Solar System and Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007

Artist Mel Bochner became a writer, he says, almost by accident. In 1965, as a young artist in New York, he was out of a job; Arts Magazine paid him $2.50 for every review he turned in, whether they published it or not; a month of review-writing paid his rent—$28.00 a month.

His reviews and articles provoked a range of unexpected reactions. "At that time, artists who wrote were looked at suspiciously, as if writing somehow tainted their visual practice," he writes. A painter friend attacked him publicly for "joining the enemy." Bochner soon began testing the boundary between writing-as-criticism and writing-as-visual-art. Solar System & Rest Rooms collects both Bochner's writings on art and his writings as art, offering more than fifty pieces— reviews, art criticism, theoretical texts, interviews, catalog statements, notecards, and his groundbreaking "magazine interventions"—many reproduced in facsimile. Bochner is a leading figure in conceptualism; his 1966 installation at the School of Visual Arts Gallery Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art is considered to be the earliest exhibition of conceptual art. Solar System & Rest Rooms chronologically documents the work and ideas of this important artist over a span of forty years, as well as providing a unique perspective on the conceptual and post-minimal art scene in New York. This book offers a rare insight into what it means to be an artist whose visual practice is inseparable from the sustained practice of writing.Mel Bochner has lived and worked in New York City since 1964. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major museum collections throughout the world.

Reviews, art criticism, theoretical texts, interviews, catalog statements, notecards, magazine interventions, and other writings on art and art in the form of writing by a leading conceptual artist; many pages reproduced in facsimile.

Publishers Weekly

Both an artist and art critic, Bochner (Inside the Studio) was a leader of the formalism-challenging conceptual art movement of the 1960s. In his introduction, Bochner explains that he began writing short art reviews to support himself, but was seen as a betrayal by his fellow artists; as such, there's much consideration of the "boundary between writing-as-criticism and writing-as-visual art." An anthology of Bochner's published articles follows, including plenty of illustrations, informal notes and reproduced magazine pages. Bochner covers a wide range of topics (drawing, Cezanne, Eva Hesse, "Painting as Becoming," "Kennedy's Assassination as TV Serial"), and his playful, intellectual sensibility is perhaps best captured in his article The Domain of the Great Bear, co-authored with Robert Smithson as a kind of "literary hoax... a time bomb inside the art system's machinery"; taking pot shots at the way art is displayed while approaching the article itself as a conceptual work of art, Bochner and Smithson successfully bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the art world, the galleries, by displaying their art on the magazine page. In the book's penultimate piece (from Art Forum Sept, 2006), Bochner discusses Domain, seminal to the direction of both authors' later, independent work. This intriguing volume may demand much from the general reader, but anyone interested in the intersection of visual art and the printed word should find it fascinating.
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Mel Bochner has lived and worked in New York City since 1964. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major museum collections throughout the world.