Today is Valentine’s Day and I’ve been happy to leave the personal questions of the heart to Lutz Bacher and her book Do You Love Me?.
Published in 2012 by Primary Information, Do You Love Me? is a large glue-bound, 440-page book of text and black-and-white images. The project contains transcribed interviews conducted by Bacher addressing the question “Do you love me?”. This question has been used by Bacher for titling a few of her projects, including a video series and installation works.
Click here to visit Lutz Bacher’s website.
For her most recent artists’ book, Bacher combines photographs of herself, reproductions of her work (from the 70s to present), letters, emails, and ephemera, with her transcripts of recorded interviews with her friends and colleagues. Bacher’s interviews seem relatively unedited – the pauses, “ums”, and interruptions of speech, along with errors in transcription, are all left in. Bacher never directly asks the interviewees “Do you love me?”, but attempts to reveal answers through other questions regarding her and her work (such as “When did we first meet?”, “Am I a diva?”, “What do you think I think about?”). The conversations wind and stray. Fragmented and filled with personal antidotes and references, they make confusing reading material. The book feels personal, honest, and raw, but maintains an ambiguity and humor that is characteristic of Bacher’s work.
Although a highly personal project, the book reveals less about Bacher and more about her interviewees. Through the conversations, Bacher lets her subjects do most of the talking, prodding them and questioning them when needed. In the first transcribed interview of the book, Tamara Freedman elaborates on Bacher’s talents in human interaction. She says, “the thing that comes to mind more than anything in terms of interacting with other people is that you’re very very good at allowing other people’s ideas to become incorporated on a spontaneous level & that I like that fact in the beginning that um though you had something that was planned & structured you allowed an enormous amount of — that there was this large room for somebody else to be able to allow you to elaborate on your idea — so I don’t consider that you appropriate from people but I do think that you allow a certain level of spontaneity to occur so that a piece becomes a unique piece”.
Click here to access more information on Do You Love Me? through the library’s online catalogue.
The Artists’ Book collection here at the library also has Lutz Bacher’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, published in 2009. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is a collection of news clippings and Bacher’s quotes, ephemera, artworks, emails, and interviews. It is similar to Do You Love Me? both aesthetically and conceptually. Through both projects, Bacher attempts to understand herself, while the reader tries to follow along. She makes conclusions impossible, pointing to the difficulty of finding one’s identity within masses of fragmented information.
Click here to access more information on Smoke Gets in Your Eyes through the catalogue.
Happy V-Day! Hope you have enjoyed the Reading Break.
-Hannah Dempsey
604-844-3840
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