Thought Is a Material: Talking with Mel Bochner about
Space, Art, and Language
Alexander Kranjec
Mel Bochner is a New York City artist who, despite dis-
liking the term “conceptual art,” is sometimes credited
with staging the worldʼs first conceptual art exhibition
in 1966 (Bochner, 2008). With a background in phenom-
enology, an interest in the work of early minimalist
artists, and inspiration taken from an artist-in-residence
position at Singer Research Labs, Bochnerʼs sculptures
and installations took a turn toward spatial, numerical,
and linguistic themes from 1968 through the 1970s.
The common thread connecting his early work is a pre-
occupation with the kinds of abstract categories that
relate objects to one another (rather than to the objects
themselves) and how the mind represents such relations
in distinct formats (e.g., boundaries, numbers, words). At
that time, Bochner articulated a desire to create art “that
did not add anything to the furniture of the world.” In
part, this was a response to an art world “dominated by
the equation ‘art = objects’” as promoted by pop artists
like Andy Warhol and minimalists like Donald Judd
(Field, 1996). Rather than creating art objects that people
could take home, Bochner wanted to provide his audi-
ence with a kind of mental tool kit. That is, he sought
to make art that compelled viewers to attend to, and re-
flect on, the most basic cognitive processes involved in
seeing the structural relations between objects.
More recently, empirical research in cognitive neuro-
science has also moved beyond a neuroscience of objects
(faces, words, tools, etc.). Interest in basic abstract cate-
gories like space, time, number, and causality has
increased, as the systems that subserve these relational
processes have come to be understood as particularly
important and potentially interrelated (Kranjec, Cardillo,
Lehet, & Chatterjee, 2012; Bueti & Walsh, 2009; Walsh,
2003). Such basic categories of experience serve well as
model domains for developing integrated theories of
mental representation and semantics. To illustrate this,
consider the semantics of space. On the face of it, the
language of space, namely prepositions, may seem rela-
tively insignificant, but this is not the case. On the one
hand, the simple meanings of spatial words present an
Duquesne University, and Carnegie Mellon University
© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
opportunity to investigate the structure of a distributed
semantic system in very stark form. Locative preposi-
tions represent a closed set of frequently used spatial
categories with meanings constrained by perception and
ecology. On the other hand, the meanings of basic spatial
categories serve as a foundation on which more complex
concepts are built; we think and talk about more abstract
conceptual categories like emotions and morality using
the language and structure of space (e.g., “Iʼm feeling
high/low.”). But the semantics of prepositions is not the
only thing that makes them important with respect to
grounding relational thinking. In part, prepositions are
special because they are semantically and grammatically
flexible in a manner that is unique in human language.
Not only can the semantics of prepositions be both con-
crete and abstract, they also often serve very different func-
tions in language (Kranjec, Cardillo, Schmidt, & Chatterjee,
2010; Frederici, 1982). Prepositions frequently serve a pre-
scribed functional role as syntactic relational units (e.g.,
“on” alert vs. “in” trouble) seemingly (but not necessarily)
empty of semantic content (which may explain why we
frequently take them for granted). By investigating how
these particularly flexible, ambiguous, and productive
units of language are represented in the brain along a
semantic–syntactic continuum, we may step closer to both
delineating aspects of language that utilize neural structures
evolved for perception and action and those that make
human language distinct from nonhuman forms of mental
representation and communication. The deployment of
basic relational language (using prepositions), grounded
in fundamentally relational cognitive domains (like space),
may make species-specific human abilities like analogy
and metaphor possible (Gentner, 2003; Lakoff & Johnson,
1999).
In this way, spatial experience and perception can be
seen as a model domain for grounding abstract meaning
and relational thinking in the brain. For cognitive neuro-
scientists, understanding how the neural organization of
spatial perception is related to the ways in which we talk
about space in terms of prepositions can shed light on
the nature of the intermediate representations that link
distinct formats (like images and words) and domains
(like space and time). Using lesion methods in patients,
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25:12, pp. 2015–2024
doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00465
previous work that I have been involved with has inves-
tigated such intermediary structures between perception
and language, in a graded model of mental representa-
tion (Kranjec & Chatterjee, 2010). For cognitive neuro-
scientists, describing the structures of “thought” at such
an intermediate level can be difficult. When doing so, not
only must one develop a verbal vocabulary to unpack
complex concepts that can bridge definitions of mind
and brain, but also, perhaps more than in other fields,
cognitive neuroscientists are frequently required to inter-
pret and develop visual vocabularies and metaphors to
further explain novel imaging methods, materials, results,
and models.
I became interested in Bochnerʼs art while visiting the
National Gallery of Art in the Summer of 2012, where it
was suggested to me by my companion that his theory of
boundaries (then on display) resembled stimuli from a
set of studies I had recently completed exploring spa-
tial representation in stroke patients (Kranjec, Ianni, &
Chatterjee, 2013; Amorapanth et al., 2012). I later found
myself becoming a quick student of Bochnerʼs work.
After recognizing Bochnerʼs general interests in spatial
semantics and mental representation, I noticed more
fine-grained areas of overlap between his interests and
my own. For example, Bochnerʼs work recognizes a
well-known neuropsychological distinction between cate-
gorical and coordinate spatial information (e.g., the dif-
ference between understanding that a shoe is “below
the table” vs. “30 in. from the table”). More than any-
thing though, Bochnerʼs particular preoccupation with
prepositions as an important window into the structure
of thought seemed remarkable to me, as was his interest
in depicting related spatial concepts in different rep-
resentational formats. By providing an opportunity to
reflect on the meanings of basic spatial relations while
moving between words and images intended to express
a common concept, Bochnerʼs art allows viewers to ex-
perience the limitations of a particular kind of repre-
sentation. His work in this respect owes something
to “The Treachery of Images” by Rene Magritte who
famously painted “Ceci nʼest pas une pipe” beneath a pic-
ture of a pipe (and remarked, “if I had written on my
picture ‘This is a pipe,’ Iʼd have been lying!” [Torczyner,
Miller, & Magritte, 1977]). However, by focusing on rela-
tional concepts rather than objects themselves, Bochner
moves away from the “furniture of the world” and closer
to “the stuff of thought” (Pinker, 2007): The very thing
that cognitive neuroscience aims to do by concentrat-
ing research on abstract categories like space, time, and
number.
When corresponding with Bochner in advance of this
interview, I sent ahead some questions in line with my
specific research interests. Although he made it clear
that he would reflect on what I had sent, he replied,
“Remember Iʼm an artist not a neuroscientist. I go on
hunches and intuitions, not theories.” This is an impor-
tant distinction and something that I kept in mind during
2016 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
the interview. Although there is precedent for Bochnerʼs
art serving as inspiration for scientists (see the anecdote
regarding Bochnerʼs collaboration with an organic chem-
ist below), it remains to be seen if an examination of
Bochnerʼs work will offer cognitive neuroscience-specific
insights. Regardless, the more general idea that con-
ceptual artists have something to offer cognitive neuro-
scientists remains very compelling. Although an artist
like Bochner may not work using the scientific method,
the idea that conceptual artists set out to systematically
visualize cognitive structure may guide cognitive neuro-
scientists to notice previously unseen connections be-
tween art and our science. Bochner has written elsewhere
regarding the mistake of believing that “systematic think-
ing” should be “considered the antithesis of artistic think-
ing” (Bochner, 2008). I am of the opinion that, despite
the starkly different methods used by both fields, concep-
tual art and cognitive neuroscience have some interesting
common ground. Namely, both disciplines use methods
that can be described as systematic or analytic, and both
are deeply engaged in the project of describing, abstracting,
and visualizing facts about basic categories of mind and
experience. Moreover, whereas the emerging field of
neuroaesthetics is gaining momentum (Chatterjee, 2011),
cognitive neuroscientists have mostly neglected conceptual
art (Bullot & Reber, 2012). This is because empirical inves-
tigations in aesthetics typically focus on perceptual prefer-
ences for visual art (i.e., “what is beauty?”). Ontologically,
conceptual art often goes further “upstream” than this (e.g.,
“what is art?”) in a manner that shares features of scientific
inquiry. (A general process that may involve reducing a
concept or function to its most basic properties via an analy-
sis of previous work and phenomenology. A cognitive
neuroscientist might be said to engage in something like
this when utilizing cognitive subtraction techniques or
considering the distinction between an experimental task
and a cognitive function.) By focusing particularly on the
spatial relations between objects, Bochnerʼs art addresses
not only deep questions regarding the meaning of art and
art objecthood but also topics of more general interest to
cognitive scientists. Those interested in how the mind rep-
resents objects and abstract concepts, both with and without
language, could learn much from how visual artists like
Bochner choose to represent such subjects in their work.
Alexander Kranjec: How do you explain the general
philosophical and scientific nature of your art and, specif-
ically, your interest in space?
Mel Bochner: Thatʼs a complicated question. I think it
would be easiest to start at the beginning of my career as
an artist. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of
Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), I couldnʼt
see a way out of an artistic dilemma I was facing at the
time, trying to reconcile all my student influences, and
was more or less at the point of giving up. I was in cor-
respondence with an old friend who was studying philos-
ophy at Northwestern. He said, “Well if youʼre interested
in philosophy, why donʼt you come here. You could audit
Volume 25, Number 12
courses and see if maybe you want to come back to
school and study philosophy.” So thatʼs what I did. I
moved to Chicago, but it didnʼt take very long to see that
thatʼs not what I wanted to do. Sitting around the library
reading all day wasnʼt my idea of something interesting.
Also, at that point, I was playing catch up. Everybody else
in the program had actually, you know, read Plato
(laughs). So, I used to get on the elevated train, go down
to the city, and spend the whole day at the Art Institute,
because Pittsburgh and San Francisco didnʼt have great
museums and Iʼd never seen a real El Greco. Actually,
Iʼd never seen a lot of things. And it rekindled my inter-
est. I realized that I really did want to be an artist. So,
jumping forward 6 months, I arrived in New York, still
without any real direction in my work, just a group of
small, all-over gray paintings that represented all my frus-
trations, in paint.
One day, I ran into a friend on the street who told me
there was a Jasper Johns show at the Jewish museum,
who Iʼd vaguely heard of but had no real idea of what
he was doing. She said, “Oh, he does all gray paintings,
too,” and for some reason, that really annoyed me.
AK: (laughs)
MB: You know, in my naiveté, I thought I was the only
one doing all gray paintings. Anyway, I went there and
saw he had been doing it for 10 years already and he
had done it much better. But, what fascinated me about
his work was not the grayness but the introduction of
language, alphabets, numbers, and things like that. In
one painting, the only image was the word “the.” They
were very beautifully painted paintings, but there was this
enigma of the word. What did it mean? Why would the
word “the” be floating in the middle of this gray surface?
And, it seemed to me that he had tapped into some other
part of the brain.
AK: That reminds me of a psychological effect (seman-
tic satiation): If you start to repeat a word over and over
and over, you more or less start to focus on the phonol-
ogy or the orthography of the word, the form of it, and
the meaning becomes lost. A word can start to feel very
strange to you, like nonsense.
MB: Warhol said, if you repeat something often enough,
it loses itʼs meaning, which is basically the secret of his
work.
Thinking about Johnsʼ work, I discovered Rauschenberg,
and it seemed to me…belatedly, because this wasnʼt news
anymore in 1964…to offer a direction out of the corner
that I had painted myself into. My objective was to find
something that was my own. I thought, “What can I do
that belongs to me and to no one else?” I decided it
would have to be like an activity. And the thing that came
into my mind was counting, just counting. When youʼre
counting, you didnʼt have to make anything up. Two always
follows one, three always follows two, four always follows
three. Then, it became a question of what to count. At
that same moment, minimalism, which was the work of
(Donald) Judd, (Dan) Flavin, and (Sol) LeWitt, was just
breaking, and I was very struck by them. I liked their ideas.
Their work was not about geometry in any conventional
way. I was beginning to see or understand that, to do
something original, you had to question existing thought
structures.
AK: Understanding this part of the story, about the
development of your work and eventually where it ends
up, is very interesting to me because it reminds me a little
of the trajectory of the cognitive neurosciences as well.
When neuroimaging (fMRI) became very popular, one
of the first things that people started investigating con-
cerned where certain kinds of objects are represented
or processed in the brain. You know, whereʼs the tool part
of the brain, or the face part of the brain, or the word part
of the brain? Much of it was very good work, and we
gradually accumulated all of this knowledge about where
stuff gets processed, that is, objects. But, no one really
thought about this kind of abstract relational information
that your work addresses until later. Itʼs sort of a second-
order question to think of the relations between objects
as objects of thought themselves. Itʼs also neat to hear
about your struggle to distinguish your art from that of
your peers, because as a scientist, too, weʼre all trying
to find our own territory (Figure 1).
MB: I remember having the idea as a young artist that I
wanted to take the knowledge thatʼs in art…because I
think art is about knowledge, not about objects…and
somehow push that further. But, where to push it that
it hadnʼt already been? The first thing I did, which I felt
was my own, was the “Working Drawings and Other
Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be
Viewed As Art” exhibition.
AK: Which is often cited as the first exhibition of con-
ceptual art.
MB: My idea was that, instead of worrying about the
object, what if we look at the thinking process behind
it? In other words, the genetics of the artwork, or what
I was calling at that time, the upstream. Whereʼs the
source? Where does the water come out of the rock?
How far upstream can you get? Is there a limit? So, I went
to other artists and asked them for their working draw-
ings and notes, things that they didnʼt consider artworks,
and through a series of events, I wound up Xeroxing the
drawings and presenting them as a book. The book
became the artwork. That was very hard for certain people
to swallow. You walked into the gallery, there was nothing
on the walls, and you stood there reading a book.
AK: Is that the bigger idea or your motivation for what
got you where you are today…perhaps something that is
a common feature of anyone who calls themself a con-
ceptual artist? That a conceptual artist needs this explicit
awareness of the history of ideas preceding them in order
to make a novel contribution? Is that why people that are
more interested in theory and criticism might be more
attracted to conceptual art?
MB: Thatʼs a good question. First, I donʼt like the term
“conceptual art.” Itʼs an oversimplification and leads to
Kranjec 2017
Figure 1. (A) “Measurement
Five” (1969) and (B) “Cardinal
Versus Ordinal” (1972). Works
from Bochnerʼs “Measurement”
and “A Theory of Sculpture”
series highlight the conceptual
distinction between number
(an abstract symbolic
representation) and
numerosity (a concrete analog
representation) that is central
to the work of several
prominent cognitive
neuroscientists. Stanislas
Dehaene and colleagues
have provided evidence for
notation-independent coding (dots, digits, and number words) of numerical quantity in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS; Piazza, Pinel, Le Bihan, &
Dehaene, 2007). The work of Jessica Cantlon further suggests that the right IPS plays a preferential role in nonsymbolic numerosity coding during
early childhood (Cantlon, Brannon, Carter, & Pelphrey, 2006). Daheane suggests that the left IPS develops its role in number processing as a function
of experience with symbols. Several pieces from “A Theory of Sculpture” also capture the difference between quantity and sequence and the
representational ambiguity involved when the same number symbols serve two cognitively distinct functions. Of this series Bochner (2013) recently
wrote, “Number constitutes a mental class of objects. Numbers do not need concrete entities in order to exist. In Latin, the word for counting is
‘calculus,’ which translates, literally, as stone. By juxtaposing the numbers with the stones, “A Theory of Sculpture” forces a confrontation between
matter (“raw” material) and mind (categories of thought)” (Bochner, 2013).

bizarre formulations like “dematerialized art,” as if there
was something in the world that wasnʼt made up of
matter. As far as Iʼm concerned, even a thought is a
material. There was no cohesive group that called them-
selves the “minimalists.” The same is true of the concep-
tualists. In minimalism, what was at stake was could
constitute the minimal conditions of interest? Can you
just put a box in the middle of the room and have it be
interesting? And if you can, “Why is it interesting?” The
people who were against it came up with some interest-
ing ideas about why it wasnʼt interesting. A critic named
Michael Fried developed his theory of absorption. He
said a cube sitting in the middle of the gallery is basically
performative, whereas a real work of art is absorptive. If
you look at a Rembrandt, youʼre absorbed into the reality
of that artwork. The cube is the exact reverse of that,
which he accused of being theatrical. And, he did have
a point. But, the best work was not theatrical in the
superficial sense, although it did force you into a recog-
nition of the space, of the context. In other words, when
you look into a picture, you donʼt think that youʼre in a
museum or a gallery, youʼre in the picture. Whereas if
youʼre looking at a monochrome canvas, or a cube by
Donald Judd, you start to look around the room and
you think about the context. And then, you think about
the experience of looking itself, which leads to all kinds
of other critical and phenomenological thoughts.
AK: So, is this how you got into space then? When you
talk about your intellectual process of reduction and
looking upstream, you get to this place where space as
a basis or context for experiencing art is at the source,
you canʼt get further upstream than that?
MB: Yes, but that was only one factor. The concept of
measurement came to me when I was an artist-in-
residence at the Singer Research Labs, talking to the
scientists who worked there. The conversations always
arrived at the notion of objectification. To them, truth
had to be verifiable by experiment, which, in turn, had
to be verifiable by measurements. Thatʼs when the trust,
or distrust, of language became interesting to me; I
began to see measurement as a language that contained
as much ambiguity as any other language. Although these
scientists didnʼt want to recognize it….
AK: And by scientists, these were engineers, these
were scientists engaged in producing useful things?
MB: Yes, they were object-oriented scientists. They
couldnʼt figure out what I was doing there (laughs). At
the time, my artwork was involved with photography—
studying cognitive structures like perspective. Then, the
measurement thing sort of took over. But, the back-
ground for this goes back to when I was at Northwestern,
which at that time was the center for phenomenological
studies in America. They were passing around a recently
translated typescript of Merleau–Pontyʼs “Phenomenol-
ogy of Perception.”
AK: Do you know Duquesne University (where AK is
an Assistant Professor) is widely regarded as the current
center for phenomenology in America? (It is home to the
Silverman Center for Phenomenology.) Itʼs one of the
last holdouts in this regard. There are psychologists in
my department who primarily refer to themselves as
phenomenologists (Figure 2).
MB: In the late ‘60s, the linguistic philosophy guys had
taken over the Harvard Philosophy department. All the
phenomenology professors moved to Northwestern
where Merleau–Ponty was the god. My friend, who intro-
duced me to this whole area, was writing his PhD on
Heidegger, who I had not heard of before. In short, all

2018 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Volume 25, Number 12

Figure 2. (A) “Notecard”
(Merleau–Ponty; 1969) and (B)
“Language Is Not Transparent”
(1970). There are signs of
both self-education and
didacticism in Bochnerʼs early
work. Whereas his “Notecards”
suggest the notetaking of a
graduate student searching for
an original project, in “Language
Is Not Transparent” the
numbered statement, written
on a surface that resembles
a dripping blackboard, suggests
a theoretical foundation for
a project that has become
more refined and personal.
Both pieces reflect Bochnerʼs preoccupation with the limits of a given representational format. Respectively, photographic images bleach visual
percepts of their dynamism, and language as inherently symbolic (and nonanalog) is necessarily ambiguous because it abstracts away the details
of a more concrete reality. Bochner told me, “All of those early works, actually all of my work, I see as a form of self-education. To learn things
you have to look in unexpected places.”
these ideas were very much in the air. This served as the
background when I started doing my first measurement
pieces.
At some point, I read a book about different concepts
of space, and there was one sentence that stuck with me:
“You canʼt make space, you can only divide space.” This
was a revelation. Space is a given. We know that from
Kant. Thatʼs the whole idea of innate structures, that
space and time are a priori. I was playing with measure-
ment, and I realized at a certain point Iʼve got to measure
something. I had sheets of paper and cardboard lying
around the studio. Standard size sheets of paper come
8 ½ × 11 in. (or sometimes 8 × 10 in.). Standard-size
sheets of cardboard come 36 × 48 in. Lumber came in
6- or 8-ft lengths. Materials are governed by standard
sizes. I came to understand that everything is modular
as a factor of mass production. Architecture was based
on these modules, so that every room has a secret—a
hidden measurement system. I asked myself, “What
would be the largest space I could measure?” Well, the
room itself. The room becomes the envelope for what-
ever action occurs inside it. That envelope is the projec-
tion of an idea, which is based on available materials,
which are based on measurements. Itʼs a self-enfolding
structure.
When I put the measurements on the wall, Iʼm forcing
the architecture to reveal itself, to surrender its transpar-
ency. When I did the first installation in Germany, I had
another revelation: In the “Measurement: Room” there is
no center, because the artwork surrounds you. As you
move around the room, it constantly appears and dis-
appears. Itʼs always simultaneously in front of and behind
you. You are the center of the work, a mobile center.
AK: Iʼm following you. So, how you got to be inter-
ested in measurement was fairly straightforward, and
then, it led to this sort of bigger idea that was the result
or the effect of your interest in measurement; you made
the ground the focus of your artwork rather than the fig-
ure. And by doing that, you make explicit these figure–
ground relations in a very interesting way. And once
you make figure–ground relations explicit, then you get
to this idea of boundaries and these other kinds of spatial
relations that you depict in the “Theory of Boundaries.”
Does that make sense? (Figure 3)
MB: Thatʼs pretty close, but Iʼm summarizing and tele-
scoping it. The progression of my work was more convo-
luted. The realizations came more slowly.
AK: Right, your measurement pieces are not Experi-
ment 1, and “Theory of Boundaries” isnʼt Experiment 2.
This isnʼt science.
MB: Art works donʼt follow each other in any necessary
way.
AK: But, you did recognize them as exploring very dif-
ferent kinds of spatial relationships?
MB: They are different, just like “Language is Not
Transparent” is a different kind of work too.
AK: The reason Iʼm harping on this is because some-
thing that I and others have studied in cognitive neuro-
science for some time now is the distinction between
whatʼs called categorical and coordinate spatial relations.
Stephen Kosslyn at Harvard has argued for some time in
favor of this distinction being particularly important in
the evolution of human cognition and that this is reflected
in a hemispheric division of labor in processing these two
kinds of spatial relations in the brain. Coordinate relations
have more to do with measurement, distance, or metric
space, and categorical relations have to do more with
the sort of discrete categories of spatial relations that
are described with prepositions, like “above,” “in,” and
“on.” Because categorical relations can be easily ver-
balized, they can also be ambiguous. There is evidence
that the left hemisphere is more important for processing
categorical relations that are more verbally mediated and
the right hemisphere is more important for processing
Kranjec 2019
Figure 3. (A) “Measurement Room” (1969), (B) “Actual Size” (Face; 1968), and (C) “Theory of Boundaries” (1969–1970). Bochner first started
to measure things while at Singer Labs. The resulting “Measurement” pieces simultaneously draw attention to certain kinds of objects (e.g., faces
and places) and away from them, as the viewer is encouraged to consider the abstract spatial constraints that structure and unify our discrete
experiences. In a historical context, they “canceled the ironic commentaries on the arbitrariness of measurement” (Field, p. 34), suggested by a
work like Marcel Duchampʼs “Three Standard Stoppages” (1913–1914). And although his actual size portraits would seem to play with the idea
that measurement is distorted when objects are represented in photographs, the knowledge that Bochner instructed the printer to develop the
12” measurement “actual size” further toys with this expectation, creating an analog metric relation between the representation and the thing it
represents. “Theory of Boundaries” dates from 1969, the same year as “Measurement Room.” Here, Bochner depicts four word–image relations
or what he calls “language fractions” (at/in, over/in, /in, at/out). In the preliminary sketch notes for the piece, first published in Arts Magazine
(1970) titled “No Thought Exists Without a Sustaining Support,” Bochner explains that, “the first term of the language fraction refers to the
contingency of the film [surface paint] to the border. [The] second term…refers to the position of the film as regards the sense of enclosure.”
For example, in the first square on the left, the color is both at the boundary and in the enclosure created by that boundary. In contrast to the metric
relations depicted in his “Measurement” works, in “Theory of Boundaries,” word–image relations are explicitly ambiguous. (It is perhaps no
coincidence that “Language Is Not Transparent” also comes out of this same year or that “No Thought Exists Without a Sustaining Support” is
presented as axiom number two as part of that series.) Bochnerʼs work during this period seems to recognize the neuropsychological distinction
between categorical and coordinate spatial information. Kosslyn (1987) originally proposed a hemispheric bias for processing two types of spatial
information. Categorical relations refer to discrete spatial relations frequently lexicalized by locative prepositions like “above,” “below,” and,
“in.” Coordinate relations are finer-grained metric relations not as readily coded by language, usually involving distance information. Categorical
representations specify abstract, equivalent (but perceptually ambiguous) classes of spatial relations and are preferentially processed in the left
hemisphere, whereas coordinate representations specify the exact locations of objects in space, information important for reaching and navigation
and processed in the right hemisphere (Kosslyn, Thompson, Gitelman, & Alpert, 1998; Kosslyn et al., 1989; Kosslyn, 1987). In Kosslynʼs later
thinking on the subject (Kosslyn & Jacobs, 1994), he hypothesizes that low-level perceptual biases in left hemisphere structures important for
abstraction (and categorization) served as a precursor for the development of language in proximate cortical areas (see Postma & Laeng, 2006, for
a short review).

2020 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Volume 25, Number 12

the kind of spatial information that is less easily described
in words. I donʼt want to get too much into the details of
the scientific theory, but I did want to make the general
point that the distinction between different kinds of
spatial relations that you explore in those two pieces maps
fairly directly onto this major overarching theory in the
cognitive neurosciences. The fact that these two pieces
came out while you were thinking about this stuff is really
interesting.
MB: Have you come across a work I did called “Axiom
of Indifference”?
AK: I read the Bruce Boice article about it in the Yale
Catalog. When I started reading it, I thought we could
really make our whole conversation just about rolling over
all of the spatial and logical relations expressed in the
article. It seems like we could spend hours doing that.
MB: Interestingly, we had never met before he wrote
that.
AK: (laughs)
MB: Boice just walked in, saw the exhibition, went
home, wrote the whole thing, and sent it to me. It was
amazing analytical detective work. He really thought his
way through. At that time, I wasnʼt thinking of my work as
consisting of “works of art,” I considered them as tools to
think with. And Boice used them that way…I worked on
that piece for over a year. Mapping out all of those spatial
and logical relationships was complicated. But, even after
I thought that I had mapped all of the possibilities, the
logical possibilities, I realized I hadnʼt accounted for the
permutations of top and bottom. One day, I was at a
friendʼs house for dinner and I was washing the dishes
and they had a little jar where they collected pennies.
And, I was washing the dishes and absent-mindedly look-
ing at the pennies, suddenly my head just exploded. Of
course, heads and tails! Tops and bottoms. And, that was
it (Figure 4).
AK: (laughs) Itʼs incredible to me that youʼre inter-
ested enough in these sorts of ideas to spend a year
making a work like this, that someone else was able to
walk through the whole thing and, like you said, do this
detective work to puzzle out your reasoning. There is this
relatively young field called cognitive linguistics. People
working in this area and some in psychology are inter-
ested in the relationship between basic perceptual pro-
cesses, cognition, and language. They pursue the same
sorts of questions like, “What does ‘between’ really

Figure 4. (A) “Prepositional Sculpture” (1970) and (B) “Axiom of Indifference” (1973) with (C) map for Sonnabend Gallery, installation of Axiom of
Indifference. “Prepositional Sculpture” illustrates Bochnerʼs interest in the verbal labeling of spatial relations in a relatively direct manner. In this case,
the representational link between word and percept is made explicit such that the tapeʼs analog position describes the spatial relation coded by
the verbal label printed on the tape (beside, between, over, under). A recent study using voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (Amorapanth et al.,
2012) found evidence suggesting that discrete verbal and perceptual representations of such categorical spatial relations show a hemispheric bias.
“Axiom of Indifference” is a larger, more ambitious work, but also more complex. In this work, Bochner depicts a number of containment relations
using pennies and tape. Logical propositions (e.g., “some are in”) describe each containment relation in a manner that, at first, seems straightforward.
However, while moving through the installation, on closer inspection, one becomes aware that the meanings of the propositions are ambiguous
depending on the frame of reference employed. Heightening attention to the ambiguity of spatial relations when expressed in distinct visual and verbal
formats is a common method used by Bochner. In this instance, he goes further by pointing out that logical structures and reference frames play a
role in creating meaningful relations between language and perception.

Kranjec 2021
mean?” or “How do different languages parse or carve up
spatial relations?” So, you know, in English, we have dif-
ferent words for “in” and “on,” but in Spanish, they use
the same preposition collapsing both spatial relations
with a single label. In Dutch, they do something different.
Cognitive linguists are interested in looking at how all
this might relate to the cognitive and perceptual pro-
cesses involved in experiencing the world.
MB: Prepositions have fascinated me for a really long
time. I did a piece called “Prepositional Sculpture” where
I took three 4 × 4 pieces of 4-ft-long wood and laid them
in a line (one, two, three). I put a strip of 4-in. white tape
at the end of piece 1. Then, in the 4-in. space between
piece 1 and piece 2, I put another strip of white tape.
At the end of the second piece, I put a strip of white tape
that starts on the floor, goes up and over the block of
wood. And at the end of the third piece, I put the tape
underneath it. On the first tape, I wrote “beside”; on the
second, “between”; on the third, “over”; and on the
fourth, “under.” So, you get these four prepositional
possibilities, which are materialized as pieces of tape.
At that time, I didnʼt want to make anything permanent.
I wanted everything, at the end of an exhibition, to return
to its ordinariness. The works are a demonstration of
an idea that hopefully strikes a chord in a viewer: enabling
them to use it as a tool to think with as opposed to
an object to possess. “Prepositional Sculpture” was the
beginning of my thinking about prepositions, which
became more refined in “Theory of Boundaries” moving
to a tighter formulation of boundary and border relation-
ships. I was reading a lot of things at that time, including
Piaget. Iʼm sure you know in those books, where he
conducts interviews with children, asking them what it
means for something to be in front versus something else
behind.
AK: Just the fact that youʼre interested in prepositions
at all I think is sort of astounding. Even for cognitive
neuroscience people that study language, prepositions
are marginalized. Language researchers are relatively
more interested in nouns or verbs, but very few people
are interested in prepositions.
MB: Prepositions are what hold the world together.
AK: Right! I mean, theyʼre incredibly flexible and pro-
miscuous, and they provide the skeletal structure for lan-
guage and thought in this really fundamental way.
MB: Prepositions and conjunctions—those are the two
parts of speech that interest me. I did a series of paint-
ings a couple years ago about conjunctions. A conjunc-
tion is a word which actually has no meaning within
itself. It has to have partners on both sides, to relate to
anything. This “and” this. This “or” that. If, then. All these
things are words without weight. They donʼt exist alone—
you donʼt talk about the word “and”; you donʼt talk about
the word “but.” At the same time, you canʼt think without
using them, and they give all language its interior sense
of cohesion.
AK: I think it was very clever of you use prepositions
in that way. Itʼs just such a natural way to get away from

Figure 5. The Kraus Campo (with Michael Van Valkenburgh, 2005). In the cognitive sciences, there is an abundance of research investigating
the links among time, space, and language (Nunez & Cooperrider, 2013). Much of this research suggests that we talk and think about time using
spatial representations. Furthermore, many studies suggest that the process of using space to structure temporal thought is embodied or grounded
in sensorimotor structure and experience. For example, most languages tend to conceptualize the future as in front, and the past as behind because
as ambulatory, front-facing organisms, events in our future tend to involve locations in front of us and those in our past tend to involve locations
behind us (Clark, 1973). Cultural conventions like reading direction can also influence temporal thought. For example, a recent study found
differences in how readers and writers of left-to-right languages (like English) and right-to-left ones (like Hebrew) make judgments about temporal
relations (Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010). Despite the abundance of behavioral and linguistic data, there is little neural data supporting the idea that
our temporal concepts are grounded in spatial representations (Kranjec & Chatterjee, 2010), although a common area in the parietal cortex may
play a role in aspects of temporal and spatial perception (Bueti & Walsh, 2009).

2022 Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Volume 25, Number 12

objects and things. That seems like an important idea
for a conceptual artist. Well you donʼt like that word,
but as an artist interested in making a novel contribution
to an art of ideas. It was a really very clever insight, and
Iʼm glad that itʼs still being recognized today.
MB: All of those early works, actually all of my work, I
see as a form of self-education. To learn things, you have
to look in unexpected places. You canʼt learn things
following the same old ruts in the road. I was always
looking for new ways to approach the subject. At that
point in my life, I was trying to build a really firm struc-
ture for my work, so that anything I did afterward would
always have a foundation that I could go back to. But in
the beginning, people mostly just looked at my work and
shrugged their shoulders.
AK: Iʼm sure. Itʼs not very different in the sciences, if
you study something so abstract, believe me.
MB: Later on, some people began to realize it was not
totally arcane. And the reason they woke up is that other
artists found that the work was useful to them. Things go
in cycles. After the ʼ80s and ʼ90s with neo-expressionism,
neo-surrealism, and all that, people were looking for
something else, and younger artists were rediscovering
these long lost things. Then, someone, like you, comes
along from out of the blue. Somebody came to me about
10 years ago. He was an organic chemist who had seen
a drawing that I did in the ʼ70s; a combination of adja-
cent triangles, squares, and pentagons. He got my ad-
dress, wrote me a letter asking, “Has anyone made
a molecule based on one of your drawings?” (laughs)
And I said, I donʼt think so, but why would anyone want
to do that?!
AK: (laughs) As if he would be really surprised if they
havenʼt already.
MB: He said, “Because this is the perfect form for a
molecular structure and if itʼs never been synthesized, I
would like to be the one who does it!”
AK: I didnʼt even know such a thing was possible.
MB: Neither did I! You were talking about metric con-
cepts of space, and itʼs something that fascinated me in
the early ‘70s—especially in relation to the pentagon.
You canʼt tile a flat surface with a pentagon because there
are always leftover spaces. Itʼs also the shape on which all
organic growth is based on. So that immediately made
me fall in love with it. I evolved this language of triangles,
squares, and pentagons that formed what I called “shape
complexes.” And then, 15 or 20 years later, this guy
comes along and has his student making molecules out
of these shapes. Bochner molecules. (laughs)
AK: Thatʼs actually a very good name for a molecule. It
has a nice ring to it.
MB: So anyway, you never know where things are
going to find resonance. But I guess my question for
you is what led you to this? Whatʼs your background com-
ing into it?
AK: As far as being interested in space, actually, my
dissertation work was more directly about relations be-
tween space and time. Ideas in line with some of the
things Merleau–Ponty was interested in. About how our
thinking about space informs and influences the way that
we think about time, especially with respect to language.
So, thereʼs all of this language of space that we use to
think and talk about time. The future being in front of
us, and the past being behind us, that sort of thing. My
dissertation work was really about getting people to think
about space in a very particular way and seeing if that
would influence their temporal reasoning. I think that
youʼre aware of that basic idea because, when I saw your
garden (The Kraus Campo) at Carnegie Mellon, I could
see that you were playing with it a little bit. Before I
puzzled out the text, I was not sure what to think. Once
I figured out the strategy, it seemed to really be about
relationships between space and time (Figure 5).
MB: Yes, and thereʼs a funny story behind it. When
Michael Van Valkenburgh, the landscape architect, and I
submitted the proposal to the committee at the Uni-
versity, the head of the Engineering Department imme-
diately hated it. He said, “This is absolutely ridiculous.
Iʼm not voting for this. Iʼm against this whole thing.”
(It wasnʼt going to cost the school a cent because a
private donor was paying for it.) I asked him what he
found ridiculous. He said, “The text is just a bunch of
gibberish. I donʼt want my students wasting their time
on nonsense!” So, somebody who had figured it out said,
“Are you sure itʼs gibberish? Did you try reading it
backward?” He said, “I donʼt read things backward! Iʼm
an engineer!”
AK: (laughs)
MB: So, this other person said, “Well, why donʼt you
try? Just for the heck of it.” So, he starts reading it…
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” he says, “Oh my god…Oh my
God…Oh my God! It really means something! This is
fantastic!”
AK: The text of the piece is actually a quote from…?
MB: Itʼs (Ludwig) Wittgenstein quoting (Arthur)
Eddington on what it might mean if time moved back-
ward. (laughs) Right up his alley. So then he said, “I love
this, I love this, we have to have it!” That sealed the deal.
AK: I had a similar experience for a while just being
sort of vexed by the text until I got it.
MB: And thatʼs the great thing because suddenly, as
a viewer, you are no longer passive, you are writing the
text by reading it. And once youʼve got it, it belongs
to you.
Acknowledgments
My special thanks to Mel Bochner for participating in the inter-
view, and for permitting the reproduction of all images included
here. I am also particularly grateful to Danielle Kranjec for dis-
covering “Theory of Boundaries” at the National Gallery of Art,
and for encouraging the development of this project. Additional
thanks to Ashley Galazia for transcription, Ashley Gill for proof-
reading, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on
an earlier version of the manuscript.
Kranjec 2023
Reprint requests should be sent to Alexander Kranjec, Psychology
Department, Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Avenue, 544 College
Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15282, or via e-mail: kranjeca@duq.edu.
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