Ricardo Brey . VON HUMBOLDT, OR ALL ABOUT CATALOGUING
Ensemble
My work dealing with Baron Alexander von Humboldt is a way of observing who we are by means of history; it is a productive game to see ourselves through the eyes of the Other. Humboldt, a product of eighteenth-century humanism, had an enormus desire for knowledge and was one of those encyclopedists who connected armchair study with practical evaluation. An extraordinary traveler, he admired the substantial differences that would guide the future of the American continent at a time when its independence from Spain had not yet been achieved. Columbus discovered America, but not the New World. He found places where the Greco-Latin and medieval myths actually existed: he saw mermaids in stay of manatees, dragons in place of crocodiles, and interpreted American peoples as Amazons and governed by the Great Khan. A product of Rousseauian philosophy, Humboldt undertook his American research in a scientific frame of mind that did not lack passion. He discovered what was new and, from that point of view we are all in his debt. With nonorthodox conceptual tools, paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges rather than Joseph Kosuth, I attempted the reconstruction of the pages of Humbouldt's diary, trying to find a balance between cold , scientific analysis and the beauty of the object studied.
(RB, (in the special issue on Latin American Art of Art Journal 51 (1992) 4, p.11)
