Lot Essay
Mel Bochner, after studying in Pittsburgh and living in San Francisco and Chicago, came to New York in 1964. He lived in a small apartment which also served as his studio and made a living first as a guard at the Jewish Museum, then as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts and a reviewer for Arts magazine.
His early work consisted of notebooks, small-scale pieces and drawings. Bochner moved quickly from small sculptures, through drawings of complex cubic objects generated by numerical formulae, to diagrams of the numbers used to generate these objects. In effect, he discarded the object in favor of a tabulation: instead of making diagrams as the basis for sculptures (as Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd, among others, were doing) he made the diagram itself into a finished, self-sufficient work of art. He describes these works as making no references to the external world; his intention was to "hook the viewer into the process of deciphering" (telephone interview, Aug. 5, 1997). These drawings are one of the first examples of conceptual art: they seek to represent ideas in visual terms and ask the spectator to discover "what you can and cannot perceive/feel/think" (ibid.). In works like Three Sets: Rotated Center, Bochner finds an elegant way to generate objects by focusing on the conceptual aspects of process, a discovery which "led him to the conviction that meaning need not obtain in things, but rather in relationships between things and in the temporal activity of perceiving those relationships" (B. Richardson, Mel Bochner, Number and Shape, Baltimore, 1976, p. 7).
Three Sets: Rotated Center is one of a group of number drawings which Bochner made in 1966, and it is one of only about six which he thought were at a sufficient scale to be considered presentational. It is comprised of patterns of numbers, derived from school children's number sheets, which are opposed and rotated about the center. Each pattern is sequential, but each defines a different structure within the square. Drawing upon both classical mathematical theorems and the "new math" then being taught in schools, Three Sets: Rotated Center illustrates the fundamental principles of Bochner.
His early work consisted of notebooks, small-scale pieces and drawings. Bochner moved quickly from small sculptures, through drawings of complex cubic objects generated by numerical formulae, to diagrams of the numbers used to generate these objects. In effect, he discarded the object in favor of a tabulation: instead of making diagrams as the basis for sculptures (as Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd, among others, were doing) he made the diagram itself into a finished, self-sufficient work of art. He describes these works as making no references to the external world; his intention was to "hook the viewer into the process of deciphering" (telephone interview, Aug. 5, 1997). These drawings are one of the first examples of conceptual art: they seek to represent ideas in visual terms and ask the spectator to discover "what you can and cannot perceive/feel/think" (ibid.). In works like Three Sets: Rotated Center, Bochner finds an elegant way to generate objects by focusing on the conceptual aspects of process, a discovery which "led him to the conviction that meaning need not obtain in things, but rather in relationships between things and in the temporal activity of perceiving those relationships" (B. Richardson, Mel Bochner, Number and Shape, Baltimore, 1976, p. 7).
Three Sets: Rotated Center is one of a group of number drawings which Bochner made in 1966, and it is one of only about six which he thought were at a sufficient scale to be considered presentational. It is comprised of patterns of numbers, derived from school children's number sheets, which are opposed and rotated about the center. Each pattern is sequential, but each defines a different structure within the square. Drawing upon both classical mathematical theorems and the "new math" then being taught in schools, Three Sets: Rotated Center illustrates the fundamental principles of Bochner.