Theories and Encounters: On Mel Bochner’s Sculpture

M ARK GODFREY

Between 1970 and 1972, Mel Bochner installed a group of works on the oors of various art spaces in America and Italy using pebbles and chalk numbers and arrows, and called the group by the collective name ‘Theory of Sculpture’. These works emerged shortly after Theory of Painting (1969–70; pp.68–71) and were part of a larger series of ‘theory’ works. Making art under the heading ‘theory’ was a way for Bochner to ask questions and suggest hypotheses about the minimal conditions and basic conventions of a given medium. For Theory of Painting he suggested that the terms ‘cohere’ and ‘disperse’, in all their combinations, were those necessary to understand the conventions of abstract painting; for ‘Theory of Sculpture’, he determined that sculpture had to take a three-dimensional form (hence the pebbles), and that it had to have some method of organisation (which could be disorganisation), hence the chalk. The advantage of making works titled ‘theory’ was also that they allowed Bochner to demonstrate his proposals about what a medium or practice could be, without having to concretise these proposals permanently. He saw the ‘theory’ series as a way of ‘doing’ art rather than ‘making’ art: of practising as an artist with the intention of arriving at knowledge (if only provisional knowledge) without having to burden the world with any more objects.

One of the works from the ‘Theory of Sculpture’ series was named Five Sculptures (1972; p.46) and comprised ve rows of ve pebbles, each group laid out in di erent directions, with chalk numbers written beside them on the oor. Glancing at the work without attending to the chalk, the viewer immediately recognised the ve sets of ve pebbles, but when looking at the writing, it soon became apparent that Bochner’s simple act of numbering and measuring these groups had created all sorts of confusion. In one instance, he had placed a number beside each pebble supposedly to designate them as 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 – but why had he started at one end of the row, and not the other? In another, he had drawn a line from one end of the row of pebbles to the other, culminating on either side with an arrow point, with the number 5 in the middle. But did this number refer to the quantity of pebbles, or to the length from one arrow point to the next, which may just have happened to correspond in this instance to the length of the ve pebbles (that is, the three middle pebbles, or indeed all the pebbles, could be removed and the arrow and number could remain true indicators of the length of the chalked line)? Elsewhere, Bochner chalked numbers in the spaces between the pebbles. Simple enough, but are there six spaces in a line of ve pebbles, or just the four internal spaces? One row o ered one answer, the other, the alternative. In the remaining sculpture, Bochner numbered the pebbles on one side of the row, but the spaces between them, with the numbers facing the opposite way, on the other. In this case, nine numbers jostled around the ve pebbles, and it depended entirely on the viewer’s orientation whether they would see the ve numerals for the pebbles or four numerals for the spaces rst.

Bochner chose the number ve because we instinctively count in ves, learning to do so from our earliest years when we use our ngers to count.1 So making a work with groups of ve units was a way of starting with something very simple and familiar. But the ambition of the work was to allow the viewer to appreciate how from this simple starting point, the acts of numbering and measuring cause various kinds of confusions.2 Around this time, Bochner wrote that in his work he wanted to ‘confront the contradiction between idea and realisation’.3 It was one thing to o er ‘realisations’ of rows of ve pebbles for a viewer to experience, and quite another to begin to state ‘ideas’ of quantity and measurement. Each chalk statement was contradicted by the next and the idea of ve ‘crumbled’ (to use a word employed in this context by Rosalind Krauss) into so many possibilities that it was rendered meaningless.4 Much later on, Bochner wrote about the work that: by juxtaposing the numbers with the stones A Theory of Sculpture forces a confrontation between matter (‘raw’ materials) and mind (categories of thought)… The numbers and the stones exist on parallel but contradictory planes. While they appear to demonstrate the same thing there is a rupture between them.5

There were many polemical intentions for pointing to this rupture and for Bochner’s ambition to uncover what he called ‘the enormous abyss that separates the space of statements from the space of objects’.6 ‘Theory of Sculpture’ emerged at a moment when many Conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Robert Barry were promoting the notion that a work of art could exist as an idea cut free from any realisation, any physical support. Bochner saw this argument as a fallacy,7 as much a fallacy as the myth in Abstract Expressionism that a brushstroke could communicate an emotion, and he wanted to make vivid demonstrations of the axiom that ‘no thought exists without a sustaining support’. An artist might start with a thought, but has to use some support, whether that is language, paint, objects, or images, to express it. And once a support is introduced, the idea is prey to the contingencies of the support’s physical and cultural characteristics. What is more, the artwork must necessarily then be encountered by a viewer constrained by a body, meaning that we view the work from a particular position, looking forward, left or right, and from whatever height we happen to be.

Bochner believed that works of art were material things to be experienced physically, and in that respect he aligned himself with father- gures such as Barnett Newman and with contemporaries like Eva Hesse. But unlike these artists, he did not want to place any special emphasis on the materials with which a work was realised at any one instance. Of course, the work required these materials to come into being, and could not be apprehended except as a material entity, but the materials could be discarded after the work was exhibited. With this kind of thinking, Bochner was proposing an idea of sculpture as provisional rather than speci c or permanent (this is also part of the reason they were called ‘theory’ works). To think of sculpture in this way was to counter the ideas proposed earlier in the 1960s by Donald Judd, whose essay ‘Speci c Objects’ had made a strong impact on artists of Bochner’s generation.

Bochner’s sculptures were also temporary and even during the time of their installation, visibly vulnerable, composed with chalk that could be rubbed away, and pebbles or nuts or coins

Theory of Painting, 1969–70