Art Review

A Calculus With Chalk, Stones and Walnuts

‘Mel Bochner: Proposition and Process’ at Peter Freeman

Peter Freeman, Inc.

Mel Bochner’s “Five by Four” (1972), of stones and chalk, from his “Theory of Sculpture” series.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: May 23, 2013

The excellent exhibition of Mel Bochner’s mind-bending, defiantly modest early Conceptual sculptures is a post-Minimalist time capsule at Peter Freeman. It provides a startlingly real sense of the attitude and physical ethos of SoHo’s experimental, artist-generated beginnings in the late 1960s and early ’70s while showcasing some of the most singular art that the era produced.

John Powers

“Measurement Plants” (1969), in the show, which is a time capsule of sorts.

“Mel Bochner: Proposition and Process: A Theory of Sculpture (1968-1973)” brings together 18 works from his “Theory of Sculpture” series, produced toward the beginning of his career — more of these of these quirky, questioning pieces than have ever been exhibited at once. It’s a museum-caliber show, but few museums could muster this setting: a looming storefront space — complete with scarred wood floor — that gives us a glimpse of old SoHo in the midst of new SoHo’s retail madness.

The pieces here show Mr. Bochner charting a course beyond the costly heavy metals of Minimalism with elegant thought puzzles that often involve small, negligible objects like white stones or walnuts arrayed on the floor and annotated in white chalk with words, numbers, lines and circles. They are appealing and subversive in their slightness and cease to exist when not on display. When they are, they present the rudiments of sculpture — materials, space and thought (language) — in a fluid balance. At Freeman the works are spread out on the floor as on a vast, rough-hewed blackboard. Moving among them, figuring out one and then the other, you can experience an easy circularity of mind, eye and body.

By the time Mr. Bochner began his “Theory of Sculpture” series, he had spent three years complicating Minimalism’s repeating volumes — most prominent in the boxes of Donald Judd and the three-dimensional grids of Sol LeWitt — in a series of brilliant, often confounding photographs of stacks of small wood blocks. These works epitomized the dematerialization of the art object, a goal that gripped so many artists at that time. But with his “Theory of Sculpture” series, Mr. Bochner turned toward something more tangible.

By extraordinary and useful coincidence, this exhibition overlaps with a show of early sculptures by Richard Serra from the same period at David Zwirner in Chelsea. The two shows represent divergent reactions to Minimalism: Mr. Serra disassembled and destabilized the Minimalist box, wielding individual planes of lead and then steel that have only increased in size and weight as he has developed. Mostly hugging the floor (like Carl Andre), Mr. Bochner opted for a kind of shrinkage, jettisoning scale and any material except his banal, often hand-size, ready-mades. He also rejected Minimalism’s obscurity and aloofness. He wanted his measurements of space to speak, or count for themselves out loud.

Sometimes he narrowed his materials down to pen and masking tape on the wall, as in the initially confusing “Continuous/Dis/Continuous” (1972), a single ribbon of tape applied to a long wall at about eye level. It is covered with numbers written alternately in red and black marker. Well, not quite. But to not spoil the experience, let’s just say that the lines of numbers run in opposite directions according to color; that spatially their progress is a matter of over and under, almost a kind of weaving; and that figuring this out can be thrilling.

Occasionally potted plants were pressed into service, as in “Measurement Plants” (1969), one of the show’s few works to have any real size or bulk. It consists of three potted plants set before a wall marked off in feet, vertically and horizontally. Clearly intended to measure the plants’ growth, these marks also give the piece the look of a police lineup for botanical suspects.

Most works here measure little tracts of space by counting to five in various ways, giving numbers — so real in the mind — a physical reality of stone, glass or walnut, plus chalk. For example “Five by Four” takes four groups of five stones and arranges each within chalk circles in all the possible combinations, both spatial and numerical, and circles them again for emphasis. In the first, the stones are all in one circle; in the last each is alone in its own circle. That the stones start to suggest different interpersonal relationships is perhaps an inevitable but resonant byproduct.

In “Hinge,” two rows of five stones each form a 90-degree angle, sharing what you might call the corner stone and the number 1. The numbers proceed along one row aligned with the stones and along the other aligned with the gaps between them, diagraming sculpture as a series of solids and voids.

“Prepositional Sculpture” uses four four-by-fours and black vinyl type to demonstrate four sculptural positions (beside, between, over and under). And “To Count: Transitive” creates an elegant hieroglyphic semaphore of numbers using burned matchsticks, starting with a single match for one and proceeding to five versions of five, each made with five matchsticks. Mr. Bochner considered the Masonite-topped folding table on which the matches are arranged a way of reintroducing sculpture’s base, which Minimalism had eliminated.

The table as base and the use of humble materials figure often in current art; examples include the table sculptures of Uri Aran and the found-detritus pieces of B. Wurtz. As for Mr. Bochner, he soon transferred the geometric shapes that emerge in some of these pieces — the triangles, squares and pentagons standing in for threes, fours and fives — to paper, the wall and eventually canvas. With time he developed his brightly colored word paintings, returning to the seductive, talkative accessibility he achieved starting out in SoHo.

Many of the most admired first-generation Post Minimalists and Conceptualists have deviated little from strategies devised early in their careers. The restless exploratory unfolding of Mr. Bochner’s art is an important exception. Its ins and outs and leaps and continuities are still not fully appreciated.

“Mel Bochner: Proposition and Process: A Theory of Sculpture (1968-1973)” runs through June 29 at Peter Freeman, 140 Grand Street, between Crosby and Lafayette Streets, SoHo; (212) 966-5154, peterfreemaninc.com.