Mel Bochner, unabashed materialist? It just doesn’t sit right. Isn’t he, after all, the impresario of graph paper and measuring systems, of intangible numbers and words, of mutable materials that blow away like so many curse words in the wind? Certainly, that is one well-established side of his radical and critical split with painting-obsessed mid-century modernism.
BOCHNER: Well, my idea was to enlarge or recast the context in which my work is seen, because my work was basically first accepted in Italy. I was never sure why, other than it seems the Italians have a propensity for something called “the avant-garde,” which dates all the way back to futurism.
BOCHNER: That’s true. I remember being in Milan at the Toselli Gallery in 1970 for my “Theory of Painting” [an installation of blue spray paint on sheets of newspaper laid across the gallery floor].shown in Milan before and nothing had ever been written about me in Italian. But I was supported. The gallery was packed at the opening. Packed!BOCHNER: I had arrived. And I wonder, “Where the hell did I arrive?” I had no idea. And then there started being collectors’ support.
DUNHAM: And they must have already been annoyed by the American cultural effort in Europe after World War II. BOCHNER: It turns your head around and opens it up. There are certain things that open up the doors to what’s permissible.BOCHNER: I have to admit, I never spoke to any of them about Fontana. My guess is that they thought it was decorative. A lot of fun Fontana is decorative. By the time I arrived in Italy in 1970, it was basically old news.
DUNHAM: You’ve been painting for a long time, but people don’t really think of you as a painter. You never hear, “Mel Bochner, the painter.” You’re an artist. The same is true of Fontana. He was an artist who found a great use for the conventions of painting.BOCHNER: That’s a really nice way of putting it. Yes, I have been painting for a long time. But I don’t know where or how my paintings fit into the current discourse, as it were.BOCHNER: They can be loud, yes. But it’s not for me to say.
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