By Lia Gangitano
This article refers to the P.S.1 exhibition Lutz Bacher MY SECRET LIFE
Lutz Bacher
Jokes (Bella Abzug)
1998
Distressed black and white photograph on aluminum, 30 ¼ in. x 37 ¼ in.
Courtesy the artist and Taxter & Spengemann, New York
Although Lutz Bacher has engaged in practices
that resist stylistic categorization, imply assumed
identities, and reject the necessity of epic art
statements, her work is both monumental and
highly personal in its intensity. Reviewing Bacher’s
projects sequentially—still to moving, spatial to flat,
silent to loud—indicates that the image, although
persistent in its mirroring and shaping of experience,
is also consistently engaged in a process of
imminent breakdown. A deliberate subversion of
apparent signature style is perhaps related to the
unstable status of the image that Bacher insinuates
throughout her practice.
While her early works in still photography
and its various reproduction methods, such as
The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1976), delineated
a constellation of concerns involving gender,
sexuality, violence, and power, they also served to
confound easy allocations of labels—feminist, for
example—due to their cool aggression and vague
authority. Hiring others to execute her paintings
and drawings for Playboys (1991–94), or appropriating
mass-produced imagery and text for works
such as Jokes (1987–88) drew a certain general
branding of Bacher as an enigmatic California
conceptualist, but this postmodern label was also
resisted by a deliberate migration from strict methodologies
(of appropriation, for example) to other
ways of working.
Bacher’s alignment with the presumed depthlessness
of the appropriated image (as infinite
copy) is thrown into further question when her
body of work is considered to succumb to the corrupting
effects of real time. It seems that Bacher
considered this question all along. Beginning with
her subtle mediation of images and texts taken
from such popular sources as pulp fiction, self-help
manuals, pornographic magazines, celebrity interviews
and gossip columns—each has been put
through some form of physical or psychic damage.
The intersection of these bodies of flat work, such
as Jackie and Me (1989), Playboys, and Jokes,
with Bacher’s time-based Olympiad (1997), Closed
Circuit (1997–2000) and Crimson & Clover (Over &
Over) (2003) is, of course, a chronological fact. But
it is also revealing to note that in Bacher’s work,
the processes of illumination and obliteration (of
image, of subject, of author) are consistent, perhaps
cumulative across mediums and time frames.
Olympiad is a video record of a walk through
the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Germany. Her particular
approach to a stadium like the one depicted
is perhaps shaped by personal history (her dad
worked in baseball, suggesting she spent time in
sports arenas growing up). The work’s unassuming
dimension, combined with relatively hidden biographical
details, does not detract from Olympiad’s
menacing presence. Bacher noted, “In the late
1990s I made a number of pieces that focus on
urban space and monumental architecture with
echoes of events cultural and political and phenomena
both technical and natural. Olympiad […]
displays the sporadic signal glitches, stoppages,
tracking problems, burnouts and other artifacts of
a corrupted or damaged videotape. Paradoxically, this graphic degradation intensifies at the same
time as it disturbs the classical aspirations of this
haunted site.” It was perhaps this accidental,
found damage that led Bacher to consciously seek
out similar effects in video post-production.
Bacher’s long-term affiliation with Pat Hearn
Gallery comprised the vast content of Closed
Circuit. A static video camera was positioned over
the desk in Hearn’s private office, feeding real-time
surveillance video to a monitor in the passageway
of the public exhibition space from October 1997
through July 1998. This project unfolded in its
afterlife into a demonstration of the intimate differentiation
between making work with, or with the
permission of, someone else—and making work
that could only be made for that person, in this
case, Pat Hearn. In Bacher’s words, “In the autumn
of the year the animation unfolds in narrative—like
sequences around the working interactions of the
woman at the center of the universe of her small
office. Into the winter and spring this orderly and
legible context is transformed by a changeable
light source and disrupted by the rapidly accelerating
montage. Finally, in the heat of the summer
our main protagonist and the space in which she
now fleetingly appears have transmuted to a suspension
of glowing translucent images which are
no longer animated by nor anchored to the former
reality—where we began—forty minutes ago—a
year ago.” As this moment unfolds, the sense that
someone is leaving the room becomes palpable.
Bacher’s association with Pat Hearn and Colin
de Land—she exhibited at de Land’s American
Fine Arts in 2003 and 2004—also provides the
elegiac context for the single-channel video installation
Crimson & Clover (Over & Over) (2003), as
well as her relationship with the progeny of these
particularly visionary dealers. The video recreates
one of the performances in a memorial concert for
de Land by the band ANGELBLOOD. An epic rendition
of the classic rock song, Bacher’s video begins
amidst the chaos of a sound check on the stage of
CBGB. Over the course of thirty unedited minutes,
this gritty tangle of performers, equipment, and
screaming feedback mutates into an ecstatically
focused collaboration for searching camera, piercing
guitars, whispering vocalists and shimmering
stage lights. Video and soundtrack are deployed as
an accumulation of fleeting moments in an unending
process, whereby increasing abstraction, not
unlike the transparency that haunts Closed Circuit,
comes to signify an un-representable immanence.
Excerpted from “My Secret Life: Lutz Bacher,” Afterall, issue 17, 2008.