Mel Bochner: Thoughts Made Visible

1997 / 36 min. / color
Directed by Michael Blackwood

With the participation of Yve-Alain Bois and Richard Field. Filmed at the Yale University Art Gallery

A major retrospective exhibition of the early work of Mel Bochner provides an opportunity to experience the site-specific installations of the artist. Bochner’s work uses the commonest of materials: pen-and-ink diagrams, photographs, tape, stones, pennies, and the very simplest of symbol systems: measurement, counting, combinations of prepositions, series of short phrases.

But while the elements are easily understandable, the art is found in the unexpected questioning of how simple things may reveal the complexity of our relationship to the greater world. That relationship is established through language, and in Bochner’s art it takes the form of a dialogue between practice (the physical work) and theory (the pure idea). Defining his subject as “the contradiction between physical space and mental space,” Bochner locates intention – and thus emotion – in the procedure, in the site, and in the mind of the viewer.