Thomas Huston
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A bootleg of Mel Bochner's 1966 Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art

This project was initiated in response to an invitation from Apparatus Projects to "fabricate a copy of your favorite work of 'conceptual art'" for an exhibition in February 2022 called I feel like a bootlegger's wife. Look! I had been aware of Mel Bochner's Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art for a while and loved that it encapsulated and complicated a moment of artistic production, in a way historicizing it and challenging it simultaneously. I came up with a list of Chicago and Chicago-adjacent artists, and reached out with a request for working drawings (and other visible things on paper, of course). The resulting book/work/exhibition gives an incomplete but expansive look at the production of work by artists in and around Chicago at a loose moment in time, guided by my own network and subjective view of the scenes of art in the city. The four binders were exhibited as objects, on chairs instead of pedestals, due to time constraints and also because it's a bootleg and bootlegs are provisional, right?

A full pdf of the binder can be found here. 
One binder is retained for the Apparatus Projects archive. 
Another can be accessed at the Art Institute of Chicago's Ryerson and Burnham Library.
The last two binders are bound for SAIC's Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection and Chicago Public Library.