The significance of the art which emerged in this country in the early 1960s is that it staked everything on the truth of that model. Therefore, if we read the work of Stella or Morris, or Judd, or Andre, merely as part of a text of formal reordering, we miss the meaning that is most central to that work. Further, we may miss or misconceive the way in which that very notion of meaning persists in certain art of the present.

Bochner’s work, for example, has been a consistent attempt to map the linguistic fact onto the perceptual one—not to show the insubstantiality of the one as opposed to the materiality of the other, but to demonstrate the necessity in experience of their mutual fruition. In Measurements, Group B, 1967, the walls of a room are printed with the notation of their dimensions, so that the space appears against the image of its own blueprint. But one has no sense of the priorness of the one to the other, of either serving as ground to the other as figure. Illusionism is erased in the experience of the extended object (the wall) as the basis for the very notion of arithmetic extension, and of an abstract geometry being indistinct from those oblique directions through which dimension projects itself into the world.

In Axiom of Indifference, a group of linguistic propositions are set up in relation to a group of physical facts, each corroborating the other. A wall running down the center of the work splits the eight integers of the work into two groups of four and makes the total configuration of physical shape and verbal proposition invisible from either side. Wholeness of shape as well as wholeness of the propositional entity becomes a matter of reconstruction, which is to say, of memory. And memory is shown to be a function of language, as language is a coefficient o that which is completely external—a presence that is forever possible. “Immediate experience,” Bochner has written, “will not cohere as an independent domain. Memories tend to be remains, not of past sensations, but past verbalizations.” Further, Axiom of Indifference, like 7 Properties of Between, functions as a composite entity in which verbal proposition and physical facts appear within a single act of perception. Verification is therefore immediate, and the work acts as a kind of model for the public assignment of truth-value to a given statement. But esthetically, these works lodge themselves within a broader aspect of the notion of a model, for what is central to them is their insistence upon the externality, the publicness of space in which verification and meaning reside. They are, one would say, visualizations of a linguistic space that if fully nonpsychological—the attempt to picture a world unmediated by the idea of a protocol language, a kind of necessary purging of the fantasy of privacy from his art.

With Rockburne’s work, particularly the series Drawing Which Makes Itself, one finds this notion of publicness carried critically into the realm of process. For insofar as Process art can be understood as the generation of a work from a set of rules or procedures instituted prior to the implementation of the work, process is not logically distinct from the arbitrariness of the private language. Part of the effort of Drawing Which Makes Itself is to generate the work from qualities inherent in the materials used: the dimensions of the edges of the paper and its diagonal folds; the double-sidedness natural to paper that makes flipping or reversing it possible; etc. And the effect of this insistence is that one feels the creation of a logical distinction between the grammar of this work and the intention-laden grammar of process.

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What I am claiming, then, as continuous over the last decade is the need of certain artists to explore the externality of language and therefore of meaning. During the same time period this need has a parallel project in the work of other sculptors: the discovery of the body as a completely externalization of the Self.

That aspect of the self comes to light in what is termed the paradox of the alter ego—the way in which the picture of the self as a contained whole (transparent only to itself and the truths which it is capable of constituting), crumbles before the act of connection with other selves—with other minds. Merleau-Ponty describes this paradox as the separation of two perspectives, as the fact that for each of us—he and I—there are two perspectives: I for myself and he for himself; and each of us for the other. “Of course these two perspectives, in each one of us, cannot be simply juxtaposed, for in that case it is not I that the other would see, nor he that I should see. I must be the exterior that I present to others and the body of the other must be the other himself.” (6) The revelation of this leads away from any notion of consciousness as unified within itself. For the self is understood as completed only after it has surfaced into the world—and the very existence and meaning of the “I” is thus dependent upon its manifestation to the “other.” (7)