Lutz Bacher: AYE!

Unlike a leopard, Lutz Bacher (1943-2019) made changing spots her habit. Throughout her public life and career, the California native remained intentionally elusive: she worked under a male-sounding pseudonym—potentially composed of her maiden name (“Lutz”¹) and a Germanized homonym of her husband Donald C. Backer’s surname—and refused any sense of belonging or authorship. For example, in the obituary published by Frieze, poet Kevin Killian remembered that Backer called Bacher “Susan,”² noting that she “had a southern life as well as an Alpine one,” and once showed up “classy [to one of his and Raymond Pettibon’s performances] with designer flare like Candice Bergen in Rich and Famous (1981), with big Joan Didion shades on, as though disguised as a Hollywood wife.” Meanwhile, one of the final official artist portraits released by Greene Naftali and Galerie Buchholz showed a cozy, carefree, and casually-clothed Bacher sunbathing on the beach, with an obscured face.³ No Didion shades this time!

Now, some four years after her passing in May 2019, a new exhibition risks undoing this carefully crafted public image. Raven Row—an East London not-for-profit exhibition venue that claims an almost cult-like following—has resurrected the artist and unleashed her ghost across the three levels of the domestic-eighteenth-century townhouse-turned-exhibition-venue on Artillery Lane, just off the bustling Spitalfields Market. AYE! (short for “Are You Experienced” and titled after the 1992 video with the same name) seems almost like a game of truth or dare. Bacher’s engagement with sound is on full display: the exhibition consists of one photograph, two moving images, and a three times three selection of audio pieces, sculptures, and sound installations from the artist’s chameleon-like œuvre. Yet what sounds like a dissonant cacophony at first listen is actually a rather oddly harmonious configuration—for the enigmatic Bacher anyway.

For AYE! is an exercise in listening in: How many works in the show are mute? (Four.) How many works have a sound? (Seven.) Similarly, the show also creates an awareness of the main differences between visual and sonic arts. While we can choose to close our eyes and not see (rather than unsee) the art in front of our eyes, we do not possess the ability to unhear the sound in the show, as we simply can’t close our ears unless we wear ear plugs. And even then, our body still absorbs sound, as research of artists with hearing disabilities has demonstrated. It’s one of these shows where we simply can’t just turn up, tune in, and drop out again. Rather we fall under Bacher’s siren-like spell—perhaps the quality her dealer Colin de Land meant when he referred to her art as “cornceptual.”⁴ As the corniest thing about Bacher is perhaps that we’ll always remember how we felt, and not necessarily what exactly we saw or heard.

As such, AYE! depends on intelligent pairings that break up the meandering streams of sounds with mute works like oases of calm and reflection in the eye of the sound storm. Each level in AYE! has at least one mute element or work as part of their arrangement. For example, upon entry, we stumble right onto the pleasant pairing of The Book of Sand (2011–12) with What Are You Thinking (2011). The pair could symbolize a glistening shoreline that borders a beach, but instead of breaking waves, we hear a placid musical score and the underlying whisper of an audio excerpt from the 1988 film adaptation of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. In the recording, Tereza (Juliette Binoche) quizzes Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) about his happiness right before both die in a car crash: “Tomas, what are you thinking?” “I am thinking how happy I am.” Yet to appreciate the music produced in touching the tons of sand that have been brought into the gallery for The Book of Sand, we need to heed the silences between the piano notes of What Are You Thinking?, as well as the notes themselves.

Not all levels of muteness are equal in the exhibition. Take, for example, the printed photograph of a typical yellow school bus (The Bus, 2011) on the third floor. While the bus model has its own distinct sound in real life, its printed photograph remains, of course, soundless. Sandwiched between James Earl Jones’s sonorous voice in Sweet Jesus (2016)—he recites the Gospel of Matthew, a legacy of fathers and sons becoming flesh and begetting the Messiah—and the competing pre-verbal utterances (ooooooooohs) of Roberta Flack in the chorus of “Killing Me Softly” (KMS, 2016)—a song about unrequited love likewise becoming flesh—the school bus could symbolize a growing up of sorts. Yet, its sonic transience remains unclear. Meanwhile on the first floor we encounter two sculptures, Magic Mountain (2015), made from foam modules, and the six horse heads Horses (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9) (2008), made with plaster, strings, tape, and dirt, that act like a stopgap or sound barrier between the levels limiting the dissonant cacophony. Meanwhile, our feet walking over and touching the infinitesimal grains of sand of The Book of Sand generate a distinct grainy snarl that follows us throughout the show with each step. With no pre-scripted route at hand, the echoes, loops, and repetitions of sound and image sequences create a sense of disorientation. They influence the amount of attention we give in response to each work and area.

We might think of the Raven Row building as a cranium—where, as Emily Thompson explained to Damon Krukowski in his 2019 podcast-turned-book Ways of Hearing, our brain processes sound while wearing headphones. Thinking this way allows Bacher’s sonic world to breathe and bounce ideas off one another like an echo chamber. For in a head full of dissonant Bachers, as we now know, her sonic arrangement doesn’t scream “me, me, me!” Rather, the sonic properties are both intoxicatingly dreamy and slightly out of focus, helping us to confront our own humanity and fragility. Despite its ostensible loudness and pleasurable disorientation, the show remains a beacon of light, radiating a calmness and serenity unseen before in Bacher’s work.

1. The New York Times’s obituary credits the name of her brother as Patrick B. Lutz. See: Holland Cotter: “Lutz Bacher, Conceptual Artist Who Hid Much About Herself, Dies at 75,” The New York Times (May 26, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/obituaries/lutz-bacher-dies-at-75.html
2. Kevin Killian, “Working Towards a World: Lutz Bacher (1943-2019)”, Frieze (May 17, 2019), https://www.frieze.com/article/working-towards-world-lutz-bacher-1943-2019
3. Sarah Cascone, “Lutz Bacher, the Elusive Conceptual Artist Who Never Revealed Her Real Name or Age, Has Died”, Artnet (May 16, 2019), https://news.artnet.com/art-world/lutz-bacher-obituary-1548001
4. Lutz Bacher and Daniel McDonald in Do You Love Me?, (New York: Primary Information, 2012), unpaginated