The Brooklyn Rail

In the late sixties, Mel Bochner began making works of art that were measurements. These took many different forms, some more ephemeral than others, and challenged notions about what an artwork could be. Among this expansive body of work is a series called “48" Standards,” which the artist developed over the course of a month in a notebook of graph paper. For the first time, the complete set will be exhibited in New York. Ahead of the installation the artist spoke with Rail Managing Editor Charles M Schultz about the origins of his measurement works in Singer Labs, the musical subtext of the “48" Standards,” and what happens if you just stop believing in the things you’re supposed to believe in.

Charles M. Schultz (Rail): You first showed the “48" Standards” in 1969. Can you tell me about their origin, and what compelled you to bring them back for this exhibition?

Mel Bochner: That was over fifty years ago, Charlie, that’s a long time! [Laughter] I was a young artist trying to find something that was his own. I’d gotten to New York and I didn’t have any marketable skills, so I applied for a job at an arts magazine as a reviewer, and I got an interview with the editor, and he said, “So you’ve done a lot of writing?” And I said, “No, I haven’t.” And he said, “But you’ve done some reviewing?” And I said, “No, I never have.” And he said, “Well, what makes you think you can do this job?” And I said, “Well, I read the magazine, I read the reviews, and it doesn’t seem like it’s that difficult.” And he got a big chuckle out of that, and he said, “All right, I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a list of shows for a tryout. You review these shows, and the way it works is, everyone you review, you get $2.50 whether we publish it or not. So here’s a list of thirty shows. You review the show, we’ll publish it if we think it’s good.” It was mostly shows at frame shops in Greenwich Village, but I dutifully reviewed them and sent them in. About six weeks later, they sent me a copy of the new issue, and there were about ten or twelve of my reviews. So I’d gone from unknown to a published author.

Rail: To be perceived by your peers as a critic, when you’re trying to be an artist—did that create some tension or conflict?

Bochner: Among certain people, yes. I remember bumping into someone I knew at an opening at the Whitney and he said, “I’m never talking to you again.” “Really? Why? I thought we were friends?” He said, “No. I can’t be friends with a writer, and you’ve crossed over to the other side.”

Rail: I like that notion of the other side, because one of the things that I’ve been thinking about in your work is the significance of boundaries. It is something you have experimented with, tested, pushed in a lot of different ways. With the measurement pieces—including the “48" Standards”—I think about the separation or gap between the precision and accuracy of a measurement, which can be “correct,” as opposed to the viewer’s experience of the work, which is aesthetic and so generally averse to notions of correct and incorrect. I’m curious what you think about that, if the sense of boundaries has shifted now that the work is being put up in a totally different time and place.

Bochner: That’s an interesting question. I am a studio artist. I know people think of my work as being very conceptual, but I don’t have a predetermined idea of what I’m going to do. I try to let one work lead to another, and when you looked around at that time, it was very difficult, because you turned one direction and you were facing Willem de Kooning, you turned in the other direction and you were facing Barnett Newman. You say, “Wow, there’s no space in this forest to plant a new tree!” That’s why the writing was significant for me. There were a lot of things flooding my mind in those days, and the writing kept me going to galleries and following what was happening, even though most of it was contradictory.

As I look back on it, it was fascinating, because I really had no guidance. All of a sudden I had Andy Warhol dropped in my viewfinder. That was a big confrontation with everything that I knew and thought I knew, and then Pop art really hit. I remember buying a copy of Art International, and there was an article with an illustration of a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar, but it was all in dots, big dots. And I thought, boy, they are really cheap. They can’t get a good Ben-Day system? It’s so insulting to Picasso. And then I looked down at the tagline, and it’s Roy Lichtenstein. My mind just blew open, and I thought, wait a second, you can’t copy a Picasso and do it in dots. I mean, the idea of copying a Picasso was unthinkable, but in dots, in big dots? Then I read the article, and I thought, “this is really interesting.” It didn’t make any sense to me why anybody would copy Picasso. I mean, there were people doing imitation Picassos all over the world, but this was significantly different. A thought went through my mind, that if Lichtenstein could get away with this, there were a lot of other things that I might be able to get away with.

Rail: That must have been in your mind when you and Robert Smithson undertook your “The Domain of the Great Bear” article.

Bochner: It definitely was. I met Smithson in about ’66. Before the opening of the Primary Structures show, we met at a party, and we just did not get along. We had this really intense, drunken, late-night argument. Over the next couple of days, I remember thinking, I’ve been in New York a couple of years, I’ve met a lot of people, but this is the smartest guy I’ve met! And I realized that you judge people’s intelligence by how intelligent you feel when you’re talking to them. And talking to Smithson, you had to keep your thinking cap on, because he was very challenging. He was very smart, and he knew art history. I hadn’t met any other artists who knew anything about art history.

Rail: How did you reconnect?

Bochner: There was this wonderful woman whose name I can’t think of anymore. She was the literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar. She would have these Sunday soirees, and she invited me over for brunch a couple weeks later. I walked in the door and there’s Smithson, and we were immediate friends. There was this immediate identification, and we jumped right back into some intense conversation. And who should walk in but Walker Evans, who was a hero to both of us.

He was a hero to Smithson because of the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and he was a hero to me because I was just starting to work with photographs. So Smithson and I pulled Walker Evans aside, and he was this very dapper Boston Brahmin, very nattily dressed, very refined. And we had this all-afternoon conversation. At a certain point I said, “I think your work lines up with what some younger artists are trying to do, which is to achieve a kind of objectivity in their work that separates them from the Abstract Expressionists.” And he said, “I don’t know anything about contemporary art.” And I said, “Well, in terms of painting, what do you like?” He says, “Well, the greatest living artist today is Ben Shahn.” I was like, really?

Rail: I bet you and Smithson loved to hear that.

Bochner: Yes, it’s like—seriously? Anyway, from that point on Smithson and I were very friendly.

Rail: So how did you get from the soiree to co-authoring a magazine article?

Bochner: We used to meet and have lunch at this little dumpy place across the street from the Hayden Planetarium, which we both really liked and used to visit. And one day, we were talking about the idea of camouflage, and how you can mean one thing but camouflage it with something else. At the time, if you took your work to a gallery, they wouldn't want to see it. They wanted to see your slides. We thought it was ridiculous because slides are reproductions.

How can we camouflage this ridiculous situation? That was the question. We looked out the window, and there was the museum of natural history and the planetarium and we thought, what if we write an article about the planetarium as an art museum? And that’s how the planetarium piece came about. We went to the museum with a letter from the editor of an arts magazine, and they gave us total freedom in their photographic archives, which is a treasure beyond belief. We had so much fun going through rooms and rooms of archives and artworks.

The guy who published it was a new editor; his name was Sam Edwards, and he was just on the edge of the weathermen, and he wanted to revolutionize the magazine. He thought, this will fuck up their heads, and he gave us, like, ten pages, which was crazy.

Rail: Speaking of critics and magazines, another person that I wanted to talk to you about is Robert Pincus-Witten, the great critic and editor of Artforum. Was your relationship with Pincus-Witten similar to Smithson?

Bochner: Not at all, because Pincus-Witten wasn’t an artist.

Rail: Right, of course.

Bochner: He was a kind of outsider critic at first, because the whole system revolved around Clement Greenberg. Pincus-Witten was a nineteenth-century scholar who wrote about very obscure things like Rosicrucianism. He came to a show I had at a place called 112 Greene Street, which was kind of an early artists co-op. He came out of nowhere and reviewed the show.

Rail: I have a quote here from the review that Pincus-Witten wrote that I want to read to you: “What happens is that the space is verified, rather than experienced, through a set of concepts which only in an oblique sense ‘measure’ the existential model—namely the room in which all this takes place—a tautological mind bender, if ever there was one.” I was interested in this quote because it echoes something Alexis Lowry picked up on when she wrote the essay for your Dia catalogue. She also uses the word, “verification.” In the endnotes for her essay, she connects her thoughts to the work you did at Singer labs.

Bochner: Singer labs was a competitor to Bell labs, and they were both doing artist residencies. Singer had a little competition, and I was chosen. And the gig was that you were to spend two days a week out in Denville, New Jersey, and see what you could do. I had no idea what to do, and so they teamed me up with a group of people that worked there. We didn’t know each other. We didn’t know what anybody was interested in. So we started out having these round table discussions, and it began to boil down to a question of language. What did they mean when they said verification or tautology? For weeks, we did nothing but sit around and have these highfalutin conversations, and I slowly began to realize that there wasn’t much that was going to come of this. So I decided that I should record the conversation and that would be the work. Each day, I noticed that everybody had a pad of paper, and they would take down notes. So after each session, I collected the notes, which were very abstract, and Michèle Didier published it. It’s called Singer Notes, 1968.

In this search for a language that we could agree on, one of the words that was central to the conversations and which was the only thing that the scientists and engineers could agree upon in terms of an axiom of verification, was “measurement.” We had to have some system of measurement to verify our discoveries, because measurements are the only verifiable thing. So the next time I was scheduled to go out there, I took a package of Letraset and a ruler, and I went around the laboratory measuring things that were totally insignificant, to show them that you cannot really verify anything with measurement, because the measurement might verify the distance between two things, but what’s going to verify the measurement itself?

Rail: The Letraset became a constant for the measurement works. Why?

Bochner: Well, the first ones I did in my studio, I just did with a piece of charcoal. I measured it and I wrote the numbers, but they fluctuated, and they added a personality to the work that I didn’t want. I wanted it to be depersonalized. In those days, Letraset was the go-to medium for an industrial or a graphic-design look.

Rail: When you were doing the measurements at Singer labs, did you tell the scientists what you were up to? How did they respond?

Bochner: No, I didn’t tell anyone. I took an early bus one morning and I went around and just did these measurements, and when everybody else came to work, it was like, “What? What is this?” These were very no-nonsense people. And I said to them, “Well, how do you verify the verification? Is that 10 inches? Do you need another ruler to measure it? What happens when you move the can?” It started to bring up a lot of different degrees of ambiguity.

Rail: There was a MoMA show in the summer of 1971, organized by Willoughby Sharp, called Projects: Pier 18 that included photographs of your measurements on the abandoned pier. The photos are black and white, written in chalk—

Bochner: The photographs were taken by this very interesting pair of photographers, Harry Shunk and János Kender. They were European and did a lot of photography for Fluxus artists. Nice guys. They did the famous photograph of Yves Klein leaping from the window.

Rail: It’s interesting, the way they composed the photographs. The measurements are really embedded in the landscape. And it’s funny because the chalk writing looks so ephemeral, like it would just wash away in the first rainstorm. The pier, though decrepit, looks more enduring. But now the pier is gone and the art remains.

Bochner: Ars longa, vita brevis.

Rail: So true. [Laughter] Let’s go back a little further in time, when you were living in San Francisco. Did you meet people like Bruce Conner?

Bochner: Bruce Conner was a big deal.

Rail: It seems that there’s a fundamental quality the two of you share, a desire—pretty much from the outset—to shake the conceptual foundations the art world was resting on.

Bochner: I mean, what if you just stop believing in the things you’re supposed to believe in, and you try to find something else? The question I remember asking myself at the time was: what could belong to me and me alone? Well, two things I could think of were language and numbers, because they’re meant to express something else: adding, subtracting, dividing, measuring. If you measure something, does it become yours? If it’s not yours, whose is it? If you write something, the words aren’t yours, but the thoughts are yours. That opened my eyes to what felt like a different way to think about things. And then the question became, what to measure? Can you measure anything? Can you measure everything? Is the measurement itself the work? Does it have to relate to something?

In the beginning, I thought it should relate to something, and it should be a constant, which is how I came across the idea of using brown paper. At that time the use of non-art materials like Donald Judd’s plywood or galvanized iron/steel or Dan Flavin’s light bulbs—it was very much in the air. So I decided I wanted something that didn’t have a fine arts quality to it, something I didn’t have to go to the art supply store to buy. What do you have around the studio? Masking tape, pencils, markers, wrapping paper. So I looked into wrapping paper, which I thought was immediately identifiable as a non-art material, and I found that the paper came in standard sizes, and one of the standard sizes was 36 by 48 inches, which I recognized very quickly was a four by three rectangle with a diagonal of five, which is the golden mean—a nice coincidence.

Rail: Indeed.

Bochner: Visually, conceptually, it’s the perfect rectangle. So I took that as the meaning of standards. It was a standard thing. It came from the store. So that was a way forward, and I started to work out all these different combinations and as the series went on, I realized this could go on forever. I have to set some boundaries. One boundary is a 36 by 48 sheet. I did them all in the month of February, one for each day, and that’s the boundary of the series. Then I started expanding it and opening it up, adding certain constants and variables.

Rail: The idea of a standard, it makes me think of standards in music, foundational songs—

Bochner: Absolutely.

Rail: When you play a standard, it has to be familiar. You have to be able to recognize it. But then the performer also has to make it a little bit strange, so you also don’t recognize it. So the experience of a standard, it has to operate on both of those levels for it to be reaching its potential. When I was thinking about what you were doing, I felt like I could sense a common tension, and I wanted to get your response to that.

Bochner: When I started writing about serialism in art—I’d gone to Carnegie, and Carnegie has a big music school, so I was friendly with a couple of young composers. This was in the fifties, and they were interested in European seriality, composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Luigi Nono, and Americans like Milton Babbitt. In the beginning, I didn’t like it. I have to admit. But then I began to see how it operates. You have your original twelve notes, a clear and defined set, and then you turn them upside down, you move them around, you integrate. That’s a standard.

I became very interested in jazz, and jazz starts with standard tunes, and once you get that, then you get access to what Charlie Parker is about, and holy shit! This is very conceptual. I wrote about some of these things in an article called “The Serial Attitude,” and that musical subtext is very important in those earlier works.

Rail: You make a distinction in that essay—

Bochner: Yes, because the idea of seriality is different than the concept of theme and variation, which is closer to de Kooning’s women or Giorgio Morandi’s bottles. The essay came out of an exhibition called Art in Series that was at Finch College.

Rail: One of the things you mention in that article—and it’s something Anna Lovatt brings up in her essay “Bochner’s Labyrinths” for your retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago—is a book called Summation of Series by L. B. W. Jolley. She writes about the popularity of “recreational mathematics,” in the mid-twentieth century. Was this kind of thing in the air?

Bochner: It was, but for a select group of people. Every month in Scientific American magazine, which was my favorite magazine, not for the mathematics or the science, but for the layout of the page, what they did visually with pictures and text. But there was also something great about setting up problems for no other reason than recreation. Can you solve this puzzle? There were whole books on it. And there were lots of artists who were interested in it. Judd was interested in it, and Tony Smith, and Smithson, of course.

Rail: As you talk, I’m thinking about how the “48" Standards” start as drawings on graph paper and then get scaled-up when they’re shown. And in the renderings for the exhibition I’ve seen, there’s one graph-paper work called 13 Sheets of 8 ½" Graph Paper (From a Non Finite Series) (1969/2024), and it occurred to me how different the experience will be. The works on the wall are not only bigger, but the writing—the measurements—are larger graphics whereas the graph paper piece retains your pencil notation.

Bochner: A lot of my stuff starts with drawings, and the graph paper is a way of scaling and carrying over a sense of relationship.

Rail: How did you think of arranging the works in the gallery? It seems like there’s a progression you’re setting up.

Bochner: It has more to do with the space. I think of them like Greek sculpture. My work always has a one thing leads to another quality. If you can do this, can you do that? Is it significantly different enough? The one on the right was as far from the one on the left as I could imagine getting it and having it be basically an object. I wasn’t ready to get away from the object until I got there and just thought, “okay, this thing can spread out.” I mean, forget the brown paper, that angle of measurement is just intrinsically beautiful.

Rail: Until this show, the only other time I’ve seen your measurement works was when Dia did the exhibition for the fiftieth anniversary of the first Measurement Room, in 1969.

Bochner: Right.

Rail: Those were big measurements! I remember they were red, which was extremely visually stimulating. So, in terms of color, how are you making those choices? The “48" Standards” are all browns and blacks, and at Dia it was a bold red. How do you make those choices?

Bochner: When I got invited to do that exhibition I walked through the gallery with a curator, James Meyer, and he said, “Here, you can have this space.” My first thought was, what am I going to do? It’s just such an enormous space. And then my second thought was, nothing. I’m not going to do anything. Because most artists who had done shows there brought an object or a group of objects into the space that wound up looking like they’d shrunk. Like they belonged somewhere else. So what am I going to do?

Rail: That’s true. The scale of the room profoundly affects the artwork.

Bochner: So, nothing. What can you do that’s doing nothing? I had done at least one drawing using that notion of the line around the room at my eye level, so that anybody coming into the gallery would know how tall I am. It divides the room into two zones, like underwater and above water. So I thought, Okay, I am going to project my eye level around the room, and see where that goes. I brought some black tape, and I put some up. The size that I usually use is a half inch. Well, that was way too small. It looked ridiculous. And in black, it blended in with all the industrial features of the building. I had done a drawing of the eye level in red. So I tried a red tape the size of the black tape. That didn’t work. So I thought, go bold. It’s nothing, but it’s got to be bold. And so I went from half inch tape to three inch tape, and it was fucking bold.

Rail: You could see it across the room!

Bochner: You could see it across the room, which is exactly what I wanted. So I didn’t add anything to the space. I gave the space back to the viewer. And I thought that was really the culmination of that whole period. I mean, it was fifty years later, but it seemed to close the parentheses. This is a real body of work now, and I’m finished—but I’d never shown the “48" Standards” in New York. I’d shown individual pieces, and once Sonnabend let me put some up in their office. But I never felt that I played out the musicality of the pieces.

Rail: I was looking at installation photographs of your show in 1969 at Heiner Friedrich Gallery in West Germany, which was the first time you showed the measurement works. It occurred to me that in West Germany they would use the metric system, not the imperial system of inches and feet. Did that raise anything?

Bochner: Oh, yeah, it aggravated everybody. The day of the opening, a major newspaper in Germany said they wanted to review the exhibition. I thought that was kind of amazing, because it was the first day that the show was open. I had never shown anything else in Europe. And how would anybody even know about this to want to review it? So I said, Okay, sure. So the guy comes in in a very long overcoat. And he pulls out a measuring tape. And he bends down, and he starts, and he says, “I can’t do this! I can’t review this!” He got very angry. “Why not?” I asked. He replied, “You’re in Europe, and we use the metric system, and you bring in this system from the United States. Why should I bother myself with trying to understand this?” And I said, “Well, if it’s a bother, don’t do it.” My work is about being true to my experience, and my experience is in inches and feet.

Rail: I want to ask you about architecture. I know it’s something you consider when you’re placing measurements, and because Richard Serra is on my mind, I’m thinking about the distinction Hal Foster made between site and context in terms of Serra’s sculpture. Site essentially referred to the literal, physical structure or location; context included the political and social relationships that connect to that place. My assumption is that the way you attend to site hasn’t changed much over time, but the context has changed tremendously, and I’m wondering how you feel that will shift the meaning or value of the work, or if it will at all.

Bochner: Oh, I think it definitely shifts. When I look at the renderings for the upcoming exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., I don’t see the works as isolated. I see some visual rhymes. I notice how this piece of paper is pointing down, and then it leads to a measurement. Then it goes up. And on the one side, it just goes up to a measurement. On the other side, it’s the brown paper itself, which is the measurement. Then that right angle, which I always considered the frame, that’s a constant. And then something that I was very interested in at that time was the difference between the inside and the outside of the work. Is the outside part of the work? Is it just the framing device? Or, at what point do you get so far apart that you don’t have a relationship anymore?

Rail: You’ve brought us back to where we began, thinking about boundaries. So let me ask another question that relates to you as a writer. It’s a quote, actually. It’s from the sixties. You wrote, “realizing it was impossible not to be misunderstood gave me an enormous sense of freedom.” I like how there is a triangulation between a sense of “impossibility,” “misunderstanding,” and “freedom.”

Bochner: I think if your work is not misunderstood in some way, then it’s not very good. The work must have more than one interpretation, right? If misunderstanding stops being possible, then how can the artwork be engaging? I am very much in favor of ambiguity.