Such temporal re-orientation is one of many modes of displacement that characterize Bochner’s modus operandi, one which allows him to engage in a dialogue across the history of his own practice, now spanning almost half a century. Each artwork is re-made using a variety of means. Both media and materials form a circular ‘delivery system’ (Bochner’s phrase), within which none of the permutations is either permanent or prioritized. Mediation on the Theorem of Pythagoras, 1972/2010, for example, is installed in the upper galleries in a version which uses nuggets of coloured glass. This dates from an exhibition at Studio Casoli in Milan in 1991, formerly Fontana’s studio building, where, fortuitously, a box of Fontana’s glass remained. Sparking a new iteration of Bochner’s entire Theory of Sculpture series, this also reflected back on Bochner’s connections to Arte Povera artists and institutions forged in the 1970s. Bochner had then used hazelnuts and small stones to make this work, found in situ when he first tried out the idea at a temple dedicated to Pythagoras, in the heel of Italy. His use of such ‘parsimonious’ materials was the subject of great jokes with Robert Smithson, who was also using rocks, but on a different scale, at that time.

 
The title of this exhibition is part of a quotation used by Bochner in 1998, when he finally decided to work from within the conventions of the orthogonal stretched canvas. In If the Colour Changes (♯4), 1998, the passage from Wittgenstein, ‘If the colour changes, you are no longer looking at the one I meant’, is overwritten in an indecipherable riot of colours in both German and English. Here, finally, Bochner’s art no longer brackets but rather embodies the problematics of painting. The Thesaurus Paintings in the final gallery constitute what followed in this century. Again, they are a return: to the methodology used in the tiny 1966 thesaurus portrait drawings, where Bochner began. Each painting starts with a word or phrase, followed by a carefully orchestrated list of substitutes which degenerate in tone using the street smart, bodily oriented slang that appears in the updated 21st century edition. From ‘silence’ to ‘shut the fuck up!’, and from ‘obsolete’ to ‘shit-canned’, we inhabit a shifting language world. It appears to operate on the level of the hive, providing a mirror of who and how we are, collectively. And yet colour is here too, contradicting, cutting in, insinuating. Colour is a silent language that speaks differently to each of us as embodied subjects. It can hit as hard as the verbals nonetheless, as Bochner’s collective palette is beyond taste, if not pleasure. He executes the lowercase words from top right to bottom left in meticulous freehand brushwork, choosing each colour change as he goes so that, just as in his early serial works, the overall result is only disclosed after completion. There are no colour studies. Instead, written lists of colour mixes are recorded on a ‘working drawing,’ executed while painting. The titles take us on a journey through the history of easel painting, from burnt sienna to dioxine purple, as evocative as a poem. The catalogue’s endpapers reproduce one of Bochner’s shopping lists, further sorted into lists of commercial colour brands: Williamsburg, Old Holland, Holbein, Winsor & Newton… The world of words and the world of colours collide in the mind, and any sense of origin, priority or hierarchy, as with Bochner’s works as a whole, has to be let go.
 
This returns us to the nature of the proposition of the whole exhibition. Any nostalgic whiff of the second-hand black and white Bochner of art history books is denied us by both curator and artist, as these works have been remade, reconfigured, revised and in some cases also transposed through new technologies. They are also re-contextualized here in relation to the 21st century work, confirming Bochner’s claim that painting had always been the missing signifier in his early work. Now that he engages with this problematic from within, we are confronted with serial methodology ‘live’ as it probes the limits of painting’s conventions extant today; and maybe he finds such a sensitive limit in our expectations of colour composition. The work is undeniably challenging and by no means does it sit tastefully alongside other contemporary serial artworks, which appear obeisant in comparison. Bochner inherited the question of how to proceed with painting and it seems his answer, to borrow the final words of Marano’s film, is ‘to be continued’…
 
 
Mel Bochner: If the Colour Changes was on view 11 October – 30 December 2012.

So it matters little whether we start by viewing Robert Morris’s Column fall dramatically from upright to prone exactly half way through the seven minutes of the filmed performance; announcing, just as it did in 1960, how static sculptural objects were hence to be viewed as subject to time, and to the presence of bodies. This moment repeatedly punctuates the gallery with its loud bang, reminding us of Minimalism’s roots in performance through Morris’s participation with the Judson Dance Theater Group in New York. The original column was Morris’s first sculpture, built as a prop out of painted plywood for an event which actually took place on 14th Street, at The Living Theater. The choice of the Judson Church as the setting for Byrne’s footage links Morris’s piece with the habitual collaborations that took place there, and back in turn to their source in the work of Cage and Cunningham. Morris had originally planned to be inside the sculpture, and so it is his absent body that the filmed column conjures: standing and falling in the empty church, forever repeating a parody of death and resurrection, to the ticking of a watch.

 
Alternatively, the film at the other end of the gallery space posits another origin for Minimalism. An interview with architect and sculptor Tony Smith, published in Artforum at the end of 1966, included a brief but influential description of his journey on the unfinished asphalt of the New Jersey Turnpike at night. The trip itself took place in the early fifties when he taught at Cooper Union, but Byrne’s film collapses the moments of the journey onto the time of its recollection, which we experience through the sound track. The aesthetic of the film closely follows Smith’s eulogy of ‘artificial landscape without cultural precedent’ as we travel in the car with him and his students, experiencing for ourselves the vast darkness outside the car windows, ‘punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and coloured lights’. The temporal slippage between sound and image is made more evident by the use of a mechanical shutter, which is choreographed to pass in front of the film as it is projected in the gallery, and break our absorption in it.
 
The effect of this process is that, as with minimalist art itself, one is made aware of Byrne’s work as an inherently performative as well as cerebral experience. One might discover the hard way, for example, that the only place to hear Judd, Flavin and Stella discussing their ideas in an interview with Bruce Glaser in 1964, which forms the sound track of another film in the installation, is to stand precisely under the speaker provided. Sitting on the floor, or moving away will result only in minimalist mumblings. The voices are relayed into the gallery as a column of sound into which the viewing body must move and stand, echoing Morris’s sculpture perhaps, but also embodying the precision with which the disembodied words of the dialogue are being chosen. The intimacy of listening to the original broadcast is once again tempered by doubts about its status in relation to the participants on screen. We watch actors performing in a radio museum in Dublin, but never actually see them speak. Instead, the camera slowly trawls over the equipment in the smokefilled studio in a kind of technophile reverie, teasing our desire for what is absent into reading a glimpse of herringbone tweed trouser as a cipher for Frank Stella.
 
Stella’s work, Tuxedo Junction (1960), shares its title with Byrne’s exhibition publication, and also appears in the fourth film, shot in the chilly November light that pours into the galleries of the Van Abbemuseum; bringing ordinary daylight, the ideal viewing conditions for minimalist artworks, indirectly into the darkened spaces at Lismore. This was the first venue in Europe to collect and display Minimalist works in earnest, and as we see, is the final resting place of many of its objects, braced and wheeled around, in the ballet that is curatorial care, a reminder of the ultimate fate of art, and all us mortals. Before we succumb to being dusted around, like the Judd pieces in Byrne’s film, reflection on a final layer of this intertextual dance might furnish a potential key to this film, one which provided the initial cue for the whole project. The position of Michael Fried’s famous critique ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) as both antagonistic towards Minimalist theory and yet also a central text in its formation, had always struck Byrne as compelling. Even in this film, where the artworks and the camera appear to have their closest encounters, Byrne ultimately places his own viewpoint on Fried’s arguments out of reach. In this way he avoids closure, and instead offers minimalism to us as unfinished business. Both as source and resource for the art-making and art theorizing of the future, its texts remain open to interpretation and re-interpretation just as its objects are potentially available to us in an endless cycle of fabrication and re-fabrication. The silence and melancholy that pervade these measured works, as in Tacita Dean’s filming of art and artists, seem ultimately to offer us little we didn’t already possess, except perhaps the knowledge that the more forensically we probe and document the past, the further it recedes from our grasp.

 
A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not formed part of Gerard Byrne’s recent exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts, which was on view 24 April – 30 September 2010.