Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz



All the “information” in this show, the symbols etc whatever, already contain within them their loss. The WTC in snow, the Buffalo, the men as soldiers, the words scrawled, the random plunking of keys. The pathos of much of Bacher’s work is heavy here in its nihilism. The bareness of the rooms offset by a horrible subconscious construction, a non-sculpture of jagged metal reminiscent of the things you cough up at night, a cubist torture device. It offsets the clean minimalism of the photographs. An empty surrealist sculpture of half formed buffalo, over-slaughtered symbol of the American west, here vessels or volumes, who, in their skeletal incompleteness, let their empty contents vaporate, disperse vaporously through the sieve of chicken wire like loosely intertwined fingers. Their “Paleolithic cave painting” look an omen of the future crumbling.
The word desolate strikes you again and again and again.
The oft-premise of Bacher work is loss, the loss of humanity, of information, of containable knowledge, a hands-in-air gesture of trying to contain, label, some part of humanity as it makes it way towards expected apocalypse, the cusp of obliteration. The buffalo sculptures deploy their feel of a culture half there half on their way out. The scrawled text’s intermediary feel pre-premise their future obsolescence, “the title of this book, the theory of everything” hypothesizes then an endpoint for the work beyond one of human time, in the far reaches of nothingness with mock laughter at the soldiers and men who once occupied it, smiling and stern, goodbye.
The work continuously occupies the place similar to nostalgic photographs, creating the empathy for the present as if its already the past.