An Aesthetics of Dispersal: Succession and Seriality

These series were born of the formal logic of the art of the Sixties and Seventies, of Minimalism’s infinitely repeatable geometry and Pop Art’s successions of everyday, standardized imagery. In his classic apologia of 1967, “Serial Art Systems: Solipsism,” a young Mel Bochner announced serial art’s rigorous break with any notion of art as expression, as capable of signifying absent events or values. Recent structuralist theories of language had thrown such models of transparent reference into doubt; instead, as Bochner would later describe it,

Language in itself is now understood to be a system of elements – a threshold
above which is difference and below which is similitude. Freed from transparency,
language is order, and the order form becomes the content.

If art itself constituted a kind of language, then according to this reasoning it must abandon its longstanding attempt to define or explain the world of things, and limit itself to naming or describing that world. Content would not be predicated on reference but on what we might call display – on the sheer material or factual presence of the work of art itself. Its significance, in other words, would no longer be transcendent but purely immanent, located nowhere else but in the ordering of the language given the artist. Bochner’s drawing, Theory of Painting (1-4) (1969), may serve as an illustration of these positions: no “meaning” inheres in the original square form (so overlaid with symbolic import through early twentieth-century abstraction) traced onto sheets of paper laid upon the floor, but resides only in the varying configurations – alternately “neat” or “messy,” in a wry parody of Wölfflinian aesthetic theory – that its constituent elements compose.

Simiarly, when in 1973 Richard Serra repeatedly passed an inked roller onto sheets of paper to produce Untitled (14 Part Roller Drawing), his work procedure could tell us nothing about himself as existential point of origin of those gestures; instead he invited us to understand “work” much more literally, as a set of de-skilled, de-cathected, repeatable actions undertaken by the artist as producer. The meaning of the resulting drawings does not lie anywhere else than on the surface which they display; their significance is no longer transcendent but purely immanent in their process – exactly fourteen passes of the roller on each of fourteen equally-sized sheets of paper, the passes alternating from one sheet to the next from left to right, beginning at 14/0 and ending at 0/14. Of course such a procedure stresses the materiality or factualness of the resulting drawing; once we grasp the simple system used to make it, we understand the varying densities of black ink, the regularly-repeated irregularities caused by anomalies on the surface of the roller, and so forth. But the work’s meaning does not inhere so much in that materiality as in its repetition and extension across the fourteen sheets.