Courtesy of the artist and DIA Beacon, New York.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Mel Bochner’s first Measurement Room, Dia commissioned Bochner to realise a new, large-scale work at Dia Beacon. In May 1969 Bochner realised the first works in his Measurement series, using black tape to draw simple, linear segments across the surfaces of Dia cofounder Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery. Punctuating these lines were numbers that corresponded to the length of the measured surface: the width of a window bay, the height of a doorframe, and so on. Several of the measurements were further subdivided, indicated by notched marks interspersed at intervals across a wall. In this work, as in subsequent iterations of this series, Bochner used lines to wrap around the architectural envelope of the gallery in a systematic evaluation of its spatial parameters and the perceptual experience that unfolds within it. At Dia Beacon, red tape maps the various surfaces of one of the museum’s largest galleries, running horizontally across walls at a height corresponding to the artist’s eye level.
