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Subject: Re: <nettime> Mel Bochner at The Drawing Center
From: "Jon C. Ippolito" <JIppolito@guggenheim.org>
Date: 29 Mar 1998 09:07:32 +0200

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>>>on 03/23/98 10:03AM murph the surf <murph@interport.net> wrote:

Over the weekend I happened to stop in at the "Drawing Room," which is a
project space run by The Drawing Center in New York and found an exhibition
put on by a group called "Parasite"....[Bochner's] small exhibition, easily
ignored and misunderstood, keeps resonating for me as an artist as a kind
of manifestation of "net.art".<<<

I'm glad Robbin Murphy saw the same parallels I did between the Internet
and Parasite's restaging of Mel Bochner's _Working Drawings and Other
Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed As Art_
(1966). She's right that Parasite's nomadic, collaborative approach
to projects--derived no doubt on the practice of member artists like Ben
Kinmont--bears a very interesting comparison to network practices like
copyleft or MOOs.

For me, however, the most provocative comparison was not with Parasite's
curatorial work in the 1990s but with the work of Bochner's from 1966s
that Parasite chose to exhibit. His use of a photocopy machine to generate
the artistic content of the show suggests the infinite reproducibility of
e-mail messages and Web pages. And his juxtaposition of "working drawings"
from such disparate fields as art, algebra, and accounting reminds me of
the Internet's tendency to cross-contaminate disciplines.

One of the most interesting parallels is Bochner's invitation to the viewer
to see technical information or diagrams as art. It is tempting to explain
Bochner's xeroxbooks as a Duchampian gesture: information is readymade art.
But central to Bochner's project is his preoccupation with uncertainty--which
is why the title is not "Other Visible Things on Paper That Are Perfectly
Legitimate As Art." And so I am left with the question implicit in Bochner's
title: what is gained--and what is lost--in cutting these diagrams out of
their original context and inserting them into art?

For example, did Bochner's display of mathematical formulae or electrical
diagrams validate jodi and other technology-as-art practitioners %avant
la lettre%, or did it prove them unnecessary? After all, if we accept
circuit diagrams as art, then you could argue that science has already
produced more beautiful formulae (such as Euler's equation) and meaningful
diagrams (such as a Lorenz attractor) than jodi could hope to accomplish.
(The argument that "scientific diagrams cannot be art because they are
tools" doesn't work in the case of Galois theory and other abstract
mathematics, which has very few, if any, useful applications.)

I'm still contemplating this last question and would be interested to know
if anyone else is. By the way, the contents of Bochner's xeroxbook were
published in 1997 by Cabinet des estampes (Geneva), Walther Koenig
(Cologne), and Picaron (Paris). For more on the similarities between a
digital network and the working methods of artists like Ben Kinmont, see
Laura Trippi's remarks in "The View from the Street" _World Art_ (Summer
1996) or mine in "Out of the Darkness and into the Loop," _Flash Art_
(March-April 1995). For more on the issue of whether mere information can
qualify as art, see "Where did All the Uncertainty Go?" _Flash Art_
(July-August 1996).

Jon Ippolito
www.three.org
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