The Brooklyn Rail

Conceived and executed in 1969, the exhibition 48" Standards by Mel Bochner at Peter Freeman showcases works that, at the time of their initial presentation, would have been considered materially and conceptually unconventional, perhaps even radical. Composed of brown wrapping paper, cardboard, graph paper and vinyl tape attached directly to the wall, these pieces now serve as reminders of the intellectual and artistic ferment of the period between 1962 and 1974, in which appropriation and the rise of post-structuralism’s critique of modernism was erased or was marginalized. Subsequently, this exhibition serves a dual purpose: it acts as a historical reenactment and an intervention in contemporary art’s discourse.

Upon entering the gallery, we encounter 48" Standards (#1) (1969), which is a piece of brown kraft paper stapled to the wall. According to the checklist, it measures 38 3/4 x 50 3/4 inches, yet Bochner, using black vinyl tape and Letraset, denoted two measurements width-wise of 48 inches and one height-wise of 36 inches on the wall. The first horizontal measurement is on the sheet of paper; the second measurement is on the wall. It takes some time to realize that what is actually being measured is the space between the brackets making the length and height not the sheet of paper. This game continues with Measurement: Crumpled 12" (1969/2024), which consists of a piece of brown paper whose original dimensions are 12 x 12 inches, but once crumpled comes to measure 11 1/8 by 11 1/8 by 1/2 inches. Other works in a similar vein test our ability to determine what is being measured. In the second gallery, we are presented with a number of installation works that predominantly consist of sheets of brown paper and demarcated segments of wall. The measurements that serve to establish various relationships are not descriptive; they are topographical, denoting the distance between points, edges and objects, or the surface they occupy.

Setting aside market considerations, one can only suspect that Bochner intends this re-enactment to prompt his audience to reconsider the place of these works in the material history of late modernism by affording us the opportunity to re-engage with them physically, rather than through photographic reproductions that flatten them into scaleless, graphic images. In this context, 48" Standards serves as a reminder that modernism was not limited to a self-reflective investigation of art but was the result of art’s ongoing role in questioning the veracity of our experiences and the systems of their representation.

A facsimile of Bochner’s original notebook drawings for the series accompanies the exhibition. It now serves as a catalog, with a text by Jeff Weiss and documentation of the installation of these works in 1969 at Sonnabend having been added to it. What this communicates is the fact that this exhibition is a re-creation; the originals of most of these works have been discarded, lost, or just not preserved because their reproducibility was built into Bochner’s original conception of them. As such, one can say that like Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, they know no original and can be endlessly reproduced by anyone who can follow their script. Likewise, they also mirror the systemic painting movement of the period, which employed predetermined rules or systems to produce variations on geometric motifs. (The term “Systemic Painting” was popularized by Lawrence Alloway, who curated an exhibition under that title at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966.)

Often considered to be a germinal manifestation of the conceptual art movement, these early works by Bochner straddled the line between post-Minimalism (which has for the most part disappeared from the critical record) and Conceptual art. This distinction is significant as it highlights the complex and nuanced nature of artistic developments during this period. Post-Minimalism was a reaction to Minimalism’s industrial and systemic nature; it emerged during the mid-1960s to mid-1970s and focused on materials, processes, and duration. The artists identified with it, such as Richard Serra and Barry Le Va, approached the work of art as a phenomenological event. At the same time, Conceptual art came to prioritize semiotic content over the physical form the artwork takes, and artists such as Joseph Kosuth or Robert Barry often dematerialized art entirely by emphasizing language and systems of meaning.

These competing concepts and practices of the 1960s emerged from a rich theoretical context characterized by such influential texts as Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” which addressed technology’s effect on our perception and psychology. Beyond this was George Kubler’s book The Shape of Time, which provided an anthropological framework for understanding artistic development. The others were Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” that offered a model of how to phenomenologically read art; Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book The Raw and the Cooked offered an analysis of the thought processes which underlie cultural phenomena; and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s text The Blue and Brown Books introduced into the critical vocabulary the context-dependent nature of meaning.

Together, these texts and others offered an alternative to traditional art historical narratives. They emphasized the importance of process and experience and offered new frameworks for understanding the relationship between art, culture, and knowledge. This provided the emerging generation of artists with new tools for thinking about time, procedure, cognition, perception, culture, aesthetics, and meaning. The influence of these works can be seen in Minimalism’s focus on seriality, reproducibility, repetition, and variation; Post-Minimalism’s phenomenological exploration of process, materiality, and bodily engagement; and Conceptualism’s focus on a structural analysis of language and knowledge.

To close the circle, let us return to Bochner’s 48" Standards, which, despite their apparent simplicity and formalism, are engaged with fundamental questions of perception, cognition, and representation. These pieces, in their materiality, serve as a fulcrum for a complex set of intellectual and phenomenological operations. By compelling viewers to both actively and self-reflectively negotiate the physical and the conceptual frameworks we use to comprehend it, this re-presentation is an important reminder of the relevancy of the ongoing dialectic between art, space, body, and senses. In our current epoch, increasingly dominated by digital interfaces and virtual experiences, 48" Standards remains a potent reminder of the enduring power of art to disrupt our habitual modes of perception and cognition.