Surface Dis/Tension 1968

Mel Bochner makes 'Surface Dis/Tension' with some kind of mysterious process – it's a photograph of a scrunched-up grid, like maybe he painted it, maybe not. I sympathize with Mel’s artistic struggle with the grid, and the will to destroy it. I can imagine him wrestling with the flatness of the picture plane, trying to inject some life into it. He might be asking himself: How can I make this thing breathe? How can I introduce some chaos into this rigid structure? The crumples and folds, captured in stark black and white, create a play of light and shadow that suggests depth and volume. The grid, typically a symbol of order and rationality, is here disrupted, distorted, its lines broken and uneven. Each square becomes a little world of its own. It reminds me that artists are always messing around with what came before, trying to shake things up, find new ways of seeing. And hey, we're all just trying to figure things out as we go along, right?