Lutz Bacher: Being There I Like To Watch TV

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. Taxter & Spengemann will present a recent series of brief, fragmentary piece on a monitor in the gallery 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 early ambient pieces as Blue Moon, Olympiad and Closed Circuit. In contrast to the episodic works at Taxter & Spengemann, this selection is characterized by the artist’s sustained attention to her subjects, often over long periods of time.

The White Columns program will focus on the video “album” works from the Lost in America series, which sprang 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.

Being There culminated last month in a series of one-day video presentations in select private residences throughout Manhattan. Visitors were given a guide that stated which video was being shown where, and could then travel to that location to watch the host’s TV. The Apartment Tour brought the TV back into the home and presented a unique scenario for each apartment, reflecting a level of collaboration with its inhabitants. With this manifestation of the project, Bacher provided a particular and transformative context for her work that insinuated the return of video to the domestic environment.

This will be White Columns’ final installment of Being There – I Like To Watch TV.

Lutz Bacher lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Solo exhibitions include: Taxter & Spengemann (2006): 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).