Studies for Sackler Gallery Installation 2002

Editor: This is Mel Bochner’s "Studies for Sackler Gallery Installation." It's a small drawing, and something about the sparseness of the sketched room feels…unsettling. What strikes you about it? Curator: It’s that tension, isn’t it? The stark room, those playful, blocky forms. Bochner's playing with our perception, how we build meaning from simple shapes in a defined space. It reminds me of early computer graphics, a world being built one pixel at a time. Do you feel that sense of possibility, that the room could hold anything? Editor: I do, now that you mention it! Like the potential is all there, just waiting to be realized. Curator: Exactly! It's the ghost of an idea, a promise hanging in the air. And for me, that's where the true art lives. Editor: I never thought of it that way.