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Lutz Bacher
Lutz Bacher (U.S., 1943–2019) Baseballs II, 2011
Baseballs
What Are You Thinking, 2011
Single-channel video, (black-and-white, sound); 3 mins. Henry Art Gallery, gift of William and Ruth True, 2021.65
Lutz Bacher was an American conceptual artist whose diverse practice spanned a range of media and variety of approaches, defying easy categorization. Using a pseudonym, and withholding basic personal information, Bacher cultivated an enigmatic persona. Bacher’s work often employed everyday materials and sound, image, and text appropriated from a range of sources to create works with an enigmatic power of their own. In What Are You Thinking, Bacher clipped dialogue from the 1988 American film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which she combined with a projection that slowly fades from light to dark. First shown at the Whitney biennial in 2012, this piece is displayed in conjunction with Baseballs II, in which hundreds of used baseballs, a uniquely American artifact, are scattered across the gallery floor.
