Mel Bochner at the Art Institute of Chicago, Spertus Institute and Werner H. Kramarsky

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"Mel Bochner: Language, 19662006" was a selection of text-based work by the artist--some 50 drawings, printed materials, paintings and installations--that was part of the "Focus" series at the Art Institute. Among the offerings were four paradigmatic installations, including Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966). Here, Bochner placed, in an otherwise empty room, four loose-leaf notebooks, each containing 100 photocopy pages of notes, drawings, diagrams, musical scores and other materials that he had collected from friends or books, on plain white bases reminiscent of Minimalist sculptures of the time. On a wall in an adjacent gallery, Bochner installed his well-known Language Is Not Transparent (1970), in which the title phrase is scrawled in white chalk on a drippy black background. Also re-created was Axiom of Indifference (1973), in which eight open masking-tape squares are stuck to the floor on either side of a wall, with texts on the tape reading "all are in/all are out; all are not in/all are not out," etc. Three pennies per square are distributed accordingly, with the viewer challenged to remember the configurations from one side of the wall to the other. Given its simplicity, the work's ramifications are endless, as it adduces issues ranging from the formal (what are the fundamentals of composition?) to the linguistic and ontological.

Drawings included the various textual portraits on little sheets of graph paper--surprisingly delicate in feeling--that Bochner made of artist friends: Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt and others (1966). Each one lists words that characterize the subject's work or artistic processes. Portrait of Eva Hesse, perhaps the drawing with the greatest kinship to concrete poetry, has Hesse-related terms written in concentric rings--"wrap-up," "secrete," "ensack," etc.--in the overall circular shape characteristic of certain of her wall reliefs. There were also Wittgensteinian diagrams and notes and, in a case, two magazine projects, The Domain of the Great Bear (a collaboration with Smithson published in Art Voices, Fall 1966) and Beach Boys--100% (in Arts, June 1967).

The early work is pretty familiar; much of it was included in the excellent and definitive survey "Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible, 1966-1973," curated by Richard Field at Yale University in 1995 (see A.i.A., Sept. '96)--and this period has been discussed exhaustively, one might even say exhaustingly. (And yet again, in a related post-exhibition volume released in June '07 by Johanna Burton with an interview by James Meyer.) Indeed, were it not for the inclusion of more recent material--specifically the thesaurus-based drawings, paintings and monoprints that Bochner has been making for the past five years--one might well ask what the Art Institute's exhibition really adds to our understanding of this artist. Do we not know already how fundamental language is to Bochner? How much more useful it would be to survey the whole range of works, the mute alongside the textually articulated.

Which is why a 40-year survey of his drawings, the last show organized by the collector Werner H. Kramarsky at his private exhibition space on Lower Broadway in Manhattan and traveling (it closed at its final venue, the San Diego Museum of Art, on Mar. 18), was particularly satisfying. Works on paper, often quite modest of means, have been central to this artist's career and function synoptically within it. They ranged from Bochner's first piece utilizing the thesaurus, Opening (1966), in which the title and its synonyms are handwritten in ink on yellow notepaper, to working drawings (a suite, for example, of four great little drawings on graph paper, that favorite medium of Bochner's, related to his large floor installation Theory of Painting, 1969); a collage in burnt matchsticks (Counting: Transitive [1-4], 1973); several works from the 1970s wielding more complicated geometric shapes, like the pentagon; Comered (1986), an explosion of lines in charcoal, pastel and gouache, Bochner's riposte, perhaps, to Neo-Expressionism; and more atmospheric recent works, among them a couple of his compositions rotating four sheets around an open center, from the '90s, and the Johnsian Random Numbers (#1), 2002.

What does become clear in light of both shows is just how concerned Bochner has been--notwithstanding his zero-degree Conceptualist method and materials--to pursue art as something physical. As one speaker pointed out at a Bochner symposium held in Chicago in early December 2006, he has in some sense always been a painter--it's just a question of whether the arena is a canvas, a room or a notecard. Both shows were also a reminder of Bochner's deep, abiding irony, and even of how outright comic he can be--especially in his thesaurus paintings, which sometimes border on raunchy. Having discovered, after a hiatus of nearly 40 years between the first time he used the resource and a new foray into it, that Roget's had grown more generous in its inclusion of slang, Bochner began inflecting his lists of words and phrases, written in emphatic, blocky letters that sometimes (in the case of the wonderful monoprints on velvet) bleed in a rather malevolent fashion into the support; they begin with the mildest term (say, "mistake") and degenerate into the more jarring ("step on your dick"). In Chicago last winter, a huge painting, The Joys of Yiddish, which Bochner temporarily erected on the construction barrier of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies down the street from the Art Institute, consisted of a list of insulting Yiddish epithets, as much rooted in Bochner's own ethnicity as referring to Jewishness in general. If the early work was characterized by a black-and-white philosophical detachment, however intimately conveyed, the more recent pieces buzz with color and something of a pissed-off shtick that feel bracingly personal.

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