In 1976, when Lutz Bacher was asked to give an interview about her art, she opted to talk about Lee Harvey Oswald instead. Naturally, the interviewer asked why, asked whether assassinations fascinated the artist. Americana, after all, punctuates her work. “It’s not that at all,” she replied.
I read this interview cut up and collaged among photos of Oswald’s face in her eighteen-part work The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1976–78). That piece opens the elusive artist’s first posthumous retrospective at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. Fittingly, it hangs near the show’s only self-portrait: a film strip showing Bacher sitting, smoking, and drinking milk, printed so small you can hardly see her face.
Why Oswald, of all people, as her stand-in? Her answer is less about him, more about photography. She begins the interview with the story of seeing, in a newspaper, a man’s face captioned “escaped psychopath.” Taking a good look at the picture, she asked herself if he really looked psychopathic, then challenged herself to try and see him as a regular guy. Next, she attempted the same thing with LHO: she looked at him and tried to see if he really killed JFK. “Did he?” the interviewer, like most people, wanted to know. Her point, she replied, was, “I don’t know.” All she had was pictures and the things people said about them, hardly enough to claim understanding.
View of Lutz Bacher’s 2025 exhibition “Burning the Days,” at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo.
Photo: Christian Øens. Courtesy the Estate of Lutz Bacher, Galerie Buchholz, and Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
I take her point to be less about conspiracy theories than something much broader: how images and narratives do and don’t work together to produce meaning; how if someone tells you that a picture shows XYZ, it can be hard to unsee it, even when the picture is hardly proof; how language can preclude looking.
As proof of concept, the artist has given fans of her work little where narrative is concerned. Lutz Bacher isn’t even her real name. She took a pseudonym that made people mistake her for a German man, perhaps obliquely aligning herself with German assemblage-jokesters like Martin Kippenberger or Fischli & Weiss. In fact, she was a woman from San Francisco who lived from 1943 to 2019. Her real name was never revealed, though her husband, a Berkeley astrophysicist, was known to call her “Susan.”
Clever tensions between showing and telling structure this survey. Captioned pictures of celestial bodies, taken through telescopes and cut out from books, line the walls of one room. On the floor, a constellation of black rubber balls undercuts the cosmic sublimity. You have to be mindful not to trip while peering at these feats of both physics and photography, all the more aware of your clumsiness by comparison. And yet, awe feels out of reach, with the pictures printed so small and so poorly that they are difficult to really see.
Lutz Bacher: Jackie & Me (detail), 1989.
Courtesy the Estate of Lutz Bacher, Galerie Buchholz, and Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
Nearby, in Jackie & Me (1989), pictures and captions by a paparazzo named Ron Galella tell a story, Sophie Calle–style, of trying to photograph Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jackie runs; Galella flatters himself by thinking she’s playing along. But the joke’s on him: she’s in much better shape, and gets away easily. The pictures show only the back of a woman’s head, yet we’re asked to trust his story, which drips with male fantasy. “The most desirable woman in the world wanted to be chased by me,” he declares. As if.
These are all found photographs, and so is another standout: Men at War (1975), which Bacher made by printing a single found negative in different crops across nine sheets of paper. It shows white soldiers relaxing on the beach, perhaps before killing or being killed. One man’s chest bears a swastika-shaped scar, the pale incision glow white against his deep tan. Who are they and what does this all mean? Evading context, Bacher flips the question: what can we make of images without information?
View of Lutz Bacher’s 2025 exhibition “Burning the Days,” at the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo.
Photo: Christian Øens. Courtesy the Estate of Lutz Bacher, Galerie Buchholz, and Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo
Men at War’s uneasy mood feeds the show’s title, “Burning the Days,” taken from Bacher’s unfinished book—and from slang American soldiers used to describe time off-duty but still deployed in Vietnam. The show highlights her knack for dissolving boundaries between sculpture and picture. A life-size chessboard hosts game pieces both flat and 3D—a cardboard Elvis, a full-scale remake of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, bisected rooks and pawns that are half-flat, half-round. The board looks more pixelated than checkered. Elsewhere, a satellite image of the world is printed on plastic and inflated like a beachball. Where does the image end and the world begin?
Like most of her images and titles, all these objects are readymades. Yet each found bit in the show feels wholly hers: unprecious things attended to with exacting wit and care. It’s easy to think of her work as withholding, but look closely and you’ll find warmth and humor. The showstopper, after all, is a flat painted pony in a birthday hat, lit dramatically and spinning around on a stick.
Walking around, you’ll find a little violence here, a little humor there, a little tenderness waiting in the next room. So it is in art as in life—which is to say, sometimes it’s all three at once. Nothing is ever one-note, with tender moments coming from, of all places, a gun catalog. Fifty-eight excerpted pages, enlarged and framed, show big weapons and desirous descriptions of how to hold and care for them. She finished the work the day before she died suddenly, of a heart attack.
Does her work give us too little meaning, or too much? The final gallery ricochets around registers. It’s arranged, like all the other rooms, associatively rather than chronologically—as Bacher would do in her lifetime, always mixing up the pairings to produce new readings. The finale features 24-inch polaroids of troll dolls—one with a bizarre belly button—alongside appropriated airbrushed versions of Playboy watercolors, their original dumb captions emphasized: <small>SURE, I’M FOR THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT</small> says a ventriloquized buxom blonde. <small>IN FACT, I’M REALLY GOOD AT IT.</small>
The trolls and topless girls are joined too by work from her “Jokes” (1985–88) series, pages from some humor book that gives celebrities speech bubbles. Bacher crumpled and soiled the pages, then rephotographed them. These proto-memes, like the Playboy captions, are not especially funny: a picture of Jane Fonda just says <small>I’M REALLY WEIRD AND FUCKED UP.</small> If there’s a takeaway, it’s that to explain a joke is to kill the vibe. Bacher seems to wager that the same is true for art: better to wonder at the weirdness than to understand the information at the expense of the experience.
Her captioned images are unlike memes—and unlike plenty of conceptual art—in that you can’t just Google the meaning. Long before the information age made our intelligence so artificial, Bacher showed us how summaries are not only suspicious: they rob us of the chance to really look. She shows us now how wonderful and how weird looking can be if we’re willing to leave room for a little ambiguity.
