Ulrich Wilmes: "Between Reading and Seeing"

Mel Bochner – Between Reading and Seeing ulrich wilmes

The route that Mel Bochner has followed in pursuit of his artistic identity has had numerous twists and turns, detours and cul-de-sacs. Born in 1940 into a traditional Jewish home in Pittsburgh he was influenced early on by his father, a signpainter by trade. Bochner’s early relationship to painting was thus in its application as a means to present pictorial and verbal information, ‘listing’ particular facilities, locations, goods, services and the like or ‘explaining’ certain regulations, directions and so on. Accordingly his early interest in painting arose from the functional purpose of signs intended to convey meaning as ‘objectively’ as possible.

In 1962 Bochner graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now the Carnegie Mellon University. As he himself has said, he was a student at an interesting time: when the art school was in transition from the old BeauxArts system to a Bauhaus-like model. In the morning you had an Albers design course – colour theory, collage studies of geometric shapes and so on; in the afternoon you drew from plaster casts, with charcoal, estompe and a chamois.1

Caught up in this struggle between opposing doctrines, the students had to try to discover and to develop their own standpoints – with traditional craft training relying on tried and tested artistic norms on one hand, and, on the other, a move towards Modernist methods founded on a critical analysis of precisely those historical parameters of artistic theory and praxis. Bochner used his training not as a means to set his own course but rather as a pragmatic springboard for his own entry into the ongoing discourse on contemporary art. Like many of his fellow students, he sometimes felt overwhelmed by the situation he found himself in – confronted with endless questions when he had actually been expecting to find answers.

It was not by chance that, having graduated, he started to

search for an intellectual exit from the artistic one-way street that had already taken him close to giving up his vocation. At the time Bochner’s work was still influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, although they were starting to become less of an all-dominating force. Even before the radical change brought about by Pop art and Minimal art, artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were paving the way for a realitybased pictoriality that would in effect rescue art from the metaphysical dead end of timelessness. Their overriding desire was to integrate artistic work into daily life – the source of their subject matter and creative forms – and, in so doing, to create an ahistorical pictorial language rooted in the ‘here and now’.

During this time, plagued with self-doubt, Bochner travelled to Mexico and San Francisco, yet could still not free himself and his painting from the all-pervasive presence of Abstract Expressionism. The gate that might have opened onto a viable path out of the labyrinth of unwanted influences was still closed, barring his way.

As an intellectual challenge and as a way out of his own artis­­- tic crisis, on the suggestion of a friend, Bochner enrolled to study philosophy at Northwestern University in Chicago – which was at that time, in the 1960s, one of the leading faculties in the United States with a particular research strength in linguistic philosophy. Although this did not immediately lead to the hoped-for breakthrough, the courses he completed did at least reinstate in Bochner the self-confidence he needed for his artistic work. It also led him to the conclusion that he would only find the right climate for his art in New York.

Having made the move to New York in 1964, like many of his fellow artists Bochner initially worked as a guard in the Jewish Museum, which was known at the time for its sensational exhibitions and was hence a source of interesting contacts for young artists. Additionally, he soon started to write reviews for Arts Magazine, in which he considered and articulated his own

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views on the latest trends in the art world. In 1966 the Jewish Museum in New York presented Primary Structures, which was to prove one of the most important exhibitions on developments in contemporary sculpture. Choosing works by Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson as the best pieces in the exhibition, Bochner made the distinction between their ‘provocative’ nature and the humanistic stammering of Abstract Expressionism, Happenings and Pop art…. Their work is dumb in the sense that it does not ‘speak to you’, yet subversive in that it points to the probable end of all Renaissance values. It is against comfortable aesthetic experience.2

In his comment that the works by these particular artists were ‘not sculpture’, Bochner was alluding to their rejection of the traditional separation of painting and sculpture. Moreover, in his view the formal uniformity and anonymity of their art exemplified more generally a characteristic feature of that time: In a world which is probably not more dehumanised than ever before, awareness of distance is a principal factor in functioning. Between objects are distances, not separations.

That suggests a detachment which more or less excludes a formal approach.3

Thus he clearly distinguished his own view from that of Judd’s concept of ‘specific objects’, which the latter first formulated in 1965.

It became increasingly clear that object-orientated art, as epitomised by the Minimalists, was easily incorporated back into the reference system of modernism. It was not a new way of thinking. The only aspect which set it apart from the art of its recent past was the insistent use of conceptual order forms.4 In other words, Bochner was neither interested in engaging with the historical foundations of modernism nor in distancing himself from the theories of postmodernism. If anything, Bochner posited his notion of a new concept of what constitutes a work of art on the creation of a visible order as a central function of the artistic process.

At this time the art historian and critic Dore Ashton was a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, here she set up a course on art history that was taught not by academically trained scholars but by young artists. On the basis of conversations between herself and Bochner at the Jewish Museum, she encouraged him to apply for a teaching post, which he did successfully, thanks to her support. The

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experience he then gained had a not inconsiderable influence on the development of his own artistic work. It compelled him to review and consider in greater depths his own thinking on the relationship between language and images. Having to reflect on and to explain – under the gaze of a room full of students – how visual ideas and phenomena can be described and put into words required a certain intellectual discipline and verbal precision, which he increasingly recognised as the necessary foundations for his own creative work.

In the mid-1960s Mel Bochner was developing his own visual language in the context of Minimal art and Conceptual art, which he both subjected to critical analysis and crucially helped to shape. At the time the debate that dominated the art scene in New York and beyond was above all concerned with the object and how it may be experienced as a work of art. However, Bochner’s aim – which he shared with some others – was to do away with this one-sided concentration and to replace it with a concept of artistic work that was rooted in the analysis and representation (by whatever means) of relationships and relations. He now used words and numbers as a rational way of describing the fickle nature of supposedly objective verbal statements or three-dimensional phenomena.

In so doing he challenged our involuntary use of language as a tool for conveying meaning by representing external reality. His aim, therefore, was to scrutinise the midway realm that divides the language we use from our experience of the world. Above all he wanted to articulate the conditions and processes that make a work of art what it is. The prerequisite for this was the recognition that meaning is not tied to external appearances but that it arises from the relationship between materials and thought processes and from the perspective from which these relationships are perceived. Accordingly, Bochner regarded all pictorial media as tools. That is to say, his aim was to develop a pictorial form or strategy ‘for an art that did not want to add anything to the furniture of the world.’5 He had arrived at this stance from his critical engagement with the various forms of Pop art and Minimal art that had led in the 1960s to the notion of the work of art being ‘dominated by the equation “art = objects”’.6 At the same time, the reproduction and repetition of identical elements had reinforced the deinvidualisation of the work and its detachment from artist and viewer alike – with the latter becoming responsible for the identification of its various levels of artistic meaning. Against this backdrop Bochner fostered the early stages of Conceptual art, although from the outset he was opposed to the complete ‘conceptual’ dematerialisation of the work.

The intellectual basis of Bochner’s art is grounded in the

radically simple formal means that he uses to explore and repre­sent the triggers and interconnections of cognitive pro­cesses. His installations, paintings, photographs and films reflect and reveal language, not as an instrument to communicate unequivocal messages and meanings, but as a system that facilitates, illuminates and substantiates an open process of comprehension. A significant aspect of the work is the comparative examination of the relations between natural circumstances and the manner of their cultural appropriation and/or mediation above and beyond their endless manifestations in words and pictures. Bochner uses his artistic work as a means to try to understand how we go about creating connections between the reality of the world and our own minds. The progress of his work, or the artistic driving force behind it, looks like a solitary march through a phenomenology that he regards as a sequence of mental and verbal processes that we employ to understand external reality – including art.

Nevertheless, Bochner has never become entangled in a purely self-referential notion of the individual, although he is well aware of its importance in the creation of art. His work is rather an engagement with language (in a wider sense of the term) in combination with a strong sense of the need to give it a physical form. He has never allowed his work to go the extremes of either ultimate reification or conceptual dematerialisation. Bochner’s art thus walks a tightrope between two in fact mutually exclusive realms. He mistrusts all formal imperatives and the bias of ideological thought processes. He is less concerned with the conceptual or physical form of the work than with the comprehensibility of its realisation. Moreover, a relationship between the viewer and the work can only be established if both speak the ‘same language’. Thus a work of art cannot exist without the supporting framework of an artistic form, whose making cannot be delegated to the viewer but has to be in the hands of the artist. A work can therefore, by definition, only manifest itself in a physical state, whatever that might be. As Bochner sees it, the concrete use of language gives form to his artistic ideas.

As he set out on this route, he became aware of the points of friction that he could use to carve out his own artistic position. Opposed to the submission to both objecthood and dematerialisation, he filtered out his own belief in the empirical presence of the work. And he shared this critical attitude towards the nature of traditional forms and materials with Robert Smithson. Together they searched for ways of transposing ideas and concepts into cognisably visual formation.

Between 1966 and 1973 Bochner developed a large number of ideas that raised interesting questions, which, unconvinced

Self / Portrait, 1966 Ink on graph paper 13 × 11.4 cm | 5 1/8 × 4 1/2 in Private Collection

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by existing answers, he wanted to approach in his own way.

His own ideas were fuelled by his critical attitude towards the one-sided dependence on the conditions of production and distribution that applied to artistic work. It was for this reason that Bochner decided to abandon painting, whose theory and practise had hitherto always determined and guided his artistic intentions.

Initially a small series of three ‘portraits’ demonstrated both the simplicity and complexity of Bochner’s thinking. In these he availed himself of the standard linguistic system of a thesaurus in order to describe the nature of artists. At the same time the drawings imitate the formal appearance of a particular work. Thus the Portrait of Ad Reinhardt alludes to the almost imperceptibly nuanced textures of his pseudo-monochrome paintings. Besides a Portrait of Jorge Luis Borges, whom Bochner so greatly admires, there is also a Self-Portrait, in which he counters personally identifying concepts with subjective interpretations.

In 1966, as a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, Bochner was invited to organise an exhibition of drawings.

He therefore turned to friends of his – including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Jo Baer and Robert Smithson – and asked them if they had any drawings that were not necessarily finished works but rather sketches that they were using in the work process. Since there were no funds available for framing, Bochner photocopied the works and placed four identical versions of each in folders displayed on plinths so that visitors could leaf through them.

This presentation of Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art has since come to be regarded as the first Conceptual art exhibition: The Working Drawings … propose a Conceptual art of process, a process art located in the development of an idea.

Bochner’s ‘conceptualism’ thus emerges as a dynamic model, a thought-activity occurring in the gaps between language and things; a conceptualism comparable, but not reducible, to that of Sol LeWitt, whose SerialProject #1 (ABCD), also 1966, proposed the development of a systematic formula alongside the realised ‘work’.7

Interested in Cantor’s paradox (demonstrating the theory of ‘infinite sizes’) and in the Fibonacci sequence (which expresses the structure of certain leaves and shells in the natural world), the tabular representations of numerical relationships that arose from these concepts led Bochner to his 36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams (1966/2003; p.xx). Using two-inch wooden cubes,

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Sol LeWitt Serial Project, I (ABCD), 1966 Baked enamel on steel units over baked enamel on aluminum 50.8 × 398.9 × 398.9 cm | 20 × 157⅛ × 156⅞ in

Measurement: Room, 1969 Tape and letraset on wall Installation view, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, 1969

he devised configurations based on a fixed basic pattern of seven by seven squares. These structures were described in drawn number diagrams that both set out conditions and record a given situation. The numbers show how many of a maximum of four cubes are to be stacked in which positions. When an invitation came for Bochner to show this work at the Dwan Gallery in New York, he found himself faced with the problem of having to choose just one of the existing versions. In the end he preferred not to make this choice, because he felt that one version alone would not be a sufficient representation of the work. This in turn gave him the idea of photographing twelve versions, each from three different directions, which could then be presented as a tableau of individual images plus the relevant diagrams. Contradictions of this kind, between formal problems and realised solutions, were to dominate his work in the years to come. At the same time, this project marked the beginning of a very productive phase of experimentation with photography.

For Bochner 1968 was a year of reflection and experimentation, when he made the formal transition from ‘event space’ to ‘language space’, which in effect saw him shift the locus of his discourse from the realms of the exhibition space to that of the written word. In the late 1960s Bochner’s preoccupation with the intermingling of language and space took on a very striking form in his Measurements. For this work he measured everyday things and noted the results on the walls and floors of his immediate surroundings. Initially he used a camera for this, as in his Actual Size works, which are derived from the dimensions of his own body. But soon the measurements alone were enough for Bochner and he moved from the realms of photography into the studio or the gallery space. In so far as the concept of space-relatedness – whereby the space was part of the work, was already evident in Bochner’s early works – it was only logical that he should proceed from measuring objects to measuring spaces. Accordingly, at his first commercial solo exhibition – in Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery – Bochner marked each of the rooms, noting the volume and dimensions of two rooms and the subdivision of a third according to particular preset proportions. The projection of the physical space onto the measured walls was a mental act that had to be performed by the viewer, which in turn drew him or her into the realisation of the work.

The Measurements alerted Bochner to the possibilities of an increasingly theoretical discourse, which would still be centred on language. Language Is Not Transparent (1970; p.xx) evolved from a small work with stamps on index cards, into the wall installation. It points to our internalised use of language. We use it without thinking about how this type of communication

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Theory of Boundaries, 1970 Chalk on dry pigment on wall Installation view, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, 2007

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works. Meanings seem obvious to us; language seems ‘transparent’.

What began as studies on space took on a new significance in Theory of Boundaries (1970) where it was linked to words in the form of ‘language fractions’. ‘What Bochner meant was that there is no thought without language, and that in the visual arts there is no language without a physical embodiment.’8 These notions are taken further in his Theory of Painting (1969–70; pp.xx–xx), which – on the basis of a few, simple situations – addresses the relationship of figure and ground as the main, decisive factor in the history of painting. The installation consists of rectangular newspaper pages laid-out on the floor; the sheets of newspaper have been sprayed with bright blue solid rectangles and open fragments of forms. Bochner plays out the figure-ground relationship in the four possible variants of the fraction in both closed and open systems.

Theory of Painting is a very visual representation of one of the fundamental phenomonological principles of perception, into which Bochner incorporates his critique of the status of and the discourse on contemporary painting. The multi-layered nature of his ‘theory’ works was particularly noted by Rosalind Krauss: Responding to the importance of the horizontal field to materialise the signifier of the pictorial mark … Bochner simultaneously ‘grounded’ his Theory of Painting and specified the nature of its material support as … trash: fallen residue, discarded matter, material remainder.

And again: It is in this orientation to the viewer’s frame of vision … that the work’s theoretical lessons of figure/ground reversal and figure/frame imbrication can be simultaneously posited and suspended. Indeed, it is still the wall, the vertical field, that is the plane on which these lessons as a kind of conceptual possibility or mental idea are posited.9

This thinking – typical for Bochner – shows how his work in 1969–70 developed an increasing potential for verbal and visual meanings. Can one convey in words what is represented pictorially or creatively? In connection with this, Bochner’s A Theory of Sculpture (1969–73), which linked counting with radically reduced sculptural forms, was highly original. It was realised as floor pieces, consisting of stones and chalk, in both pointedly simple and more complicated variants. Bochner’s demonstrations of his Theory of Sculpture hardly fulfil our traditional expectations of sculpture. Instead the focus is on the

viewer’s experience: the ‘sculpture’ is constituted in his or her physical movements and powers of imagination.

The concluding work in this sequence is Axiom of Indifference (1972–73), which sums up all Bochner’s ideas to date, in so far as it shows the ambivalence of two seemingly identical statements, namely, ‘all/some are in resp. out/are not out resp. not in’. This conundrum points to the ambiguity within a field of reference, which – albeit existentially defined – is universally imaginable.

The installation has two sides, shielded from each other by a free-standing partition wall. On either side four square fields are marked on the floor with gaffer tape. Inside and/or outside each of the squares there are three pennies, irregularly distributed/ placed. Short formulas describing the spatial relationship of the coins to the squares are written on the gaffer tape. In addition to this, the patterns of coins on either side of the wall (either inside or outside the squares) are mirror images of each other.

With this simple arrangement Bochner demonstrates the potential, perspectivally induced opposition of two identical statements. ‘The Axiom is one enormous network of overlapping inter-relationships between just such subtleties.’10 This work reinforced his sense that he had exhausted the ideas he had formulated so far, that no more questions were still open, which – in this formal, analytical context – seemed important enough to require clarification. If anything, Bochner now had the impression that the viewer could no longer readily follow him into the intellectual terrain that had been visibly enclosed or opened in Axiom of Indifference.

Accordingly he now decided to use drawing to reconnect with an artistic field that he had left behind many years earlier; that field was painting as the traditional ‘convention’ of creative practise: ‘One goes to painting because of its conventions. I’m interested in painting as a text that is continually rewritten.’11 In other words, Bochner did not regard this return to painting as his main area of artistic practise as a contradiction or rupture in the development of his œuvre, but rather as a new beginning: In the pre-1973 work I had been attempting to question the most primitive relationships between thought and sight.

Literally (and in some cases figuratively) I wanted ‘to measure things for myself’, in order to find, in my own experience, a firm foundation for my work. ‘To continue,’ Barnett Newman said, ‘is to begin again.’ For me, to begin again meant a change of methodology.12

And in response to James Meyers’ introductory question as to how Bochner ‘could defend to make paintings’ in the present day and age, the latter replied,

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Yes, I do think of painting like a tool, but, in that sense, I thought of all my works as tools to think with. Of course, sometimes the tool determines what you’re thinking. But tools can also give you access to things to think about, which, because of the nature of the tool, you weren’t able to think about before.13

As a first step Bochner started exploring geometric forms and formal relations. By extending his reference system of triangles and squares, he arrived at an equilateral, five-sided form – the pentagon. The introduction, through drawings, of this form into his pictorial thinking created an important link back to earlier phases in his work, which in turn gave him access to painting again. In the following years he concentrated on the realisation and painterly underpinning of syntheses comprising geometric primary forms in direct relation to actual architectural situations. These investigations into the relations between different combinations of forms led directly to multifarious structures that afford a certain freedom within a system with few parameters. In brightly coloured combinations they also develop a surprising sensuality, which Bochner consistently progressed. And he found the solution to the problem of the negation of the object-character of the painting by turning to the time-honoured technique of fresco painting. This allowed him to abandon the restricted pictorial means he had been using in favour of a highly elaborate painterly process.

After years of intense work on the syntactical relationships between language and space, in the 1970s Bochner turned to an investigation of the visual aspects of pictorial praxis. In so doing, he developed a grammar for the transposition of pictures/ images into language, so to speak in a reversal of his previous transposition of language into pictures/images. During this process, the pentagon presented itself as the decisive element in the expansion and simultaneous destruction of a painterlypictorial syntax. For Bochner it was a way of sidestepping ‘the death of painting’, which – in the mid-1960s – he had regarded as inevitable, as a crime passionelle.

This development saw him abandon his analytical approach to pictorial representation in favour of a synthetic view of the picture, as we see in the ‘wall paintings’ (p.xxx) and the subsequent (easel) paintings on canvas. His simple scheme of three formal elements opened up a seemingly infinite number of potential combinations that could be used in modular chains and constructs. As wall paintings, they again allowed Bochner to create a direct connection with the space in question, which also determined the definitive parameters for the painting. In

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other words, the wall is not just the carrier on which the form/ figure is represented; for Bochner does away with the usual figure-ground relationship by making the wall an integral part of the painting. Segments of wall – as negative forms – are incorporated/introduced into the pictorial composition. This interpenetration of wall and image is underpinned by loose brushwork, which creates a certain transparency in figure and ground. At the same time, the selection and combination of colour hues bespeaks an intuitive approach, with no need of a colour-theory backup. The work phase that Bochner entered in the 1970s illustrates his undogmatic attitude to the artistic praxis that he used to explore syntactical relationships between different elements and the implications, with regard to meaning, of the material properties of his means of representation. This was in itself an analytical process, in which linguistic structures and visual features entered into a dialectical relationship.

Bochner’s clearly articulated intention to introduce drawn structures into his combinations of forms then also opened up the possibility of critically examining pictorial form as a function of inner structures. In this light his subsequent return to easel painting makes perfect sense.

The ‘wall paintings’ came to an end for a number of reasons.

First, I was tired of fighting architecture. I had more or less done everything I wanted to do with the walls and corners as a painting support. But the biggest reason was that I got sick of having them painted out. To me they were paintings, painted in the most permanent way with the most permanent materials. But within the current cultural context they were misinterpreted as being a kind of ‘conceptual’ statement about impermanence – as if I intended them to be destroyed! So, I had to re-establish my work in terms of something that was not dependent on the site for the continuity of its existence.14

Bochner’s easel paintings led him to a heightened form of painterly expression, with the construction of the composition from elementary forms taking on the appearance of a rationally driven improvisation. The ensuing dependence of the composition on the process of painting manifested itself in shaped canvases, in which structural forms are obscured by thick colours. The transition to painting on canvas reinforced the delimitation of the painting compared to the limited space around it. In Bochner’s hands, virtual spaces in the painting with their illusionist projection of spatial phenomena now relate directly to the real wall surface, whose architectural function is pitted against the pictorial form of the painting. In this process the painting gains an internal, illusionistic depth. ‘Eventually

Axiom of Indifference, 1972 Ink on tape, and pennies on floor Installation view, Art Institute of Chicago, 2006

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I reached the point where the dense web of revisions was obliterating itself. I realised I had to begin painting because the plasticity of oil paint would allow me to constantly change my mind without losing the record of decisions. It’s ironic because I had been escaping from oil paint since art school.’15 The first of Mel Bochner’s shaped canvases date to 1983.

They arose from his desire to ‘go inside the structure’ of the painting, whose external dimensions would only be determined at the end of the decision-making process, during which he would yield to the natural flow of the development of the image:

Syncline, 1979 Acrylic on wall Installed in artist’s studio, 1979

I have a general idea of what I want to do, and I start painting.

The shape of the stretcher is the last decision I make. Once I have decided on that shape, I don’t paint on it anymore…

Most shaped canvases begin with the shape. The choice of a shape for the stretcher more or less determines the image inside the painting. The object comes first painting comes second. I realised that my procedure was different… First I paint the painting, then I decide on the shape. This allows me to capitalise on whatever develops while I’m painting. I can intensify the tension between the interior and exterior shapes because both remain plastic… And by making the shape the last drawing decision, I have enormous freedom to push the image around the canvas, to draw and redraw it, to add as well as subtract.16

The path that has taken Bochner from the analytical (conceptual) works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, through the wall paintings and the revision of easel paintings in the 1980s and 1990s to the painterly concepts of his present work has been narrow and rigorous. While it may seem that in some places his experimentation was misguided, the underlying route – for all its twists and turns – has always remained true to his early thinking and aims. Bochner’s ability to ‘bracket’ certain elements allows him to isolate individual aspects and to examine them independently of other criteria. It has enabled him to focus on particular questions, without a priori excluding others.

Moreover this approach is not beholden to external restrictions.

And this is also seen in his engagement with painting and colour, both of which are fundamental to his art.

Colour has always been a concern of mine: the small, painted cardboard sculptures of 1966; the colour photos of 1967–1968; the wall paintings of the 1970s; the shaped canvases of the 1980s. I don’t think I have ever not been thinking about colour. The same goes for process, or humor. It’s a question of bracketing. Certain things were just not useful at certain Fjord, 1984 Oil on sized canvas 236.2 × 238.8 cm | 93 × 94 in

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points. When something is placed in brackets it isn’t rejected, it’s merely set aside.17

On this basis Event Horizon (1998; pp.xx–xx) can be seen as complementary to the Measurements, which directly register and record the real dimensions of the architectural space.

Event Horizon consists of a sequence of 83 individually painted canvases in a variety of formats. In fact they are standard sizes painted by Bochner in monochrome, equally standard unmixed acrylics. The sequence of the colours is quasi coincidental, in the sense that, in Bochner’s view, one may seek to draw a little closer to chance but one can never actually aim for it or grasp it. The canvases are hung as vertical or horizontal formats, linked by their central horizontal axis, which is marked by a continuous white line. At irregular intervals there are figures noting the distances between randomly selected points marked by arrows. These measurements might be the width of a single canvas or of several canvases. The continuous line, which is almost 100-feet long in total, both connects and intercepts the sequence of paintings on the wall. For the viewer, the full extent of the work can only be grasped from a considerable distance, which in turn makes it difficult to see the individual sections.

Thus the viewer is forced to choose between simultaneous or successive perception and to switch between the continuity and discontinuity of the overall image.

Bochner’s free recourse to the formal means of painting resulted from his renewed reflection on the interplay of different variables that come together in a painting: in other words, he decided to explore the issues that create the relationship between the concept of the painting and the means with which it can be realised and that make it into a picture. Every decision taken during the process of painting conveys a particular intention and has certain implications. These decisions concern the fundamental relationship between colour and drawing, dimensions and forms, figure and ground, process and time.

Bochner initially examined this variable web of connections in the series If the Color Changes (1997–2000; pp.xxx–xx). To this end he painted a sentence (in different colour variations) from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour, in which he considers the perception-theory distinction between different processes of seeing. In If the Color Changes Bochner overlays the German original with the English translation. The painterly variations range from writing in two colours on a pale, neutral ground to a more complex version with multi-coloured letters on a coloured ground or gradually mutating hues on a ground that is mutating in the opposite direction. Thus he heightens the painterly obscuration of the words and hence also of the

comprehensibility of Wittgenstein’s statement. In these works Bochner sets out a self-referential reflection on painting, highlighting the distance between visibility and legibility.

Colour here fulfils both an optical and syntactical function in the paintings; this upsets the synchronicity of eye and mind, which are no longer in step with each other. With this painterly complexity Bochner increases the difficulty of understanding a text, which itself addresses the problem of formulating objective statements on the perception of colour.

The pictures in the ‘thesaurus paintings’ (pp.xxx–xx) are based on the listing of synonyms for particular words. For this work Bochner consulted a current edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, the best-known reference work of this kind in English. The formal appearance of these paintings is determined by the number of lines in an entry and the number of letters in each line. The unmodulated background colour is also decided in advance. The letters, whose colours are chosen during the process of painting, are then painted freehand on the background.

In this way each word or phrase is modified by the hue, value, or intensity of its colour. The function of the colour is to divert the text from any responsibility to meaning. Because each new colour alters the accumulated reading of every previous colour, I do not know what the painting will look like until the final comma has been painted.18 However, Bochner does not replicate the sequence of words and phrases as they appear in the thesaurus, but arranges them according to their form and content. On one hand the number of letters in a word helps to determine its selection and placing; on the other hand the series also graduates the level of the language, moving from the most literary synonyms to the more colloquial versions.19 The narrative of each painting begins with the more formal words and then devolves into words and phrases that refer to body and its functions, from the prim and proper to the rude and vulgar… I think it’s related to what philosopher Alain Badiou meant when he said that in the world ‘there are only languages and bodies’.

This structure is seen again in a commission that Bochner realised in 2009 for the new football stadium for the Dallas Cowboys. For one of the staircases in this gigantic stadium – with a capacity of over 100,000 it is the largest of its kind – Bochner created a monumental ‘thesaurus’ wall painting on the word ‘WIN’. The series of synonyms starts with ‘VANQUISH’ and closes with the slang ‘KICK SOME BUTT’, in an allusion to the greater tolerance for public self-expression in this special context. In that sense the sports stadium, as a

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place where emotions run high, presents the ideal conditions for an investigation into this phenomenon, which is documented here in a perfectly matter-of-fact manner as though in a serious reference work.

The balance between artistic and linguistic meanings/ readings (and between visual and syntactical functions) tips further towards painting in Bochner’s ‘Blah, Blah’ series.

A number of paintings in this group of works are executed in Prussian blue – a colour that has a particular appeal for Bochner, that can never entirely be pinned down. The dumb litany of this empty phoneme, a universal code for redundant chatter, emerges from and sinks back into the profound depth of this colour. The lettering in the paintings is loose, almost expressive. The paintings look like radical distortions of a meaningless stream of talk which – in our language climate, where communication is celebrated for its own sake – builds up to white noise only to ebb away again.

These recent series of works are closely intertwined with the elongation of the temporal realms of seeing and comprehending, which presents a challenge to both the maker and the recipient of the work. On one hand painting – with all the formal decisions that are needed – serves Bochner as a visual analogy for his understanding of the connections/relationship of language to time and space, which is in itself fundamental to his work. On the other hand his paintings engage with the developments that emerge on an almost daily basis as a result of the astounding acceleration in communications. They point back to Bochner’s use of language in the late 1960s, which could be summed up in the programmatic maxim Language is not Transparent. Whereas those early works almost entirely bracketed out painterly aspects in favour of a radical questioning of internalised processes and of the façade that runs/has been erected between seeing and comprehending, form and meaning, Bochner’s current paintings have a narrative background/trim, in which painting and language seek to connect beyond literal meaning.

As Bochner himself has said, ‘By being both experiential and linguistic the colour collapses the space between seeing and reading. But it also creates a surplus meaning, a visual meaning, one that survives the consumption of the narrative.’20

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ulrich wilmes

1 Phong Bui, ‘Mel Bochner with Phong Bui, Art in Conversation’, Brooklyn Rail,

May 2006.

2 Mel Bochner, ‘Primary Structures’, Arts Magazine, June 1966.

3 Mel Bochner, ‘Art in Process – Structures’, in Arts Magazine, September/

October 1966.

4 Mel Bochner, ‘ica Lecture’, Mel Bochner, Solar Systems and Rest

5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 1 3 14 1 5 16 17

1 8 19

20

Rooms – Writings and Interviews, 1965–2007, mit Press, Cambridge, ma and London, 2008, p.91.

Mel Bochner, ‘Three Statements for Data Magazine’, Data Magazine, February 1972, p.64.

Mel Bochner, ibid.

James Meyer, ‘The Second Degree: Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art’, Richard S. Field, Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible, 1966–1973, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, ct, 1995, p.102.

Ibid., p. 41.

Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Theory of Painting’, ibid., p. 222.

Bruce Boice, ‘The Axiom of Indifference’, in (toward) Axiom of Indifference 1971–1973, Sonnabend Gallery, New York and Paris, 1974, p.63. ‘“How can you defend to make paintings now?”, A conversation with James Meyer’, As Painting: Division and Replacement, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus oh, 2001, quoted from, Mel Bochner, Solar Systems and Rest Rooms (see note 4), p.160.

‘Inside the Process’, City University Lecture, 1975, Mel Bochner, Solar Systems and Rest Rooms – Writings and Interviews, 1965–2007 (see note 4), p.118.

‘How can you defend to make paintings now?’, ibid, p.160.

‘Mel Bochner Interview with Charles Stuckey’, Mel Bochner: 1973–85, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, 1985, p.16.

Ibid., pp.16–17.

Ibid., p. 20.

‘Mel Bochner. Frédéric Paul, A Conversation: December 3, 2007–February 13, 2008’, Mel Bochner, Centre d’art contemporain – Centre culturell de rencontre, Domaine de Kherguéhennec, Bignan, France, p.20.

Op cit, p. 12.

Mel Bochner in Conversation with James Meyer, Mel Bochner, Language 1966– 2006, The Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven, ct and Yale University Press, London, 2007, p.141.

Op cit, p.141.