I’m walking on sand. Sand? It seems to be sand… the sensation is the familiar one of gently sinking. It reminds me of when I was a kid back home and I used to play near the sea. I wonder if sand brings similar memories in Lutz Bacher’s mind, but on a second thought it might be the case that for Lutz sand has a different meaning. Californian beaches: Paradise and Hell at the same time. A beautiful land that every year it is witness of earthquakes and other natural disasters. The more I think about it the more I believe that the sand is a friend as well as an enemy…the sand that dances with the hurricanes or that as a liar covers the remains after a flood or an earthquake, pretending that nothing is happening like a government of promises that carries on ignoring all the millions of homeless people still leaving upon their own remains. And it is of remains that Lutz Bacher’s art nourishes itself; Andrew Berardini defines her installations a “composed of cultural and personal detritus” where “desire and entropy happily shape her work”.(1)
My gently sinking in Lutz Bacher’s black sand it is disturbed by the sound of it, which is not familiar or pleasant at all, it is screaking strident and harsh. I touch it and I discover that the illusion of the “alien black sand” it is made of coal slag, a raw glassy sort of alumina-silicate that it is also used by the United States Navy for blasting at nation’s major warship and submarine bases.
So I wonder if the moonlike fictional landscape created by Lutz is not supposed to symbolize a post-apocalyptic world surviving after a massive conflagration…leaving on the surface only remains… but what remains? A large broken mirror resting horizontally on a wall and a robotic shaped assemblage of recycled piece of metal. What do they represent? Is the “little robot” a self-portrait? I can see some initials (of a name?) bended on its side. Is the broken mirror a broken identity, multifaceted like the one of the artist, but at the same time mirroring the viewer as confused puzzle to be put back together? Is the sound installation of the epilogue by the Shakespearean Puck repeated mechanically over and over again an apology to human race of the future (or what it remains of it) for anything wrong that we might have done today? I do not know.
There are really few if not none clues for me to grasp the meaning of the installation and I find myself wondering about the same question Andrew Bernardini asked in his article: “How are we supposed to look to the work of Lutz Bacher?”1 I remember how her friend and curator Lia Gangitano hironically defined Lutz as artist: a “mysterious Californian conceptualist”(2) or what Sam Thorne said about her “resisting of an idea of totalizing vision” of her work.(3)
According to Martha Schwendener , Lutz Bacher, “using punk/Dada/anti-art techniques, she parses perception, showing how, in an image-saturated culture, it's easier to be told how to see (and, hence, think) by professional image-makers rather than working it out for yourself” 4.
Working it out for myself… So maybe that is how the artist wants me to look at her work. As if I am in front of a rebus to solve, she is making me stop, slowing down and think, grasping what is visual about her personal experience and making it mine, conceptualizing what I know (or don’t know) of the world through her symbols. My understanding is that there is no understanding, it is a cosmic feeling of our limitations towards the unknown of the universe, therefore not everything in Nature is understandable…
By Nadia Perrotta
Bibliography
- BERNARDINI, A. (2012) Lutz Bacher. Art in America.[Online] March 01 2012. Available from: artinamericamagazine.comhttp://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/lutz-bacher/. [Accessed: 14th November 2013]
- GANGITANO, L. (2008) My Secret Life: Lutz Bacher. Afterall.[Online] 17 (Spring) . Available from: afterall.comhttp://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.17/my.secret.life.lutz.bacher/.[Accessed: 14th November 2013]
- THORNE. S, Institue of Contemporary Art London, (2013) Online Talk: Lutz Bacher. [Online Video]. November 7th. Available from:http://www.ica.org.uk/39697/Talks/Online-Talk-Lutz-Bacher.html.[Accessed: 14th November 2013]
- SCHWENDENER, M. (2008) Lutz Bacher Gets Damaged A veteran provocateur brings a punk aesthetic to her survey exhibition at P.S.1. Village Voice.[Online] March 4th 2009. Available from: villagevoice.com,http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-03-04/art/lutz-bacher-gets-damaged/2/. [Accessed: 14th November 2013]