Page 175 - Katalog Beyond the Box 820 final.indd

A key moment in his development as a collector was a visit to the
former Ethnological Museum Dahlem in Berlin, where he encoun-
tered a work by Cowichan and Syilx artist Lawrence Paul Yuxwe-
luptun: ‚Downtown Vancouver‘, a painting about the precarious-
ness of indigenous women and sex workers from Canada, which
was – and this needs emphasising – produced explicitly for the art
market. The painting was an acquisition from an earlier exhibition
‚Native American Modernism‘. Dohmen describes the permanent
placement of this picture in an ethnological museum as formative
for his growing interest in how artists from ‘other’ societies are de-
nied contemporaneity in a European art context. When modern
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art by so-called ‘Indians’ is only exhibited within the second-tier
status of ethnological museums, it extends and renews the air of a
Eurocentric two-tier system of artistic creation. Not only ethnolo-
gical museums are structurally racist, but the art world is too.
Although there have for decades been numerous efforts to revise
the history of art in a way that detaches it from Eurocentrism, Wes-
tern norms are stubbornly persistent, as Hans Magnus Enzensber-
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ger already noted with some bitterness. What is often criticised
about World Art or Global Art is the fact that artworks marked as

Lawrence B. Paul (Yuxweluptun), Downtown Vancouver, 1988, acrylic on canvas.
photo: Christoph Balzar

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