When Lothar Baumgarten applied the names of Indian tribes to the walls of the Guggenheim Museum, some visitors were offended. They didn’t understand why a German artist would tell Americans about their own history. The crux of the matter lies in how one approaches the artist’s use of words: the subject of this work is not American history, not the Indians or their customs; it is the words themselves. When Baumgarten uses words in his installations, he is not interested in what they signify, but, rather, in what social constructions they reflect.

On the interior walls of Portikus, pairs of words