Why Would Anyone Want

to Draw on the Wall?

MEL BOCHNER

In the spring of 1970, the Jewish Museum opened Using Walls, the first
museum survey to explore the phenomenon of artworks drawn directly on the
wall. Included were Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Lawrence Weiner, Richard
Tuttle, Daniel Buren, and myself. At the opening of the exhibition, I happened
to overhear a young painter say, I still dont get it, why would anyone want to
draw on the wall? Although we might smile at his question after everything that
has happened in art over the last forty years, the idea of an ephemeral artwork
was anathema to every belief system then current. But the real question was, and
still is, this: what led these artists to take the radical step of abandoning traditional supports and begin working directly on the wall?
From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s, the status of the object lay at
the center of the most advanced artistic debates. From Robert Rauschenberg
and Jasper Johns to Frank Stella and Donald Judd, the major questions circled
around the issue of objecthood. Was a work of art primarily an object even if it
was, in Judds terms, a specific object? Or was what you see is what you see, in
Stellas 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 solipsism, 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 happen 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. 135140. 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Paolo Uccello. Sinopia for Nativity and

Annunciation to the Shepherds. 1446.

Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?

137

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

remained: how do you do that? I would like to briefly discuss three events that
occurred in the late 1960s that pointed to a possible exit strategy from the culde-sac of the object and the academicism of art-as-idea.
There is a long tradition of painting on the wall, from the Lascaux caves to
the Mexican muralists, but virtually nothing of this tradition could be seen in
t he United St ates. That all changed in t he spr ing of 1968 when t he
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 government. 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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OCTOBER

was impossible not to be impressed by them. Here the wall played an important
role as the inescapable site for a dramatically open-ended public conversation,
available to anyone with something to say and a can of spray paint. At the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from The Great Age of Fresco, it nonetheless
demonstrated that the ephemeral could be as powerful, in its way, as the monumentaland could carry with it a tremendous political punch.
For the third event, we must look back to the spring of 1966, to a distant
early warning signal of the shape of things to come. Andy Warhol, for his April
1966 exhibition at the Leo Castelli gallery, filled the front room with heliuminflated silver Mylar balloons. That was it. In the most important gallery of its
era, there was nothing to be seen (and nothing to be sold) except a bunch of
silver balloons floating around in the otherwise empty space. At the time, most
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
wasnt a big enough slap in the face, in Castellis 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 discourse I referred to earlier, nothing short of shocking. Everywhere you turned,
the cows, in their placid goofiness, were staring at you. The room was completely 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 corners, 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 Warhols 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 timein short, the possibility of a
new kind of experience. Wall-works bypass double supports. Marks drawn on the
wallhere forward and in view; there only peripherally visiblespread along
the wall. Simultaneously, in front of and behind you, fixed where they are by the
walls 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.

Paris graffiti. 1968.

Guy Le Querrec/
Magnum Photos.

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OCTOBER

Andy Warhol. Wallpaper and Clouds. 1966.

Installation view, Castelli Gallery, April 1966.
2009 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts / ARS, New York.

Which brings us back to the opening question, Why would anyone want to
draw on the wall? My answer is that eliminating the object was the result of a
desire to create an unmediated experience. By collapsing the space between the
artwork and the viewer, a wall painting negates the gap between lived time and
pictorial time, permitting the work to engage larger philosophical, social, and
political issues. That was the motivation. But beyond motivation and historical
circumstances, there was something more inchoate. It was a dream, perhaps
unrealizable, that this work might somehow achieve an existential unity between
reality and appearance.