ARTS MAGAZINE.

MEL BOCHNER'S ART AS A STUDY OF MENTAL PROCESS. May, 1984 pp 86-89. Betty Collings.

Mel Bochner's art is a cumulative investigation of the kind
that embodies concepts and prompts speculation about them,
which may not always be germane to the individual parts.

Mel Bochner has been making and exhibiting mature art works for almost 20 years. In the beginning he used his art to build an individual visual language based upon, and as a reflection of, a personally directed probe into the meaning and the structure of the forms of language. This led to a series of studies of the formal relationships that underlie all types of visualization. Separately and in combination they have included number, sequence, seriality, proximity, boundaries, shape, symmetry, identity, equivalence, relations, color, as well as deductive and inductive cognitive process. His is a cumulative investigation of the kind that embodies concepts, and prompts speculation about them, which may not always be germane to the individual parts. Hence, the most interesting aspect of Bochner's recent solo exhibition (a group of paintings shown at the Sonnabend Gallery in November) was the way in which the form of the paintings, as well as the methods by which they were achieve, extended the total study.

The new art shows that the artist, ever interested in the workings of his own mind, continues to watch it and use it as the implement in a probe that is directed toward revealing some of the ways the mind works, in this case the role of the subconscious in visual decision-making. Because probing the mechanisms of the mind is an area on intellection that a growing number of artists share with a number of progressive cognitive scientists, Bochner's work prompts question about the role that the arts can or may play in the scientific study of cognition. Here, even though the procedures for the work purport to reveal the relationship between conscious and subconscious visual decision making, the gradual enlargement of Bochner's mental world-model has been so closely watched and documented that it may be the way in which the new work enlarges his total oeuvre that is of ultimate relevance. It is possible that careful artistic studies such as this are sufficiently compatible with the specialized rigors of scientific investigations to become a special case in a structural analysis of mental modeling, particularly one concerned with the structural patterns of mental development. Furthermore, especially as the works have stimulated critical commentary that stresses their similarity with Analytical Cubism, it is interesting to consider the cultural mechanisms that permit the physical limitations of two and three-dimensional representations to be transcended by changes in the perceptual set of both the creative thinker and the acultured viewer.

Bochner's recent work was the beginning of a study intended to reveal the mechanisms that underlie the subconscious decisions that are usually taken for granted in visual decision-making =. The specific vehicle was a series of paintings that ended up as irregularly shaped, painted, and stretched canvases each about 60 square feet in area. The construction of these works served as the vehicle for an ancillary investigation into the relationships that exist among the internal parts of a painting and between these and its outer limits as defined by edge or frame. This formal subject matte, like the flags of Jasper Johns, was deliberately chosen to be "neither different nor novel." That is to say, the elements of the problem are sufficiently commonplace for the attention of both artist and viewer to be freed to engage with the underlying purpose. Bochner's attempt to "reveal the basis of (his own procedural) decisions" was an outcome of a long-held view that not only are the decisions of a painter based upon appearance, but that the act of seeing draws upon all available levels of cognitive assessment. It was also a response to his sense that the factors he had uncovered by past "analysis (had) reached a point of necessary synthesis." In order to accomplish his goal he set out to devise a situation within which all decision making, whether of the specific kind contribution to the development of a shape, or in the nature of assessments (such as determining the suitability of a drawing as a basis for a finished canvas), would follow the dictates of intuition and preference rather than conform to a predetermined or consciously realized logic.

The physical procedures of construction began when a large, loose, rectangular canvas sheet was tacked to the studio wall. Upon this outstretched surface, a freely applied colored ground became the basis for the key image; a network of lines depicting a collection of more or less) equal-sided planar pentagons, squares, and triangles. Some of these collections were enlargements of shapes previously developed in drawings; others were devised on the canvas, as many as four or five unsatisfactory directions were painted out and redrawn. During this boldly executed process of trial and adjustment, as throughout the continued development of the painting, pains were taken to ensure that traces of erasures, revisions, and amendments remained. This was to enable a subsequent observer - including the artist as observer - to be able to mentally reconstruct all the stages of the procedural sequence.

Once an unobstructed "grid" of polygons was in place, the work developed like a freely interpreted form of plane geometry. For each polygon, a point outside its own borders, but within the outline of the "grid", was established as a focus. In conventional plane geometry a group of rays would have connected each focus to the vertices of its corresponding polygon. In this work that concept was extended in two ways. First, connecting nodes were occasionally created halfway between vertices as well as at the vertices. Secondly, the points of focus were turned into transfer points, a deceptively simply modification of a known technique that permitted the artist to use the lines as the instrument and evidence of interconnection of the individual polygons. The course of these connections appeared to be determined by an unpremeditated, fluid, visually stimulated sequence of individual assessments; the result of this mental action is that the final painting stands as the tangible residue of the rise and fall of a discrete, localized, logic.

In some paintings, Saturn for example, it was possible to make the procedural sequence readable using a single color for the network of connecting lines. In others, such as the slightly smaller Ahnighto, several colors were necessary to ensure that individual sets of lines could be retrieved from the final dense network. The need for some degree of clarity also determined the use of oil paint; this medium was more suitable than either the graphite or the conte crayon used in earlier expression of these ideas. It did not smudge but, slow to dry, gave the artist ample opportunity to vigorously cross-score. The result, even in the areas of maximum overlay, allows a persistent viewer to single out the color-coded procedural lines embedded in the multiple and interlocking layers of paint.

Except for the determination to proceed with a specific problem of formal composition and the desire to emphasize unpremeditated choices, Bochner did not want to impose any type of structural or procedural order for the accomplishment of these paintings. However, the process inevitably became bounded by the logical outcome of early decisions. For instance, the number of possible variants in the underlying network is affected by the mechanistic need for equal-sided shapes, the decision to keep the network free of overlaps (a decision presumably taken in the interest of clarity), and the size of the canvas. Furthermore, the network was often terminated because there was no room to move - another situation consequent upon the earlier decision that elements of the grid should not overlap,. Then, when these parameters became established and were aligned to a further, necessary decision - that of making all interconnections between shapes take place within the outline of the basic grid - freedom of choice was further constrained. Even so, in the construction of the grid there was freedom of choice in the placement of the first polygon, in the choice of early moves contributing to shape development, and in the acceptance or rejection of the finished "grid." Also, the moves of interconnection (for which the artist preconceived neither sequence nor effect) permitted choices - where to begin, where to end - which, at least at the beginning of the paining, were largely unrestrained. Finally, the cropping that determined the outer border of the completed canvas appears to have been more or less available to preference.

For the purposes of this argument the most significant of these freedoms is the interconnection of the polygons. Here the isolation of a salient procedure not only allowed the artist a desired "moment of fulfillment," but it resembled the techniques of experimental psychology. That is, by sifting out residual symbolism, downplaying expressionism and developing "natural" limits, the artist directs a retrospective concentration on the manner of the mental process involved.

Attempts to reconstruct the entire sequence of moves from the final field of layered scoring and erasure are so thwarted by the density of lines that only short spurts of conceptual clarity can be followed. The painting is read as a semi-stochastic series of related but disconnected sequences. This activity feels like the occasions when the mind, teased by an unresolved or even unrealized idea, casually roves, sporadically probing the seemingly subconscious peripheral references that fluctuate in and out of consciousness. At these times, thought, taking the form of a mental opalescence, registers a multi-sensate kaleidoscope, but unable to hold -- or unwilling to form-a retrievable pattern, does not translate effect into sustained cognitive action.

From the foregoing it is understandable that, to many, Bochner's art has appeared to be involuted, rarely predictable, frequently obscure; for he is approaching a method of allusion that, like poetry, uses the expectations of the known language as a structure against which the intuitive, the peripheral, and the subconscious are etched. An artistically derived method for the study of intuition, which uses the impetus but eschews the histrionics of expressionism, it nevertheless remains a study in which major conclusions are subjective and the province of the artist. From outside his mind we can only speculate on the possible conscious and subconscious reasons for a tendency to produce pentagon-like shapes. Neither we nor, for that matter, the artist really know what factors contribute to the subconscious assessments that motivate, underlie - even determine - the so-called free choice, while seemingly relevant questions as to whether his "visual" decisions are furthering subconscious rationales, or whether subconscious rationales coalesce in respond to visual information, are eons away from meaningful answers. But, because the artist is exploring uncharted territory, we must be prepared to observe his visual descriptions if it with an open mind. This includes a degree of trust that is supported by credentials that include his notes, statements, publication, exhibitions, as well as the continued critical commentary. These demonstrate, even those leery of what an artist has to say, that a connected sequence of coherent problems is now in existence. Nonetheless, when one gets down to it, it is only the appearance of the work, its order of execution, its mechanistics, and its declared concepts that can be described with any veracity. The fact of the matter is that we don't yet know how the subconscious works and we do not know how the brain converts the specific experiences of the past into data available to the present; we know little of its storage systems and less of its mechanisms for interpolation and recombination. For the work in question, the uncertainty of interpretation is both its problem and its strength.

The artist has chosen to work in the arena now known as Cognitive Science. Recently formed, its practitioners are all interested in the processes of the mind. Cognitive scientists can be philosophers, linguists, anthropologists, neuro-biologists, mathematicians, and the experimental psychologists studying all forms of sensory perception as well as artificial intelligence. They are not generally artists; however, several of the accepted practitioners of Cognitive Science are aware that these days there are a number of artists who are willing to ally the expressive purposes of their art with the renewed cultural interest in the responses of individuals. These are the artists who, schooled in the formalist underpinnings of conceptual and systemic art, aware that the "unfettered imagination approaches anarchy," (i) make artistically directed "objective" probes into the factors that underlie artistic or intuitive behavior. Cognitive specialists who take art seriously include Michael Kubovy who, in a recent address entitled "The Visual Artist as Avant-Garde Psychologist of Perception." (2) recognized that art can effectively instigate fruitful lines of inquiry; Arthur Danto who, in a lecture to Bard College in 1983, concluded that many aspects of art and philosophy have become merged (3); Morse Peckham, a philosopher who has for some time regarded art in terms of biological necessity (4); and Douglas Hofstadter, a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, who looks for pattern congruence between fields as seemingly dissimilar as mathematics, art and music.(5).

Parallel disciplinary interest between art and science is not a new phenomenon, nor is objectivity in art. Artists have always been a weathervane for shifts in cultural percepts and have consistently displayed an interest in the quantitative aspects of their discipline. Impre3sssionism and Pointillism are often cited as examples. Andre Breton, poet, principal spokesman and instigator of Surrealism was physician with a penchant for psychological experimentation.

In 1967, Will Insley's comment that "many Pop artists are still at the beginning of investigations" (6) emphasized that the visual illusions of the Pop=-Op period, constructed by artists with pattern and color were firmly grounded in experimentation. Most recently, some of the many artists who are intuitively drawn toward the kind of artistry that stresses a variety of types of perceptual phenomena have been able to focus their interests into "experimental" inquiry. For instance, John Davies has produced films that, among other things, ask the question: how much information about a familiar object (a face) is needed to trigger recognition? The first of Davies films was used by the cognitive scientists Michael Kubovy and Roger Shepard in a presentation entitled "Knowledge, Belief and Skepticism" at the 1983 session of the interdisciplinary European Forum at Alpach, Austria. The sculptor-draftsman William Ramage, dissatisfied with the way the historically developed language of linear perspective blocks visual representation of perceptual insights common today, has introduced a "cylindrical" perspective into his recent installations. (7) In this method all information radiates outward from a centrally located viewer. By contrast, the painter Enrique Castro Cid has taken linear perspective as a priori in his unique two-dimensional transformations of four-dimensional space. Bochner's construction of a procedural framework for interconnecting all the polygons of his "grid" - in a way that could isolate and reflect his "visual" decisions - furthers this contemporary practice. This is of particular interest because not only is the subject matter a hot topic, but the purposeful narrowing of parameters reinforces the seminal contribution made by his early work to the use of such methods in the arts.

Bochner, interested and informed and articulate about many of the specificities of the history of art, understood early in his career that the essential quality of art is that it is a means to knowledge that follows personal, even idiosyncratic, direction. Preferring to work alone he pursued both the subconscious and conscious impulses of his own mind, carefully retaining all the artifacts (drawing, notes, photographs, "finished art works"} of the many stages of what became a marriage of expression and theory. In the past, many thought this to be egotistical but, in fact, the existence of the collection enhances the possibility that the gradual revelation of his own genetic epistemology will become the basis of a case study in a general description of the development of mental models.

Many artists follow the directives of a personal vision but few leave a trail as clear as Bochner's. This, even though many others working over an equally long time period have covered similar ground. Gary Schwindler, George Woodman, and Judy Pfaff are three such painters. As every artist is a special case of the concept 'art', in any evaluation of accomplishment the mixture of talent and drive with training and opportunity, aas well as mode of presentation, differs from person to person. But for each of these artists the indices of the developing mental models - the art - show periodic climaxes of formal facility, expressive and factual presentation, plus the use of conscious and subconscious "reasoning"; furthermore, each has co-opted structure as a foil for the expression of the "unbounded." All have crafted a philosophical position form a world in which the form of knowledge, far from being static, moves among the many forms of procedural process. The sequence of analysis and synthesis of any one, or all, could be grist to the mill of a structural analysis which, contrasting with those forms that completely dismember existing entities in order to construct new formal logics, takes chains of action as the fundamental unit in a search for a transformational structure capable of linking all the alternative forms of the mental mechanisms directing thought. Such an extended relational study of mental processes could show the way in which the structures of procedure and the shape of memory interlock in the attainment of enhanced awareness. In this respect, the anthropologist Adam Kuper's work on dreams may serve as a skeletal model.(8)

If one neglects to include the period of conceptual and systemic art when evaluating these new paintings in historical terms, it is easy to read them as projective geometries with protruding, three-dimensional implications. To do this is to see them as a form of representation that merely extends the concepts of Cubism. Such as limited view must lead to questions about the efficacy of static forms of visualization - painting and sculpture - to make cogent intellectual arguments in a cultural period for which continuous transformation is implicit in any vital structure. Certainly, when presented with a network of converging and overlapping lines, the syntactical norms of visual communication make it exceedingly difficult to avoid spatial dimensionality, a factor that serves to emphasize the point that cultural percept has changed.

In creating these works the artist was not striving for spatial illusions; the dimensions represented are mental, an assertion support by the fact that Bochner's art coexists with the works of a whole generation of artists who continue to evince an interest I qualifying intangibles such as order, space, process, relations and thought. As static objects that not only encode their order of becoming, but use that order as a means to begin to quantity the yet unknown variables of subconscious thought, these new paintings attempt to reach knowledge mechanisms at the root of their development. Their procedures demonstrate a quantum advance in the possibilities for visual elucidation, one that even the impressive options of serial presentation are hard-pressed to surpass.

1. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Beacon, 1969. p.3.

2. Michael Kubovy, "The Visual Artist as Avant-Garde Psychologist of Perception," in Aspects of Perception. Catalogue of an exhibition curated by Betty Collings and held at the Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College 1982 and 1983 pp. 48-51

3. Arthur Danto, "The End of Art," ibid. pp.58-59

4. Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos; Biology, Behavior and the Arts, Schoken, 1965. p.319.

5. Douglas Hofstader, Godel, Escher, Bach. An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, 1979.

6. Will Insley. "The General Public is Just as Disinterested in Advanced Art as Ever." Esthetics Contemporary, pp. 217-219.

7. '"Minding Measure; Measuring Mind," an exhibition of work by Mel Bochner, Ann Dewald, Barry LeVa, Thomas Macaulay, William Ramage and Judy Rifka. Islip Community Art Museum, 1984.

8. Horace Freeland Judson, "Behind the Painted Mask," The Sciences, March/April. 1984. p.3