Regarding Mel Bochner’s Artistic, Critical and Theoretical Viewpoint

At a certain point in their training, painters, sculptors and architects, as well as poets and writers from every part of the world, have indulged in an “Italian Voyage,” in observance of what has become a proverbial custom. It was also done with the aim of achieving a coveted recognition of artistic talent and expertise in the country considered to have the greatest expertise in the exercise of the arti maggiori—Italy. Along with Dürer and El Greco, Ingres and Picasso, artists like Calder and Rauschenberg, Beuys and Warhol, LeWitt and many others have taken part in this rite. Therefore, when the young Mel Bochner felt ready to embark on his voyage to Italy, few people had heard of his artistic profile, his range of action and his poetic goals.

What was known was that Ileana Sonnabend, a first-class gallerist and a regular in the artistic circles of Europe and Italy, has been promoting his coherent conceptual research in the United States and Paris for some time. The fact remains that gallerists like Gian Enco Sperone and Franco Tosellu, figures at the forefront of the early ‘70s and with an impeccable sense of timing, immediately accepted his work. Viewers were thus given an opportunity to observe this research in person, which unfailingly aroused surprise, curiostiy and either sincere reservations or outspoken interest and even admiration. The reservations concerned the type of elaboration Bochner had undertaken which appeared to radicalize and reduce the more extreme plastic proposals of Arte Povera proponents like Anselmo or of Minimalists like LeWitt. On the other hand, those who expressed support and interest in Bochner’s work appreciated the constituent elementariness of a language that was concrete and most importantly, comprehensible while, at the same time, revealing foundational data that could project the laws and norms of aesthetic, geometric, and philosophical tradition into a new art based on sensibility and conceptualism. With qualities like a gentle character and a very pronounced clarity in his artistic thought process, Bochner soon attracted the attention not only of the above-mentioned gallerists and of some figures of the Roman cultural milieu like Graziella Lonardi Buontempo, promoter of the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, or gallerists like Pasquale Trisorio and Lucio Amelio in Naples, but also of some young critics who were just starting out like myself. We not only had a generational correspondence with Bochner, we also shared a certain Zeitgeist that filled the air in those years. In Rome, Milan, Naples, and Turin you would run into Mel Bochner with artists like Boetti or Prini, Kounellis or LeWitt, to the point that Mel soon became an integral part of our encounters of those months and of our nomadism within our peninsula and beyond.

Today, his interest in Fontana and Boetti and his curatorship of the exhibition for Magazzino Italian Art is not surprising to see. In fact, numerous aspects allow us to consider these artists closer to each other than might seem at first. Bochner’s interest in and relationship to the art of Fontana was documented in the exhibition of 1991, which was held in the actual studio of the Italian Argentinian artist, long active in Milan (on corso Monforte, 23), in spaces adjacent to the current offices of the Fondazione Fontana(1). Inspired by the discovery of some glass fragments that had belonged to Fontana, Bochner declared in the catalogue of the show that: “Glass interested me for various reasons. First of all, Fontana is an artist I respect very much. Secondly, glass is a natural material that is found everywhere (...) Glass is made from sand, and sand is made from crushed rocks. Rocks are what I have always used in my pieces for the Theory of Sculpture. That is why I decided to make this show an homage to Fontana whose work centers on light and space.” The constructive principles and concepts underlying the work Bochner made for his homage to Fontana had already been exhibited in a show I had seen in Rome in September 1990, at the Galleria Primo Piano directed by Maria Colao. However, in this show, the pebbles laid out on the Roman gallery floor in different linear, geometric and numeric arrangements had been reformulated and substituted with the fragments of colored glass that had belonged to Fontana. The following works were all represented: Measurement Five, 1969/1991, Meditation on the Theorem of Pythagoras, 1972/91, and other essential configurations endowed with eloquent regulatory principles, such as Triangle, Pentagon, Square, 1973/91. Before these important exhibitions in Rome and Milan, Bochner’s work had already been exhibited in 1972 at the Marilena Bonomo Gallery in Bari and at the Galleria Schema in Florence.

Along with the consideration of what helps define sculpture in the work of Bochner, Fontana and Boetti, we must also examine the material, the quantity or numerical element of the medium and the colors used. The number and color of Quanta (1960) by Fontana, the velvet and glass of his Concetto spaziale – Attesa, just like the textiles of Boetti’s “embroideries,” the many words he chose, the threads used in the works made in Rome, Kabul and Peshawar, all correspond to the principles underlying Bochner’s works. Though the artworks may differ completely in terms of sensibility and significance, they are similar in their conception of a plural, atomistic, and composite elementariness.

The exhibition held at Magazzino Italian Art highlights, among the magical similarities and numerous masterpieces it contain, and unsaid but nevertheless present fact, which had already been noticed in various occasions in Bochner’s practice. He is not only one of the major American artists to have emerged in the second half of the ‘60s but also a theoretician of very efficacious concepts. Even on this occasion, his accurate reading of the work of Italian artists like Fontana and Boetti, with whom he entered into a dialectical relationship, demonstrates that artists are outstanding art critics. In this exhibition, he provides an example of how art criticism can differ from the three types indicated in his essay Serial Art Systems: Solipsism: ‘impressionistic’ criticism, ‘historical’ criticism and ‘metaphorical’ criticism; and does not disregard an interest in the materiality of the works of art that being placed next to each other. In so doing, Bochner also reveals that his critical method is fundamentally phenomenological and far from idealistic(2).