Ricardo Rodríguez BreyAuthor(s): Luis CamnitzerSource: Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4, Latin American Art (Winter, 1992), p. 11Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777275 .

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Ricardo Rodriguez Brey, Humboldt's Diary: The Event, c. 1982, mimeograph stencil on paper, 30 x 40 inches. Collection of the artist.

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 human- ism, had an enormous 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 a place where the Greco-Latin and medieval myths actually existed; he saw sirens instead of American birds, dragons in place of croco- diles, 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 discov- ered 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 Humboldt's diary, trying to find a balance between cold, scientific analysis and the beauty of the object studied.

RICARDO RODRIGUEZ BREY, presently living in Belgium, was a member of Cuba's pioneering experimental generation named "Volumen Und'o" (Volume I) in the early 1980s.

ART JOURNAL

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