Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

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Mel Bochner. Working Drawings and Other Visible
Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be
Viewed as Art. Installation, School of Visual Arts
Gallery, December, 1966.
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Mel Bochner, by contrast, seems to have chosen Dan Flavin as his primary
figure of reference. He wrote one of the first essays on Dan Flavin (it is in fact a
text-collage of accumulated quotations, all of which relate in one way or the
other to Flavin's work).5 Shortly thereafter, the text-collage as a presentational
mode would, indeed, become formative within Bochner's activities, for in the
same year he organized what was probably the first truly conceptual exhibition
(both in terms of materials being exhibited and in terms of presentational style).
Entitled Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant
to Be Viewed as Art (at the School of Visual Arts in 1966), most of the Minimal
artists were present along with a number of then still rather unknown Post-Minimal
and Conceptual artists. Having assembled drawings, sketches, documents,
tabulations, and other paraphernalia of the production process, the exhibition
limited itself to presenting the "originals" in Xeroxes assembled into four looseleaf
binders that were installed on pedestals in the center of the exhibition space.
While one should not overestimate the importance of such features (nor should
one underestimate the pragmatics of such a presentational style), Bochner's
intervention clearly moved to transform both the format and space of exhibitions.
As such, it indicates that the kind of transformation of exhibition space and
of the devices through which art is presented that was accomplished two years
5. Mel Bochner, "Less is Less (for Dan Flavin)," Art and Artists
(Summer 1966).