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HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
How much control does the artist have in the interpretation of his work?
MEL BOCHNER:
A little bit in the beginning, but eventually you have to give up control of the interpretation of your work. It seems that things only last as long as they can be misused. So it becomes a question of what the degree of misuse is. But it's inevitable, it will be misunderstood once it enters the culture.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So it's to do with misunderstanding?
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. The context something is created evaporates almost immediately. Once that time frame is lost each subsequent interpretation, each subsequent change in historical contradictions transforms the meaning of that work. All interpretations become part of that work. Even the misuse of it becomes part of the work. At that point you have two entities: the entity that you thought you knew when you were making it, and you have the so-called "grown up child." Then the problem becomes what right do you have to interfere in the life of your children after they have grown up and left home? Of course you can protest against the misuse of your work, but you must be aware that your protest becomes part of the work.
SANDRA ANTELO-SUAREZ:
Is that just an interpretative misunderstanding or is it actually the reworking of a piece that one has done at some point? Can it be an afterthought?
MEL BOCHNER:
It could be both. Either you didn't realize the potential of an idea, or you thought you had taken something to its conclusion and then realize you hadn't. For example, my "Measurement" pieces. Within the context of the '60s, it would have been inconceivable to have put them on canvas. Yet as time past, I kept thinking there's more left here, another layer of complexity that I missed. So it's not simply rethinking the past, it's more like finding a new perspective to see it from.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
I interviewed Billy Kluver a few years ago for the same series of interviews, and speaking about experiments in art and technology, he mentioned your "Singer Project" which is very much related to what John Latham in England set up, the Artists Placement Group. Kluver had a similar project in which people were invited for residencies. I wondered if you could tell me a little about your experience with EAT in this "Singer" lab. I imagine there must be a lot of realized and unrealized issues because "The Measurement" series grew out of this, it was one of the things that was triggered by it, but at the same time there were a lot of unrealized projects in this context.
MEL BOCHNER:
The "Singer Project" proved to be important to me, for a number of reasons. But I had two requirements before I accepted the project, because I didn't want to be there as a "tourist." I wanted to be there on exactly the same terms as the scientists, so I demanded a salary - whatever the average salary was for a research scientist. I knew it was the only way to be taken seriously. My second requirement e was an office, so I was physically part of that situation.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
You were infiltrating.
MEL BOCHNER:
You could see in those terms. The daily process was quite simple; we sat around a table drinking coffee, and talking. I talked about the things I was thinking about and the things that I wanted to do, and they did the same. One of my projects was to feed numbers into the computer and the computers would generate permutations of those numbers which would be printed out as photographs.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
That must have been a very early moment of digital photography, that's incredible.
MEL BOCHNER:
Unfortunately a bit too early, because they didn't have the technology to do it. The programmer told me, 'do you know what, you can make these faster by hand than I can' because, in 1968, he couldn't write a complex enough program. At that time you had to translate everything into FORTRAN. That sort of washed out the one project I had intended to do there. So after that we sat around for three months just talking.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Coffee breaks!
MEL BOCHNER:
Basically a day-long coffee break. But this is what they did for a living, what they did every day. It was research and development, brainstorming new things for the company to produce, sitting around the table, scribbling notes to themselves. So, right from the very first day, I started saving every scrap of paper.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
And has that been published?
MEL BOCHNER:
I made a Xerox edition of two, which I called "The Singer Notes."
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So it remains kind of unpublished.
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes. What was exciting was that the conversation roamed all over the place. One scientist was very interested in color theory. So we started designing a motorized three-dimensional color model. It never got built, but it led to some interesting conversations about the chemistry of color. They told me about some dyes that had recently been invented that were temperature sensitive. Only at certain temperatures would you be able to see them. One project I came up with was to draw or write things in a landscape using dyes that you could only see when it was very cold. Suddenly when the temperature fell below 32F, a message would come out of the ground.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
A form of public art which according to the weather would be...
MEL BOCHNER:
Invisible. Anyway, many of the ideas weren't meant to be realized, they were pure speculation, meant to provoke the conversation, because it was clear to me that the conversation themselves were "the project." The conversations often centered around the idea of objectification - how can we find a common language, and that invariably came down to some form of measurement. It was about how experience can be communicated, and at the same time, the fallibility of every measurement system.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
No absolute.
MEL BOCHNER:
Exactly and that's where perception came into the equation.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Perhaps there are some connections with Merleau Ponty?
MEL BOCHNER:
In a way, very close to his ideas. The first measurement piece that I did was for the sake of the conversation. I secretly went around the laboratory measuring things, marking dimensions on the walls and floors with letraset numbers.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
That was an intervention directly into the science lab?
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes. For example, I measured the distance from a spray can to the end of the wall.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
And so if the can is removed it leads to disorder!
MEL BOCHNER:
Or if the door is closed the signifier disappears. I had photographs taken of these interventions and when I looked at the photographs the interesting thing was that there was no way to know the actual size of the object in the photograph. So I next drew twelve inches on the wall and photographed myself against it, then gave the negative to the printer and asked him to print it so that the measurement in the print would be exactly twelve inches, or actual size. By doing that the photograph became the index of the index, or a vicious circle. That, for me, was the end of photography.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So the time of your residency at the Singer lab was not only the beginning of "The Measurements" but also the moment of the end of photography for you.
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
When I interviewed Billy Kluver, it struck me that rather than discussions around round tables about interdisciplinarity, bringing practitioners together in a very pragmatic sense with a concrete project is a truly visionary model. Do you think this is the case?
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes, I do. The EAT project was visionary also in terms of the openness and generosity of it. Rauschenberg and Kluver made so much time and energy available for other artists, I can't think of anything else that's been like that. EAT was unique because it wasn't ideological in any sense - that in itself was pretty radical in the sixties.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
And transgenerational too. Before we were talking about misunderstandings, (and I was curious about this in relation to science and engineering) there can sometimes be productive misunderstandings, and this was just at the moment that you made the amazing work entitled Misunderstandings. Could you talk a little about these issues and this work?
MEL BOCHNER:
When I realized in 1967, that my work had become about photography without wanting it to - I thought, I should do some research, look into the history of the medium and find out what's been written about it, what the issues are. What I found was really pretty dumb - it had no value in any theoretical terms. And the more I read, the more I began to see it all as a colossal misunderstanding. So I started compiling a set of misunderstandings. After a while I had quite a large number of these quotations which I wanted to publish. The first title was "Dead Ends and Vicious Circles"...
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
That's a beautiful title.
MEL BOCHNER:
...I submitted it to Artforum but Philip Leader said 'we're not a goddamn photography magazine, this is an art magazine, don't give me anything on photography, we don't do photography!' Then I sent it to Art in America and they were not interested either, but suggested that I send it to a photography magazine! Like Popular Photography! Well I knew that no photography magazine could possibly be interested in this, so I put it in a drawer and forgot about it. Then in 1970, Marian Goodman, who then had a gallery called Multiples Gallery, came up with the idea of doing a boxed multiple set of artists' photographs. She made this box which was quite an amazing thing, it had Smithson, Graham, Ruscha, Dibbets, Rauschenberg, LeWitt, myself and a number of other artists. My contribution was a version of Dead Ends and Vicious Circles, a compilation of quotations I titled "Misunderstandings( A Theory of Photography)." And to further add to the confusion, three of the quotes were fakes, I made them up. The last card in the envelope is a reproduction of a negative of a Polaroid, but of course Polaroids don't have negatives!
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
In terms of "Experiments in Art, Technology" I wanted to ask you about the series of photographs called "Transparent and Opaque."
MEL BOCHNER:
Another EAT project.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
...and in a very pragmatic way they made a link for you with a production photographer.
MEL BOCHNER:
I wanted to take photographs of completely ephemeral things, something that would have no reason to be except to be photographed - to pose for its photograph! Once it had been photographed, it evaporated, or dissolved. I never took any of my photographs myself so I was thinking about who to get to photograph this project for me. I thought the best thing would be to get a professional photographer of the kind who takes snazzy photographs in magazines of beer bottles, you know, a product photographer.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So was the aim to make it generic?
MEL BOCHNER:
Not generic just not "artistic." All the photographers I knew worked for artists and took photographs of sculptures and paintings. They already knew, or thought they knew what I wanted. But I wanted to get someone between myself and the object, who would do something that I couldn't expect. I found out that it cost $150 per hour to hire one of these photographers. I asked E.A.T for a grant of $300 to buy two hours of time. Francis Mason, who was the director at that point, said 'oh that's a great idea, here's the money, go ahead'. So I found someone listed in the telephone book and went to him with a piece of glass, a can of shaving cream, which was opaque and white, and a jar of vaseline which is colorless and transparent. I explained the project to him, I think he thought I was deranged. He kept asking me 'what are you trying to sell with these photographs?' We took two chairs and put the piece of glass between them and I squirted the shaving cream on. My only directions were 'do something that you think would be really beautiful'.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
It's incredible because it's almost a painting.
MEL BOCHNER:
Because I had in the back of my mind the whole question of painting; paint, image, representation, abstraction, composition. But doing it through photography was a way of demythologising them, of subverting the romanticism of painting. It's another case of use and misuse. The way in which something done within a specific context, now lost, can be found useful at a later date.
SANDRA ANTELO-SUAREZ:
Or it finds its context later on. Which leads me to another question, because it was around the same time that you curated the "Working Drawings" exhibition.
MEL BOCHNER:
Slightly earlier actually, in '66.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Earlier we spoke about the museum, and I'm very interested about this idea of artists curating their own displays or shows, so I wanted to ask you about the working drawings, and also how they started. I know of it through the reprint which I bought a few years ago, and I wanted to ask you about the genesis of the exhibition and how you came to curate it.
MEL BOCHNER:
I was a young art history instructor at the School of Visual Arts. The director of the gallery at the school invited me to curate an exhibition of drawings for a Christmas show. I didn't realize that she was putting the accent on the word "Christmas" while I was putting the accent on the word "drawings"! There was clearly a miscommunication. Anyway, my work at that time was about getting away from objects and the "finished thing." I had in mind the notion of getting upstream from the work, trying to find the source. That's what led me to the concept of "working drawings." My original intention was to organize an exhibition that focused on the thought process, a kind of genealogy of the artwork. So I asked artists that I knew and some that I didn't to borrow their working drawings, but I asked them to choose the works themselves. I didn't want to enforce any specific aesthetic view on the work. Everyone was very co-operative and very agreeable. When I got the drawings, the fascinating thing was that they all looked remarkably similar! I thought that was really interesting. Unfortunately, the director of the gallery did not. First she said 'we can't afford to frame all these little scraps of paper. And anyway, what the hell are they?' I explained it to her but she still wasn't buying it. So I said 'well it's not important that we show the actual drawings, we could show photographs of them. She said 'we don't have money for the photographs either.' So I left her office and I suddenly thought of the Xerox machine that the school had just bought: at that time a very new thing.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
The early days of the Xerox.
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes, and because I was on the art history faculty, I had unlimited use of the machine. So I thought, well, if they can't buy frames and if they can't afford photographs, at least the Xeroxes are free!
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
And this was before Seth Siegelaub's "Xerox Book"?
MEL BOCHNER:
Two years before.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So yours was probably the first Xerox exhibition in history.
MEL BOCHNER:
Probably. Anyway, when I'd made the Xeroxes the big revelation was that all the various drawings on different sized pieces of paper were now all the same size, they were all 8.5 by 11; they had already become a book.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So it just happened.
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes, it but it happened within a specific context. One of the things that I was thinking about at that time was Marshall McCluhan's statement that 'the photocopying machine will make everyone a publisher'. So I thought 'well, this makes me a publisher.' So I thought well, this makes me a publisher, this will be my book. But there weren't enough pages. I thought I needed at least a hundred to make it interesting, but I had run out of artists who I knew or whose work I was interested in. So I called a mathematician, an architect, a dancer, a chemist, because they all must make some kind of working drawing too. When there still weren't enough pages, I Xeroxed diagrams from Scientific American magazine. Next, I decided that there should be four books because that's the first non-primary number, it suggests infinity or reproduction, and that's what Xerox was all about. From the stationary store I bought the most conventional black ringbinder notebooks, with plastic sleeves to put the pages in, so it was like a book in an office. The final decision was to exhibit them on four sculpture stands in the center of an empty gallery. Each sculpture stand was the same height as a table, which made it uncomfortable to bend over the whole time you were reading the book. At that point I returned all of the drawings and explained what I was doing to see if there were any objections; there were none, though Judd was a little skeptical when I said that I considered the exhibition a work, he couldn't see how it could be called my work. So I explained that I had made certain decisions along the way that were no longer curatorial decisions but artistic decisions. He shrugged his shoulders; still couldn't see it. But he didn't withdraw. He had said from the beginning that he didn't make drawings and didn't consider what he had given me to be drawings. That's why he gave me his fabrication bill, and said that 'this is probably my best drawing.'
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
The industrial process of production.
MEL BOCHNER:
Exactly.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
We found these instructions for use, do-it-yourself instructions and they triggered the project Do-It, which is artists from all kinds of contexts and different generations, proposing instructions which are then realized by museums or by people in their homes. I was very interested in knowing more about the use of instructions and partitions, and also more about your photocopied books because somehow these process drawings are a lot of instructions, partitions or scores. There was a moment in Fluxus which followed a post-Cage idea of the open partition and misunderstanding being part of it, but then there are a lot of different uses of partitions, and I was wondering what your position is in relation to this?
MEL BOCHNER:
I don't have a single unified position. There are works of mine that can be made from instructions, and other works that can't. In terms of the whole idea of instructions, I'm more interested in the situation where the instructions are inside the work. In other words, where you don't need to know the recipe before you eat the cake!
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
[laughs]
MEL BOCHNER:
For example, "The Theory of Painting" incorporates language written on the wall which grammatically maps the physical relationships; the language is, in a sense, the instructions or the genetic code of the piece. It is presented as equivalent to the physical evidence.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So it's both.
MEL BOCHNER:
It's both; in order to create a dialectical tension. Do you go from language to object or from object to language?
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Can you give us another example of instructions in your work?
MEL BOCHNER:
"The Seven Properties of Between;" a logical proposition is set parallel to a physical situation. Each statement expresses a relationship between the stones: seven different propositions describing the possible conditions of "betweenness." The seventh situation is a single stone sitting on the paper. It reads: "if nothing is between a and b, they are identical." Clearly that's not true but no-one ever questions it! Why? Because everyone looks at an artwork as if it expresses a truth. Well what if it's a lie?
SANDRA ANTELO-SUAREZ:
And that's what you said in the piece "Language is not Transparent" and you've stamped it seventeen times, so the last one was almost invisible.
MEL BOCHNER:
Language obliterating itself. This was my argument with certain of my contemporaries, who proceeded as if language were transparent.
SANDRA ANTELO-SUAREZ:
So that's one way in which semiotics came into your work.
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes, because the situation is more complicated than putting a statement on the wall and calling it a work of art.
SANDRA ANTELO-SUAREZ:
Also the fact that while it might mean one thing to one generation, it might mean something completely different to another; it might also be the opposite or even become obsolete.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So instructions are in difficulty.
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes and that's what makes them interesting. It's the difficulties that make things interesting. But the difficulties must somehow be integrated.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So does this have to do with resistance?
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes, absolutely.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Coming back to the Xerox books for a moment, there is a wide range of partitions, open proposals, pre-production, production, post-production, all kinds of instructions are in there. Is it true to say there is a wide range?
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes, and because I left the choice of drawings to the individual artists, the book has taken on another life that I couldn't have anticipated. And this is another example of how things are understood and misunderstood. People now look at it and think 'oh it's a book of drawings by famous artists.' But none of these artists were famous at that time. Secondly, many of those drawings have disappeared; so it's the only record of them that exists. And thirdly, whatever's in that book, is absolutely raw material, an accurate documentation of what they were doing around September of 1966.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So it's a time capsule.
MEL BOCHNER:
Inadvertently, yes.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Not only did it anticipate Seth Siegelaub's "Xerox Book," but also Lucy Lippard's work, "955,000" or whatever.
MEL BOCHNER:
It's funny that you should mention that. I actually did an instruction piece for that Lippard show.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Can you tell us about it?
MEL BOCHNER:
No matter what you ask someone to do in those kinds of shows, they usually don't do! [laughs] They usually just put the instructions up on the wall. If they have 50 artists in the show, how can they perform all of those instructions in one week? So I wanted to do something where the piece would exist without anyone having to do anything. Lucy's instruction was to assign one cubic foot of empty space somewhere in the exhibition to me with no definition other than her knowledge of where it was! [laughs]
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
It was a secret between you and her, a conspiracy.
MEL BOCHNER:
All she had to do was say to herself that the cubic foot right there belongs to Mel. The boundary existed only in her head and her imagination. It was a way of being both in and out of the exhibition at the same time. Another piece which was similar, the next stage of that, was in the exhibition called "The Brooklyn Bridge Show"...
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
... By Alana Heis?
MEL BOCHNER:
... And Gordon Matta Clark. It was Gordon who came to me and said 'we're doing this show and everyone's doing something or giving instructions to do something on or under Brooklyn Bridge. Then Shunk and Kender are going to photograph everything and it's going to be shown at the Museum of Modern Art'. I was already getting a bit sick of these kinds of shows by that time. But I went down to the Brooklyn Bridge, which I knew, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, I walked back across the Brooklyn Bridge, I walked across the Bridge, I looked under the Bridge, and I said 'I can't think of anything to do!' So I told Gordon, ' I can't think of anything to do.' And he said 'Try harder, you'll think of something!' And I said, 'No, that's what I'm doing! Not thinking of something to do.' So he said 'Okay, but that's going to be very difficult to photograph.' I thought 'at last, a work you can't photograph.'
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Did you appear on the artists list?
MEL BOCHNER:
I can't remember. [laughs]
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
And what about cinema in all of this? We have spoken about music and the link to partitions and so on, photography, and very early you anticipated this situation of the post-medium condition. What about cinema within this post-medium condition? You did a work about Godard's "Alphaville" and at the same time you made several experimental films
MEL BOCHNER:
Robert Moskowitz and I were visiting a mutual friend one day, in 1965, who was making a film and had 72 seconds of film left in his camera. He said 'if you guys have any ideas for a 72 second movie, you can have the rest of this film.' That's how we came up with our first film idea "Walking a Straight Line through Grand Central Station." Starting at the 42nd Street entrance we walked the camera straight through the station and up the escalator that takes you out of the building, which, as it happened, took about 72 seconds! But the idea was to attack the rationality of the straight line with the chance movement of the rush hour crowd.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
There was a high degree of unpredictability!
MEL BOCHNER:
A very high degree! [laughs] I was the cameraman, Bob was walking in front of me and slightly to the left. The idea being that I would keep his ear in focus in the lower left hand corner and he would guide me through the station. But, of course, with the crowd bombarding me from all sides, the movement of the camera was impossible to control. The film was the ultimate cinema-verite nightmare! Our second film, "New York Windows," was the opposite, total stillness. Bob and I were both great fans of Warhol's films, which were just coming out at that time. But his films were a return to what Edison was doing at the turn of the century, basically turning on the camera and recording life as it is lived. I wanted something which was much more abstract. But since a film has to be a film of something, how can it be made abstract?
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
So it involved a high degree of self-reflexivity?
MEL BOCHNER:
Exactly, figuratively and literally, and that's where the window comes in. The window presented itself as a metaphor for self-reflexivity. We framed the images in the movie in relation to the frame of the window, so you get the superimposition of the film frame, which is an abstract concept, with the window frame, which is literal. We set the camera up on a tripod in front of the window, wound it up, turned it on, and just let the camera film itself filming the window. The objects inside the window remain motionless, while, like a mirage, the pane of glass reflects the movement of cars and people behind the camera. The space between the camera and the window collapses. The front is in the back, the back is in the front. It's a vicious circle of self-reflection. We chose all different kinds of window displays; uptown, midtown, downtown. From teapots to tombstones. I thought of it as an epic film of New York - life, sex, death - all in twelve minutes. But unlike the Warhol idea of the truth of artificiality, I wanted to bring out the artificiality of truth. And that, it seemed tome, could only be done by editing - the Eisenstinian idea of the cut. You have to have the cut, to signify it's a film. Something starts and then abruptly stops, something else starts... One window ends and the next begins.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
Can I ask you one last question? There is one question that I ask in all the interviews and it's a question about un-built roads, about unrealized projects. Could you tell us about your favorite unrealized projects, and by that I mean projects which are utopic, projects which are maybe too big or too small to have been realized, forgotten, self-censored, censored by others?
MEL BOCHNER:
Yes. In 1967 or '68 there was a wonderful exhibition organized by Jan Van der Marck, a great curator who started the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, called "Art by Telephone." The idea was works of art that could be realized by telephone. There was a big controversy at that time because the minimal artists were having their sculptures fabricated industrially. Barnet Newman when they asked him what he thought about the minimalists making art by telephone, quipped 'well, they must geniuses because when I call the deli and order the sandwich, they never get it right.' Anyway, my piece for the show was an international game of "telephone." I called Van der Marck and read a text to him in English. He wrote it down and then called a friend of his, Arturo Schwartz in Milan. Van der Marck read it in English to Schwartz, who was supposed to translate it into Italian and call someone in Germany and read it to them in Italian; that person was to translate it into German and then call someone in Sweden, read it in German to someone who would translate it into Swedish, then call someone in France, who would translate it from Swedish into French, then call someone in England who would translate it back into "English." Finally that person would call Van der Marck and read the final version to him.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
That's beautiful.
MEL BOCHNER:
The piece was the first and last texts hung on the wall. But somewhere it broke down and it was never finished.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST:
: If you are still happy with the idea, that's something we could do for "Do It."
MEL BOCHNER:
Thirty years from idea to realization! [laughs]... Why not? |