Increasingly, the artist’s notebook is exhibited as an artwork in its own right. From Frances Stark’s annotated book paintings to the exhibition and republication of Lee Lozano’s spiral bound pads, the notebook has well and truly entered the system of contemporary art. These works bring with them a series of historical assumptions about the role and status of the notebook as a site of interiority and as a precursor to a more fully realised artwork. The late American artist Lutz Bacher (1943-2019) playfully challenged these assumptions, proposing instead the notebook as a form of artistic masquerade.
In the beginning was a notebook
The artist’s notebook is a place for jotting, scribbling, and experimenting with ideas. For this reason, it is imagined as providing an insight into the mind of the artist. By leafing through Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus (1478–1519), we may learn a little more, not only of the artist’s process but of the artist’s deepest thoughts and desires. If the artwork is mute, the notebook holds out the promise of a kind of speech, which will reveal an artist’s impulses and inspiration. Like the letter or the diary, the notebook is imagined as a place of intimacy, privacy and interiority.
Artists’ notebooks frequently feature in art-historical retrospectives in this guise. Protected from the fingers of the public by the glass of a carefully lit vitrine, they lie open on a judiciously selected page, inviting us to imagine the artist’s own hand at work. In a gesture of quasi-religious solemnity, these artefacts are examined with care by the gloved hands of art historians in museum archives. These gloves preserve not only the fragile document but also the notebook’s aura of authenticity and presence. The notebook as artiefact is understood as a precursor to a finished work, a blueprint of a work to come, or a set of sketches out of which a work will one day emerge. The notebook is understood to occupy the place of origin, prior to the work’s realisation as an object. An artwork begins, according to this model, in the mind of the artist and is then transferred to the notebook where it gestates and then finally is born into the world as object.
Intimacy and impersonality
Lutz Bacher was an artist whose work frequently returned to the relationship between technology, intimacy and identity. Bacher was a contemporary of the Pictures Generation of the 1970s, who, like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, adopted strategies of appropriation or what art historian Douglas Crimp described as ‘processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging’.[1] Emblematic of this is her early work The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (1967-78), a photographic collage of xeroxed images of Kennedy’s assassin which adopts the aesthetic of a punk fanzine.[2] Unlike the pristine coldness of Prince and Levine’s use of found photography, Bacher’s black and white photocopies have been decayed by the process of reproduction. In the language of systems theory, the noise of transmission is of as much interest to Bacher as the signal being duplicated.
Bacher further complicates this transmission by juxtaposing the images of Oswald with text from an interview she conducted with herself about the process of artmaking. This is hardly a tell-all exclusive. In the interview Bacher as interviewee is elusive with herself as interviewer. Like Lou Reed facing hostile journalists after the release of Metal Machine Music (1975), she cultivates an alluring vagueness, never replying directly but breaking off into evasive non-sequiturs. Her very name, Lutz Bacher, is a masculine pseudonym. Bacher was always reluctant to discuss her personal history, even if this history often appeared obliquely in her work.
It is this paradoxical blend of intimacy and impersonality that contributed to Bacher’s cult status. She playfully acknowledged this status in The Betty Center (2010) in which she exhibited part of her personal archives.[3] As Bacher’s work evolved from photography to video and sculpture during the 1990s and 2000s, she continued to interrupt the anonymity of appropriation by inserting tantalising references to her personal life. These references were in turn interrupted by her refusal to adopt a ‘signature style’, cultivating instead what critic and curator Caoimhim Mac Giolla Leith described as a ‘magnificent perverseness’.[4]
Notebook Exercises
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that an artist so fascinated by the artistic persona should eventually turn to the form of the notebook. What better way to interrogate the relationship between intimacy and estrangement in contemporary art making? During the 2010s, Bacher published a number of artist’s books, all with simple brown cardboard covers. These covers mimic the appearance of exercise books and contribute to the sense that we, as readers, are about to be invited into Bacher’s inner world.
In Shit for Brains (2015), the notebook takes the form of a series of handwritten jottings in black pen.[5] These notes have then been reproduced by photocopier. Pages include crossed out text that nonetheless remains visible. It isdescribed in a press release as a novel, encouraging the reader to interpret the notebook as a fiction. At times a plot is hinted at, ‘I knew my project in this relationship was to save this made man’ but is quickly interrupted by gnomic utterances like, ‘Titles are Important’.
The artist book Open the Kimono (2018) expands Bacher’s use of the notebook form by incorporating a wider range of ephemera.[6] While the reader opens the book eager to glean some insight into the artist’s elusive practice, we instead find fragments of the film Casablanca next to advertising maxims like ‘We Do more so that You can Do Less’. The book is a chronological record of lines collected from films, novels, and advertisements, interspersed with conversations overheard on the subway and in elevators. These phrases are written on post-it notes, office stationery and bank statements in what we again assume to be Bacher’s jagged hand.[7]
Techne, Process and Mask
In Bacher’s books the sense of the notebook as a site for collecting and storing fragments and ideas is especially prevalent. Yet by publishing the notebook, the distinction between process and work is elided. These notebooks aren’t preparation for another ‘real’ work yet to be realised. In Bacher’s hands the notebook attains a status of relative aesthetic autonomy with expressive capacities of its very own. Bacher’s extensive use of handwriting in these projects brings into play the wider dynamics of the artist’s notebook. The identity of the artist’s hand and the specificity of the mark is precisely what Bacher’s work had otherwise avoided, through her use of found objects and images. However, rather than operating as a signature of identity and presence, the notebooks juxtapose the hand-written mark against its capacity for endless reduplication through the photocopied image.
As we puzzle over Bacher’s handwriting, studying it for some trace of her inner life, we encounter instead the notebook as a tool, and a tool which allows us to reflect on tools more generally. It is writing itself that appears to us as a technical form in Bacher’s books – and one which intersects with other technologies like cinema, advertising and media more generally.
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued for a more all-encompassing understanding of technology as technics, drawing from the Greek word techne defined as an art, craft, or practice.[8] Everything, from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the first sharpened stone tools, as well as writing, are technics in Stiegler’s sense. For him, all technical objects can be defined as ‘exteriorisations of memory’ and are means of preserving thought outside of the body and the brain.[9] Artist’s notebooks can be considered as one such exteriorisation of memory, as a record of a thought in a mark or trace upon a page.
Stiegler’s notion of technics also allows us to consider the notebook as part of a practice, a process of refining and establishing a gesture, through which a work begins to form. Art making in this context is not an inner impulse expressed through a tool but is conditioned and made possible by tools such as notebooks. The notebook does not merely record an idea or impulse from within. Rather, the notebook becomes the place in which the process of creation expands – in a loop between the hand, the mind and the page.
Bacher’s consistent play with subjectivity evokes what British psychoanalyst Joan Riviere described as ‘feminine masquerade’ in a landmark essay from 1929. Riviere argued that in order to evade patriarchal authority, femininity ‘could be assumed and worn as a mask…much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods.’[10] Bacher’s books imply that the notebook, too, can be a form of masquerade. Her notebooks are not a site for personal revelation but instead a contribution to an understanding of identity as a mask in a game played with the ‘stolen goods’ of appropriated images, or in this case, appropriated text. By insisting on the notebook as both technics and mask, Bacher implies a broader sense in which personality is subject to the rhythms and languages of mass culture. Artistic identity, too, becomes subject to a similar reconsideration.
The notebook is thus revealed by Bacher to be a kind of genre. Once it enters the world of circulation in exhibitions or publications, the artist’s notebook operates according to a pre-existing code for interpretation and classification. Even if this code is upended and rerouted in Bacher’s hands, her books ultimately rely on a series of conventions regarding the status of the artist’s notebook in order to function as alluring objects. We read Bacher’s books with incredible eagerness and care, puzzling over the meaning of each jotting, as if we were Sherlock Holmes tracking down a suspect’s identity from the way they form a particular letter. It suggests that even as technics or mask, we still long to enter the mind of an artist through their notes and it is this desire for intimacy which Bacher gleefully exploits, leading us by the nose as we search for clues in the slant of an ‘L’ or the scrawl of a ‘B’.
----
----
[1]Douglas Crimp, ‘Pictures’, October, Vol. 8, 1979, p. 87.
[2]Lutz Bacher, The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview, Galerie Bucholz, 2021, https://www.galeriebuchholz.de/exhibitions/lutz-bacher-new-york-2021#?_ec=announcement||start (accessed 9 June 2025).
[3]Lutz Bacher, ‘The Betty Center,’ The Betty Center, 2010, https://thebettycenter.com/ (accessed 8 June 2025).
[4]Caoimhim Mac Giolla Leith, ‘Lutz Bacher: Disjecta Membra’ in Beatrix Ruf, Gregor Muir and Sophie Van Olfers (eds), Lutz Bacher: Snow JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2013.
[5]Lutz Bacher, Shit for Brains, Galerie Bucholz, Berlin, 2015.
[6]Lutz Bacher, Open the Kimono, Koenig Books, Berlin, 2018, u.p.
[7]Ibid.
[8]Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, Stanford University Press, Redwood City, p. 9.
[9]Ibid., p. 141.
[10]Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 9, 1929, p. 306.