“‘Borges speaks of a labyrinth that is a straight line, invisible and unceasing,” wrote Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson at the beginning of “The Domain of the Great Bear” (1966), their picture-essay pastiche on the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, from which the title of Bochner’s new and long-awaited collection of writings and interviews is taken. (Evidently, it was a real piece of signage in the old planetarium.) The name of that labyrinth is, perhaps, language.
For centuries, it seems, art lingered near the mouth of that labyrinth; some of its adventures there, from the appearance of Annunciation scrolls in late medieval art through the use of newspaper fragments in Cubist collage, were traced by Michel Butor in his book Les Mots dans la peinture (1969). In the 1960s, though, art plunged deeper into the maze, and has yet to emerge. This tropism toward language is inextricable from the emergence of Conceptual art, with which Bochner’s protean early work is usually classified but is not simply synonymous. For art historians, the crux of the matter is this: Did Conceptual artists usher art into the realm of language (or language into the realm of art) or, on the contrary, did the fact that art had already become linguistic allow certain artists to invent a practice that could be called Conceptual art?”
art in and around South Florida
