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

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.