Colour My Mind

ACHI M B ORCHARDT - HU M E

Unless you nd yourself in a public place in the presence of bystanders, I suggest that you read the following aloud:

MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE, TOP DOG, HEAD HONCHO, KING OF THE HILL, NUMERO UNO, THE BIG ENCHILADA, THE BOSS, THE DECIDER, RULE WITH AN IRON HAND, GOTCHA BY THE BALLS.1

Notice the deep intake of breath required for its recitation, the downward cadence that leads from the adoration worthy of a Marvel comic hero to the colloquial derision of somebody you fear yet cannot help but respect, and ends with the aggressive smugness of having asserted your own sense of superiority.

Now read this:

AMAZING! AWESOME! BREATHTAKING! HEARTSTOPPING! MIND BLOWING! OUT-OF-SIGHT! COOL! WOW! GROOVY! CRAZY! KILLER! BITCHIN’! BAD! RAD! GNARLY! DA BOMB! SHUT UP! OMG! YESSS!2

Here, the voice ascends from the overused exclamations of prescribed enthusiasm to more intense expressions of approval to youthful street slang, nishing in the near-orgasmic expression of success – the moment for which late-Capitalist culture asks us to strive at all times.

And nally, try this one:

OH WELL, THAT’S THE WAY IT GOES, IT IS WHAT IT IS, WHAT CAN YOU DO?, WHAT WILL BE WILL BE, DON’T GET YOUR HOPES UP, SHIT HAPPENS, NOTHING EVER CHANGES, JUST LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT… 3

This time around, we exhale as we utter the words, the body mirroring the sense of de ation conveyed by an increasingly phlegmatic set of popular idioms for persuading oneself to compromise.

‘Amazing!’, ‘Oh Well’, ‘Gotcha by the Balls’. Language is performative, as is painting. Both are bound by complex sets of conventions that we learn to decipher, but of which in everyday life we are not consciously aware. Language can be spoken, recited, written and read. Most of us are experienced in all of the above activities. They are what we do to communicate, to connect with others, to create a social bond. The act of painting is usually performed by one person only, the artist. Then another type of performance takes over: that of looking. The rst to look is the artist, generally in his/her studio. Once a work is exhibited publicly, others join in, bringing to a work their own subjective readings.

Mel Bochner’s recent ‘thesaurus paintings’ intertwine an unusual number of the performative acts described above, playing the conventions of painting o against those of language, reading against looking, with colour providing the vital bond between the two. These paintings can be read – quite literally – as much as viewed; they can be recited aloud like a piece of poetry or theatre, or read quietly to oneself. The latter is closer to the way we look at them as paintings, silently retracing the complex web of Bochner’s compositional manoeuvres. At this point, words dissolve into patterns, horizontal word chains into diagonals and zig-zags of colour that dart across the paintings’ surfaces. The initial impulse is to read the words, yet the longer we look at the paintings and become absorbed by our visceral responses to colour and all that it entails – contrast, light and weight – the more the written word takes a back seat.

Bochner ceaselessly probes language and its workings by jotting down word chains in his notebooks. Often, the starting point is provided by an expression that he overhears or chances upon in conversation. With the help of Roget’s Thesaurus, he then builds up word chains that are not unlike concrete poems – a process that he had rst explored in his word portraits of friends like Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt or Robert Smithson in the 1960s. This process, however, is less mechanistic than is often described. Far from leading from one clear synonym to another, there are variations carefully re-ordered by the artist, so that the nal list is more akin to a set of Chinese whispers with the meaning slowly shifting from one expression to the other, and the spaces and punctuation marks in between as important as the words themselves. In the paintings, this space between often entails the purest moments of colour, the luminous ground on which each di erently coloured letter is inscribed in impeccable freestyle handiwork.

The use of the thesaurus, and the way in which it applies scienti c rigour to something as amorphous and hard-to-grasp as a living language, is symptomatic of the way of thinking that has underpinned Bochner’s oeuvre for the past 45 years or so. On rst encounter, especially his early work may seem cerebral and in thrall to academic thinking when, in fact, it is far from a self-absorbed intellectual exercise. Seeking to understand the conventions by which we see and verbalise what is in front of our eyes, that is, by which we share our perception of reality through language, is at the heart of Bochner’s project. If his sophisticated use of language expresses the logical and rational side of this endeavour, then his ever more exuberant use of colour attests to his growing recognition of its limits. Colour both eschews and challenges language. If I say ‘red’, what type of red do I mean? And how could I de ne it further? One double-page spread in Bochner’s notebooks contains a table ordering artists’ paints by their manufacturers and product names (see pp.1, 214). The names are sheer poetry: Zinc Bu , Persian Rose, Pozzuoli Earth, Dioxine Purple, Sfumato Grey, Verditer Blue. Yet they tell us little about the exact shade, unless we are familiar with the products and hence know the system of conventions underpinning the di erent labels.

Painting is mostly discussed through language – apart from by painters who discuss painting by making other paintings. Language in relationship to the visual arts became all the more important during the period of Bochner’s early career, when there was a dramatic increase in critical writing and theory. Many artists (including Bochner) responded by seizing control of part of this discourse themselves. From a secondary tier of interpretation, language was promoted to a primary medium of expression. Historically, the striving for precedence between word and image goes back a long way. Greek Orthodox icons are ‘written’, not painted, no icon being complete unless it entails at least some words, often carefully disguised. Jehovah forbids his followers to try to make an image of God, as does Muhammad on behalf of Allah, with the result that in Judaism and Islam mimetic language takes the role that visual representation occupies in European Christianity and, by extension, in most Western art from the Renaissance onwards. It is perhaps little wonder therefore that as the 500 year-old rule book of representation came under increasing pressure with the rise of modernism, a growing number of words found their way into painting, starting with the frequent usage of newsprint in the fractured still lifes of Braque and Picasso. In most of these cases, the preeminence of language and the ‘sign’ led to colour being sidelined. Where language dominated, colour subsided, whether in the grey-brown palette of early Cubism or the grey-scales of Jasper Johns’ strongest textbased works.

The same, to some degree, is true of Bochner’s own trajectory. One of the last paintings by the 22-year-old artist that can be considered amongst his early works is a square masonite board covered in thick layers of brown oil paint. Colour is a scienti c and perceptual phenomenon as well as a material one. Whereas Newton argued that the totality of the prism-coloured rays of light produces white, or colourless light, the sum-total of material paint – the stu from the tube – produces an ill-de ned brown instead. Thus Bochner’s small painting arguably contains all colours with the e ect that no single one is any longer discernible and that all the light perceptually entailed in bright colour has been swallowed by the swamp of faecal-coloured paint. As Bochner abandoned the making of paintings in order to probe instead the medium’s conventions, colour began to play an ever more subordinated role. However, it never quite disappeared. In 1970, he made his seminal installation entitled Theory of Painting (pp.68–71). Newspapers are spread on the oor so as to create four distinct areas. In some instances, they are neatly organised into clearly de ned rectangles; in others, they form a less regular arrangement. Each eld of paper serves as ground for one or multiple shapes created with bright blue spraypaint. Similar to the newspaper ground, these shapes can consist of a single large rectangle or a multitude of smaller ones that follow no discernible rule. Four pairs of words written directly onto the wall articulate the relationships between gure and ground enacted by the spray paint and the newspapers on the ground: cohere/cohere; cohere/disperse; disperse/cohere and disperse/disperse. These are the key strategies that Bochner’s generation of US-American painters inherited from their Abstract Expressionist ancestors and Clement Greenberg’s formalist discourse. If painting was de ned by the relationship between support and painterly medium, with the surface the arena of their encounter, then these were the only routes left to explore: to subvert the conventional rectangle of easel painting or to apply the medium in ways that no longer resembled brush on canvas, as Lynda Benglis, for instance, did in in a large white loft and who only paints white paintings – a thinly veiled satirical portrait of Ad Reinhardt. A crazy zealot, Pure can’t bear anything that contaminates the essence of painting – even colour. In one of the best passages – part of which Bochner would cite in his text ‘A Compilation for Robert Mangold’ – Pure was pronouncing on colour: Pure explains that since ‘A painting must have no color’, his shelves are lined with tubes of colour that he never touches (permanent green light and alizarin crimson are the pigments he ‘most prefers to reject’).4 Reinhardt preferred to reject the kind of subjectivist gestural painting that he associated with Willem de Kooning, and even more he preferred to reject the elements of guration that continued to contaminate it.

Bochner’s own relationship to Reinhardt is signi cant and not straightforward. He has said of Elaine de Kooning’s piece that Reinhardt really did remain Mr Pure and that:

An idea existed after the war that abstraction had something like a sacred duty to ful ll. Anything less than ‘abstract’ was tainted, or impure, or corrupt (as in De Kooning’s desire to paint the gure).5

No one was more extreme in their articulation of that sacred duty than Reinhardt, earning himself the soubriquet ‘the black monk’. As arch-puritan, he was also the most articulate spokesman of abstraction’s postwar impasse and of what he referred to as the ‘art-politics syndrome’.6

In major accounts of postwar art Reinhardt’s role has been underestimated – as has Bochner’s – so the relation between them is worth unpicking. Reinhardt ‘found’ black in 1956 and continued to paint black, as well as red and blue, monochromes until his death in 1967. Having expunged everything that was extraneous from the canvas he painted subtly – almost imperceptibly – di erentiated surfaces that revealed faint crosses or other shapes that emerged only after looking at them for a period of time. His writings, lectures and notes endlessly elaborated this strategy of refusal. In one essay for example, living up to the name of Pure, he enumerated his ‘no’s’: ‘In painting, for me no fooling-the-eye, no window-hole-in-the-wall, no illusions, no representations, no associations, no distortions…’ The list – he often red o lists as his weapon of choice – continued for over a page, ending with ‘no confusing painting with everything that is not painting’.7

In 1966, Bochner made a group of word-portraits on graph paper of people to whom he was close or whom he admired. The words are collated from the lists of synonyms found in Roget’s Thesaurus and nd themselves placed in odd juxtapositions (‘rest’ next to ‘deafen’, ‘torpid’ next to ‘sti ed’ and so on). Of all these portraits, the one of Ad Reinhardt is perhaps the closest to his recent paintings in one or two respects: it isn’t so much that he stretched out the shorter words to make them t the width of the column or that these therefore appear bigger – but rather, that we perceive some words as more assertive than others. Words like ‘shut up’ or ‘gag’ seem to come out at you and therefore contradicting the word ‘quiescent’ that is the trigger for the portrait in the rst place. Of course, it is di erent when Bochner goes on to making paintings using colour later on, but the Reinhardt portrait seems to be a very early instance of this form of antagonistic address.

But if this is a portrait, then in what way is it – could it be – of Reinhardt? Given that Reinhardt was notoriously loquacious, we can deduce that it was his monochrome painting that provided the starting point of ‘silence’ – or can we?8 And what does it mean, anyhow, for a painting to be silent? The ricochet e ect back and forth – there it is again – is far from quiescent but wordy and frenetic. Which in some respects brings us back to Reinhardt himself – who made pure abstracts that would seem to silence language and yet was full of words.

Reinhardt wrote constantly – and wrote in a beautiful and unmistakable hand in black indian ink on sheets of notepaper in which the letters take physical shape. It’s an unmistakable hand, and he set out his notes in the manner of the layout man that he was (he had trained as a graphic artist9) but also in ways quite as suggestive of a calligram by Apollinaire. Bochner’s portrait takes the form of two handwritten symmetrical columns, which also mimics Reinhardt’s preoccupation with symmetry in his paintings but also draws attention to the contradictory directions that were at play in the work, that cut against the grain of pure abstraction. Words that hit you like ‘dummy-up’ or ‘shut-up’ suggests the ways silence is forced on you, that it can be a kind of violence even. It is hard to describe the e ects of the words. For example, ‘lifeless’ could be a negative word but in this context it could be positive. It’s unclear and ambiguous. Reinhardt was anti-art-as-life, after all, and pro-art-as-art. If there’s anything pure here, it’s pure contingency.

That is, Reinhardt was the artist who preached purity but practised something more complicated; who talked ‘art-as-art’ but was a lifelong leftist. When Bochner discussed the precedents for the kind of ‘artist/writer’ that he and Smithson became, it was Judd and Reinhardt whom he mentioned, in particular Reinhardt’s ‘caustic critiques’ in the form of cartoons.10 And he has told the story on several occasions of how he and Smithson once met Reinhardt on 57th street. After a long conversation about what was wrong with contemporary art, Reinhardt said to them that the problem was that everybody ultimately had to choose between