Replika Project by Peter Bauhuis. An Exercise in Self-imitation. A Future Classic in Contemporary Jewellery

The works of Peter Bauhuis remind us of the famous dictum of Jacques Lacan: „I am an Other“, which implies that all reflection is essentially archaeology. For, as I dig into myself, my expectations of hitting anything like a rock bottom of my „innermost nature“ is thwarted whenever I find myself crossing a threshold to an Other that has been lurking within me all the while, eroding my inner unity with its uncanny and clandestine difference.

The Other in Bauhuis’ Gallium Project (The Gallium Treasure of Obertraun) is more than just an „other mind“. It is an „other life“, including other practices and (metallurgical) techniques, other materialities and certainly other modes of enhancing life with jewellery. In 2011, Bauhuis exhibited his Gallium pieces within one of the venerated spaces of the Archaeological Museum of Munich as a display of findings made by a (fake) Austrian archaeologist called Johann Niederpointner, whose very name signifies the act of pointing downwards towards the earth.


Peter Bauhuis. The Gallium Treasure of Obertraun, 2011. Set in gallium. Photo by Peter Bauhuis.


Around these pieces, Bauhuis spins an archaeological narrative in the style of the documentary literature that typically accompanies archaeological exhibits. He elaborates how Niederpointner discovered them unexpectedly in a little place called Obertraun in Austria shortly before his mysterious disappearance, and underscores the technological and aesthetic proximity of Niederpointner’s findings (“fake”) to the iron-age artefacts of the Hallstatt civilisation (“real”). While opening the show, Bauhuis introduced himself as the curator of the exhibits, without disclosing the fact that he himself had produced them and stating instead that his interest in these objects resulted from a certain „affinity between them and my own works as a jewellery maker“.

Besides the arm-rings and neckpieces in the shapes of archaic objects like skulls, hollowed spheres or seeds, the Gallium treasure trove includes a series of oversized arm rings, which are not really wearable – partly due to their scale and partly due to the peculiarity of their material, Gallium, which begins to melt at body temperatures.

In a more recent project titled Replika (2015-2017), Bauhuis takes his archaeological thought experiment a step further by going over from the unwearable Gallium rings to a new set of wearables. The latter includes visually “oversized” but eminently wearable rings, cast in bronze and fire-gilded by employing an ancient Greco-Roman technique. The result of such a technique is a dull golden sheen of the metal surface that is left unpolished in order to display the unevenness produced by this type of gold plating. Are these pieces objects in their own terms or copies of the Gallium originals? Is it possible to pirate one's own work? In connecting the Replika rings and their muted golden sheen to the earlier Gallium pieces, we find ourselves questioning our habitual ideas of authorship.

Imitating the Lacanian Other in the Me can thus engender an ontological theatre displaying a whole undergrowth of dormant and hitherto unlived possibilities and spelling out the guidelines for a practice of self-transformation. Placing one's own work within the context of an invented archaeology and creating a series of wearable copies as imitations of the same can thus amount to an exercise in breaking out of the prison-house of one's own style and rending apart the shell of technological and aesthetic preconceptions that inform one's work till such a point.


Peter Bauhuis. Rings: Replika, 2016. Bronze, fire gilding.



Why Future Classics?
What Makes a Contemporary Jewellery Piece Become a Classic? Our aim is not to define academic criteria or impose any form of conservatism, but to collect subjective perspectives that help us understand the values and expectations shaping our field, without reducing them to fixed rules or hierarchies. By sharing these voices, we invite you to think together and open a conversation about durability, relevance, and the ways particular works contain certain patterns or enigmas that make them continue to speak over time.


 

About the author

Pravu Mazumdar studied physics in New Delhi and Munich and has a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Stuttgart. He writes in German and English and has published several philosophical essays on modernity and industrialism. One of these books is his monography on jewellery, which came out in 2015 under the title: "Gold und Geist: Prolegomena zu einer Philosophie des Schmucks" (Gold and Mind: Prolegomena towards a Philosophy of Jewellery), Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Currently, he is writing a book-sized essay on Capitalism and Copy.

Contact: pravu@pravumazumdar.com