Bill Bollinger is one of those new artists-including Alan Saret, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Le Va and, occasionally, Robert Morris who make sculpture out of “formless” or ready formed materials variously strewn, stacked, jumbled, or jerry built, thereby carrying to new heights the Duchampian proposition that art is anything at all the artist says it is. One such new height is the 19th floor of the Starrett-Lehigh Building, a massive structure on the waterfront at 601 West 26 Street, the site of Bollinger’s current show.’ The artist has artfully cluttered the place with 20 freeform works” which will be dismantled, probably forever, when the show closes later this week [May 20, 1970]. For sale are only Xeroxed photographs of the pieces and one edition of readymade components which the buyer is to assemble as he sees fit.

An industrial loft might seem an unlikely locale for an exhibition of fine art, but in Bollinger’s case it is quite perfect for at least two reasons. The first is the practical one of size. Bollinger’s new work requires a lot of space to sprawl out in, and the intimate confines of his normal gallery, the Bykert, could be reproduced on Starrett-Lehigh’s 19th floor probably eight or nine times. Then there is the matter of ambience, which in this instance includes the creak and rumble of heavy industry proceeding on neighboring floors and a lordly view of the Hudson through slightly grimy windows.This is a real place. When set in the jewelbox, somehow fictive space of gallery, work like Bollinger’s tends to be so jarring that one can scarcely respond to anything but the shock waves. And Bollinger’s work is sufficiently subtle that such tremors though pleasurable in a Dadaistic kind of way make it hard to see clearly.

What exactly there is to be seen in Bollinger’s show is, in one sense, a great deal and, in another, at least at first, not much. There is certainly plenty to look at: Loose, mostly low lying arrangements of all sorts of materials including big steel barrels, lengths of plastic and rubber hose, new and used lumber, sawhorses, logs, steel pipes, stones, and contained water. In few cases is anything fastened to anything else, except where it is necessary to cap or connect pipe and hoses to keep water from escaping. Things are simply leaned or strewn or piled together the way they might be in a “natural” setting, in a factory or on a farm, some of the arrangements vaguely functional looking but most seemingly fortuitous. So what’s to “see”?

There is, after all, a kind of operating logic behind the shaggy appearances, and it has to do precisely with Bollinger’s “naturalistic” approach to his materials. That is, he uses things in ways in which they are supposed to be used or in ways that seem reasonable, given what they are. Thus, sawhorses are used to support things, barrels and hoses are used to contain water, logs are stacked in racks, constructed to hold them, etc. What one gets are “phenomena,” physical demonstrations of simple abstract principles “containment,” for instance, or “support,” as one experiences directly the fact of fluid being held in or of objects being held up.

Which is not to suggest that the primary thrust of Bollinger’s work is didactic à la Mr. Wizzard, though he is obviously intent on making the viewer see with unaccustomed clarity some elementary physical relationships. He is a modern artist, and his work is self-referential in the way most modern art is as well as mysterious in the way all art is. One of his pieces consists of a row of 12 steel barrels filled with water, tilted forward by a board on which they half rest. Red rubber siphon hoses run from one to another keeping the water level the same in each. Intimately linked in this Archimedean demonstration, the different objects and substances both keep their separate identities and surrender them to the whole: on the one hand a confabulation of board, barrels, hoses, and water; on the other a sculpture that is wooden, metallic, rubbery, and wet.

Another, less orderly piece, the most floor consuming in the show, is an apparently casual arrangement of a sawhorse, boards, a metal pipe and lots of snaking plastic hoses. Again the organizing principle is physical: The hoses and pipe have water in them. Were they laid and propped differently, some of the water would spill out. Not that another arrangement could not be equally artful and pleasing; just that another arrangement could not contain exactly this amount of water in exactly this way.

At first hopelessly arcane and nondescript, Bollinger’s work becomes cogent and fascinating when one begins to catch on to it. At root, it is a species of “Conceptual” art. That is, it sets itself problems, quite arbitrary problems, usually, like how to relate a log to a steel trough-that challenge the artist to come up with simple, “rational” solutions: in this case, fill the trough with water and float the log in it. What one gets out of this is a view of the artmaking process, as it were, seen through a microscope and then blown way up. Paul Valéry once speculated that the number of mental operations involved in the creation of one line of poetry by a good poet must be astronomical. Bollinger’s log-and trough-piece may be seen as a working model on one such operation-a leap of imagination that ends up making perfect sense.

Of course there is a kind of austerity, an intellectualism, to this work that makes it hard to really like, however much one is inclined to give it high marks for its rigor. But this is a weakness (if that’s the word) endemic to all concept oriented art, and it is to Bollinger’s credit that he has not had recourse to pretty or “sensual” materials in an effort to doll up his pieces. If one kind of art had everything, there would be no point in any other kind of art existing. And Bollinger’s odd, vigorous show in the Starrett-Lehigh Building gives evidence that, not so much despite as because of its limitations, his kind of art is very much in business.