Description:
Grey circles on black groud in various shape formations: square, circle, line, triangle, cube, rectangle
Label Text:
Rules of Inference is based on two similarly titled previous works: a site-specific floor installation from 1972 and a charcoal-and-gouache drawing from 1973. In the installation, the numbers from one through nine are represented by configurations of pebbles inferred from mathematical principles and connected by chalk lines. The drawing echoes the installation, with black circles on white paper. The third generation of this Conceptual work is the print, with a deep black aquatint surface that does not include connective lines. Its impact is of a more indeterminate and mysterious nature than its predecessors, obscuring the artist's basis in logic and certainty. In fact, the subject of all these works is not the specific mathematical principles from which they were derived, but rather the relationships between things and the process of perceiving these relationships.
Mel Bochner's first solo exhibition in 1966 at the School of Visual Arts in New York has been described as the first exhibition of Conceptual art. Throughout his career, Bochner has been attracted to the question of how we know what we know via an investigation of the distance between what we see and what we think. Born in Pittsburgh, he received his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962 and throughout the 1960s explored linguistic and mathematical systems through installations and drawings. In the ensuing decades, his work in painting, photography, and printmaking has continued to demonstrate an underlying basis in Conceptual thinking.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=UM+1986.15 |
