Lutz Bacher’s Secret Life

The display of the art pieces in “My Secret Life” -the personal exhibition of the artist Lutz Bacher, which is currently at PS1, the New York dependency of the MoMA- offers the impression of a group of isolated shows, rather than a retrospective of a single artist. There is a sense of fragmentation which is stressed by the compartments of the second floor of the building. Each hall is devoted to a single series of works. Bacher plays with the idea of the disintegration of authorship through artistic appropriation, which paradoxically is how she emerges as an author.

However, this fragmentation and this disintegration of authorship is rather a simulacra. In fact, the artworks are somehow connected in a dialogical way. Polyphony is perhaps a word that could help to define the installations. Bacher works in appropriations from several sources in order to produce a body of work in which the “stylistic” unity is one of a dialogue among different styles and media (from drawing, to photography, to video). In a playful and politically meaningful way, Bacher seems to hide herself in this plurality. “My Secret Life,” therefore invites the spectator to find the hidden meanings in the artistic display.

I would like to mention few examples of hidden meanings in Bacher’s work. In My Secret Life -the installation located in one of the halls in which the show is segmented- Bacher presents pieces from different moments in her career. There are four leitmotifs, alternating with each other. First, in the drawings and paintings of Playboy girls (Bacher hired some professionals to make the copies), the artist added some sexual and political jokes alluding to female desire, and therefore subverting the Playboy girls drawings which tend to portray females as sex objects. There are also pictures of politicians referring to power with nasty language, which is probably occult behind the politeness of their public image. The written joke exposes the visual as appearance, ideological montage and mass-media spectacle. There are photos of actors, and finally, color pictures of the popular, sexually ambivalent Troll puppets. The spectator might feel this is political art, but nothing is taken for granted, since he must construct his own meaning. Is the artist suggesting that well-known politicians -the Kennedys, Carter, Lyndon Johnson- share something in common with puppets or Playboy girls? Are they like movie stars? In what sense could sexual jokes be articulated into political partisanship? The four thematic motifs, by dialoguing with each other, by influencing one another, evoke an undefined chain of associations.

 It is worth stressing the analogy between the artist’s “secret life,” disguised in several identities, and that hidden in the appropriation of mass-media images (from Hollywood celebrities, to Playboy’s Vargas Girls), politicians, Playboy girls, and actors disguised with spectacles. This analogy could be read as a critique of critical art. With a subtle irony, Bacher’s “My Secret Life” suggests that critical art is another mass-media construction. The critique of the status quo is unmasked as spectacle. In Bacher’s “My Secret Life,” critical art contains its own negation. Appropriation of mass-media images, political jokes and simulated disintegration of authorship support a critique against critical art, which, as the French thinker, Jacques Rancière has observed:

“Critical art that invites you to see the signs of capital behind everyday objects and behaviors risks inscribing itself into the perpetuation of a world where the transformation of things into signs redoubles the very excess of interpretative signs that makes resistance disappear” (1) 

The idea of an identity which is impossible to grasp seems to be one of the topics in two other installations. In Lee Harvey Oswald Interview, Bacher’s appropriation of documents -which she merely photocopied- renders a blurred portrait of the character she apparently attempts to define. The notion of the secret is also present. The documents are turned into the fragmentary layers of a puzzle which remains unfinished or incomplete, as if some pieces were missing. The spectator ends up not knowing whether Lee Harvey Oswald was working for the Soviet Union, the CIA or if he embodied the masculinity of a macho society. The psychological portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald is also unclear, oscillating between ingenious answers, and the psychotic. His face is reproduced to the point that Lee Harvey Oswald becomes an empty image. Some sentences of the interview are overlapped, thus making it difficult to even read the written words.

In Jackie and Me (1989) there is also an identity that cannot be exposed. The woman hides her face from the photographer, as if she were trying to keep it a secret. The story, which is told through both written testimony and pictures taken by the paparazzo, depicts Jackie Kennedy avoiding mass-media representations that have defined her identity from a masculine perspective. Jackie and Me could be read in at least two directions: Jackie and the paparazzo (who tells the story in the first person), and the identification between Jackie who, while running away shows that she wants to hide something and the female artist, who seems to expose an unnamed  secret through artistic appropriation.

Jackie and Me is also a story of surveillance, since the paparazzo claims he is being watched by a bodyguard, at the same time that he is watching Jackie Kennedy. In the same room, surveillance is once again present in the video installation Closed Circuit which is a view -compressed in 40 minutes- from a camera located at the desk of the Pat Hearn Gallery, shot during nine months from October 1997 until July 1998. As in Jackie and Me, the public is interfering in the realm of the private.

Video installations are a supplementary part of the show, which goes, as Lia Gangitano  stated, “from still to moving, spatial to flat, silent to loud”(2). I would like to mention a last example of how Bacher produces suggestive meanings through the dialogue between texts and images, and the display of the artworks in the show. In a video installation called Blue Angels, there are two screens placed in a corner of the room. Here the title is a kind of humorous pun alluding to the pure visuality of the installation since the two videos of the blue sky are at a 90-degree angle. The name Blue Angels could therefore refer to the visual “blue angle” created by the screens. The videos are shots of planes participating in a military maneuver. The noise of the engines turns the view of the sky into a hell. Noise is ironically subverting the text. In a contiguous room there is another video installation called Crimson & Clover (2003). In this case the artist filmed the performance of the band Angel Blood during a well-known concert for the land. The titles of the installation and the rock band (Blue Angels and Angel Blood) are related and perhaps opposed to each other. Also the noise of the engines is associated with the sound of electric instruments in contemporary music.

In “My Secret Life,” artistic appropriation is a way in which Bacher emerges as a very personal and imaginative artist. It is a show in which there is an entanglement between the private and the public, Eros and the political, feminism and mass-media representations, political power and sexuality, the visual and the text.

Notes.

1)    Rancière, Jacques. “Problems on Critical Art,” in Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2006, p.43.

2)    Gangitano, Lia. “Lutz Bacher. My Secret Life” in PS1 MoMA Spring 2009 Newspaper, New York, 2009, w/p.

Ernesto Menéndez-Conde is finishing a PhD in Romance Languages at Duke University. He has published in magazines in Havana, Spain and New York. He has also collaborated with Marlborough Gallery and Sotheby’s in New York.