Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?

Author(s): Mel Bochner

Source: October, Vol. 130 (Fall, 2009), pp. 135-140
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40368573
Accessed: 16-12-2018 03:31 UTC

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 "Why Would Anyone Want
to Draw on the Wall?"

MEL BOCHNER

In the spring of 1970, the Jewish Museum opened Using Walls, the
museum survey to explore the phenomenon of artworks drawn directl
wall. Included were Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Lawrence Weiner,
Tuttle, Daniel Buren, and myself. At the opening of the exhibition, I h
to overhear a young painter say, "I still don't get it, why would anyone
draw on the wall?" Although we might smile at his question after everyt
has happened in art over the last forty years, the idea of an ephemeral
was anathema to every belief system then current. But the real question
still is, this: what led these artists to take the radical step of abandoni
tional supports and begin working directly on the wall?
From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, the status of the objec
the center of the most advanced artistic debates. From Robert Rausche
and Jasper Johns to Frank Stella and Donald Judd, the major questions
around the issue of objecthood. Was a work of art primarily an object ev
was, in Judd's terms, a "specific object"? Or was "what you see is what yo
Stella's reductivist dictum, all there was to a work of art? To some of us, too
much was missing from these formulations. They represented a kind of solip-
sism, a withdrawal from the world that left art with no possible means of
affecting philosophical, social, or political conditions. How could a work of art
destabilize the status quo from within such a limited aesthetic framework?
Merely asking this question created a rupture in the discourse. Art split wide
open, and ever since that gap has only widened.
One direction the argument took went something like this: what would hap-
pen if objects were eliminated completely? What would be left? Ideas? But the equation
"art-as-idea" was equally hollow. It not only eliminated the visual from visual art,
it reduced what remained to the experiential emptiness of a tautology.
The argument as I saw it (and from this point on I am speaking only for
myself) went in another direction. Thickness, "the obstinate chunkiness of the
third dimension," is what makes objects objects. If the thickness of the world can-

OCTOBER 130, Fall 2009, pp. 135-140. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Paolo Uccello. Sinopia for Nativity and
Annunciation to the Shepherds. 1446.

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"Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?" 137

not be willed away, could it be made negligible? But a difficult pr

remained: how do you do that? I would like to briefly discuss three even
occurred in the late 1960s that pointed to a possible exit strategy from th
de-sac of the object and the academicism of art-as-idea.
There is a long tradition of painting on the wall, from the Lascaux ca
the Mexican muralists, but virtually nothing of this tradition could be
the United States. That all changed in the spring of 1968 when the
Metropolitan Museum opened its spectacular exhibition The Great Age of Fresco:
Giotto to Pontormo. Since the end of the Second World War (and especially after
the disastrous 1966 flood in Florence), a group of extraordinary frescoes, many
monumental in size, had been detached from their walls in order to preserve
them. The Met exhibition brought to this country works by Fra Angelico, Giotto,
the Lorenzetti brothers, Orcagna, Masolino, Piero della Francesca, Uccello, and
Castagno. Particularly for young artists of my generation, most of whom, at that
point, had never been to Italy, seeing major works by these masters was a truly
eye-opening experience.
But the greatest surprise of the exhibition was not the frescoes themselves,
but the sinopias. A sinopia is the preparatory drawing that is made directly on
the plaster before the painting is executed. In the process of detaching the
paintings from the wall (the restorer literally peels off the top layer of plaster on
which the painting had been painted), the sinopia was revealed. These drawings
had not been seen since the day the painting was finished. For the first time, it
was possible to see the sometimes spontaneous, but more often highly calculated
preliminary sketches, the preparatory substrata of these great paintings. One
could not help but be struck by the freshness and directness of these drawings,
drawn at a scale we had never seen before. Some were larger than the largest
Pollocks, Newmans, or Clifford Stills. Their boundaries were determined not by
the restrictions of canvas and stretchers but only by the size and shape of the
wall that they had been painted on.
The second event was the May 1968 student riots in Paris. What began as a
protest by the students at the University of Paris at Nanterre quickly spread into
an all out confrontation between the forces of the left and the Gaullist govern-
ment. Led by a loose coalition of Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, Situationists, and
Anarchists, the mobilized students and workers, plus a sympathetic segment of
the liberal-minded population, nearly brought down the French government.
They came so close to toppling the government that De Gaulle had to go into
hiding in Germany. Most of the violence took place on the streets. And it was
the streets that the students turned into a signboard. A steady stream of images
of these graffiti slogans began filtering back through the mass media. Their
power was so immediate and aggressive, yet at the same time so poetic, that it

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 138 OCTOBER

was impossible
role as the ines
available to any
site end of the
demonstrated t
mental - and co
For the third
early warning s
1966 exhibition
inflated silver
era, there was
silver balloons f
viewers dismissed this event as a mere stunt. The balloons, however, were at
least objects, and they were not unrelated to a kind of work, called "inflatables,"
being done by other artists. But if the front room filled with silver balloons
wasn't a big enough slap in the face, in Castelli's back gallery Warhol plastered
the walls with florescent pink and green "cow wallpaper." The effect of walking
into that room was literally breathtaking, and in the context of the object dis-
course I referred to earlier, nothing short of shocking. Everywhere you turned,
the cows, in their placid goofiness, were staring at you. The room was com-
pletely empty, yet at the same time, oppressively full. For the first time, in my
experience, the work of art was inseparable from its support. And the support
was the limits of the space itself.
While the concept of "virtual" flatness had been endlessly championed in
modernist polemics, the "cows" were something new, because wallpaper, given
its function as decoration, is "actually" flat. Furthermore, it went around cor-
ners, completely surrounding you, and in the process made itself identical with
the architecture. What this implied to me was a work without a center, or, more
radically, a work where the viewer becomes a mobile center.
Taken together, the Renaissance frescoes at the Met, the May '68 graffiti
slogans, and Warhol's Cow Wallpaper were clues to an alternative direction away
from the self-contained object. This is not to suggest that these three events
alone constituted the sole impetus for the turn to the wall. But they began to
suggest a new site, a new scale, a new sense of time - in short, the possibility of a
new kind of experience. Wall-works bypass double supports. Marks drawn on the
wall - here forward and in view; there only peripherally visible - spread along
the wall. Simultaneously, in front of and behind you, fixed where they are by the
wall's mass, they become, perceptually, pure surface. The thickness of the wall
has been rendered experientially negligible. These works cannot be "held"; they
can only be seen.

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 Paris graffiti. 1968.
© Guy Le Querrec/
Magnum Photos.

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140 OCTOBER

Andy Warhol.
Installation view
© 2009 The And
Visual Arts / AR

Which bring
draw on the
desire to cre
artwork and
pictorial tim
political issue
circumstanc
unrealizable,
reality and a

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