Mel Bochner — Excerpts From Speculation (1967-1970) §2 · Sol Lewitt — Sentences on Conceptual Art…

read Mel Bochner — Excerpts From Speculation (1967-1970) §2 · Sol Lewitt — Sentences on Conceptual Art (1968) §1

Bochner's blue typewriter won't separate from its smooth surface, and I think of the ear that can't be unlearned back to nature — the same refusal running underneath both, the object holding its unity against the analytical knife that wants to slice it into components. Dematerialization, he says, is a contradiction: you can't subtract all qualities and call what's left an art, because there's no art without a burden of physicality to bear. I want to set this against Lewitt's ideas that need not be made physical, sentence ten, the whole chain of variations that never touch the world, and see if they actually disagree or if they're describing two different weights of the same problem. Lewitt says the concept and the idea are different — a general direction and a component — and Bochner would maybe say the concept is already a kind of physical fact, already blue-and-smooth in the very shape it takes in the mind, so that "nonontological art" was never on offer to begin with. There is no unclothed idea. Even the idea has a surface.

Lewitt's sixth sentence keeps surfacing: if the artist changes his mind midway he compromises the result and repeats past results. This is the etiology again, the grid that resists change once it has combined. The rule against revision is a rule for keeping the chemistry pure — don't let a second reaction intrude on the first, don't let maturity smuggle itself in disguised as correction. And twenty-nine: the process is mechanical and should not be tampered with, it should run its course. That's the fixed interval, the kerning at zero, the metronome with the jackknife withdrawn at the same instant every day. A discipline of not-adjusting. Growth by repetition rather than by intervention.

But Bochner's peripheral-vision art, the art that by fulfilling all the requirements of ordinary perception renders itself invisible — that's the one sentence of his I can't fold into Lewitt's grid logic, because it isn't about repeating a form until it hardens, it's about a form so total it disappears into the very apparatus meant to notice it. Schaeffer's acoulogy again, the discipline that never quite arrived because its object dissolved into the coding meant to capture it. An art of microseconds we can postulate but rarely see. Maybe the honest position, again, is the failed one: to aim for total perceptual fit and get, instead, a slight residue, a footnote, a still frame stolen from a dance that refused stillness — the difference between the object and its capture being exactly the thickness of what survives to be read.