The Photographs of an Idea

Mel Bochner came to New York as a 24-year-old conceptual artist in 1964 at a time when virtually no galleries were seriously exhibiting photography as art. Photography was an overlooked medium in its commercial relationship to the art world, so much so that the young Bochner purchased a Walker Evans photograph from a 1965 exhibition for the now preposterously meager sum of $100. In this art scene which did not yet value photography, Bochner produced a series of innovative photographs that proved the medium’s potential. His seminal works would later help to elevate the status of photography as well as advance the aims of conceptual art.

For the opening of his current show at the Sackler, Mel Bochner: Photographs 1966-1969, curator Scott Rothkopf engaged the artist in a witty dialogue that illuminated the conceptual motivation of his photographs. Bochner is an influential and ground-breaking figure in the post-minimal and conceptual art movements. Although known more for his paintings, installations and drawings, Bochner’s photography offers an unusual insight into the process and development of the artist’s conceptual pursuit. Significantly, Bochner did not actually take and develop the photographs himself; rather he constructed and contrived the circumstances for their professional execution. These photographs are best viewed as the physical residue and record of his conceptual musings and investigations.

Ranging from cubic block constructions to perspectival black-and-white grids to colored images of shaving cream, Bochner’s work is essentially discursive and involves a response or conversation with certain ideological and visual contradictions. In what seems like a cold, bloodless and scientific artistic expression, there is actually an underlying and fundamental exuberance—a fervent obsession with ideas and a perpetual fixation on objectivity.

The exhibit is a compilation of separate photographic series that together form the first complete overview of Bochner’s short-lived career in photography. The photographs show how Bochner’s originality of thought hovers between artistic movements. While structurally indebted to minimalism, the photographic process denies the materiality of the object, thus gesturing towards conceptualism. But, because the photographic process is inevitably influenced by some degree of chance, Bochner is not simply translating unmediated literal concepts directly into visual form. Instead, he allows the interference and complication of the artistic process to advance the conceptual foundations of the work.

The first group of images—which is also his oldest work—describes Bochner’s investigation of block structures constructed from a systematic arrangement of two-inch cubes. Grid-like and highly organized in both presentation and content, the photographs depict the formation of these assembled cubic modules and their dependence on a mathematically predetermined model. Schematic diagrams that are evidence of the work’s interest in seriality are shown in conjunction with several views of the block structures. As Bochner stated, this series is principally about the process rather than the object. Attempting to undermine the accepted minimalist notion championing the “object nature” of art, these objects actually seek to be as visually uninteresting as possible in order not to distract from their purpose as models of a thought process.

In an incessant chain of increasingly complex visual premises and ideas, Bochner’s perspective series asks the viewer probing questions. Understanding linear one-point and two-point perspective as an invented illusionistic device or artistic tool, one will also observe that this ready-made and prefabricated formulaic system of perspective is unnecessary in photography as the image inherently depicts depth on its own. Nevertheless, Bochner applies the device of perspective to photography as a way of analyzing and looking at the artistic device itself, rather than actually using it. Portraying linear perspective as the image of a black or white grid on a contrasting ground in space, he is effectively displaying “a representation of representation.”

This codified riddle of illusionism is taken one step further in the manipulation of his former perspective images through “surface deformations.” Bochner takes the negatives and photographs of his perspective series as the literal object and subject of his next exploration: “I would use the photographs and negatives that I had and treat them as objects. By changing it as a surface, the photo-grid in perspective becomes a map of itself through deformation and crumpling. I had a photograph developed, soaked it until it dissolved, let that dry and shrivel up, photographed that and then had a negative and positive displayed.”

What results are beautiful and mountainous images that are a far cry from minimalism’s hard edge with their rich tones, palpable textures and perceived movement. In these distorted surfaces where the crumpled grids are maps of themselves, the viewer discovers, as Bochner put it, objects conflicted about their own identity.

In his 1968 series “Transparent and Opaque,” Bochner seems to abandon his flirtation with perspective and use textural nuance as the springboard for further photographs. By photographing glass surfaces smeared with either Vaseline or shaving cream and brightly colored with filtered lights, these photographs transform mundane, household accoutrements into stunning artistic landscapes. While the Vaseline acted as a shiny, phosphorescent light trap of transparency, the voluminous viscerality and lush corporality of the shaving cream reflect light, recording the light without the presence of its own physical existence. Bochner distills and separates the reflected color as imposed on the subject, and by isolating this formal element he recalls his previous perspectival investigations that also stressed the artistic device as artifice.

The last major series in the show deals with representation of measurements in photography. Through an Experiments in Art and Technology grant working with scientists, the artist became infatuated with scientific concerns about communication, quantification, numbers and measurements. Playing out these scientific concerns led to photographs of demarcated and measured spatial segments (with their numeric lengths inserted into the scene) in the interior three-dimensional environment of rooms. Bochner became increasingly interested in the representation of scale in a photograph and began developing images of a 12-inch measurement printed to actual size, so that the entire picture was necessarily life-size. At this point, Bochner felt that he had achieved the total deconstruction of photography because the life-size image was exactly as the real-life scene had existed, in which case the photograph was a superfluous and redundant ornament of reality. Discarding the photograph, he turns to an actual installation of measurements in space: measurement takes the place of photography.

Bochner’s photographs are like enigmatic riddles that must be deciphered in a logical and mathematical way. The pleasure that the viewer derives from his work lies in the beauty of the ideas that sustain the imagery.

Mel Bochner: Photographs 1966-1969

Sackler Museum

Through June 16

visual arts

Mel Bochner: Photographs 1966–1969

Mel Bochner

Sackler Museum

Through Jun. 16