The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview

Lutz Bacher

1976 · Photocopies, typescript, tape, and ink · Photographs

Bacher created this piece in response to a request for a book of interviews with artists based in San Francisco. Fulfilling and subverting the task simultaneously, Bacher "interviewed" herself on the subject of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President Kennedy and became the subject of obsessive study by conspiracy theorists. Partly inspired by the ragged cut-and-paste graphics of the nascent punk-rock movement, Bacher's schizophrenic self-portrait is assembled from photocopies of images purportedly showing the shadowy assassin, who himself may have been two or more conspirators posing as "Oswald." A mad fugue of mechanical reproduction gone awry, Bacher's perceptual hall of mirrors is finally about the blind spot implicit in all representation. It is also a quintessentially 1970s form of identity quest filtered through the shards and fragments of cultural memory.

Artist

Lutz Bacher

Date

1976

Medium

Photocopies, typescript, tape, and ink

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Anonymous Gift, 1999