2011Saul Ostrow

The art world Bill Bollinger encountered as a young artist in the mid-1960s was intellectually and socially contentious, consisting of numerous cross-conversations. Ideas and opinions were no one’s property and free for the taking. In the late 1950s, the Abstract Expressionists, because of their international success, had gained for non-traditional art practices a degree of respectability in the US. With this, contemporary art began to attract a new, young, and upwardly mobile middle-class audience. Meanwhile, artists were increasingly being educated at art schools and colleges, and the professionalization of criticism soon followed. In the mid 1960s, the art world’s body of knowledge was coming to include not only existentialism, but critical theory, structuralism, and phenomenology, as well as linguistics.

Profound social changes in the culture at large were finally manifesting themselves in the art world. Along with the broad groundswell of the civil rights movement, which had been building since the Supreme Court’s school integration decision of 1954, the fem-inist, gay liberation, and ecology movements were gathering force; anti-war sentiment spread rapidly as US involvement in Vietnam escalated, and the cultural revolution of sex, drugs, and rock and roll was galvanizing western society. Artists, through their work, were engaged in a heated debate about the very nature of art’s being. Everything was open to question, including the austerity, intellectualism, and industrial esthetic that characterized the newly emergent schools of Pop and Minimalism that a few years earlier had successfully challenged AbEx’s hegemony.

Though Pop and Minimalism had represented a radical shift away from abstract painting and an Expressionist esthetics, much of the work that would come to be included in the expanding field of sculpture would be a result of interfacing painting with assemblage and the readymade. Given the crosscurrents and competing esthetics of the period, it was not long before artists such as Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, and Bill Bollinger would come to reject the machine esthetic and the precision of industrial mass production, and to re-interpret the rawness and spontaneity associated with AbEx, which the Pop and Minimalist artists had thought only worthy of caricaturing or rejecting. These artists found inspiration in Jackson Pollock’s employment of process, chance, and transience, and drew encouragement from Harold Rosenberg’s vision of the canvas as “an arena in which to act.” Many artists set to work physically dismantling painting, taking the canvas off the stretcher, discarding the support, constructing eccentric or free-standing formats, and even forgoing the use of paint.

Bollinger’s earliest works may well be lost. He began as a painter. An untitled shaped-canvas construction from 1965, which Harris Rosenstein describes at length (but which is not reproduced) in his 1969 article “The Bollinger Phenomenon,” (1) apparently partook of the project of extending painting’s means. In hindsight, this work would supply Bollinger with the complete lexicon of the physical and material qualities that he would go on to explore through “sculpture.” So in 1966, though Bollinger ostensibly abandoned painting, in actuality he seems to have decided to explore it structurally.Rosenstein describes a piece he saw in Bollinger’s studio that made explicit Bollinger’s metonymic approach to painting. The work consisted of a length of coiled stainless steel wire whose ends had been anchored to the floor. Bollinger had then sprayed gray paint along the entire length of the resulting jumble of wire curls [illus. p. 193]. Such a work could be understood to reference at once issues of figure, ground, gesture, line, plane, etc. Later works using chain-link fencing, spray paint on the gallery wall or floor, spills of graphite, or washes of color from droplights could also be seen as invoking the all-overness of Color Field painting.

The shifting optical density and gestural twist of Bollinger’s 6-by-50-foot wavelike expanse of cyclone fence [illus. pp. 126-27] included in the December 1968 show Nine at Leo Castelli, curated by Robert Morris, alludes to the ideal, grounded in Action Painting, of art as event-driven. At the same time it evokes the grids used by Minimalist painters. Two other examples to be found in the Castelli show of imagistic or structural references to painting were Keith Sonnier’s horizontal latex rectangle applied directly to the wall, flocked, and then partly detached so that the upper half hung free, and Richard Serra’s famous molten-lead splash piece, in which the Pollock lineage is unmistakable. When Serra produced a similar work for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1969 process show, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, the photos of Serra making the piece self-consciously allude to Hans Namuth’s well-known images of Pollock painting.

A number of adventurous dealers were active in showing this new hybrid work, though it was widely considered extreme and unsalable. When Robert Morris filled a gallery with threadwaste (Castelli, 1969) and Barry Le Va systematically scattered cut pieces of felt on the floor (Bykert, 1970), their works could be understood to refer to Pollock’s fields of drips and splatter. Likewise, the billowy, modular sheets of latex that Eva Hesse laid on the floor, affixed to the wall, and hung from the ceiling (Fischbach, 1968) could be seen as dealing with the issue of moving from a horizontal surface (the site of their production) to a vertical position (that of their display). Similarly, Dorothea Rockburne would evoke the physical and the pictorial aspects of stain painting using crude oil sandwiched between clear sheets of plastic (Bykert, 1970) or planes of oil-soaked cardboard (Bykert, 1972). Bollinger’s own endeavor to create a synthetic practice different from that of the Minimalists also corresponds to the approach of Alan Saret, who in the mid-1960s began to show jumbles of electrical wire and crushed chicken-wire mesh, as well as floor pieces juxtaposing various materials. One of these, involving a sheet of orange latex on which was piled yellow sulfur, had particularly painterly implications (Bykert, 1968).

Other artists whose work was characterized by the use of grids and seriality, while emphasizing process or the hand-made in contrast to the machine esthetic of Minimalism, were Jackie Winsor, Cecile Abish, Richard Tuttle, Rosemarie Castoro, Robert Rohm, Gary Kuehn, Rosemary Mayer, Richard Van Buren, Lynda Benglis, and Joel Shapiro. Such work was not confined to the US art world; it corresponded to what was being done by the Supports/Surfaces and Nouveaux Réalistes artists in France (who were emphasizing unconventional approaches to painting), Arte Povera in Italy (mainly involved with sculpture made of common materials), as well as the Zero Group (which in addition to process-oriented techniques experimented with kinetic/mechanistic methods and electric light). Other kindred spirits in Germany were Blinky Palermo, Imi Knoebel, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Franz Erhard Walther, and Klaus Rinke, among others.

Given this broad context of international avant-garde interest, many of the process-oriented artists from the US initially gained more widespread exposure in Europe than on their home ground.

Bollinger had his first one-person show in 1966 at Paul Bianchini Gallery on West 57th Street in New York. This gallery also showed Robert Watts, Robert Breer, Michael Snow, Elaine Sturtevant, Lee Lozano, Gary Kuehn, and Robert Ryman. Bollinger’s exhibition consisted of austere wall-pieces made from lengths of 2-by-2-inch aluminum U-channel molding, the ends of which had been cut at various angles [illus. pp. 114-15]. Though I do not remember seeing this exhibition, Bollinger would show related works in a group show at Bykert the following year. Those works, which I did see, also consisted of multiple pieces of aluminum channel whose ends were cut at reciprocal angles. The lengths were arranged so that they alternately either cast a shadow or reflected light.

Their needle-sharp angled ends simultaneously suggested the potential for infinite extendibility and the finiteness of each segment. At this early stage, it seemed as if Bollinger’s intent was to outdo Minimalist reductivism by abandoning all sense of mass/ volume, leaving only edge and plane; meanwhile, in format, the pieces mimicked the horizontal beam-like wall progressions Donald Judd was having fabricated at the time.

Bollinger’s U-channels physically articulated the two qualities sculpture and painting share–edge and plane. Though they can be seen as relating to painting, their categorical indeterminacy made it apparent that Bollinger was not interested in making sculpture about painting. Instead, he subsumed painting by cannibalizing certain of its identifying characteristics and transforming them into material propositions. Bollinger succeeded in making these issues his own because he used his materials in a way calculated to produce a specific visual effect, rather than to assert a condition or problem. It was his emphasis on how a single act, form, or material came to embody multiple linked references, undermining the notion that reductivism and specificity go hand in hand, that differentiated Bollinger’s work from that of many of his peers at the time.

I remember how perplexing Bollinger’s two solo shows at Bykert were. The first, in December 1967-January 1968, consisted of three large, rather ungainly linear sculptures, each comprising two straight sections of narrow (2-inch diameter) aluminum pipe that were not quite the same length, the longest sculpture measuring probably 30 feet.” The pipes were connected by a universal joint that permitted the “legs” to be variably positioned. In the exhibition, each piece was arranged in a different configuration, in two cases with one element on the wall, the other resting on the floor, and in the third case, entirely on the floor, “legs” splayed.

For his 1969 show, he created two site-specific installations. In one room he had covered half the floor, from wall to wall, with a layer of black graphite illus. p. 132]. In the other room he had irregularly sprayed gray paint on the floor, over which he had sprinkled a thin layer of a green sweeping compound; he had also sprayed black paint directly onto one of the white walls to form a blurry oval several feet in diameter [illus. pp. 130-31]. In the hall between the two rooms several drawings were stapled to the wall, and a piece of open steel grillwork [illus. p. 133], heavily sprayed with black paint, appeared nearby. The work in both Bykert exhibitions was at once accessible and incomprehensible. It appeared to be addressing familiar issues such as repetition, variation, and process, but the pieces were ultimately not concerned with having the viewer reconstruct either the process of their making or the artist’s intent. This left viewers in that enigmatic place where they could not be sure what they were looking at.

In 1968, Bollinger began to exhibit with Galerie Ricke in Cologne, and came to be included in numerous museum and gallery shows in Europe. It is interesting to note the increasing international concern for the conceptual and material properties of things.

This tendency was summed up in two important exhibitions: Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,’ which opened at the Kunsthalle Bern in March 1969, and Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/ Materials at the Whitney Museum in New York, opening two months later. Bollinger was included in both shows.

The most direct, albeit most complex, instance of Bollinger using a single piece to address multiple propositions was the 30-by-36-by-48-inch, two-ton boulder [illus.

1. 145] that he exhibited in Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. Placed near the elevators on the fourth floor, this was the piece that visitors confronted as they entered the show.

There is a telling anecdote I can add regarding Bollinger’s boulder piece at the Whitney. The stone was to be taken from the excavation site of New York’s new World Trade Center. Late one night, after some art world event, Bollinger decided that a group of us should drive down into the excavation to see “his” boulder in situ. Given that any large rock would have fulfilled his needs for the piece, it’s clearly significant that he wanted to revisit the rock before it was moved. With our descent into what might have been the largest earthwork in existence at the time, Bollinger was able to conflate aspects of Robert Smithson’s “The Monuments of Passaic,” which had been published in Artforum in December 1967, and Tony Smith’s experience of driving on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike late one night, an account of which had been published in Artforum in December 1966. Though our conversation that night did not run to such speculations, I am convinced that Bollinger was aware of all these connections, and more. Beyond this anecdote, it is apparent from Rosenstein’s article that Bollinger had been thinking about making earthworks. Heizer’s grand scale undertakings in the Nevada desert are surely also apropos.

Bollinger’s choice to present the boulder permitted him to collapse his concern for the discrete object, the readymade, the discrepancy between nature and artifice, and preoccupations with scale into one piece. In this last matter, we potentially have still another reference to both Smith and Smithson. Bollinger’s boulder literalizes in one fell swoop Smithson’s concerns for site and non-site, the geological and the archeo-logical, the inert and the entropic. While it is not monumental in scale, it does become an enigmatic “monument” of sorts, akin to those of Passaic, given the size of the hole it was taken from. Inversely, the size of Bollinger’s boulder reflects Smith’s concern for keeping the scale of his sculptures non-monumental. Yet whatever his ambitions for the piece-and they were considerable-Bollinger had no interest in fetishizing the boulder: it was discarded after the exhibition, along with the rectangular section of cyclone fence which had been his second piece at the Whitney.

Like many of his contemporaries (among them Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and some of the Fluxus artists), Bollinger had already determined that others could install/make his work for him based on his instructions. The art critic Lucy Lippard “realized” a massive Bollinger log piece (i.e., had it made in the absence of the artist) in September 1969 for her exhibition titled 557,087 (then Seattle’s population) at the Seattle Art Museum. This fact (as well as the discarding of the stone and section of fence) indicates that he did not see his work as being reducible to the material object. Instead, the object was just a material manifestation of an idea. (For Lippard, this tendency among artists to dematerialize art was an expression of resistance to art’s commodification-another idea than enjoying broad currency.)

While engaging with many such Conceptualist tenets, Bollinger also developed an ambiguous relationship to photography. At times his use of photographs was rather subtle. Bollinger often seemed intent on conjoining Smithson’s presentation of largely documentary images as self-sufficient works with Nauman’s performative approach, which calls our attention to the photograph as a construct. Bollinger’s negotiation between these alternating states is reflected in a pair of five-picture sequences of a motorcyclist illus. pp. 146-47], reproduced in the Anti-llusion: Materials/Procedures catalogue. The first set of photos offers us a head-on view of a motorcyclist” progressively coming over the crest of what appears to be a bridge. Though from one shot to the next we are able to see more and more of the rider and bike, they do not appear any closer to us. The depth of the foreground remains constant. A second series presents a sequence in which the motorcyclist, seen from behind, overtakes a panel truck. In these images the depth of the foreground increases as the size of the motorcyclist decreases. Both sequences document as well as manipulate the photographs’ subject (a figure in motion), while referencing the compensatory actions of the unseen photographer. In a more unpretentious vein, at Galerie Ricke in 1970 Bollinger showed photographs (almost snapshots) of works done outdoors, and later the same year, for Art in Process IV at the Finch College Museum of Art in New York, he also included photos along with a group of drawings.

Though Bollinger’s use of photographs as supplementary material and his attitude toward the art object connected him to Conceptualism, this did not mean he was abandoning his concern for the status of the object itself as a material proposition. In this same productive moment we find a new use of linear and planar elements, as the idea of verticality and the use of platforms emerged as recurring themes. In a benefit show for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Paula Cooper, October 1968), Bollinger installed a rope which he anchored to the floor and ceiling [illus. p. 125]. At the Galerie Ricke in March 1969, also a vertical rope [illus. p. 137] and shortly after at the Kunsthalle Bern, a horizontal piece by Bollinger (both installed for him by Serra) were on view. The vertical Rope Pieces consisted of two equal lengths of rope linked by a turnbuckle which simultaneously disrupted and created their continuity.

(These vertical elements inevitably recall Barnett Newman’s painted “zips” as well as his thin, freestanding sculptural counterparts such as Here I, 1950.)

To move beyond his work’s dependency on architecture as a framework and continue his exploration of verticality, Bollinger, on his father-in-law James Agee’s farm at Hillsdale, New York, drove a section of pipe into the ground that rose to a height of 14 feet. (A photo of this pole piece appeared on the invitation card [illus. p. 140] for When Attitudes Become Form.) The only known film by Bollinger, Movie, 1970 [illus. pp. 172-73], which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, is described in

the museum’s film catalogue as showing a “man repeatedly trying to balance a wooden post on one end. He occasionally succeeds, only to walk up to the post and push it off balance.” It brings to mind Serra’s early films, especially the ones that record such simple repetitive physical actions as trying to catch pieces of lead as they fall.

As for the horizontal plane, which was intrinsic to many works by Carl Andre, Morris, Serra, Le Va, and others, Bollinger, outside Cologne and also at Agee’s farm, built a platform about the height of a table, its top approximately 16 by 12 feet (Flat Piece, 1969-70) [illus. p. 206]. The legs consisted of nine fence posts set into the ground. Spanning the posts were three 4-by-4-inch wood beams; set across these were nine more beams. Laid on the top of this structure were sheets of (what appears to be) plywood. This type of logical construction allowed Bollinger to escape the subjectivism of relational composition, while the arrangement of the beams also introduced a reference to the sculpture of Bollinger’s friend Richard Nonas, who was making floor-based works by stacking old wooden beams in a similar manner.

The title Flat Piece might be seen as invoking the flats (scenery) used in theatrical production-in which case Bollinger might be commenting on Michael Fried’s famous complaint concerning the theatricality of Minimalism. (VII) Or it could be a joking reference to the formalist painter’s preoccupation with flatness. The obvious problem with the latter reading of Bollinger’s “flat” is that, because it is a stacked construction, held together by gravity, to turn it on its edge as if to hang it on a wall is to destroy it (perhaps still another painter’s joke).

The complexity and scope of Bollinger’s work was most apparent in his massive New York show (VIII)eld in the spring of 1970. It was situated in a cavernous industrial loft on the 19th floor of the enormous Starrett-Lehigh Building on West 26th Street in Chelsea, overlooking the Hudson River. For the show Bollinger constructed around 18 works using water, 55-gallon drums, vinyl and rubber tubing, galvanized metal troughs, logs, sawhorses, lumber old and new, and various other industrial and raw materials. (Earlier in the year, two smaller shows at European galleries-Ernst in Hannover (IX) and Sperone in Turin (X)– for which he made water works using steel barrels and rubber hoses, could be thought of as “rehearsals” for the New York event.) Many of Bollinger’s outdoor works had already involved water, including a log floating in the Rhine at Cologne, which he photographically documented in connection with a show at Ricke. His photo of the horizon taken on a transatlantic crossing (XI) was first published on a poster illus.p. 129) for the Bykert Gallery in 1969. I suspect, given Bollinger’s increased interest in natural elements, that the sweeping view of the Hudson through the panoramic windows should be considered a crucial part of this site-specific exhibition, just as the reference to the World Trade Center excavation became an intrinsic aspect of the boulder presented at the Whitney.

The water pieces at Starrett-Lehigh, once constructed, were left in place where they had been made; they could not be moved, both because of their weight, and because the water they contained was held in place by the interdependency of the various components. However, the pieces constituting the exhibition were the results of an extended period of work in the space during which the artist had actually produced some sixty sculptures; it’s likely that he photographed them all, and then dismantled many of them. The only things Bollinger intended to offer for sale from the show would be a portfolio of Xeroxed photographs of all the pieces made on site, and an edition of ready-made components which buyers were to assemble as they saw fit. (XII)

The biggest sculpture consisted of four lengths of large-diameter clear plastic tubing connected to a cross-fitting in the center of the room. The piece spanned the entire space. Each segment of tubing was filled with water and ran along the floor, its end turned upward as it met its respective wall (XIII) Each water work was ordered by such principles as containment, support, circulation, leveling, etc. A parallel can be drawn between Bollinger’s water works and Serra’s prop pieces, which also explore weight and gravity as structural principles.

Where Bolinger had previously used water as a support, or field, to foreground logs, he now exploited its fluidity and weight to create self-regulating structures. One of the larger configurations consisted of two rows of 55-gallon steel drums interconnected by siphons made of rubber tubing. These drums, set side by side, were tipped toward one another and alternately propped up on one or the other of two parallel wooden beams. Two of the most iconic and indexical pieces were a galvanized metal trough tilted so that the water it contained touched the opposing lip of the trough; and another such trough containing a segment of a log that stayed centered in the water. With these works, Bollinger paired such terms as fixed/unfixed, weight/mass, container/contained, action/inertia, etc., with the use of readymades, and the creation of self-organizing systems.

In the context of the Starrett-Lehigh Building exhibition, Bollinger had pressed the notion of his work as a source of experience and reflection bound to material relationships and a field of indeterminate effects. In turn, he brought his audience inside the work/situation, placing viewers in an unusual position from which to view and analyze his sculptures. The overall sense of the exhibition was that you were in a workspace in which various hydraulic systems/configurations, as well as various materials, structures, and forms, were being experimented with. Though they go unmentioned in articles and reviews of the water show, XV in a group of recently rediscovered b/w photographs? there are numerous pieces using logs, one a crib made of two-by-fours holding a stack of logs, another a long, thin segment of log which formed the spine of a configuration that also involved six identical lengths of either electric conduit or metal pipe; the pipes, arranged three to a side, were set at right angles to the log in pairs, one end of each pipe resting on the log, the other on the floor, and aligned with a facing segment where they met in the center. Another piece seen in the background of several of these photographs appears to be made of a segment of log around which snow fencing has been wrapped. The pattern of alternating slats and open spaces recurs in the plank-and-runner construction of skids and platforms that Bollinger would make for his exhibition at O.K. Harris in 1972. In still other photographs, a group of color slides likely taken by Bollinger,XY there is a sawhorse piece, as well as a work in which rocks were used to prop up two wood planks to form a V-shaped trough into which additional rocks were placed.

The water show’s implications of ongoing process had much in common with Robert Morris’s 1969 exhibition at the Castelli Warehouse titled Continuous Project Altered Daily, for which Morris went to the gallery every morning to perform preconceived tasks or manipulate a broad range of materials, including clay, dirt, asbestos, felt, electric lights, and a tape recorder. The show was open to the public every afternoon. The significant difference between the two exhibitions is that Bollinger offered us finished works rather than ongoing flux.

After the Starrett-Lehigh exhibition, Bollinger showed less frequently-a change from his tightly packed schedule of the years 1969-70. When he did reappear, his work focused on issues involved in the making of discrete objects. In 1972, his show at O.K.

Harris Gallery consisted of an arrangement of wooden skid-like constructions, which Bollinger referred to as ramps. Their form and arrangement suggested flooring, loading docks, as well as his earlier Flat Piece. Though the ramps themselves were of differing sizes, their slat-and-runner construction was modular and again indicated a multiplicity of concerns and references. Bollinger oriented these ramps in different ways, using them as walls or platforms, and creating configurations that formed interior spaces.

The resulting arrangements were consistent with the proto-Minimalist works of LeWitt, Andre, and Morris, which had used variation and repetition as their basic schema, and they particularly resembled the straightforward carpentry of Judd’s earliest constructed works in wood.

A year later, in 1973, also at O.K. Harris, XVI Bollinger exhibited works that combined cast-iron elements with new and recycled wood beams-in their contrast of materials recalling the juxtapositions of wood, steel, and iron in the early works of Mark di Suvero. Yet another allusion to Pollock-and to painting-may be found in another work in this show, a rectangular cast-iron slab whose top surface bears a number of deep hand-prints. They resemble the rough black handprints Bollinger had painted onto a wall at the Jewish Museum in the spring of 1970. The iconography of the handprint itself can be indexed first to Pollock and then to Jasper Johns.

Bollinger’s third, and last, show at O.K. HarrisX was in January 1974 and introduced a radically different approach. He produced a number of unique sand castings whose forms are irregular and, though not excessively large, massive. With these cast-iron works, Bollinger seems to have re-engaged yet again with aspects of the process of painting. In their rippling surfaces, they can be thought to reference gestural abstraction, and perhaps even specifically Willem de Kooning, who in 1972 had begun to make figural bronze sculptures. The textures of Bollinger’s castings, like de Kooning’s, are the result of the hand of the maker. In Bollinger’s case, the sculptures take the form of the unevenly scooped pits in the casting sand which were excavated to receive the molten metal, and bear the traces of the tools he used. One surface of each sculpture, however-the top of the metal “puddles”-is relatively flat, though pitted and often deeply cracked as a result of the casting process, the iron shrinking as it cooled and set.

While these cast-iron forms are process-derived, they are also in a sense representa-tional, since they take their contours from the shorelines of specific lakes. Obviously, this reference to lakes sets up an antithetical relationship to the water works, which emphasized fluidity and containment, while these result from a fluid (the molten iron) which becomes an object-a congealed mass. Yet, never one to leave things in an uncompromised state, with many of these works he returned to addressing sculpture’s verticality by standing the castings on end in the gallery. As with Pollock, whose floor-made canvases become paintings only when hung on the wall, Bollinger, by tilting his castings upright, contrasted their verticality with the self-evident horizontality of their making as well as their referent. (Two very small sculptures in the show, straightforwardly portraying a pyramid and the Empire State Building, addressed verticality and-more literally-representation.) The cast-iron sculptures embodied a new line of inquiry as Bollinger moved away from an interest in the readymade or works that could be executed by others. They took preparation and planning to make, and were not simply to be discarded or abandoned after the exhibition was over. Bollinger appears to have decided to question his own premises, and those held by his peers, setting out to see what he might accomplish by taking an alternative, less transient approach to art making. Yet, within the context of this re-orientation, Bollinger remained true to his concern for how a simple, singular act or use of a particular material comes to engender a multiplicity of relationships.

After the last of the O.K. Harris exhibitions, Bollinger was less in evidence in the New York art world. He had gained momentum rapidly after his first solo show in 1966.

Counting solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the US, he participated in 21 exhibitions in 1969, and 16 in 1970, including the ambitious Starrett-Lehigh undertaking; he also had a piece in the Museum of Modern Art’s Information show that year. Most of these events involved the making of new, site-specific pieces. The fact that in 1969 a Bollinger work was used on the announcement card for Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form, along with the positioning of his boulder piece at the entryway to the Anti-Illusion show, indicates that his work was recognized as central to, even emblematic of, the artistic ambitions of period. But his disappearance from the scene was as precipitous as his rise. He moved out of New York City in the early 1970s, and after 1970, he showed only a few times each year. His last New York solo was in 1974, and by 1976, his career was, in effect, over.

The fact that so much of his work was ephemeral played into his growing obscurity, and Bollinger’s personal life had become painful and difficult. In his article “Not Lost, Not Found: Bill Bollinger” (published in 2000),* sculptor/critic Wade Saunders outlines some of these circumstances and describes a distressing situation:

“Cut off from New York City, Bollinger progressively lost his professional, artistic, and personal bearings….. At the end of [the 1970s], he tried to get back into the New York art world. But a lot had changed in a few years, and he was given the cold shoulder or treated like a ghost by certain of the dealers, artists, and critics he had known. He was stunned. He drank more and more. 

In 1988, he died from alcoholism at the age of 48. His death drew little notice.” (4)

The disappearance of so significant of an artist cannot be purely the consequence of his personal circumstances. Late in the game, when Bollinger tried to return to showing actively, he was confronting an inhospitable art climate. The spotlight had moved on, as Neo-Expressionist painting was taking center stage. An art-historical and critical summing up of the era of Bollinger’s prominence was being used by influential aca-demics, critics, and curators to construct a narrative of the end of modernism. Many of the artists identified with Postminimalism who (like Bollinger) did not fit into this scenario came to be excluded from an increasingly restrictive account. Among them were Alan Saret, Jackie Ferrara, Alan Shields, Gary Kuehn, and Stephen Kaltenbach, as well as many of the German artists mentioned earlier that Bollinger had been identified with in Europe. Others, such as Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Eva Hesse, had come to be included under the rubric of Minimalism.

Saunders’s article, the result of prodigious research, put Bollinger back on the map. In 1990, Saunders became interested in the question of what had happened to Bollinger. Like a private detective, he set out to find answers. Bollinger had been dead for only two years, but it was well over a decade after his exhibiting career had ended. Almost no trace of Bollinger’s work was to be found in the US. Saunders’s research was propelled by his persistent memories of the work. Likewise, my own memories of Bollinger’s shows at Bykert and the water works exhibition at the Starrett-Lehigh Building stay with me to this day.

Consequently, it was good to see some fine examples of Bollinger’s work make a welcome reappearance when selections from Rolf Ricke’s collection were shown first in Nuremberg in 2002, and subsequently in the following years in Innsbruck, St. Gallen,

Frankfurt am Main, and Vaduz. In 2008, several of the late, sand-cast “lakes” were exhibited in New York at the Mitchell Algus Gallery.

To rediscover and present once again the complex experiential, conceptual, material, and esthetic propositions that Bollinger’s work embodies is not only to acknowledge his achievement, but also to recognize that his work was prescient in articulating a non-reductive, situated approach to art making, whose terms are just now coming to be extrapolated by still another generation of artists seeking to explore the complex terms and conditions of making art by a diversity of means.

1 Rosenstein, Harris. “The Bollinger Phenomenon.” Art News 68, no. 5 (September 1969), pp. 48-51, 62.

Republished in the present volume, pp. 37-40.

2 The photographs were taken by Elizabeth Baker, New York.

3 Saunders, Wade. “Not Lost, Not Found: Bill Bollinger.” Art in America 88, no. 3 (March 2000), pp. 104-16, 143-44.

4 Ibid. p. 144.

5 Einfach Kunst. Sammlung Rolf Ricke, Neues Museum in Nürnberg, Nuremberg, June 6-August 25, 2002; Schokolade, was denn sonst. Sammlung Rolf Ricke, Kunstraum Innsbruck, April 26-June 21, 2003; Sweet Temptations. Dialoge mit der Sammlung Rolf Ricke, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, February 26-May 16, 2005; Das Kapital. Blue Chips & Masterpieces. Die Sammlung Rolf Ricke im MMK, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, April 21-August 26, 2007, and Lust for Life. Die Sammlung Ricke, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, September 21, 2007-January 13, 2008.