Mel Bochner, xerox, from the exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art, School of Visual Arts, New York, 1966 (melbochner.net).
Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, ca. 1979-90 (5th version), 1999
From exhibition catalogue Mark Lombardi Global Networks, Robert Hobbs, Independent Curators International, New York, 2004
This is a selection of 20th–21st century artworks that invoke the power of the diagrammatic. You could start this train of thought with many great artists of the diagram. But here we start deliberately with the aesthetic of the unaesthetic, something not produced by an artist at all. A badly xeroxed technical drawing from Mel Bochner’s seminal conceptual exhibition Working Drawings and Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art that took place at the SVA, New York in 1966. It marked a new way of marvelling at the diagrammatic. This badly copied image is nonetheless a thing of mystery and beauty. Diagrams we cannot decipher hold a fascination for us, they become open oracular figurations, complex portraits of something invitingly unreachable. In the conventional sense diagrams facilitate understanding, but here they are used to uncover conspiracies and forge new ones, satirise knowledge, map visions, mark time and construct new poetic forms.
Leila Peacock, born in the UK, lives and works in Zürich. Her work plunders the space between drawing, writing and editing, between essay and cartoon, poem and diagram.