Description

The faithfully reproduced drawings from Melanesia and of South-east Asia were created in the 1930's during feeldstudies of the then renown Viennese ethnologist and ethnophotographer Hugo A. Bernatzik (1897-1953). The related writings convey a pluridisciplinary approach to the exceptional and multilayered quality of those folios. The ethnologist, Jacques Ivanoff, situates the drawings within the scope of a transcultural, long time dynamic of ethnicity; the anthropologist, Manfred Faßler, focuses on the drawings as being an inherent medium of mankind; and the artist and philosopher, Elisabeth von Samsonow, analyses the relationship between the empty sheet as "pure potentiality" and the "choreographic nature of the line". The various positions are by no means competing, but are alternatively stimulating. At once these reflections on the Drawing as Universal Language lead to the possibilities and limits of Mans' knowledge of Man.