Mel Bochner

This is only the beginning of the review of
Mel Bochner's Solar System & Rest Rooms - Writings and Interviews 1965-2007
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 24-30, 2012

For the full review, go here: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/310902-solar-system-rest-rooms-review

I think part of what impressed me & pleased me about the work collected under the umbrella term of "Conceptual Art" in the 1972 bk of that name edited by Ursula Meyer was the variety of radical rethinkings of how art might manifest itself & where it might start from & what its purposes might be. Conceptual Artists weren't just taking it for granted that art had to be a painting or a sculpture & then just deciding to take a different approach to color or POV (Point-of-View), etc, they were starting much more from scratch. Much of the work was 'simple', in a physical/craft sense, but the idea behind it was substantially different enuf from the conventions that the results were elegant rather than stupid.

Mel Bochner was represented in Conceptual Art by "Excerpts from Speculation" [1967-1970] [reprinted from Artforum (1970)] wch starts off w/ "For a variety of reasons I do not like the term "conceptual art." Connotations of an easy dichotomy with perception are obvious and inappropriate." In Solar System & Rest Rooms - Writings and Interviews 1965-2007, this essay appears, as does his review of the Lucy Lippard edited Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 in wch Bochner even more strenuously objects to the use of "dematerialization" as a way of describing the work referenced. SO, even these catch-all terms were under scrutiny, as they shd've been. My ongoing questions are: Has there ever been a better umbrella term for collectively categorizing the work now generally known as Conceptual Art? Are we better off w/o such a term b/c it does more to obfuscate & oversimplify than it does to explain? Such questions aren't confined to Conceptual Art, they apply to umbrella terms in general. Bochner writes in his Six Years review:

"Another serious issue is the self-fulfilling implication of the title itself. By attempting to predict the future it distorts the present. Some art critics believe that their contribution to culture is enhanced by coining titles for "art movements." Her term, "dematerialization," has been filtering into general usage as a prescriptive device used in an ethical context. It suggests the immorality of artists who continue to make objects. A letter from the Art-Language group, published in this book, is an accurate analysis of the word and its misuse:

"All the examples of art-works (ideas) that you refer to in your article are, with few exceptions, art-objects. They may not be an art-object in its traditional matter-state, but they nevertheless are matter in one of its forms, solid-state, gas-state, liquid-state. And it is on this question of matter-state that my caution with regard to the metaphorical usage of dematerialization is centered upon . . . That some art should be directly material and that other art should produce a material entity only as a by-product of the need to record an idea is not at all to say that the latter is connected by any process of dematerialization to the former. (Italics mine) [ie: Bochner's]

"Does this dissuade the author? No. She replies in her preface, "Granted. But for the lack of a better term I have continued to refer to a process of dematerialization." (Italics mine)" [ie: Bochner's]

Nonetheless, in his 1971 "ICA Lecture" Bochner states "For lack of a better term, I would refer to this new period as "post-modernism"" (p 91) (Italics mine) [ie: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's] thusly repeating Lippard's apparently unforgivable lack of intellectual rigor.

Bochner continues in his "Excerpts from Speculation" by writing re the term conceptual art that "The unfortunate implication is of a somewhat magical/mystical leap from one mode of existence to another." (p 72 of Solar System & Rest Rooms) Despite this criticism, Bochner loves Sol LeWitt's work even tho LeWitt writes in his "SENTENCES ON CONCEPTUAL ART": "1. Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach." (p 11 of "Art-Language", volume 1, number 1, May 1969)

In Bochner's "ICA Lecture", also presented in this bk, he states:

"The approach that I am interested in could be characterized as "reflexive abstraction." It does not derive from things, but from our ways of acting on things. My interest is in the various fundamental ways we have of understanding and moving through the world, of coordinating our acts or operations, for example: joining, separating, corresponding, or transposing. I am not "making" art. In the sense that my work is intransitive (it has no object), I prefer to say that I am "doing" art." - p 92

These statements are all well & good & I think they're among the most important, for me, of what Bochner has to say. At the same time, I have sympathy for the critic's attempts to find a commonality of description that assists w/ seeking out the manifestations of a zeitgeist. I, personally, have been substantially involved w/ a movement called Neoism. This movement has been named & defined by the people involved w/ it. It's also resisted historicization by being as slippery as most of its more serious participants are capable of. If one reads about Neoism as a movement w/ some sort of narrow focus like "plagiarism" or as something that manifests itself thru such means as Visual Poetry than one can be sure that the real Neoism is elsewhere. In fact, it seems to me that there may very well not be a movement called "Conceptual Art" - there may, instead, be some like-minded people who use differing terminologies, like Bochner's "reflexive abstraction". This 'movement', so-named, may be more of an invention of critics & anthologists - the name, unlike Neoism or Dadaism or Surrealism, doesn't come from the people associated w/ it - it comes instead from people looking at & thinking about an amorphous group of practitioners.

Similarly, I've always felt that Fluxus implied something more elusive than a clear common denominator movement, & that there're Situationists w/o there being a 'Situationism' - something that seems to be almost universally forgotten these days (or, more accurately, perhaps, never even picked up on by lazy (pseudo-)intellectuals).

At least Bochner says that "the artists I was writing about did not necessarily agree with what I wrote. Judd was an empiricist, so he was very skeptical about my ideas. Andre was a materialist, and was actually quite hostile. Anyway, the point is that my writing did not represent what those artists thought about their work." - p 169

In short, it seems to me that one of Bochner's strengths is in avoiding being trapped by the simplicity of any particular theory as the theory: "I decided that my contribution would be a selection of quotations which taken together might (or might not) suggest the impossibility of a "theory" of photography." - p 180

Alas, as I'm always saying (does anybody listen?!), it's the "Art" part here that strikes me as the weakest idea of all - & this is part of what contributes to the ultimate borderline mediocrity of Bochner & others. In 1997 I was 'interviewed' by someone in Berlin who wanted to talk about art. I told him I wasn't interested in talking about the subject. He kept insisting, I kept changing the subject. The result? He published his article saying it was 'the most boring art interview' he'd ever conducted (or some such)! Despite my actually having sd things in this 'interview', he didn't bother to quote me (w/ one exception) b/c I didn't say what he wanted me to! In the early 2000s, I was approached by a writer for a Brazilian arts magazine. I've never had anything published about me in Brazil so participating in this interview wd've been 'good for my career' (if that were where I'm 'at'). He asked me very predictable questions about Neoism's lineage w/ Dada, etc. Since, as usual, I didn't want to participate in an art interview & didn't want Neoism to be perceived as an 'art movement', I replied to each of his questions w/ a repetitious description of a sexual obsession. I never read from the Brazilian writer again & seriously doubt that the interview ever appeared in whatever publication he was connected w/. Bochner, alas, never goes so far. He objects to "Conceptual Art", he objects to "Dematerialization", but he never objects to the much more banal & stupid context of ART itself - that wd be going too far, eh?

I'm reminded of composer Cornelius Cardew's response to Concept Artist (self-description) Henry Flynt's call to "DEMOLISH SERIOUS CULTURE": "Dear Mr. Flynt..Since I may be depending on organized culture for my loot & livelihood I can wish you only a limited success in your movement...." - p 73, Flynt's Blueprint for a Higher Civilization

&, alas, maybe it's Bochner's lack of vision, lack of ability to take that true great critical leap that ultimately makes this work such a colossal bore for me. Take, eg, his collaboration w/ Robert Smithson entitled "The Domain of the Great Bear". Throughout this bk, the piece is emphasized as some sort of great breakthrough:

"The befuddlement of the readers of Art Voices wondering what The Domain of the Great Bear was doing in its pages delighted Bochner and Smithson, for, notes Bochner, "it meant that [they] had succeeded in flying under the radar screen." Those poor perplexed readers were unknowingly right on target, though, for what Bochner and Smithson had been secretly doing was questioning the identity of art, its boundaries; moreover, they were declaring among themselves (and to their friends) that it was this questioning of boundaries that made of their piece a work of art - or to say it otherwise, that the work of art (as in "the job of art") is to question, abolish, or expand boundaries. There are, of course, many other reasons, now that the secret has long been leaked, for which The Domain of the Great Bear "is" a work of art. Here are just three: (1) its parodic structure (including a parody of Donald Judd's Hemingway-esque style of writing, and, as far as layout is concerned, a self-parody of the minimalist grids, which both Smithson and Bochner had been previously using in their sculpture); (2) the montage structure of the brilliant choice of illustrations (for example, the juxtaposed shots of the old-fashioned and "morbidly lit" entrance hall and of the slick installation of the "Astronomia" gallery sponsored by IBM); (3) its utter deadpan-ness, perfectly attuned to the anti-expressive stance deployed by Bochner at the time in his small serial sculptures, his number drawings, and his Portraits pieces (made out of lists of synonyms gathered in a thesaurus). Parody, montage, and deadpan-ness are all aesthetic strategies, each with a copious history. But for Bochner at least (and it might have been the same for Smithson), the importance of The Domain of the Great Bear seems to have been that it confirmed that the medium per se did not matter. This did not mean, as he insisted over and over, that one could bypass the medium altogether, but that anything could be transformed into an artistic medium. The Domain of the Great Bear, precisely because the gap between magazine article and "work of art" seemed inititally so unbridgeable, is one of Bochner's first "verifications of a hypothesis."" - pp vi-vii, Yves-Alain Bois's "Foreword"

No amt of hyperbolic hot air will ever make The Domain of the Great Bear interesting to me. In an interview w/ Lizbeth Marano this exchange occurs:

"MB: It grew out of our conversations about how to subvert the gallery system. One idea was to circumvent production by going directly to reproduction, to make a work where there was no original. We thought that by using the art magazine as the vehicle, it would transform what is expected as a secondary source into a primary medium. The planetarium was chosen for a couple of reasons - first because it was so fascinating in itself, but mainly because it provided the perfect camouflage for our real intentions. When we offered the piece to Sam Edwards, the editor of Arts Magazine, he was intrigued by it and gave us eight pages and let us do the layout.

"LM: Did he realize he was getting an artwork?

"MB: No. We made sure not to present it to him in those terms." - p 170

[..]

"MB: The idea was that a reader would read this and be baffled. Why is it in an art magazine? What's it about? What does it have to do with anything? These days you see a lot of artists' projects in magazines. Artforum has "artists' projects." Each artist tries to do something that's a little different, to come up with a new way of inserting "artwork" into a magazine. But it is always in quotation marks, because you know it is meant to be an artwork. Domain was subversive because it was camouflaged. We wanted to bring the reader into it without knowing what they were getting into. It looked like everything else in the magazine, only more so. It wasn't in quotation marks, it was set right into the context. Our intention was to disrupt the flow by surprising the reader with something unexpected, which would then call into question everything in the magazine."

[..]

"And since it takes place as a work solely within the media, with no aura whatsover, it fulfills certain postulates of what came to be called conceptualism. In that sense I would say it predicted conceptualism. It was the first signal of a new attitude about art." - p 171

Ooooooo-Kaaaaaaaay. It's precisely the NARROWNESS of Bochner's position that enables him to delude himself into thinking that he was opening up such wide vistas. But he's like a person who only opens his door wide enuf to let himself in & out who suddenly discovers that he can open it 2 inches wider. In the meantime, people accustomed to opening the doors all the way wd be baffled by his behavior. The main implication here is everything in an arts magazine wasn't itself art. Therefore, the artists who designed the cover & the layout, eg, weren't artists. I reckon they were 'commercial artists' - an inferior thing to the 'real art' that Bochner & Smithson apparently thought of themselves as representing. In other words, the arts magazines that Bochner was familiar w/ & thought in terms of fit this model: gallery has show of artist's work, magazine does story of show presenting photographs of artist's work. The market system is clear: the gallery is the store, the magazine is the catalog for the store. But is that what Marcel Duchamp thought when he edited/contributed-to the 1917 magazine RONGWRONG?! Now it cd be argued that RONGWRONG was an artists' magazine & not an "arts magazine". IMO (In My Opinion) that's putting too fine a point on it & wd just be illustrative of the NARROWNESS previously alluded to.

An article about a Planetarium appears in an arts magazine. The readership was then expected to "read this and be baffled". Perhaps that was the case. But why? The planetarium in question is in the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. I've worked for a science center, 3 arts museums, a history museum, & a natural history museum & had work exhibited in a children's museum, etc.. In ALL these places, the exhibits are designed & built by artists. Museums are the primary places where art is exhibited. Bochner & his interviewers act like having an article about a museum in an arts magazine is like finding someone smoking a cigarette underwater w/o any diving gear on.

As for the article itself: the layout is very straightforward & conventional. The "self-parody of the minimalist grids" amts to nothing more than an ordinary layout that I doubt that anyone wd've found puzzling. Given that most of the writing & all the illustrations are simply taken from promotional literature, the writing only steps outside the mold when Smithson or Bochner write it & even then its "deadpan-ness" really doesn't amt to much. No doubt they wrote things that wdn't be in an ordinary article about such a subject. Things like: "The hall is confining, claustrophobic. If this is outer space, any closer will do. These flat heavenly bodies are nothing more than transposed images of mental fixity. The room is a replica of quasi-deaths." (p 20) Big deal. Perhaps, at the time, w/in the narrow art market world of NYC, this was slightly odd. But I think it's much ado about nothing.

NOW, in contrast: when I was 15 yrs old in the 10th grade, the guy I sat next to in Honors English asked me to write his self-description for him for our highschool yrbk. This wd've been 1968, the yrbk was published in 1969. Either I alone, or both of us, picked these words out of a handy dictionary: "I am an ursiform, unranographic, wrasse, zymurgical, neodymic, asegaic, clepsydric, coccidioniodonycosic, existentialist person." Contrast that to the previous person's entry: "Renewed in Christian faith. Living in a rational world." When I was 16 (1969) I wrote this self-description for the yrbk (published 1970): "Nascent, orthopteran, sabaist, luxated, oleographic, turgid; labiac, excogitate, accentric, hydrophytic, crispy, intarsia, magnetize." This is encoded, by the by, it's not just 'random words'. Here's the entry before mine: "I laugh a lot." I maintain that these 2 examples are far more subversive uses of language than anything Bochner has ever done & that the appearance of such language in a highschool yrbk is far more unexpected than his planetarium article was in an arts magazine.

"One idea was to circumvent production by going directly to reproduction, to make a work where there was no original": I've got news for you: there IS an original. You can't reproduce something w/o producing it 1st. DUH. In other words, their original layout for the article was/is the original. They cd destroy that after it gets printed from but that doesn't make it less of an original - it just makes it a destroyed original.

"In that sense I would say it predicted conceptualism. It was the first signal of a new attitude about art.": the article appeared in the fall of 1966. Contrary to Bochner's claim, I present the following: the term "Concept Art" was coined by Henry Flynt in 1961: from Henry Flynt's bk entitled Blueprint for a Higher Civilzation (1975): "I am the originator of concept art, the most influential contemporary art trend. In 1961 I authored (and copyrighted) the phrase "concept art." My document was first printed in An Anthology, ed. LaMonte Young, New York, 1962." - front inner flap. Later, on p 9 of the same bk, Flynt says that An Anthology came out in 1963. Either way, this is a minimum of 3 yrs before Bochner & Smithson's article appeared. & Flynt was in NYC too. & Flynt was published by a prominent NYC cultural figure.

I find Bochner's "Methodology (1968)" to be more promising - even tho it is taken straight from science & can't, therefore, be properly called "Bochner's":

"1. Hypothesis (what if...)
2. Demonstration (it could be like this...}
3. Theory (therefore it seems that...)"

Applying this type of mindset to art seems more likely to produce interesting results than the more common 'I want to make something that looks such-&-such a way.'… (más)