BERNAR VENET AND THE RATIONAL IMAGE

Venet has come back from New York with the idea of reproducing trigonometric forms. . . .¹

François Pluchart, 1966

There is a Neo-Duchampian painter, Bernar Venet, who also came to us rather early on. . . .²

William Rubin, 1978

FOR A GOOD 12 YEARS Bernar Venet has been active on two sides of the Atlantic, but acknowledgment of his work has been complicated by his decision in 1971 to stop producing art and then, after a five-year intermission, not only to start painting, but to do so in a manner that seemed to make a travesty of his conceptual past. I think, however, that the apparent contradiction between his early and his late work may not hold, and that the pictures this artist has produced in the last two years make a significant contribution to the case for painting’s continued viability.

Born in Saint-Auban (Alpes de Haute-Provence) in 1941, Bernar Venet began painting at an early age. He met Martial Raysse, a member of the Nouveaux Réalistes, while he was serving in the French Army. Venet was sent to Algeria during the war there, and, in the fall of 1962, he was dismissed and returned to Nice, where he had already studied and where he had assisted the stage designer of the opera.

There is no doubt that Nice as an art environment, with Yves Klein as the superstar, had a profound impact on the young artist’s thinking. In addition, Bernar Venet admits to having been impressed with the propositional art of the Milanese painter and activist Piero Manzoni. But within one year of each other, both Klein and Manzoni died; their lives started to gain mythical proportions and their work remained curiously without following. In the fall of 1962, another Niçois, Ben Vautier, returned from taking an active part in the “Festival of Misfits” in London. From his secondhand phonograph record shop in the old part of town, he became a conduit for Fluxus, a recently founded art movement that lent legitimacy to his own theatrical flaunting.

Venet, on the other hand, was trying to get away from personal expression. From the end of 1961 until 1963, he painted plain black surfaces, some flat, some collaged and showing slight relief, all done on canvas backgrounds in the most available of blacks, i.e. the tar used in road construction. He may have been affected, in these intentionally unattractive pictures, of which few remain, by the monochrome craze that hit Europe around 1960, but it is only fair to point out that Venet’s work never incorporated objects in the manner in which Klein’s contained sponges, Arman’s the debris of musical instruments, Spoerri’s the leftovers of friendly repasts, and Raysse’s samplings of Prisunic cosmetics. For Venet the work had to be, and always has been, its own object. No less important was his deliberate exclusion of color and compositional arrangement. He criticized what made Klein’s reliefs so elegant and ingratiating, Arman’s accumulations so reminiscent of the refractions in a cracked mirror, and Raysse’s resort pictures with their powder-puff cheeks and neon lips as carry-overs from an older esthetic.

Venet’s most radical gesture involved the use of gravel mixed with tar (later reconstructed in charcoal for the exhibition “A Propos de Nice” at the Centre Pompidou in 1977) and presented in simple shapeless heaps in 1963, but never accepted in a gallery or museum. These gravel piles were neither ready-made nor ready-found; they were neither prefabricated nor were they an “appropriation of the real” in the sense in which Pierre Restany applied that term to the accumulations of Arman. To Venet they were a statement of liberation and rejection—of the Constructivist tradition specifically. Yet it is entirely possible that the artist did not realize at that moment what, precisely, his work was driving at. It now seems clear that Venet’s gravel piles anticipate by quite a few years those piles of raw materials presented in different contexts and with different objectives by artists from Joseph Beuys to Robert Morris. Testing the need for specificity of materials and integrity of form in art was undoubtedly a concern of all three artists.

In August 1963 Venet began a painting that was divided into 12-by-4-inch rectangles, to be filled in, at the rate of one a month, by the artist in a color chosen by the owner (buyer) until the whole surface was covered with paint, at which point the picture had to be destroyed to allow this process to start all over again. The principle introduced here was that it did not matter what color was chosen or who chose it as long as the process was respected and the game was played within the rules set for it. The intellectual parameters of what constitutes a work of art are beginning to be set here, well in advance of Venet’s 1966 conversion to graphic presentations.

His introduction of color, in 1963, did not change Venet’s preference for the monochrome. Continuing to use heavy cardboard, which he liked for its industrial quality, he began to spray his pictures with brightly colored, all-purpose lacquers, homogenizing their layered surfaces and obliterating chance markings. Through this depersonalized treatment, which made his works intentionally uneventful, Venet avoided meanings that inevitably adhere to handmade objects. This carried him further along in the direction of the work of art without connotative readings; from such industrial-looking surfaces it was but one more step to invent variants in the shape of heavy cardboard or polyvinyl rolls or tubes.

Venet has always claimed to be a painter. Twice, however, he toyed with the idea of a third dimension—in 1963 when he produced his gravel piles and, once more, during and immediately after his first visit to New York in the spring of 1966. Extremely receptive to what artists over here were doing, he still regrets not having seen “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum, but vividly recalls his impression of the works of Judd and Morris in the Jean and Howard Lipman Collection, exhibited at the Whitney Museum at about the same time. Those plywood and sheet metal forms must have struck the young artist from Nice, not only because of their simple, straightforward shapes and their industrially painted surfaces but also because of the implication that they could be and, in order to look their best, should be fabricated for, rather than made by, their inventors.

For a short period Bernar Venet made tubes of gray polyvinyl chloride or cardboard painted yellow, bevel-edged or right-angled, of a length chosen or specified by whomever wished to buy and own one of them. Obviously he lacked the money to have them made, but when the Museum of Céret in Southern France invited him to participate in the exhibition “Impact” scheduled for the summer of that year, he quickly recognized an opportunity to have a work built at the museum from a drawing that he would mail from Nice. But, once the drawing was dispatched for exhibition, did it really matter whether a tube was actually produced or not? Which was more important, the tube or the instructions for it? By itself, the tube could be mistaken for a length of utility pipe or a phallic symbol. The drawing, on the other hand, was fully unambiguous as the instruction for constructing a tube, with no connotations or meaning other than the one spelled out.

From this point on Venet’s work developed, changed and moved further ahead on the strength of its internal logic. If validation through construction is no longer necessary, and if art can exist in a conceptual state (Venet’s premise), then why not present straight constructs of the mind, thereby shutting the door on decisions required of an artist who quite clearly preferred to make as few as possible. Thus he turned from industrial drawings on canvas to graphic representations from high school textbooks on physics and mathematics, faithfully copied and enlarged by hand on either canvas or paper.

Bernar Venet paid a second visit to New York in the winter of 1966–67. After returning to Nice he wrote a summary of his views and, at the same time, a declaration of his beliefs, which justified, rationalized and sustained the decisions he was going to make in the next four years.³ “Art only exists on the level of creation,” Venet claims, thus denying that there .is such a thing as practice. Since an artist can be called creative only when he makes an historic contribution to expanding the boundaries or furthering the cause of art, and since such contributions do not normally occur more than once in any artist’s lifetime, most waste their time and our attention, according to Venet, by honing their craft and producing variations extraneous to art at the creative, problem-solving level.

Venet’s verbalization of his views and beliefs was followed, that same year, by a blueprint for action. Not trusting his own limited understanding of the sciences, he consulted specialists to map out a production sequence that would include the visual and, in some instances, auditory, presentation of significant subjects or studies in the fields of astrophysics, nuclear physics, space sciences, computer mathematics, meteorology, stock market analysis, meta-mathematics, psychophysics and psychochronometry, sociology and politics, and mathematical logic. There was no conscious attempt at organization, let alone inclusiveness, and the artist seemed perfectly content to be as arbitrary about the choice of the last as he was about the first discipline he tackled, provided the subject treated was intrinsically important. It only takes a simple comparison with Matisse, who turned a homely model into a beautifully painted odalisque, to see that there was no formal concern whatsoever in the works that Venet proposed to deliver over a period of roughly four years.

Venet accomplished what he set out to do. He used the most functional means to transmit the works’ didactic messages, employing at one time or another photographic enlargements,⁴ tape recordings, live lecturers, the mails, books, complimentary newspaper subscriptions, invitations to attend scientific conferences and exhortative texts in exhibition catalogues. Noted scientists such as Martin Krieger, Stanley Taub, A. Reichel and F.T. Krogh assisted or allowed Venet to borrow from their work. Over a period of five years the artist produced some 341 presentations, many if not all of which were exhibited in museums and galleries from Krefeld to New York. Important group shows that functioned as late-1960s barometer readings included work by Venet and, in 1971, just prior to a malaise which made itself felt in Conceptual art, the artist decided that he had accomplished his program and was now free to stop producing, as he had promised to do four years earlier.

Artists have stopped producing for a variety of reasons, but the art world does not accept the possibility that they do so of their own free choice. Marcel Duchamp is an obvious example, but not the only one. He merely smiled when we respectfully accepted his “state of nonactivity” and then rewarded us with Étant Donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage from beyond the grave.

It was astute of Venet to predetermine the duration of his productive phase and to set himself a deadline, but he fell victim to art-world skepticism. Here was an artist who exhibited widely and was beginning to sell, so why give up a good thing? Ironically, however, his public acclaim went up instead of down because he concentrated on having his work and ideas understood and accepted. To Venet no longer making art does not imply no longer being an artist; artists, unlike police officers, are not expected to surrender their badges upon termination of active duty. Afflicted, however, with a notoriety earned through on-the-record vows and statements, it has been difficult for this artist to rejoin the practitioners of painting (if not necessarily art), and to reenter a world on which, in 1971, he slammed the door.

Mel Bochner, an artist with whom Venet has been compared,⁵ “investigated art” through critical writing, drawings based on numbers and cardboard structures derived from diagrams, from 1965 to 1967, but without making what he then saw or conceived to be “artworks.”⁶ He was interested in meaning as against form, and in relationships in objects. While it is possible to consider Bochner’s drawings in colored ink on graph paper and his intricately collaged photo fragments of 1967 as works of art, they performed, for the artist, an investigative, rather than a visual, function.

In a 1975 lecture at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Bochner looked back at an earlier phase of his career:

With the completion of Axiom of Indifference [an installation at the Sonnabend Gallery in January 1973] I came to the end of a five-year period in my work. The examination of the problems that had first revealed themselves to me in 1968 was, as far as I was capable of seeing, complete. . . . To continue meant a reinvolvement with issues primarily visual in nature, concerns which I had bracketed out of my work for some time. (However, I have always considered my work to be visual art, no matter how far I deviated from or stretched traditional modes of presentation.)⁷

Bochner’s involvement with geometry, the calculus, linguistics and logic gave way, in 1973, to drawings and pastels applied directly to the wall, in which conceptual concerns appear to be subsumed by formal and coloristic concerns, and where color and form are wedded in a gestalt with emotive as well as intellectual appeal. This shift of emphasis from the conceptual to the perceptual in Bochner’s work is analogous to the conversion of outlook in the work of Venet. Like Venet, Bochner has faced the indignant criticism of purists (or conceptualists refusing to compromise their principles) who see an unabashed return to pictorialism in these color-shapes that “need not be imagistically referential nor either organically or expressionistically abstract.”⁸

Yet another example of the kind of conversion of outlook that defied expectations and mocked consistency can be drawn from the history of philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein, widely read by artists in the 1960s (although Venet admits to no more than casual knowledge of this philosopher’s writings) thought that he had solved all essential philosophical problems by the time he turned 30. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) explores the parameters of logic and language, reaching the conclusion that the world has a fixed structure and an a priori order. In what sounds like an echo of Martin Heidegger’s declaration that every great thinker thinks but one great thought, Wittgenstein defended the decision to abandon his calling and become a grade school teacher in an Austrian village by claiming that no one can do more than five to ten years of good work in philosophy.⁹

Unawares, Bernar Venet rephrased both philosophers when he wrote that an artist is creative but once during his career. But, just as Wittgenstein took a second chance at philosophy, so Venet took a second chance at art. Each stopped in his tracks, so to speak, while still quite young, then rethought his position during a period of ostensible nonproductivity, and eventually converted to new operational methods that seem to contradict his old ones.

It is not unwarranted to draw a comparison between Wittgenstein’s oracular tone and a priori methods in the Tractatus, and Venet’s normative views and the four-year program that he drafted in 1967. Both abandoned what they were best at in the wake of successfully completed work because they felt it impossible to maintain a high creative level longer than a certain number of years; both returned, after five to seven years, to make another creative contribution, even though it called their earlier beliefs into question. Whereas the young Wittgenstein philosophized in solitude and wrote as though he were delivering a monologue, the mature Wittgenstein took the lessons he had learned as a schoolteacher to heart and developed a Socratic method of discourse that set the tone for his later writings.

Similarly, Bernar Venet, from the time of his first visit to New York in 1966 until the premature enshrining of his oeuvre at the New York Cultural Center in the winter of 1971–72, worked in relative isolation compared to the majority of “Conceptualists,” who followed ideological or commercial bonding patterns. His presentations of scientific disciplines on wall-mounted panels, through tape recordings, and in illustrated lectures were indisputable and unilateral. A constant need, after he had stopped producing, to explain and curate his past and to manage his ongoing career turned Venet into an eloquent apologist, eager to debate and ready to write (with a remarkable grasp of the semantic and philosophical issues underlying his work and that of others).

Back at the University of Cambridge, Wittgenstein’s interests shifted from the cognitive to the expressive, from analysis to drawing distinctions, and from the systematic to the unsystematic. More and more, he took a pragmatic view of language and adopted an a posteriori method of investigation. Wittgenstein’s new concept of philosophy grew progressively clearer in the 1930s, finally crystallizing in the Philosophical Investigations during the second half of the ’40s. Again, we are tempted to compare Venet’s work since 1976, with its emphasis on the empirical and the self-evident, to that of the experiential and poetic Wittgenstein of the later years. The visually commanding and physically imposing paintings with which Bernar Venet made his comeback no longer overwhelm the viewer with more information than he can hope to absorb in one good glance; instead, they are paradigms of straightforward exposition, as form defines content and content dictates form.

In 1970, Bernar Venet came across an issue (No. 15) of Communications on the analysis of images, containing an article by Jacques Bertin entitled “La Graphique.” Casting around for a linguistically precise way in which to phrase his intentions in art, Venet seized upon the distinctions that Bertin, a semiologist, had drawn between auditory and visual systems of perception, and the meanings attached to signs of greater or lesser intrinsic definition in the realm of human communication. Bertin calls music and nonfigurative images “pansemic,” because their meaning is virtually limitless. Verbs and figurative images, on the other hand, may invite different interpretations, but their limited meaning make them “polysemic.” In the past we needed to leave the domain of art, poetry or music in order to find a mode of auditory or visual communication (a signifier) with a single signified, as only mathematics and the graphic image, according to Bertin, qualify as “monosemic.” Adopting Bertin’s system of fundamental signs, and the degree of signification attributed to these signs, Bernar Venet realized that he had been using “monosemic”symbols since the time, four years before, when he had turned to industrial drawings and mathematical diagrams for subject matter.

The “pansemic” character of the nonfigurative and the “polysemic” character of the figurative image respectively derive from the assembly of signifiers contained in those images. Since there is no pre-established code, their reading will vary according to the nature and the number of signifiers as well as to the receiver’s ability to perceive and interpret their message. A speech or a portrait can be given but a finite number of interpretations, whereas a piece of music or an abstract picture are the perfect examples of “pansemic” communication: the sum total of the signs they emit signifies everything in general and nothing in particular. To Bertin the graphic image—a means of nonverbal communication or, as he puts it, “a language meant for the eye“—is the prime example of a “monosemic” sign. Specifically, he refers to diagrams, geometric figures, outlines and industrial drawings, which are essential for the effective communication of scientific and technical data.

When aligning himself with Bertin’s views, Bernar Venet not only borrowed the semiologist’s terminology to articulate his own intentions in art, but he also amplified Bertin’s system of fundamental signs so as to accommodate a personal reading of art’s gradual evolution toward authentic abstraction. Degrees of Abstraction after Jacques Bertin is an explanatory chart, reminiscent of the kind drawn up by Malevich, in which Venet has attempted to demonstrate, first, Bertin’s three types of signification as they apply to the visual arts and, second, the evolution of what he calls “the rational image.”

Georges Vantongerloo, the first artist on record who wanted to “arrive at an artistic expression by geometric forms”¹⁰ remained attached to the expressive image. Venet explains that Vantongerloo’s 1930 painting y = x² / 6, goes a long way toward a rational organization of the picture space, yet remains one man’s pictorial interpretation of a quadratic equation. The viewer cannot read or deduce the equation from looking at the painting, and he is more likely to associate its image with a floor plan or a pane of leaded glass.

Donald Judd’s lacquered sheet metal sculpture Untitled 1965 comes a good deal closer to the “rational image.” No longer an interpretation of a mathematical proposition, and in the realm of the pictorial like Vantongerloo’s piece, Judd’s Untitled 1965 is based on a mathematical proposition (the arithmetic progression of alternating solids and voids) and thus belongs in the realm of the real. But neither artist has assigned mathematics more than an instrumental role, employing it on the level of composition or construction instead of making it the sole content of an art free of nonmathematical associations. Degrees of Abstraction after Jacques Bertin thus culminates in Bernar Venet’s Figure 241 of 1966, the graphic representation of the function y = -x² / 4, demonstrating that only through a linguistic use of mathematics (whether in industrial drawing or in what Venet presents as art) it is possible to arrive at an image, both rational and “monosemic,” by virtue of employing symbols that have only one meaning.

Bertin calls a system of perception, whether auditory or visual, “monosemic” when the knowledge of the meaning of each sign precedes the observation of their assembly. This holds true for the mathematician who is shown a new problem and for the technician who is given a fresh blueprint. No literate person with a basic grasp of geometry, once he has overcome the shock of their unexpected context, will fail to recognize in the new works of Bernar Venet rectangles, circles, triangles, diagonals, arcs or chords, and the numerical references to size and complementary relationship in degrees. All symbols used are a recognizable part of a common language with but one meaning.

Effective communication is impossible without a pre-established code, which can be a set of principles, as in a code of honor, or a set of signals, like the one Samuel F.B. Morse invented to send messages by wire. The symbols used in a code can be simple or complex. Venet has used, consistently since 1966, a mathematical code to present the scientific disciplines he chose as the content of his work. As for the subjects, they ranged from A Flare Spray at the Solar Limb on July 11, 1966 to the 1969 Patience May Be the Only Strategy, according to whether the work’s content was astrophysics or stock market analysis. In Venet’s more recent work the code has remained the same: plane geometry is its content, with the subject ranging from angle to arc to chord.

When he started to produce pictures again Venet realized that he had to explain his new course of action. Artists should not too quickly assume, he argued, that their first experiences count as fundamental experiences. They should be prepared to revise their concepts and to give up their sense of security in order to acquire new knowledge. A fondness for known solutions, rather than for the mind’s faculty to find new solutions, constitutes a cultural danger¹¹. It is as impossible to disagree with Venet’s argument as it is to not recognize in its tone the urgency of self-justification. In reality we do not need the artist’s reassurance of the rightness of his course, for this leap from his formerly dogmatic to his now experiential position is vindicated by the quality of his paintings.

In 1967 Venet set the boundaries of the content he wanted his work to have. As their subjects were not wedded to any one mode of support, there was no attempt at integration of image and form: text or diagram were simply projected against a neutral field. In 1976 Venet quite literally drew the boundaries of his subjects around the forms of his paintings. If, ten years ago, a subject in plane geometry was presented as the image, that same subject is now used by the artist to make (as well as be) the image. The artist has solved the problem of making form subsidiary to content: instead of denying form stability and permanence, as in the early works, he immerses it in content so we are no longer aware of it as a separate entity. Just as in Stella’s irregularly shaped canvases of the early 1960s the pictorial field was a function of the pattern that governed it, so, in Venet’s new paintings, shape is a function of, and becomes fully indistinguishable from, subject.

“Cognition transmuted into form”: Max Bill’s definition of his intentions in art¹² is equally applicable to Venet’s paintings. He makes us perceive an abstraction, no longer in the didactic manner of his 1967–71 presentations, but in a newly physical way. These paintings seem to return Conceptual art to its Minimalist beginnings as they embody and confirm Minimalism’s standard criteria that a work of art be geometric in shape, basic in structure, monochromatic, its own object, bound by its own frame. Like Minimal art, with which Venet’s paintings share such distinguishing features, they are without clear formal precedent, and, for that matter, without close competitors. Simple as they may strike the unaccustomed viewer, they are new in the real sense of not having been encountered before.

The paintings Venet began making in the fall of 1976 are rectangular, circular and triangular configurations in acrylic on canvas stretched over frames that conform to diagonal or radial division into two usually unequal parts. The resulting “off-white” shapes instantly reveal their relative proportions and bear linear and numerical black markings to indicate and measure the angles, arcs or chords that constitute the varying subjects. They come in almost any dimension, as diagrams have a fixed proportion but not a fixed size. Straight and curved lines, the numbers and arrows in their appropriate locations are so many keys to the proper perception of these paintings: they “anchor“ them in the realm of “monosemy.” Without such clues Venet’s paintings would open themselves up to formal interpretation in the manner of an expressive image, in lieu of being decoded, as befits a rational image.

Now, although helpful to a work’s proper reading, those black markings are reiterations of what is evident or implied and are thus redundant and tautological. Much as he intends to stress the didactic character of his paintings with arrows and numbers, Venet graphically articulates the tautology of subject and form. For it should be realized that every work of art is a tautological statement in that the knowledge it imparts is but a rephrasing of its subject. The connotative character of traditional art, which thrives on reference and association and uses what Venet would call a “weak code,” hardly lends itself to the transfer of information or knowledge. So Bernar Venet proposes, at the risk of situating his work outside the domain of art proper, a denotative picture with a strong code referring to nothing but itself.

There is, however, a snag. A rational image or a denotative picture cannot exist without corresponding material support. Since the artist is now willing to provide that support in a conclusive and permanent way, as he did not earlier on, there is room for the personal and irrational to enter into the breach. The new paintings are neatly executed, but have an undeniably handmade look. They started out without texture and brush work, but in the short span of two years the artist has gone from hiding to flaunting their material quality. Besides, decisions with regard to segmentation, internal division and the sizes of the interstices between shapes are no longer made beforehand, but are, instead, empirically determined. Venet relishes, as he did not seem to do before, this direct and physical involvement that encompasses every level of decision-making, from determining the width of the black borders to the type and size of numerical markings, including subject identifications within or outside the picture’s perimeters.

Is Venet trying to have it both ways? As long as he respects the mathematical code and uses symbols that are “monosemic,” a sliding toward the expressive image is unlikely. The artist was never really indifferent, but now he seems more willing to own up to a picture’s need to be internally organized and visually calibrated as well as externally imposing and in command of the space it occupies. He physically enhances the clarity with which a subject is communicated on the semiotic level. When has a subject merged, as simply and as eloquently, with the shape of a picture, and when did a subject stand as explicitly revealed through the shape of its support? Venet has shrunk the distance between subject, form and title, which overlap each other in his recent paintings; manipulating them as though they were three different lenses in one optical viewer, he has been able to focus with increasing precision on the rational image in personal pictorial terms.

In 1967 Bernar Venet wrote that since he was not interested in problems of form, color and materials, any direction his work was to take could not be by definition an esthetic or stylistic one. What did he mean by that? The simple explanation, it would seem, is that the artist—for whom form is indeed neutral (or identical with subject), color optional (as long as it is white or black) and material a conveyance of content only—concluded that for him an evolution prompted by logic was the only viable alternative. The cutting edge of progress in art, following Venet’s reasoning, could not be found in art that advances new forms toward the creation of a new style, but must be found, instead, by proposing a new code and a new content for art. Venet did that when he adopted mathematics as his code and a full range of scientific disciplines as his content.

Venet has never, by his own definition, presented mathematics as art, nor has he chosen only the most elegant solutions to a set of given problems in any of the disciplines he dealt with (to establish an analogy or parallel to beauty in art). He is only interested in the questions raised by his own dealing with particular scientific subject matter as material for art. This Bernar Venet has likened to Cézanne’s not being interested in apples as fruit but as a subject fit for art.

Bernar Venet, without even touching religious or sexual matters, has hit upon one last taboo after Duchamp. His obtuse quotations from science in an art context have made scientists and esthetes equally uneasy, presumably because the pictures he presents in such an embarrassingly public way mock the artificial separation of the sciences from the humanities. The viewer is puzzled by the simultaneous, and normally conflicting, demands that he look at what is supposed to be read and that he read what is supposed to be looked at. In other words, from what constitutes the proper form for art the debate has now been extended to what constitutes its proper content.

As Bernar Venet has more often denied than granted his works their specific form, there is no reason for him to be concerned with style as a distinctive and characteristic mode of execution subject to the forces of evolution, change and fashion. As a matter of fact, he emphatically discounts all morphological concern in his work. “In order to avoid style,” one of Venet’s more categorical statements goes, “none should be adopted.”¹³ This admonition suffers from confusing what lends distinction to form with what is a personal attribute of questionable effectiveness. What Venet admittedly seeks to avoid is having his work become assimilated into a particular form and technique so that it acquires a style of its own. Whether he likes it or not, that is what is happening, partly as a result of the form, and partly of the content, he has chosen. Impatient with self-conscious absorption in formal problems and contemptuous of those artists who borrow a style so they won’t have to invent one, Venet is particularly at odds with style as an a priori notion, because it seems to imply that art is of secondary importance. But he may not be able to avoid style any more than Marcel Duchamp was able to avoid following his own taste, despite his fear that decisions in art based on personal choice and preference might be corruptive. Yet art does not seem the poorer for that. Venet draws into the realm of the visual what heretofore belonged to the realm of the mental, and with the same quiet authority that distinguished so many of the best visionary or mystical artists of the past, who rendered the invisible visible and did not know or care whether their activity was called art.

From the 1963 tar paintings and gravel piles to today’s split rectangles and segmented circles, Bernar Venet’s career spans 15 years. In the process, he has set forth some of the more challenging concepts about art from Minimalism on. When formalism went unquestioned, Venet insisted on the primacy of content. Neutrality of form was an objective from the beginning. By avoiding the tyranny of composition and by denying his materials their specific form, Venet anticipated principles current in the New York art world of the middle and late 1960s. More than other Conceptualists he investigated and in his work gravitated toward that zero degree of style in the Barthesian sense.¹⁴

With artists of his own generation, from Morris to Smithson, and with such pioneers of abstraction as Malevich, Bernar Venet shares a conviction that art should be, in part, discursive and didactic. An artist should evaluate the art situation, analyze art categories, redefine the notion of quality, pinpoint the area of his own greatest concern. Venet wasted no time first coming to terms with, and then discarding, Soulages’ muscular or Klein’s fetishistic abstraction. He consciously chose a conceptual focus and refused to set material limits for his art. Since he believes that media should support but not alter art’s content, Venet singled out those media impersonal enough to preclude an interpretative slant to the information conveyed. Quality, for Venet, does not reside in form, but is an attribute of content and, even more importantly, of the spirit informing that content. In the last analysis, a work’s true significance, for Venet, is neither in its form nor in its content, but in what the two combined suggest about the nature of art itself.

Venet thus proposes to substitute the nonaffective judgment used in science and technology for the affective or qualitative judgment used in art. He does not care whether his work is liked, appreciated or admired, preferring that it be considered correct, effective and, he would hope, significant. The only value Venet recognizes in his art is that routinely recognized in science: its proper functioning. This poses a problem with which art did not have to cope until Venet identified it and suggested a possible solution. In the process of aging, traditional art acquires historic authority and an aura of preciousness that no one would suggest “updating.” What happens, though, when content ages badly, as in the case of Venet’s scientific presentations’ losing their relevance, some day, or, worse yet, standing exposed as incorrect, false or misleading? The most that would remain, therefore, is a quaint demonstration of human fallibility.

Considering that in the early work form is of so little intrinsic importance to Venet, and that he entrusts others with its execution or gives prospective owners a choice of medium or format, there is no ideological obstacle to the appropriate updating of content either, particularly in the light of certain obsolescence. As that content was chosen by specialists on the artist’s behalf in the first place, should not future specialists be called upon by future owners to save Venet’s work from ultimate irrelevance?¹⁵ Still worse, a work by Venet left unchanged in years to come might risk losing its integrity as a rational image with a single meaning, as the result of its encrustation with unanticipated meanings. This just goes to show that art, for Venet, is not really part of the history of form, subject to stylistic development and belonging to the domain of esthetics. Instead it is part of the history of ideas, subject to dialectic development and belonging to the realm of semiotics. This has put Bernar Venet at odds-more in the past than recently—with a fraternity whose professional beliefs in the importance of form he coolly questions.

Turning from the presentation of scientific disciplines to subjects in plane geometry objectified in acrylic on canvas, Bernar Venet enriches a new way of thinking about art with a new way of looking at it, thus restoring to an art bared to its conceptual core the perceptual aura of which it had been stripped so ruthlessly. A pragmatic attitude and an instrumentalist approach enabled him to recapture the losses of physicality that years of theorizing had wrought.

—Jan van der Marck

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NOTES

1. “Sur la tombe d’Yves Klein, l’école de Nice compte ses sous,” Combat (Nice), August 22, 1966.

2. In conversation with Marcelin Pleynet, Paris-New York; situation de I’art, Paris, 1978, p. 93.

3. This statement, “Possibilités,” appears in translation in The Five Years of Bernar Venet, New York Cultural Center, 1971, pp. 10–12.

4. A type of presentation he started to use only when he could afford it, in August 1968. One may assume that Joseph Kosuth used photographic enlargements before Venet did, but to establish a chronology for this commonly available medium of presentation seems pointless in the light, particularly, of Venet’s lack of interest in the material character of his scientific presentations, as well as in that of the different ends to which each artist applied his photographic enlargements.

5. In a lengthy review of The Five Years of Bernar Venet (Artforum, January 1972, pp. 85–86) Joseph Mascheck notices “undesired artistic relations with Mel Bochner” in Venet’s 1966 acrylic on canvas calcule de la diagonale d’un rectangle. Chronology is badly twisted, as the earliest use of measurement in Mel Bochner’s work occurred as late as May 1969 at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Munich. Measurements Group B (Room Series) was a black tape on white walls, installation consisting of horizontal lines along the floor and vertical lines along the edge of walls, broken by the exact measurements of every one of the gallery’s dimensions. An even more direct precedent for Bochner’s putting the information normally found on architect’s blueprints on the walls of a finished building is Venet’s 1966 proposal to the Nice architect Guy Rottier, who had asked him to execute decorations integral to the design of a house he had been commissioned to build. The stipulation was that specific information about the house—type and number of materials used, dimensions, stress calculations and other measurements—be indicated in black on the floors and on the white walls and ceilings. Besides the fact that Bochner could not have any knowledge of Venet’s unexecuted proposal, the intentions of the two artists must have differed fundamentally. Venet, on his part, demonstrated the primacy of content over form and the convergence of signifier and signified, with no intention of affording us a spatial experience or imposing on the space of that building a mental order of his own. As insubstantial an argument can be made of Bochner having looked at Venet’s 1966 presentations of industrial drawing and elemental geometry; it would be lust as pointless to compare Venet’s recent paintings to Bochner’s 1969 Degrees, as installed at the Galleria Sperone in Turin in 1970. with its 360° and 90° configurations in charcoal on the walls and a rope diagonal on the floor, despite the obvious similarities resulting from both artists’ use of geometry.

6. Brenda Richardson, Mel Bochner: Number and Shape, The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1976, p. 7.

7. Ibid., p. 37.

8. Ibid., p. 48.

9. K.T. Fann, Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy, Berkeley, 1971, p. 41.

10. Paintings, Sculptures, Reflections, Wittenborn, Schultz, New York, 1948, p. 9.

11. Bernar Venet, Travaux Récents, Musee d’Art et d’Industrie Saint-Etienne, 1977, p. 11.

12. “The Mathematical Approach in Contemporary Art,” STRUCTURE (Bussum) III, 2, 1961, p. 66.

13. The Five Years of Bernar Venet, p. 14.

14. Roland Barthes told Thierry Kuntzel, an early writer on Venet’s work, that the zero degree of style in writing is more difficult to achieve than the zero degree of style in painting, although if anybody had successfully pushed forward in that direction, it was Bernar Venet.

15. Not all of Venet’s works lend themselves to be “updated” in this manner. The artist himself specifically referred to the presentations of title page and content page of books that are chosen for their significance in the fields they cover. The Five Years of Bernar Venet, pp. 30–31.