Lutz Bacher at Pat Hearn - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

A small in number years ago Lutz Bacher ground a three-ring binder of "Vargas girls" torn from Playboy magazine. She commissioned a commercial artist to transcript in acrylic the Alberto Vargas "originals" upon 44-by-43- or 36-by-44-inch canvases against white backgrounds, without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw with terse Vargas legends rife with sexual innuendo. Bacher lately exhibited nine of these, collectively titled "Playboys." Engaged for sum of two units decades in a materially varied critique of sexual politics, art- and medical-world hubris, sex representation, etc., Bacher has been something of a casualty of novel York logocentrism, as she gained stature in the Bay Area while being pass overed by the East Coast critical/gallery apparatus. in the '80 Bacher might have stood a head above a number of artists achieving greater recognition for similar endeavors. I amazement however, if her "Playboys" are not now something of an anachronism.

The "Playboys" hang bright and shiny upon the walls, their white turfs a hygienic foil. The familiar images awaken a creepy nostalgia as they beseech the often furtive contexts in which they might originally have been viewed. Bacher's paintings are too big and too not absent to tuck away, with their polished execution sleazily fetishizing the girls in satin unmodulated colors. Huge breasts become as aggressive and metallic as tanks. Pithy fictitious storys and representations sexualize allusions to contemporaneous public circumstances class tensions or simply seasonal occurrences In Peace, for instance, a tanned girl makes a V of her drawn out legs, as the legend reads, "You make your peace sign, I'll make mine" - an ambiguous respect to the early '70s peace move Further diffusing the message, a boating hat cast not upon carelessly to the side invokes a world of jetset privilege that was an important curved catch in Playboy ideology.

Certainly, as paintings the Vargas girls foreground the allusive force of such details. But is that enough to make these works abundant more than handy visuals? Does their status as contemplative particulars in the white cube make them any more dislocating than the originals, viewed either through the presumptive allies or the elusive adversary in Bacher's artistic polemics? When I was a sneaky kid hunting for the Playboy stash I remember finding either Sheikdom ("So that's what you meant when you said you had your have a title to little sheikdom") or an illustration actual much like it, and feeling baffled by means of the joke: I was simply extraneous to Playboys marketing department. Now I realize I've also become extraneous to exhibitions in which a stale game with an overdetermined objective is played by the agency of art-world culture warriors. This may not be for a like reason unpleasant a realization.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group