As curator Helena Kritis tells Elephant, Lutz Bacher’s work is rooted in an “affective” approach to images and authorship – a perspective that guides ‘Burning the Days’, the first posthumous survey of the artist’s five-decade practice. Words by Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin.
Lutz Bacher (1943–2019) was resistant to interviews but fascinated by excavations of truth; acts which attempt to get at the essence of an object, but leave us with more questions. This tension underpins the artists’ legacy and vast works, even her androgynous pseudonym. Presented at WIELS in Brussels, Belgium, ‘Burning the Days’ is the first posthumous survey exhibition of the US-born artist, offering an expansive view of her practice across five decades. This slick display lends fluid interactions with Bacher’s rich, multi-media art. The exhibition avoides a strict chronological approach, allowing the work itself to shape the curation. Emphasising the thematic links between artworks, “Burning the Days” seamlessly reflects Bacher’s own thinking around her practise, her methods of interrogating historical narratives; her probing into the distinction between fact, feeling, and imagination.
After her peripatetic upbringing, the artist moved to the West Coast in the mid-1970s, together with her husband who was a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. She became an influential member of the Bay Area art community as it was exploring conceptual approaches to art through video and performance. During this period, she became an important figure in the tradition of the readymade. This came as a result of a shift in her approach: at the beginning of the 70s, the artist made work using photography. She then (temporarily) abandoned her camera, focusing instead on found objects. As a result, she started to explore radical approaches to images and image-making: inverting, splicing, and reframing photographs in unexpected ways to identify, complicate and play with their meaning, or true nature. While invested in the possibilities of the readymade, Bacher’s early perspectives feels distinct from her forebears (such as Marcel Duchamp): her work is “affective” – Helena Kritis, Chief Curator at Wiels, tells Elephant – she plays with “the notion of authorship” while retaining their “emotional charge”.
This approach is perhaps most evident in three of her works. The earliest is “Men at War” (1975), which comprises cropped photographs of young, sunbathing American soldiers. On first glance, the scene appears to exude pleasure and relief – handsome men soaked in gentle sunlight, squinting – but closer inspection reveals a swastika tattoo on their chests. An almost impossible image to make sense of, the work reflects Bacher’s artistic and discursive roots, her curiosity with gender, nationhood, and American mythology – how these unwieldy subjects are shaped by fraught iconography. Such themes are also visible in “The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview” (1976-78) and a later work entitled “Jackie & Me” (1989). In 1976, Bacher was approached to be interviewed for a volume of artist interviews. Instead, she interviewed herself about Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of US President John F. Kennedy. The result is an 18-page photocollage consisting of fragmented questions and answers taken from the ‘interview’, layered around portraits of Oswald. In “Jackie & Me”, Bacher drew on another famous American figure – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the widow of US President John F. Kennedy – to explore the ambivalence of national identity and storymaking. The series consists of photographs and captions taken from a book published by Ron Galella, known as a pioneer paparazzo, which claims to show the figure fleeing from his snooping lens.
With the presentation of “Jackie & Me” at the end of the 1980s, Bacher also hinted at the provocative work she was about to produce during the 1990s. During those years, she began teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA). She also deepened her ties with New York, where she showed with the influential Pat Hearn Gallery from 1993. It was at this time that the artist produced one of her most contentious, but also alluring, artworks: Playboys (1991-93). The paintings comprise of airbruished portraits replicating the pin-up girl illustrations of Peruvian-American artist Alberto Vargas. Bacher attempted to represent femininity – in particular, American femininity – as a form of political iconography and commercial object, eschewing stark moral clarity and consistency. What happens to sexist imagery when its ownership is transferred to a female artist? Daring to ask made for a controversial show. Many viewers felt it contradicted their feminist sensibilities. In an article published by New York Times, for instance, one critic remarked: ‘It is notable only for the intellectual hoops through which Lutz Bacher’s promoters leap to justify these silly pictures and their sexist captions.’
Since the 2000s, Bacher started to gain mainstream success, developing a legendary cult status. Her work remained eclectic in its use of materials, forms and ideas, however new motifs also emerged, and became consistent throughout her later career. Inspired by her late husband’s research into astrophysicism, the artist drew on planetary forms – spherical, globular shapes. In 2011, she produced “The Celestial Handbook”, containing pages she collected from an amateur’s compendium in the 1960s. Like her previous work, the handbook examines conflicts in perception, our human urge to explain that which is too complex to explain, such as the universe, or death. Three years after the passing of her husband in 2010, Bacher moved to New York. Until her own death in 2019, she continued to create melancholic installations, including Black Beauty (2012) – mysterious, grainy videos of the moon shot by the artist through her window.
There is a “deep sense of mourning” in her later works, Kritis explains. Perhaps it is inevitable for the incomprehensibility of death to become a key theme in an artist’s later life. Still, what Bacher leaves us contemplating is the possibility that being alive is just as strange and unknowable as whatever comes after.
