Mel Bochner
Surface Dis/Tension Silhouetted composite gelatine silver print mounted on board 1969
“To create this piece, Bochner made a gird on a studio tabletop using photographic tape, then had it photographed from an oblique angle, compounding the curvature of the lens with additional perspectival distortion. He next soaked the resulting print in water until the emission could be peeled swayed front the paper support. After allowing this thin layer of emission to dry, Bocher rephotographed the wrinkled image, enlarging it and overlaying negative and positive versions of the copy photograph in slight misalignment. Lastly, he mounted the final print onto a sheet of Masonite to give it a noticeable thins. The artist has said that he conceived this project partly as a retort to painter Frank Stella, who famously quipped in 1964 of his own shaped paintings - canvases painted according to the width of a standard brush and mounted on a stretch of the same thickness - “What you see is what you see.””
DETAIL: M. S. Witkovsky. (ed.) (2012) Light years: conceptual art and the photograph, 1964-1977. Chicago, Ill.: Art Institute of Chicago.
