An earlier version of this review incorrectly referred to as Bochner’s 1966 word portrait of Ad Reinhardt. Although that work is in the exhibition, the description was of a 1966 word self-portrait. The review also said that Bochner stopped making thesaurus paintings for several decades after 1970. He stopped making thesaurus drawings during that period, but he didn’t start making thesaurus paintings until 2003. This version has been corrected.
Critic’s review: National Gallery’s ‘In the Tower: Mel Bochner’
(Copyright Mel Bochner 2011/ ) - Mel Bochner, \"Die,\" 2005 oil and acrylic on canvas
In 1966, when he was in his mid-20s, artist Mel Bochner assembled a collection of drawings and documents from various artists, architects and composers, photocopied them and displayed them in four black binders sitting on four pedestals. The result, a piece he called “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art,” is sometimes cited as the first example of conceptual art. That kind of claim is always tricky to prove, but it certainly moved the idea of art “upstream,” to use Bochner’s own term for his lifelong focus on the process and ideas rather than the traditional art object that can be bought, sold, fetishized and displayed in a gallery.
The slightly absurd length of Bochner’s title, its deliberate wordiness, presaged a lasting interest not only in words and language, but in how systems such as language or mathematics have in them inherent flaws and contradictions. When defining something with language, more description doesn’t always yield more clarity. “Bring me the red one” is often a far better way of getting your spouse to bring the right sweater than “bring me the red one next to the green one, under the blue one made of wool.”
(Copyright Mel Bochner 2011) - Mel Bochner. ‘Self / Portrait,’ 1966, ink on graph paper sheet.
Bochner’s interest in language as medium and material for art produced a series of early “thesaurus” drawings in the mid- to late 1960s, in which he created portraits of friends and colleagues using words taken from that boon to bad writers, the humble treasure house of synonyms. Arranged in rows, circles or columns, these works played with the essential but appealing flaw of the thesaurus, its abundance of words that are never quite interchangeable and often lead the writer away from rather than closer to the essence of his meaning.
An exhibition in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building tower space juxtaposes these early thesaurus and other language-based works with Bochner’s most recent paintings, which move his conceptual preoccupations into the strange new world of old-fashioned painting. It is a colorful show, richly rewarding and often surprisingly touching. If nothing else, it suggests that the “upstream” of Bochner’s current work is his older work, but with a twist, and it is in that twist that one gets a sense of something often deemed irrelevant to the conceptual artist: the humanity of the creator.
The “twist” is literal in a 2001 charcoal-and-pencil drawing called “Wrap: Portrait of Eva Hesse,” a recasting of a classic word portrait he made in 1966. The original drawing, in ink on graph paper, arranges various synonyms for the word “wrap” in concentric circles. The word wrap may refer to the material and techniques of Hesse, an artist and friend of Bochner, or may be an allusion to ideas of covering, surface, containment and disclosure. It is placed in the center of the circle, the form of which recalls specific Hesse works, including the breast-like circle of an untitled and contemporaneous work she made by winding concentric rings of cord and fixing them to masonite.
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