munich, 1997, p. 3.



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