"8" Branch from Counting Alternative Series (The Wittgenstein Illustrations)

Mel Bochner

(1971)

A drawing in felt-tip pen, colored pencil, ink, and pencil on paper in which Mel Bochner arranges the numbers 0–99 into an X/“8”-like branching diagram to make the act of counting and rule-following visually explicit.

Neat, hand-lettered numerals crawl along four diagonal arms that meet at a central knot, set against faint crosshair lines and a pale wash so the page reads like a sparse, rhythmic map of a counting process.

By turning a basic logical operation into a visible system, the work links conceptual art to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s questions about certainty and rules, helping open up art that makes language, procedure, and notation itself the subject.

Palette

Exhibitions

A Century of Modern Drawing, 1881–1981

1982

Drawings of the Eighties from the Collection, Part I

1989

Contemporary Drawings

1984

Drawing in Austria and Germany

1985