Line as Language, or, What Is Mel Bochner Translating?

Abstract Taking off from Rosalind Krauss's suggestive phrase Line as Language, this essay focuses on Mel Bochner as a pivotal figure in the history of art's engagement with translation across verbal and visual media. Alongside contemporaries such as Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, Bochner explored what happens to elements of verbal communication—words, statements, phrases—when they are looked at, be it as physical properties of paint, materials of design and architecture, or predicates of mathematical formalization. In this essay, Bochner's work is framed through the lens of transmedial translation practices with a special focus on the double meaning of line as both line of language and as a series of strung-together points, prompting viewers to query: What is a line exactly? In what does it inhere? Is what I am looking at a drawing or a text? When and how does a drawing write? When is a line, to reprise Paul Klee's famous quip, simply “a dot that went for a walk?” Such questions are considered in a selective survey of Bochner's early and late work. In the 1960s and 1970s, Bochner was primarily interested in interrogating the limits of language as a rational system dependent on symbolic logic, as an information network, as something to be looked at, and as an ensemble of textual graphics set out in marked contrast to measured lines. Post-2000 he shifted his medium to painting and to free-standing “strong words,” (as in the Blah Blah Blah works). Though his approach to line as language would vary greatly, this essay argues that translation remains a constant—a source of medial experimentation and philosophical reflection.