1 Mel Bochner, Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), 1967–70. Photo offset on ten notecards, manila envelope, 5 × 8 inches each. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
6
PRODUCTIVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS: INTERPRETING MEL BOCHNER’S THEORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Mel Bochner is conventionally considered a conceptual artist. Bochner, however, objects to the label and, having started his career as a painter, is now painting again.1 In fact he has been painting since 1973, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of first generation conceptual art. Why are conceptual artists painting again? ‘Because they think it’s a good idea.’ Or so runs the provocative thesis of a recent series of talks addressing the conditions of contemporary practice organized by the critic Jan Verwoert.2 Is it a good idea? This question demands to be approached historically and theoretically as well as empirically: that conceptual artists are painting again does not prove it is a good idea. Nevertheless, the empirical observation is certainly enough to prompt a fresh consideration. Bochner’s return to painting in 1973, and the reasons he has advanced in support of it, forms an essential point of reference. Counter-intuitively perhaps, Bochner’s return to painting can best be understood with reference to his short-lived and still little discussed photographic practice.3 In view of this, in what follows I will frame Bochner’s photography through a critical reading of Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (1967–70). By reconstructing and interpreting its claims, I will also show that Misunderstandings can be made productive within a closely related context, the ongoing assessment of the critical and historical significance of photoconceptualism. Conceptual art, despite its highly contested critical legacy, is widely held to constitute an enduring negation of the importance of ‘medium’ as a legitimate guarantor of an object’s status as art. Conceptual artists’ use of photography (as a ‘non-art’ form) has been understood as one of the main means by which this negation was pursued.4
Surprisingly, Verwoert sets up the problem of ‘conceptual painting’ as a question of ‘what medium-specific practices like painting or sculpture can do today’ even while he acknowledges that, taking into account the development of art after conceptual art, such practices have ‘no preset justification’.5 Given that Verwoert is concerned specifically with ‘conceptual artists’ who are ‘painting again’, it would seem more coherent to elaborate the problematic without reference to medium- specificity. Such an apparent contradiction must be understood against the backdrop of the constitution of photography as a new artistic medium in the wake of the collapse of photoconceptualism. Considered illegitimate as art in the early 1960s, by the mid-1990s photography had arguably taken the place of painting as the dominant ‘medium’ of mainstream contemporary art. After (photo)- conceptualism, photography was turned into ‘Art, with a big A’, as Jeff Wall has described it: ‘Photoconceptualism led the way toward the complete acceptance of photography as art – autonomous, bourgeois, collectible art – by virtue of insisting that this medium might be privileged to be the negation of that whole idea.’6 For Wall, whose claims have been highly influential, conceptual art attempted a negation of medium-specific, or ‘canonical’ art by photographic means (‘photoconceptualism’) but failed, with the result that photography was assimilated into canonical art as a legitimate artistic medium. In this context, one way that painting might be a ‘good idea’ again would be as a negation of the photograph- as-medium (as art). A critical question, after conceptual art (and specifically after photoconceptualism), is whether painting, as ‘conceptual painting’, can make this challenge. This is a problem that Bochner’s painting has long recognized. His work thus anticipates contemporary debates and holds out consequences for the theorization of photography in, and as, conceptual art that are still under- acknowledged.
In 1966 Mel Bochner had no expertise with a camera.7 He chanced upon photography as a means to show his process-based sculpture in a gallery context without producing an undesired ‘objecthood’. Here Bochner, along with Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson and others formed part of an emerging ‘postminimalist’ response to the perceived contradiction between minimalism’s emphasis on contextual concerns and the residual monumentality of much minimalist work, up to, and arguably including, Robert Morris’s ‘anti-form’ pieces. The images in Bochner’s first photographic work, 36 Photos and 12 Diagrams (1966) (plate 2) were taken by Gretchen Lambert, a professional photographer who had made her reputation in the New York art world shooting minimalist works for publication. Yet, as early as 1967, Bochner realized that his own artistic practice had come to focus on the photographs themselves, that his work had ‘become about photography without [my] wanting it to’.8 Seeking to ground his photographic work theoretically, Bochner determined to ‘look into the history of the medium and find out what’s been written about it, what the issues are’.9
The photographic literature of the mid-1960s proved of little use to the young artist: ‘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 misun- derstanding.’10 Bochner, nevertheless, resolved to make something of such unpromising material. He attempted to use it as a foil for his practice: ‘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.’11 This motley assortment of quotations was assembled under the provisional title of Dead Ends and Vicious Circles (1967), and pitched to Artforum as a magazine feature.12 Philip Leider, the editor, knocked it back testily asserting that ‘we’re not a goddamn photography magazine, this is an art magazine, don’t give me anything on photography, we don’t do photography!’13 Leider’s vituperative comments indicate how marginal photography’s status was for the art establishment of the time. A second pitch, this time to Art in America, was also rejected on similar grounds. As Bochner explains in retrospect, ‘in 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic.’14 This was because ‘photography was seen as the enemy of all the values of late modernism ... and as things turned out it was.’15 At this stage though, Bochner was disheartened by such rejections and shelved his initial version of the project.
2 Mel Bochner, 36 Photos and 12 Diagrams, 1966. Thirty-six gelatin silver prints and twelve pen and ink drawings, 8 × 8 inches each, 73 × 55 inches overall. Munich: Stadtische Galerie im Lenbach- haus. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
In 1970, however, the gallery owner Marian Goodman gave Bochner a fresh opportunity to realize the work. She determined to issue a boxed set of artists’ photographs and Bochner was invited to contribute to the edition, along with Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Ed Ruscha, and Sol LeWitt, amongst others. He delivered a new version of Dead Ends and Vicious Circles for Goodman, and re-titled it Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (1967–70). By giving the work a new title in this way Bochner assimilated it to his burgeoning Theory series, which also included The Theory of Painting (1969), Ten Aspects of the Theory of Measurement (1969), The Theory of Boundaries (1969–70) and, subsequently, A Theory of Sculpture [Incomplete] (1971–72).16
Misunderstandings comprised ten photo-offset prints on index cards, all enclosed in a manila envelope (see plate 1). Nine of the ten cards featured handwritten versions of some of the quotations about photography Bochner had already assembled, to his own dissatisfaction, from notable figures in the arts, politics, philosophy and the sciences. The remaining card featured an image, a ‘negative’ of Bochner’s own hand and forearm, laid alongside a 12” marker (plate 3). Bochner had already used the image on this card along with the quotations on two of the others in, or as, other works.17 As such, even though Bochner denies that there is any hierarchy amongst the quotations, these three cards seem to encourage more interpretative effort than the others.18
3 Mel Bochner, Actual Size (Hand), 1970. Photo offset on notecard [detail of Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography)], 5 × 8 inches. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
Teasingly, Bochner has asserted that his ‘selection of quotations ... might (or might not) suggest the impossibility of a “theory” of photography.’19 The three cards suggest a response to this provocation. In fact by isolating just these three cards Bochner’s wilfully perplexing ‘theory,’ or perhaps better anti-theory, of photography can be interpreted. In so doing, the significance of Bochner’s relatively brief, but highly intense, period of photographic experiment from 1966 to 1970, of which Misunderstandings was the summation, can be drawn out. Even before issuing Misunderstandings as a multiple, Bochner had given up the photographic component of his practice and he has not resumed it since.
The first of the three cards to be considered here features a quotation from Marcel Duchamp: ‘I would like to see photography make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.’ Misunderstandings is a deliberately opaque work. Bochner has stated not only that he considered the quotations he included within it to be ‘dumb’, but also that he faked three of them, mischievously undermining their theoretical utility still further. To this day Bochner refuses to specify which of the quotations are false.20 Yet this Duchamp quotation, though abridged, is genuine. It comes from a letter, now well known, that Duchamp wrote to Alfred Stieglitz in 1922, responding unfavourably to the American’s project to have photography recognized as a fine art.21 Duchamp’s statement is clearly modelled on the nineteenth-century commonplace that photography would ‘take the place of painting’, so hackneyed as to have merited reference in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas (posthumously published in 1911). In this sense, then, it could be considered a misunderstanding; photography had not taken the place of painting, even by the late 1960s. Yet Bochner had used this same Duchamp quotation before, including it as one of his Four Comments Concerning: Photograph Blocks (1967) (plate 4). For Bochner then, there was something more to the remark. In fact, Duchamp reformulates a commonplace misunderstanding, that one representational art would simply replace another, turning it into a pithy objection to the representational-as-art.
Duchamp’s readymades had, of course, already actualized his own anti- representational and anti-retinal rhetoric. However, the readymade ultimately failed to negate the ‘depictive’ arts.22 As Wall has observed of Duchamp’s ready- made: ‘something significant has happened, but the anticipated transformation does not materialise, or it materialises incompletely, in a truncated form.’23 Wall goes on to clarify this claim:
Since a depiction cannot be selected as a readymade, depiction is therefore not included in Duchamp’s negation. This is not to say that the depictive arts are not affected by the subversion carried out in the form of the readymade; far from it. But any effect such a subversion will have on them is exerted in terms of their exemption from the claims it makes about art, not their inclusion.24
Conceptual art aimed to succeed where Duchamp had not, by rendering a work’s status as a painting decisively insufficient to qualify it for status as art. The use of photography in, or as, conceptual art was one way in which this was pursued.25 Bochner took up photography at a time when painting was still entrenched as a medium, when photography was still not considered admissible as art. In this sense then, Bochner and other photoconceptualists enacted Duchamp’s first negation, that of painting by photography, for the first time.
But what about the second negation, the negation of photography by ‘something else’? Paradoxically, the most prominent outcome of conceptual art’s progressive use of photography has been regressive (at least according to the terms established by conceptual art). Photography after conceptual art, developing a restricted reading of conceptual art’s ‘failure’, has legitimated itself as a new and autonomous artistic medium, a way to continue the Western tradition of ‘depictive’ art. It is Wall’s tableaux, and his own sophisticated theoretical work in support of them, that have been historically constitutive and the model for a legion of less sophisticated imitators.
4 Mel Bochner, Four Comments Concerning: Photograph Blocks, 1967. Photocopy mounted on board, 12 × 12 inches. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
Yet Wall acknowledges that his widely influential critical history of ‘Photography in or as conceptual art’ examines only ‘aspects’ of the history; actively pursuing ‘only two’ of the ‘several important directions’ that photoconceptualism took.26 Nevertheless, much of the detailed historical and critical work exploring the other important directions that Wall omits remains to be done.27 The result is that Wall’s strong but limited analysis of directions within photoconceptualism has become generalized as the history of photoconceptualism proper. Wall’s claims about photography’s role in the ‘failure’ of photoconceptualism and the installation of photography as a canonical ‘depictive’ art form, the legitimate inheritor of the Western picture, have largely been accepted.28
By recovering Bochner’s strain of photoconceptualism, however, the scope of the category is enlarged. Another ‘aspect’ is added to the story. For if one might wish to distinguish a contemporary ‘post-conceptual photography’ from ‘photo- graphy after conceptual art’ (on the grounds that the first formulation suggests a practice which holds within itself the lessons learnt by having worked through the challenges posed to visual representation by conceptual art, whereas the second suggests only a practice which comes after conceptual art chronologically, one that may well be hostile towards its achievements), then it is nonetheless clear that a comprehensive account of photoconceptualism is needed if ‘post- conceptual photography’ is to constitute a fully elaborated critical category and not just a weak and historically under-specified one. Beyond the interests of historical accuracy, there are real stakes at issue in putting pressure on Wall’s genealogy of photoconceptualism via a recovery of Bochner’s photographic work (work that does not feature in Wall’s account). Wall’s position is becoming increasingly reactionary, turning back from the gains that progressive practice made in the 1960s (including that of his own earlier work): ‘medium has been made problematic, but only outside the canonical forms. The canonical forms simply do not have a way to escape medium, or a need to do so.’29 A consequence of the status accorded Wall’s genealogy of photoconceptualism (and his own work as the culmination of the ‘directions’ he analyses) has been the global proliferation of banal photographic tableaux staking a claim to the name of advanced art. In the contemporary artworld photography is becoming ‘unbearable’ all of its own accord. There is of course a long history of attempts to have photography recognized as an art medium, from early efforts by Stieglitz and the pictorialists, through John Szarkowski’s at MoMA in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to Wall’s own. Yet it is only relatively recently that photography has obtained widespread acceptance as such (with prices to match), and Wall’s particular ‘artification’ of photography has played a decisive role.30 Consequently the grounds of any contemporary negation of photography, any attempt to fulfil Duchamp’s hopes, will be obliged to proceed via a critique of Wall’s position and will need to provide an alternative to his historical and theoretical account of photography’s development as art.
THREATENING THE ART IN PHOTOGRAPHY
The second card for consideration bears a quotation attributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica which may or may not be genuine: ‘Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas’.31 Whether it is genuine or not, the year before its inclusion in Misunderstandings Bochner had also issued the quotation as an individual work, Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (1969) (plate 5). Both works belie the quotation’s claim. Here is a photographic record of an abstract idea, viz. of that which photography purportedly cannot record. Though initially presenting itself as little more than a flip repudiation of the quality of knowledge sold door-to- door, the piece repays further attention. It provokes reconsideration of one of the most tenacious claims about photography, one that Wall makes central to his claims about photography-as-medium (as art), namely that a photograph, qua photograph, is ‘depictive’:
Photography cannot find alternatives to depiction, as could the other fine arts. It is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things. In order to participate in the kind of reflexivity made mandatory for modernist art, photography can put into play only its own necessary condition of being a depiction-which-constitutes-an-object.32
5 Mel Bochner, Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas, 1969. Silver dye bleach print, 16 × 20 inches. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
This is of course a transposition of Greenberg’s familiar claims about medium- specificity, but it repays being explicitly contrasted with them:
The unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered ‘pure’, and in its ‘purity’ find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence.33
Greenberg’s own position on photography’s claim to art status sits uneasily with Wall’s transposition. Greenberg’s arguments about painting were not the same as those he applied to photography. For Greenberg photography was a mixed mode: ‘the art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are properly pictorial.’34 Greenberg also asserted that ‘I myself happen to find, on the basis of experience and nothing else, that photography can be a high art.’35 Greenberg thus relies on his view that photography can occasion aesthetic experience, rather than on its medium-specific characteristics, as the guarantor of its art status. Although he acknowledges photography as art, he does not do so on the basis of its self-reflexivity as a medium. In other words, for Greenberg, photography is not a medium in the strong sense.
It is important to put pressure on Wall’s account because it implies that the ‘internal aestheticization’ that afflicted many, but not all, photoconceptualist practices should be considered the historical fate of photoconceptualism as a whole.36 John Roberts notes a historical alternative to the ‘incipient pictorialism’ within photoconceptualism in John Hilliard’s and Roger Cutworth’s emphasis on the constructed nature of photographic truth-telling: ‘the work from this period (1970–73) is perhaps the only photo-based conceptual art which is actually discursively engaged with the mechanics and chemistry of the photographic document.’37 The point is apposite but misses Bochner’s earlier contribution to precisely this type of photoconceptualism.38
In the most substantive critical account of Bochner’s photography published so far, Scott Rothkopf has persuasively argued that it was Bochner’s failure to achieve sufficiently ‘literal’ photos of his early process-based sculpture that caused him to begin to interrogate photography as an illusionistic medium.39 Subtle quirks of the photographic apparatus such as lens-barrel perspectival distortions and insufficient fill-in flash coverage frustrated Bochner’s original desire for ‘objectivity’.40 Realizing that even his professionally commissioned photographs never achieved this, Bochner instead began to present failures of depiction. After his abortive attempts to capture his block constructions in perfect planar perspective, Bochner made a new series of works collapsing perspectival conventions in on themselves, for example, Perspective Insert (Collapsed Centre) (1967) (plate 6). He started to pull photography apart as a ‘depictive’ medium and began working over its purported ontological ground. In so doing, Bochner went beyond most conceptual artists’ vernacular use of photography as a direct recording of objects in the ‘real’ world.41 In so doing, Bochner challenged photography’s status as a medium whose specificity could be secured as ‘depictive’ long before Wall argued for instituting photography as an art medium on precisely these grounds. Bochner thereby furnishes an objection to Wall’s totalizing claims that ‘photo- conceptualism was ... the last moment in the prehistory of photography as art.’42
It might be objected that Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (1969) is still ‘depictive’ because, although it records an abstract idea photographically, it also remains a depiction of a note card. It was in the projects that Bochner conducted under the aegis of Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Kliiwer’s Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) programme that the artist was really able to get to grips with photography as a ‘depictive’ apparatus. Here he came as close as the technology of the time would allow to realizing a truly abstract photograph. For his first EAT- funded venture, the Transparent and Opaque (1968) series (plate 7), Bochner commissioned a baffled professional product photographer to shoot squirls of toothpaste and streaks of Vaseline bearing an unmistakeable, and parodic, relation to the ‘allover’ composition of abstract expressionism. As Bochner has explained, ‘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.’43 Transparent and Opaque can also be understood as an important step in subverting the incipient romanticism of photography. Yet it was not until a later EAT-sponsored project that Bochner’s intent became unequivocal. In 1968 he undertook an artist’s residency at the Singer Corporation, then heavily involved in developing telecommunications technology. The first pages of his unpublished The Singer Notes (plate 8) demonstrate Bochner’s prescience about the ontological destabilization of photography that still haunts discussions of digital photography today:
6 Mel Bochner, Perspective Insert (Collapsed Centre), 1967. Gelatin silver print mounted on masonite, 48 × 48.5 inches. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
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. ... Unfortunately ... 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.... 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.44
As early as 1968, then, Bochner had determined to produce photographs directly from a computer’s permutation of numeric code. Constrained by the technology available to him at the time, he could not realize his plans. However, he was able to foresee that it would be possible. At issue here is the way in which digital photography seems to render questionable Barthes’ claim that photography ‘accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality (‘‘that-has-been’’) with truth’.45 Today of course it is possible to produce, from scratch, an entirely digital ‘photographic’ image, one that doesn’t have any relation to ‘reality’ in the sense Barthes intended. Bochner anticipated this development, albeit via the parodic simulation of abstract photographs. Bernard Stiegler, working in a more decon- structive mode, has similarly questioned the kind of photographic ontology that Barthes takes for granted, and so, too, its implications for the relation between analogue and digital photographs. Stiegler argues that the photograph never bore an unproblematic relation to the ‘that-has-been’, and, consequently, that this was never a way to secure an ontological specificity for photography: ‘the digitaliza- tion of the analog destabilizes our knowledge of the this was, and we are afraid of this. But we were afraid of the analog, too: in the first photographs, we saw phantoms.’46 Frustrated though Bochner was with the technological limitations of early computing, his claim that he ‘sat around for three months just talking’ during the remainder of his Singer placement is an exaggeration.47 Exploring the boundaries between different image media, he attempted some primitive video to photography ‘transductions’ as can be seen in the series Roll (1968) (plate 9). Here Bochner trained a video camera on four wooden blocks set out in a square formation on a grid. He then modulated the vertical hold on the video monitor displaying the shot. By photographing the monitor he was able to capture the heavy ‘ghosting’ effect that he had produced. In lieu of producing his proto-digital photographs, Bochner focused on the ‘phantoms’ that haunted analogue visual media. In so doing, he anticipated Stiegler’s insight that the photograph, pre- digitalization, always already destabilized our knowledge of the ‘this was’. It was, however, the way in which Bochner concluded his Singer placement that was also to conclude his photographic practice in a notably emphatic way.
7 Mel Bochner, Transparent and Opaque, 1968. Twelve silver dye bleach prints, 16 × 20 inches each. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
8 Mel Bochner, The Singer Notes (Sheet 3), 1968. Ink and pencil on paper, 11 × 8.5 inches. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
9 Mel Bochner, Roll, 1968. Eight gelatin silver prints, 20 × 24 inches each. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
The third card from Misunderstandings is apparently a negative of Bochner’s own hand and forearm, laid alongside a 12” marker. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that this card features an impossible image. Looking more attentively at the border around the ‘negative’, it is revealed as the frame of a Polaroid. Paradoxically then, the image declares itself to be the negative of a positive, that is, a negative-less, photographic process. No longer a misunderstanding, this card presents an outright dissimulation. It is the most blatant forgery in the pack and, as such, acts as Misunderstandings’ ‘tell’, the clue to revealing Bochner’s theoretical hand. This image card from Misunderstandings is in fact an uncropped version of Bochner’s earlier work Actual Size (Hand) (1968) made as he came to the end of his Singer Lab placement. Actual Size (Hand) was originally shot as a Polaroid by one of the Singer technicians. It was later re-photographed in order to generate the cropped print without the Polaroid’s distinctive frame. It is only the impossible ‘negative’ aspect of the Polaroid on the Misunderstandings card that is faked.48
Following the failure of the Singer scientists to realize his plans for abstract, computer-generated photographs, Bochner’s subsequent conversations with them moved on to problems in information theory. These conversations were often to centre on the idea of objectification and how artist and scientist could find a common language. This led to discussion of quantification and measurement. ‘It was’, says Bochner, ‘about how experience can be communicated, and at the same time, the fallibility of every measurement system.’49 Such discussions stimulated the artist’s earliest measurement works, modest Letraset and tape interventions within the Singer Labs (plate 10). For Bochner, there was a conundrum lurking within these works. Having had the Letraset and tape interventions photographed in order to record them, he realized that there was no way to determine the actual size of the objects featured in the photographs; they were scaleless even though they contained a scale. So Bochner started to include parts of his own body in subsequent photographs of his measurement interventions, using them as an identifiable referent to guarantee the integrity of the scale. A printer was then instructed to print the 12” ruled marks in the resulting images to exactly twelve inches, that is, to print the scale, and thus also Bochner’s body parts, at actual size.
10 Mel Bochner, Singer Lab Measurement #4,1968. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8 inches. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
This convoluted process resulted in Actual Size (Face and Hand) (1968) (plate 11), works that held profound significance for Bochner: ‘the photograph became the index of the index, or a vicious circle. That, for me, was the end of photography.’50 This attempt to produce a true 1:1 ratio, to make a perfectly indexical depiction, resulted paradoxically only in the generation of an index (the photograph) of an index (the scale alongside Bochner’s head or hand). Bochner considered this situation a ‘vicious circle’ because the apparent solution to the problem of producing ‘true’ photographic indexicality only produced a further problem, the recursive production of an ‘index of an index’, and thus demonstrated that the original problem (the attempt to achieve true indexicality) was fatally intractable, since the ontological referent always escapes. In fact, the situation is more recursive even than Bochner acknowledges. Actual Size (Face and Hand) is in fact the index (the photographic print) of an index (the negative produced by re-photographing the original Polaroid taken by the Lab technicians) of an index (the original Polaroid) of an index (the scale). By the time Bochner has had it lithographically printed as the image card in Misunderstandings, the chain or recursion has become even more extended.
Bochner’s Actual Size (Face and Hand) goes further than Victor Burgin’s superficially similar Photopath (1967), executed a year earlier. Burgin had also produced a work at precise 1:1 scale, laying photographs of gallery floorboards directly over the same floorboards but printing them in black and white so that the distinction between the floor and the photographs was clearly evident. Having recently returned from a postgraduate year at Yale studying with Robert Morris, Burgin was at this point working at the far edge of minimalist concerns. Investigating the boundary between the photograph as the most minimal possible ‘specific object’ (the limit case of literalism) led him to a concern with photography itself as a cultural form (the beginnings of Burgin’s interest in semiotics). In contrast, Bochner, starting from a similar postminimalist point, believed, as early as 1968, that he had undermined the ontological ground of the photograph. Here Boch- ner’s early concern with the ‘phenomenology of the photograph’ tipped over into its deconstruction.51 Whether Bochner’s emphasis on recursive chains of indexicality actually ‘deconstructs’ photography is open to question since the recursive chain still terminates in an index. Difference is deferred but not indefinitely. Nevertheless, Bochner’s work certainly destabilizes the claim to straightforward indexicality with which photography has long, if problematically, been associated.52 This was enough to convince the artist that the putative ‘transparency’ of photography was deeply problematic and in this sense analogous to Derrida’s concern with the ‘transparency’ of language to thought.
Here Bochner can be brought into a final productive contradiction with Wall. What Wall has to say about photography’s relation to conceptual art sits at the very heart of the debate on photoconceptualism:
Dragging its heavy burden of depiction, photography could not follow pure, or linguistic, conceptualism all the way to the frontier. It cannot provide the experience of the negation of experience, but must continue to provide the experience of depiction, of the Picture. It is possible that the fundamental shock that photography caused was to have provided a depiction which could be experienced more the way the visible world is experienced than had ever been possible previously. A photograph therefore shows its subject by means of showing what experience is like; in that sense it provides ‘an experience of experience’, and it defines this as the significance of depiction.53
It is with this qualification that Wall introduces his rationale for the promotion of photography as a turn away from the ‘reductivism’ of conceptual art. Yet Wall’s affirmative account of photography’s production of the ‘experience of experience’ sits awkwardly with Bochner’s demonstration of photography as an ‘index of an index’. For Bochner this ‘vicious circle’ led him to the end of photography rather than its affirmation.
Bochner’s ‘theory’ of photography proceeds by negation, that is, via a specification of what photography is not, rather than by the development of an account based on positive terms. Bochner’s photographic work thus dovetails with his ‘theory’ of painting and sculpture, all of which challenged the ontological security of art as conceived by formalist modernism, that is, as secured by medium-specific characteristics. Reflecting on and explaining his Theory series, Bochner stated that it was:
derived from the hypothesis that every process presupposes a system. Any particular endeavour I have chosen for investigation consists of a set of internal principles of development (its practice). The ‘art’ is the demonstration of the network of supports that forms the system, the knowledge of it, in it.54
Bochner thus mobilized photography’s ‘anti-art’ status self-reflexively as a resource within a wider set of strategies of anti-art art production contemporary with conceptual art. Bochner’s photographic work formed a part of a wider theoretical investigation into the ontology of art, and in this sense his early work can be considered conceptual. Recovering Bochner’s generic conception of art as ‘the demonstration of the network of supports that forms the system [of art]’ clearly indicates that he once articulated a post-medium conception of art.
Much of the ground for Bochner’s articulation of this post-medium position is prepared in his photographic work. Bochner recognizes that the ontology of photography is, as Peter Osborne has claimed, distributional ‘without any single, underlying ontologically fundamental basis to its unity’.55 Thus there is nothing irreducibly specific to photography that would serve to make it a medium in the sense outlined by Greenberg and developed by Fried.56 As Bochner explains: ‘the “groundlessness” of the quotations became the equivalent of the “groundlessness” of photography itself, focusing attention on the artificiality of any framing device.’57 Bochner’s theory of photography thus constitutes a neglected moment in conceptual art’s negation of medium and an anticipation of contemporary, digitally inflected, challenges to photography’s ontological security.
After producing his Singer Labs Measurement series, Bochner moved on to make his renowned Measurement Room (1969) series (plate 12). Though these works were documented photographically, it is the measurements themselves that, within the gallery context, constitute the work. This transition was clearly envisaged while Bochner was on his Singer placement and are in fact a consequence of it, as can be seen from a key page in The Singer Notes which sketches out plans for room-scale measurement works (plate 13). For Bochner the end of photography inspired direct intervention in the traditional context of art. Bochner negated photography with an incipient art of context. The systematic investigation of the ‘network of supports that forms the system’ of a given medium was sublated by the beginnings of a systematic investigation of the art system itself.
11 Mel Bochner, Actual Size (Face and Hand), 1968. Two gelatin silver prints, 22 × 14.25 inches each. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
12 Mel Bochner, Measurement Room, 1969. Tape and letraset on wall, size determined by installation. Installation: Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, 1969. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
13 Mel Bochner, The Singer Notes (Sheet 43), 1968. Ink on graph paper, 11 × 8.5 inches. Photo: © Mel Bochner.
PAINTING AFTER PHOTOCONCEPTUALISM
Bochner’s experiment with an art of context was short-lived, however. He became dissatisfied with working on the ontological grounds and ontological boundaries of art by systematic means, and returned to canvas-based painting in 1973 via a transitional phase of wall painting. That is, Bochner started painting again just as his contemporaries, most notably Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke and Michael Asher, were honing their critique of the very institutions where Bochner’s new paintings would be exhibited.
Bochner continues to paint today. In a well-known interview, James Meyer has interrogated Bochner on his return to painting. Meyer inquires in the bluntest terms ‘how can you defend making paintings now?’58 Bochner responds that all of his previous work should be understood as a preparation for his return to painting, stating that ‘without the history of the practice of painting as the background for all my work, it becomes a series of disparate gestures.’59 Later in the interview, Bochner goes even further, ‘I always thought of myself as a painter ... a painter who just didn’t happen to paint’, and concludes, ‘but what I can see in retrospect is that it’s the absence of painting that gives definition to the Photo Pieces, the Measurements, the Theory of Boundaries. They all circulated around that missing signifier.’60
A combative Meyer, avowedly ‘sympathetic to ... the discourse of painting’s insufficiency’, objects to Bochner’s claim, implying that it could be read as revisionist: ‘your work became well known for its investigation of systemic thought... Even your wall paintings of the’ ‘70s and early’ ‘80s were systemically derived. Your current work is not, and I’m wondering whether it hasn’t betrayed the anti- subjectivist, anti-compositional commitments of your early work and writings.’61 Bochner defends his position with the claim that ‘the system predicted the result. It was tautological – a closed as opposed to an open investigation.’62 Consequently, ‘there were two choices: totally abandon the visual or see if I could renegotiate the terms of painting... One goes to painting because of its conventions. I’m interested in painting as a text that is continually rewritten.’63 Yet, as Meyer objects, the problem for Bochner, after conceptual art, is why exclusively, or even primarily, paint? Why fall back on ‘conventions’ that have been undermined? This standoff between Bochner and Meyer is not resolved within the context of the interview.
Yet is not painting once again a ‘good idea’? Such a question cannot be answered in the abstract. In Bochner’s case, a local case would need to be built, entirely based on his practice, demonstrating that his particular return to painting was productive. Bochner negates painting by photography and photography by an art of context, only to return to painting. Thus his position seems to go back on the gains made within the terms of his own project. His later work apparently takes it for granted that painting, qua painting, is art ‘because of its conventions’. Here then, Bochner would seem to concur with Wall’s renewed faith in the contemporary claims of canonical art. Furthermore, Bochner’s more recent paintings seem to exhibit little of the anxiety about the medium and its history that is so manifest in other significant painters, such as Gerhard Richter or Luc Tuymans. Unless, that is, it could be demonstrated that Bochner adheres to his post-medium concept of art in his return to painting. In this case painting would be a ‘good idea’, the conceptual content of the work would secure its status as art, not its relation to the history of the medium. In this sense Bochner would, pace Verwoert, be a post-conceptual painter.
Those painterly paintings I did ... I realized that I was walking on the edge of an abyss. I knew how easily they could be misunderstood, and they were. But that was not my problem. I had an idea and I owed it to the idea to see where it would take me.64
Notes
I would like to thank all those who have contributed to the final form of this chapter, in particular Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen. Sincere thanks are also due to Mel Bochner and Scott Rothkopf who graciously agreed to let me interview them. An AHRC Doctoral award has supported my work.
1 ‘I do not like the term “conceptual art”. Connotations of an easy dichotomy with perception are obvious and inappropriate.’ Mel Bochner, ‘Excerpts from speculation’, Artforum, May 1970, 70–3, 70.
2 The series comprises monthly talks held at the United Nations Plaza, Berlin, beginning in October 2008 and continuing at the time of writing.
3 The major exception here is Scott Rothkopfs pioneering study of Bochner’s photographic practice. My chapter is indebted to it both as a source and as an inspiration. I have aimed to develop and extend some of the important issues it raises. Scott Rothkopf, “‘Photography cannot record abstract ideas” and other misunderstandings’, Mel Bochner, Photographs: 1966–1969, New Haven and London, 2002,1-49.
4 ‘As a critique of medium ... the impact of conceptual art continues to be felt across the whole field of current art practices.’ Peter Osborne, Conceptual Art, London, 2002, 47. Previous returns to painting, such as the neo-expressionism of the 1980s, have predominantly staked their claim against the achievements of conceptual art and the post-conceptual practices descended from it.
5 E-flux email announcement, 29 September 2008.
6 Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of indifference": aspects of photography in, or as, conceptual art’, in Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews, New York, 2007, 14368, 149.
7 Mel Bochner in conversation with the author, 24 March 2008.
8 Hans Ulrich Obrist and Sandra Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’, http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/notes/interview/i003_text.html., retrieved 22 March 2008.
9 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’.
10 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’. Bochner has added a caveat to this claim in a previously unpublished commentary on Misunderstandings from 2000 included in his recently published collected writings: ‘the writings on photography of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes had not yet been translated’. Mel Bochner, ‘Misunderstandings (a theory of photography) (1967–1970)’, in Mel Bochner, Solar System and Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965–2007, Cambridge, MA, 2007.
11 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’.
12 Bochner, in collaboration with Robert Smithson, had established the precedent for this form of artistic intervention into print media with The Domain of the Great Bear (1966). Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson, ‘The domain of the Great Bear’, Art Voices, Fall 1966, 44–51.
13 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’.
14 Bochner, Solar System 180.
15 Bochner, Solar System 180.
16 Although Bochner has given 1969 as the official start date of the Theory series, he dates Misunderstandings as starting in 1967. This suggests Misunderstandings may have held generative significance for the series as a whole. ‘The series generically entitled Theory was begun in 1969 ... ‘Mel Bochner, ‘Three statements for Data Magazine’, 1972. Reproduced in Solar System, 96–101, 98.
17 The works in question are Four Comments Concerning: Photograph-Blocks (1967), Actual Size (Hand) (1968) and Photography Cannot Record Abstract Ideas (1969).
18 ‘[T]he unbound, envelope format was chosen to subvert any implication of a beginning, a middle, or an end (at least in that order).’ Bochner, Solar System, 180. The three cards in question are the image card, and the cards featuring the Duchamp and the Britannica citations.
19 Bochner, Solar System, 180.
20 Jonathan Benthell made an early, and plausible, guess at the fakes suggesting that the Mao, Proust and Merleau-Ponty quotations were Bochner’s invention. Jonathan Benthell, ‘Bochner and photography’, Studio International, April 1971, 147–8, 148.
21 The full quotation reads: ‘you know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.’ Marcel Duchamp, ‘Letter to Stieglitz’, in Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York, 1973, 165.
22 ‘Depictive arts’ is Wall’s term. See ‘Depiction, object, event’, Afterall, 16, Autumn/Winter 2007, 5–17, passim.
23 Wall, ‘Depiction, object, event’, 8.
24 Wall, ‘Depiction, object, event’, 8.
25 John Roberts has elaborated on photo- conceptualism’s enmity to modernist values, asserting that ‘Photography was the means by which conceptual art’s exit from Modernist closure was made realisable as practice.’ John Roberts, The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966–1976, London, 1997, 9. Roberts perhaps overstates the case here since conceptual art proposed more than one means of exit but his emphasis on the importance, and perhaps even the priority, of photography is well made.
26 Wall, “‘Marks of indifference’’’, 144. The two ‘directions’ that Wall names are ‘photodocumentation’ and ‘amateurization’.
27 Certainly such work has not been undertaken by Wall, who seems to put more distance between himself and the legacy of conceptual art by the day. This is perhaps most pointedly indicated by the Stereo controversy, namely Wall’s decision to alter Stereo (1980), so that what was originally a diptych (comprising separate image and text panels) is now exhibited without the text panel. This decision has been interpreted as emblematic of Wall’s decision to distance himself from his early engagement with conceptual art. Wall’s response to this critique has been to deny its validity in a rather unpersuasive manner: ‘the sign side was always too bright. I never figured out a way to make it less bright. I always disliked the imbalance, so I asked the owners of the panel to remove it.’ See, Jeff Wall, ‘Art after photography, after conceptual art: Jeff Wall interviewed by Peter Osborne’, Radical Philosophy, 150, July/August 2008, 36–51, 40–1.
28 See, symptomatically, Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven and London, 2008.
29 Wall, ‘Art after photography’, 44.
30 The scare-quotes on ‘artification’ are Jeff Wall’s. See Wall, ‘“Marks of indifference”‘, 149.
31 It is not by chance that Bochner should have chosen the Britannica. In order to check the veracity of this citation the scholar would have to take up the labyrinthine challenge of working through the entire back history of the Britannica from the date of the first entry on photography. This is so extensive that even the British Library does not hold the complete set of all relevant editions. This may well be intentionally ironic in that nothing hangs on whether or not this particular citation is faked; all that matters is that we know that three may be.
32 Wall, “ ‘Marks of indifference’”, 144.
33 Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist painting’, in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, Chicago, 1995.
34 Greenberg, ‘Four photographers: review of A Vision of Paris by Eugene-Auguste Atget; A Life in Photography by Edward Steichen; The World Through My Eyes by Andreas Feninger; and Photographs by Cartier-Bresson, introduced by Lincoln Kirstein’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, 183–7, 183.
35 Greenberg, ‘Seeing with insight: review of Norm and Form by E. H. Gombrich’, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4, 258.
36 Roberts, The Impossible Document, 38.
37 Roberts, The Impossible Document, 38.
38 This oversight is perhaps attributable to Roberts’ focus on the achievements of British photo- conceptualism.
39 Rothkopf, “ ‘Photography cannot record abstract ideas’”, 1–49.
40 Bochner expressed his original desire for ‘objectivity’ in photography as follows: ‘Any time I became involved in the craft aspect, there was the danger of looking old fashioned. By using the fabrication techniques of minimalism, it gave me a certain objectivity.’ Bochner, as cited in Rothkopf, “ ‘Photography cannot record abstract ideas’ ”, 10.
41 ‘Yet photography itself was of little interest to most conceptual artists, producing a situation in which critical agency is given to the photographic image without photography becoming theoretically self-conscious as a medium.’ Roberts, The Impossible Document, 9.
42 Wall, “‘Marks of indifference’’’, 167.
43 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’.
44 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’.
45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, London, 2000, 113.
46 Bernard Stiegler, ‘The discrete image’, in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek, Cambridge, 2002, 147–63, 152.
47 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’.
48 Mel Bochner in conversation with the author, 24 March 2008.
49 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’.
50 Obrist and Antelo-Suarez, ‘Interview with Mel Bochner’.
51 Bochner, ‘Misunderstandings’, 180. The artist has described the work as a ‘deconstruction’ of photography. Mel Bochner in conversation with the author, 24 March 2008.
52 For a detailed discussion of the issues surrounding the concept of indexicality in photography see the transcript of a roundtable discussion featuring Jan Baetens, Diarmuid Costello, James Elkins, Jonathan Friday, Margaret Iversen, Sabine Kriebel, Margaret Olin, Graham Smith and Joel Snyder, in James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory, London and New York, 2007, 130–55.
53 Wall, “‘Marks of indifference’’’, 167.
54 Bochner, ‘Three Statements for Data Magazine’, 98, 100.
55 Peter Osborne, ‘Photography in an expanding field: distributive unity and dominant form’, in David Green, ed., Where is the Photograph?, Kent and Brighton, 2003, 63–70, 63.
56 For an account of the concept of medium-specificity and its problems, see Diarmuid Costello, ‘On the very idea of a “specific” medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on painting and photography as arts’, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2008, 274–312.
57 Bochner, ‘Misunderstandings’, 180.
58 ‘How can you defend making paintings now? A conversation between Mel Bochner and James Meyer’, in Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville, eds, As Painting: Division and Displacement, Cambridge, MA and London, 2001, 199–204. Bochner includes a reprint of this interview in Solar System, 158–66.
59 ‘How can you defend making paintings now?’, 199.
60 ‘How can you defend making paintings now?’, 203.
61 ‘How can you defend making paintings now?’, 199, 203.
62 ‘How can you defend making paintings now?’, 204.
63 ‘How can you defend making paintings now?’, 201.
64 Phong Bui, ‘In conversation: Mel Bochner with Phong Bui’, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/05/art/in-conversation-mel-bochner-with-phong-bui, retrieved 22 March 2008.