Mel Bochner as Translator: An Aesthetics of Contingency

Abstract Starting with his earliest works of 1966, Mel Bochner developed a set of processual and translational operations that function simultaneously as method and theoretical apparatus, working to dismantle the persistent mythologies of linguistic transparency. His Transduction (1969–2025), which carries a text through six successive translations, epitomizes how language can be submitted to unfathomable contingencies. While Bochner's work has been repeatedly interpreted through the prism of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and a dematerialized reception of Conceptualism, the present text seeks rather to examine the ways in which his practice parallels the conceptual displacements enacted by Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes and how the materiality of thoughts necessarily exists within sustaining supports. In this sense, Bochner's work may be understood as elaborating not merely a meta-linguistic investigation, but a genuine theory of translation that reconfigures the relation between linguistic system, visual production, and the contingent conditions of the creation of meaning itself. At a moment when the very category of truth is continually compromised, and when the convergent logics of totalitarian techno-political power increasingly saturate the field of public discourse, a sustained engagement with Bochner's critical practice is crucial for sharpening our theoretical tools.