Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Lutz Bacher
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Brussels, Belgium: WIELS (Exhibition: Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days)
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Chess. 2012. Fiberglass, wood, rubber, metal, plastic, paint, canvas, linoleum color offset print on cardboard, and audio loop
... (TFS, 2026)
Brussels, Belgium: WIELS (Exhibition: Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days)
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Whiteboard. 2018. Dry erase board, marker, and Plexiglas
As a standalone this piece doesn't accomplish much, but as a component of the WIELS exhibition where I saw it, it operated as something like a skeleton key to the show, if not to Bacher's whole hermetic practice. The work is a readymade* classroom whiteboard containing four columns of scattered phrases from American history. (Bacher's put a Plexi sheet over the board's surface, presumably to protect the text from damage but also to shoehorn in a little bit of coy pictoriality, as well as art historical allusion [Twombly].) There's no real context for any of these phrases apart from their shared placement on this whiteboard, plus the obvious fact that it's all broadly mid-century American stuff ("HUAC," "Rock+Roll," "The Draft"). The implication — which would be tedious if it were being made by a less beguiling artist than Bacher — is that history reduced to ranged-out facts is akin to abstraction, bearing little relation to the flux of real time and the animating decisions, small and big, which people make within it. What turns this observation into more than a platitude is its relationship to Bacher's disparate practice, and to the way its parts fit together as an aesthetic whole: her art engaged in scattershot, utterly disconnected appropriations and semantic abstractions; hyperlegible pop picture-making; cloying agitprop gestures; conspiratorial surrealism — and all this and more with an almost palpable, but ultimately tragically homeless, political content that vanishes as soon as you ever try to access or articulate it, but that also binds Bacher's many incommensurable "moves" into an unstable totality. Whiteboard both is and isn't a too-canny metaphor for what it is that Bacher did as an artist. Her brilliance, here and elsewhere, is in this disregard of hers for canniness, which becomes uncanny.
*I think it's a readymade and I found some writing about it to that effect, but I couldn't find bulletproof confirmation. (TFS, 2026)
Brussels, Belgium: WIELS (Exhibition: Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days)
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Jackie & Me. 1989. 7 xerox prints on paper
... (TFS, 2026)