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What order-type is universally present wherever there is any order in the world? The
answer is, serial order. What is a series? Any row, array, rank, order of precedence,
numerical or quantitative set of values, any straight line, any geometrical gure em-
ploying straight lines, and yes, all space and all time.
Josiah Royce, Principles of Logic
Serial order is a method, not a style. The results of this method are surprising and diverse.
Edward Muybridges photographs, Thomas Eakins perspective studies, Jasper Johns numerals,
Alfred Jensens polyptychs, Larry Poons circles, dots and ellipsoids, Donald Judds painted wall
pieces, Sol LeWitts orthogonal multi-part oor structures all are works employing serial logics.
This is not a stylistic phenomenon. Variousness of the above kind is sucient grounds for
suggesting that rather than a style we are dealing with an attitude. The serial attitude is a
concern with how order of a specic type is manifest.
Many artists work in series. That is, they make dierent versions of a basic theme;
Morandis bottles or de Koonings women, for example. This falls outside the area of concern
here. Three basic operating assumptions separate serially ordered works from multiple variants:
1 The derivation of the terms or interior divisions of the work is by means of a numerical or
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otherwise systematically predetermined process (permutation, progression, rotation, reversal).
2 The order takes precedence over the execution.
3 The completed work is fundamentally parsimonious and systematically self-exhausting.
Staircase. Using the technique of superimposition and transparency he divided the assigned
canvas into a succession of time intervals. Due to the slight variation in density it is impossible
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to visualize specic changes as such. Alternations are leveled to a single information which
subverts experiential time. Duchamp has said the idea was suggested to him by the experiments
of Dr. Etienne Jules Marey (18301904). Marey, a French physiologist, began with ideas de-
rived from the work of Muybridge, but made a number of signicant conceptual and mechani-
cal changes. He invented an ingenious optical device based on principles of revolution similar
to Gatlings machine gun. This device enabled him to photograph multiple points of view on
one plate. In 1890 he invented his chronophotograph, which was capable of recording, in
succession, 120 separate photos per second. He attempted to visualize the passage of time by
placing a clock within camera range, obtaining by this method a remarkable dissociation of
time and image.
Types of order are forms of thoughts. They can be studied apart from whatever physical
form they may assume. Before observing some further usages of seriality in the visual arts, it
will be helpful to survey several other areas where parallel ideas and approaches also exist. In
doing this I wish to imply neither metaphor nor analogy.
My desire was for a conscious control over the new means and forms that arise in every
artists mind.
Arnold Schoenberg
Music has been consistently engaged with serial ideas. Although the term serial music is
relatively contemporary, it could be easily applied to Bach or even Beethoven. In a serial or
Dodecaphonic (twelve tone) composition, the order of the notes throughout the piece is a
consequence of an initially chosen and ordered set (the semitonal scale arranged in a denite
linear order). Note distribution is then arrived at by permuting this prime set. Any series of
notes (or numbers) can be subjected to permutation as follows: 2 numbers have only 2 permu-
tations (1, 2; 2, 1); 3 numbers have 6 (1, 2, 3; 1, 3, 2; 2, 1, 3; 2, 3, 1; 3, 1, 2; 3, 2, 1); 4
numbers have 24; . . . 12 numbers have 479,001,600. Other similarly produced numerical
sequences and a group of pre-established procedures give the exact place in time for each sound,
the coincidence of sounds, their duration, timbre and pitch.
The American serial composer Milton Babbits Three Compositions for Piano can be used
as a simplied example of this method (see George Perles Serial Composition and Atonality for
a more detailed analysis). The prime set is represented by these integers: P 5, 1, 2, 4. By
subtracting each number in turn from a constant of such value that the resulting series intro-
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duces no numbers not already given, an inversion results (in this case the constant is 6): I 1,
5, 4, 2. A rotational procedure applied to P and I yields the third and fourth set forms: Rp
2, 4, 5, 1; Ri 4, 2, 1, 5.
The composer is freed from individual note-to-note decisions which are self-generating
within the system he devises. The music thus attains a high degree of conceptual coherence,
even if it sometimes sounds aimless and fragmentary.
The adaptation of the serial concept of composition by incorporating the more general
notion of permutation into structural organization a permutation the limits of which
are rigorously dened in terms of the restrictions placed on its self-determination con-
stitutes a logical and fully justied development, since both morphology and rhetoric
are governed by one and the same principle.
Pierre Boulez
The form itself is of very limited importance, it becomes the grammar for the total work.
Sol LeWitt
Language can be approached in either of two ways, as a set of culturally transmitted be-
havior patterns shared by a group or as a system conforming to the rules which constitute
its grammar.
Joseph Greenberg, Essays in Linguistics
investigation of any array of elements obeying xed rules of combination. Studies of isomor-
phic (correspondence) relationships are especially interesting.
Practically all systems can be rendered isomorphic with a system containing only one
serial relation. For instance, elements can be reordered into a single line, i. e., single serial
relation by arranging them according to their coordinates. In the following two-dimensional
array, the coordinates of C are (1, 3), of T (3, 2):
R P D
L B T
C U O
Isomorphs could be written as: R, L, C, P, B, U, D, T, O or R, P, D, L, B, T, C, U, O.
An example of this in language is the ordering in time of speech to correspond to the ordering
of direction in writing. All the forms of cryptography from crossword puzzles to highly sophis-
ticated codes depend on systematic relationships of this kind.
(. . .)
The structure of an articial optic array may, but need not, specify a source. A wholly
invented structure need not specify anything. This would be a case of structure as such.
It contains information, but not information about, and it affords perception but not
perception of.
James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems
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vanishing point or innity of perspective). Out of his investigations of visual (as opposed
to tactile) geometry came the eld of projective geometry. Projective geometry investigates
such problems as the means of projecting gures from the surface of three-dimensional objects
This text was published in Artforum, 6:4 (December 1967), pp. 2833.
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