Being There – I Like to Watch TV – an ongoing project by Lutz Bacher

Taxter & Spengemann, Participant Inc and White Columns are pleased to present Being There – I Like to Watch TV, a multi-art, multi-venue, video exhibition by Lutz Bacher. For every month of the 2005 – 2006 gallery season, each venue will simultaneously present a new installment of Being There, as a continuous single channel video on a monitor.

The videos have been selected by the artist specifically and thematically according to the venues, and include pieces dating from 1996 to the present. White Columns’ program will focus on Bacher’s video “album” works from the Lost in America series which spring from the various road trips of Bacher’s peripatetic existence, particularly those pieces that relate directly to the musical and audio traditions of road movies and memories of family car trips. Taxter & Spengemann will present a series of brief, fragmentary, pieces on a monitor in the gallery’s office. Bartender and The O.C. (both 2005), for example, are deceptively simple but nonetheless reveal the artist’s ongoing interest in distorting notions of authorship. Many layers of appropriated imagery, sound, and performance reside in these short studies. Participant, Inc. will host some early and ambient pieces such as Blue Moon, Olympiad and Closed Circuit. All of these are ambitious in scope and in contrast to the episodic works at Taxter & Spengemann, arose out of long and intimate hours spent with her subjects.

Being There will culminate in 2006 in a one day presentation of all of the videos in select private residencies throughout Manhattan. The Apartment Tour brings the TV back into the home and out of the public realm of the galleries. With this manifestation of the project Bacher creates a collaborative environment with minimal intervention and provides a particular and transformative context for the work.

Lutz Bacher lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Solo exhibitions include: American Fine Arts, New York (2004, 2003); Participant Inc., New York (2003); Pat Hearn Gallery, New York (2000, 1997, 1996); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (1993); and in 1991 a ‘White Room’ project at White Columns. Groups show include: ‘Makers’, Taxter & Spengemann, New York (2005); ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’, Roth Horowitz, New York (2004); ‘BitStreams: art in the digital age’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2001); ‘Whitney Biennial’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); and ‘In a Different Light’, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (1995).