Thursday, May 16, 2019

Lutz Bacher, the Elusive Conceptual Artist Who Never Revealed Her Real Name, Face, or Age, Has Died




Lutz Bacher, the Elusive Conceptual Artist Who Never Revealed Her Real Name, Face, or Age, Has Died

The mysterious, pseudonymous artist died of a heart attack on May 14, leaving behind precious few details of her life.
Lutz Bacher. Photo courtesy Greene Naftali and Galerie Buchholz.
Lutz Bacher. Photo courtesy Greene Naftali and Galerie Buchholz.
The pseudonymous artist Lutz Bacher died of a heart attack in New York City on May 14. Her conceptual work, known for defying categorization, encompassed photography, sound art, sculpture, video, and appropriation art, much of it exploring sexuality, power, and violence through politically charged juxtapositions of text and image.
News of Bacher’s passing was confirmed by the artist’s galleries, Greene Naftali in New York and Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, Cologne, and New York. “The impact and influence of her life and work is immeasurable,” Greene Naftali director Martha Fleming-Ives told artnet News. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among many other institutions.
Bacher kept her real name a secret, and the only photograph of the artist that appears to be available online, on the webpage for her 2018 solo showat the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette in Paris, obscures her face.
The details of Bacher’s biography also remain a mystery, despite a career that spans more than 40 years. According to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the artist was born in 1952. But a 2008 work, Bingo (Or the Year I Was Born), calls that into question by presenting a bingo card with numbers that light up at random. (Wikipedia lists her birth year as 1943.)
About the work GB Galerie Buchholz Berlin, Köln• Follow Lutz Bacher, <em>Jokes (Groucho Marx)</eM>, 1987–88. Photo courtesy of Galerie Buchholz.
Lutz Bacher, Jokes (Groucho Marx) (1987-88). Photo courtesy of Galerie Buchholz.
Bacher moved to Berkeley, California, in the 1970s and called the Bay Area home for decades before relocating to New York sometime after 2013.
The artist was similarly evasive about her work, once releasing a recipe for butterscotch pudding in lieu of a press release for a 2008 exhibition at Ratio 3 in San Francisco—almost certainly delicious, but not particularly illuminating in terms of understanding the art. In 2012, Bacher published a book titled Do You Love Me?, based on extensive interviews with artists, curators, and others who knew her and whom she asked to describe her.
“[Bacher’s] approach has been constantly to shape-shift, deny her authorial signature, disperse like smoke,” wrote Martin Herbert in Art Review in 2015. “Recognizing the cult of personality that clings to artists, she’s made herself a personality in absentia, à la Warhol and Duchamp.… Recognizing up front that viewers never get a full picture, always inject their biases into whatever they see, Bacher doesn’t even try to present one; she offers something explicitly speckled with holes and gaps to occupy.”
Lutz Bacher, <em>Do You Love Me?</em>. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Lutz Bacher, Do You Love Me? Photo courtesy of the artist.
Often humorous and pointed, Bacher’s work includes her 1986 series “Sex With Strangers,” which featured enlarged photocopies of pornographic images, and “Jokers” (1985-87), which overlays off-color comments atop blown-up photos of celebrities and politicians, most of whom are white men.
Lutz Bacher, <em>Closed Circuit</em> (1997–2000). Photo courtesy of MoMA PS1.
Lutz Bacher, Closed Circuit (1997-2000). Photo courtesy of MoMA PS1.
Over the years, Bacher’s New York gallery representation included Pat Hearn Gallery, Colin de Land’s American Fine Arts, Taxter and Spengemann, and Alex Zachary Peter Currie.
When Hearn, who died in 2000, was diagnosed with liver cancer, Bacher set up a surveillance camera in the gallery, capturing 1,200 hours of footage of the last years of the dealer’s life. The result was a 40-minute video, Closed Circuit.
Lutz Bacher, Magic Mountain (2015). Photo courtesy of MoMA PS1.
Lutz Bacher, Magic Mountain (2015). Photo courtesy of MoMA PS1.
Bacher was the recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman grant in 2002, and was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, where her piece Baseballs 2(2011) dumped hundreds of baseballs onto the museum’s fourth floor. A similarly show-stopping work, Magic Mountain (2015), filled a gallery with a massive pile of gray foam spikes in the “Greater New York” exhibition at MoMA PS1 in Queens in 2015. The museum had previously hosted Bacher’s first museum survey, “MY SECRET LIFE,” in 2009.
The artist’s last one-person gallery show, “Open the Kimono,” was in Cologne at Galerie Buchholz last fall. It featured Bacher’s recent series “Swingers,” in which she rephotographed personal ads from the back pages of vintage adult magazines, a precursor to today’s online dating.
Lutz Bacher, <em>Carter/Kennedy (Kiss Ass</em>, 1987. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Lutz Bacher, Carter/Kennedy (Kiss Ass) (1987). Photo courtesy of the artist.
“One always treads uncertain territory with Lutz Bacher, who has made a habit of elusiveness,” wrote Faye Hirsch in Art in America in 2015. “Yet suddenly her avoidance strategy feels like an effective defense against an art world in which understanding can be so easily monetized as PR or collecting points.”

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previously (2018) about the same manuscript | 2 articles

previously (2018) about the same manuscript
2 articles
...|...



Did Artificial Intelligence Really Decode the Voynich Manuscript? Some Leading Scholars Doubt It

Scholars questioned the methodology of the paper that sparked the reports.

The Voynich manuscript has baffled scholars for centuries. Photo by Cesar Manso/AFP/Getty Images.
The Voynich manuscript has baffled scholars for centuries. Photo by Cesar Manso/AFP/Getty Images.

Last month, some remarkable news surfaced: the fabled Voynich manuscript had finally been decoded by artificial intelligence. But it turns out that the content of the cryptic 600-year-old, 240-page document—written in a language nobody has ever seen before or since—may still be a mystery.
Scholars and Voynich experts quickly sought to set the record straight, expressing doubts over the accuracy of the research methodology applied in the 2016 paper that claimed to have cracked the ancient puzzle.
Most scholars agree that the manuscript is written in a substation cipher, a simple code in which certain letters of the alphabet are interspersed with made-up ones. The problem that has confounded researchers for centuries is that nobody knows what language (or alphabet) the document was originally written in.
In Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script, written by computer science professor Grzegorz Kondrak and graduate student Bradley Hauer of the University of Alberta in Canada, the researchers developed a methodology for finding the source language of ciphered texts and then tested the algorithm they developed on the ancient manuscript. In the end, Kondrak and Hauer concluded that the Voynich was originally written in Hebrew. But scholars are questioning the methodology they used to arrive at this conclusion.
Kondrak and Hauer wrote an algorithm to identify certain patterns in texts such as how often each letter or combination of letters appears. Next they used the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which is translated into 380 languages) as a sample text to teach the algorithm to identify the original language of a text encrypted with substitution ciphers—which worked—but when they turned the algorithm on the Voynich manuscript, problems began to emerge with some of their underlying assumptions.
Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, told the Verge that an algorithm trained to identify modern languages cannot reliably be used to identify the language of a document that has been carbon dated to the 15th century. “The grammar, spelling, and vocabulary would have been quite different, especially for a manuscript like the Voynich that is scientific in nature,” Davis said.
In addition, Kondrak and Hauer’s algorithm merely produces suggestions for potential matches but doesn’t evaluate the likelihood of these matches. Beyond that, the researchers based their analysis on a debatable theory that the Voynich is also encoded in anagrams, a hypothesis that has been suggested before but which is not supported by scholarly consensus.
Kondrak and Hauer admit in the paper that they had to make some adjustments for the translation to make sense in Hebrew, writing that the first attempt was “not quite coherent.” The adjustments included making “a couple of spelling corrections” before using Google Translate to convert the text into English. “Any time you have to resort to Google Translate over someone who has actually studied the language, you’re going to lose some credibility,” Fagin said.
Speaking to the Verge, professor Shlomo Argamon, a computational linguist at the Illinois Institute of Technology, concluded that “their method… gives them huge latitude in doing this sort of impressionistic interpretation. They take this decoded sentence, squint at it through thick eyeglasses, and say that’s good enough for us.” Nick Pelling, a Voynich expert who’s written several books on the mysterious document goes even further, saying that the paper’s likelihood of being correct is “So close to zero percent as makes no practical difference.”

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AI May Have Just Decoded a Mystical 600-Year-Old Manuscript That Baffled Humans for Decades

The secret to the Voynich Manuscript? It's in a language no one expected.

A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

One of the world’s most infamous mysteries may have just been solved, thanks not to human genius, but to artificial intelligence. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912, the 240-page Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown script and an unknown language that no one has been able to interpret—until now.
Computing scientists at the University of Alberta claim to have cracked the code to the inscrutable handwritten 15th-century codex, which has baffled cryptologists, historians, and linguists for decades. Stymied by the seemingly unbreakable code, some have speculated it was written by aliens. Experts have even posited that the whole thing is a hoax with no hidden meaning. Today, housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven, Connecticut, the manuscript’s delicate vellum pages are illustrated with botanical drawings, astronomical diagrams, and naked female figures.
When it came to tackling the centuries-old mystery, professor Greg Kondrak and grad student Bradley Hauer put their expertise in natural language processing to good use, running algorithms that compared the document’s text to the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in no less than 380 different languages. According to the computer, the Voynich manuscript was written in Hebrew.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Other researchers had previously hypothesized that the document had been encoded using alphagrams, the letters in each word rearranged in alphabetical order. Based on that theory, Kondrak and Hauer used an algorithm to solve each anagram in the first 10 pages.
“It turned out that over 80 percent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn’t know if they made sense together,” Kondrak told the university. (He published his findings in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics.)
Their colleague, Hebrew-speaking computer scientist Moshe Koppel, took a crack at reading the first line to no avail. But, aided by a couple of spelling corrections, Google Translate had better luck.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
If the Alberta team is right, the first sentence of the manuscript reads “she made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” Weird, yes, but an impressive breakthrough nonetheless.
Of course, after all these years, the Voynich Manuscript isn’t giving up all its secrets at once. Last year, scholars quickly debunked the claims of Nicholas Gibbs, who announced he had translated the tome from an abbreviated version of Latin and that it was a women’s health manual.
In their paper, Kondrak and Hauer acknowledged that more work needs to be done to definitively prove the accuracy of their discovery, but called their findings “a starting point for scholars that are well-versed in the given language and historical period.” Hopefully, Hebrew experts will follow up on this groundbreaking research and solve this mystery once and for all.
See more pages from the Voynich Manuscript below.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
A page from the Voynich Manuscript. Canadian computing scientists believe they are cracking the code with the help of artificial intelligence. Photo courtesy of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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