Being There – I Like to Watch TV is a multi-part, multi-venue, video exhibition. During each month of the coming 2005-06 gallery season, three venues will present a new installment of Being There as a single-channel video displayed on a monitor.

The videos have been selected by Lutz Bacher according to the venues and include pieces dating from 1996 to the present. White Columns’ program will focus on Bacher’s video “album” works from the Lost in America series, which sprang from the road trips of Bacher’s peripatetic existence.

Taxter & Spengemann will present a series of brief pieces on a monitor in the gallery’s office. Bartender and The O.C. (both 2005), for example, are deceptively simple but nonetheless reveal Bacher’s ongoing interest in distorting notions of authorship. Many layers of appropriated imagery, sound, and performance reside in these short studies. Participant, Inc. will host some early and ambient pieces such as Blue Moon, Olympiad and Closed Circuit. All of these are ambitious in scope and in contrast to the episodic works at Taxter & Spengemann, arose out of long and intimate hours spent with her subjects.

Being There will culminate in 2006 in a one-day presentation of all of the videos in select residences throughout Manhattan. The Apartment Tour brings the TV back into the home and out of the public realm of the galleries. With this manifestation of the project Bacher creates a collaborative environment with minimal intervention and provides a particular and transformative context for the work.

Lutz Bacher lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Solo exhibitions include: American Fine Arts, New York (2004, 2003); Participant Inc., New York (2003); Pat Hearn Gallery, New York (2000, 1997, 1996); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (1993); and in 1991 a ‘White Room’ project at White Columns. Groups show include: Makers, Taxter & Spengemann, New York (2005); Power, Corruption and Lies, Roth Horowitz, New York (2004); BitStreams: art in the digital age, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2001); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); and In a Different Light, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (1995).