Anna Brus, Joseph Imorde, Erhard Schüttpelz
This workshop suggests to re-visit the colonial encounter with foreign art worlds in the work of Julius Lips. At once marginalized and influential until today, his seminal work “The savage hits back” (1937) opens up a kaleidoscopic view on depictions of Europeans worldwide. Inverting the colonial gaze on the other, the critical stance towards the European prevented a major exhibition in Nazi-Germany and Lips was driven into exile.
- Lips broad universalist scope reaches from Benin bronze-reliefs of Portuguese merchants to Victorian age aboriginal drawings and from Northwest-coast carving to African tourist art sculptures of colonial officials. The objects express mutual experiences of alterity and document the history of cultural contact-zones along formal and iconographic features. Art forms travelled through different locales and sparked new aesthetics into being - confusing prevailing regimes of primitivist aesthetic and pseudo-scientific presuppositions about the other: When „salvage anthropology“ asked for „pure“ objects, seemingly untouched by external influences, Lips showed non-western art as contemporary art for the first time. When primitivists were interested in formal abstraction or the magic of „fetishes“ Lips pointed out the explicit realism that is generated in the depictions of the Westerner and his material culture.
Ort: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Kulturen der Welt, Cäcilienstraße 29-33, 50667 Köln
Veranstalter: Universität Siegen, DFG-Graduiertenkolleg Locating Media