"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

Art Terms

Conceptual art Drawing Colored pencil Ink Pencil Contemporary art

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