Conceptual Artist Dies at 84

Mel Bochner, a conceptual artist who incisively explored the slippery relationship between language and art, died on February 12 at 84. His death was announced on Friday by three of his galleries, Fraenkel, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, and Peter Freeman Inc.

Bochner was one of the key artists associated with the Conceptualist movement during the 1960s and ’70s. In legendary pieces that hardly looked much like art at all, he offered measurements, numbers, words, and others’ photocopied drawings within galleries. There was often little to admire, and that was intentional—Bochner wanted viewers to think of art as being more than something to see.

While these works earned Bochner a critical following, his audience would grow dramatically with his paintings filled with stenciled words, many of which didn’t connote much. The word “BLAH” recurred frequently in these mordantly funny works, which showcased the limits of language.

One sentence appeared constantly, both in the early conceptual works and the later paintings: “Language is not transparent.” It was something akin to a manifesto for Bochner, who also achieved renown with his art criticism just as his work was began to be shown widely.

Bochner began working in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, whose emphasis on artistic genius, painterly excellence, and formalism left many of his generation feeling uneasy. Alongside other capital-C Conceptualists, he began making work that suggested art existed as much in objects as it did in the ideas appended to them. But unlike other Conceptualists, he did not venerate all the text that often accompanied contemporary art.

In 1973, in Arts magazine, he wrote a famous review in which he dressed down Lucy Lippard’s otherwise acclaimed book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, which is typically considered the greatest tome ever written on Conceptualism. He called it “an act of bad faith to art,” claiming that its fragmented format misunderstood what Conceptualism was all about.

Later on, in a 2006 interview with Phong Bui for the Brooklyn Rail, he would say, “To claim that language offers a direct connection to the artist’s ideas is not different in kind from the claim that a brush stroke, or a drip, offers a direct connection to the artist’s emotions. By the way, did you ever notice, as someone once pointed out, that no matter how big or small the painting, all drips are the same size?”

Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1940. He grew up in a Jewish family; Yiddish vernacular would ultimately wind its way into his word paintings. He studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, graduating in 1962, and later described his education as a combination of Beaux Arts studies and a “Bauhaus kind of model.”

He came to New York around 1964. His first job in the city was as a guard at the Jewish Museum, though he only lasted about a year before being fired for falling asleep behind a Louise Nevelson sculpture. At night, he honed his painting practice.

Then, in 1966, Bochner was hired by critic Dore Ashton to teach at the School of Visual Arts. That same year, at that school, he staged the exhibition, “Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art.” By this point, Bochner had already begun transitioning away from painting, utilizing mediums such as photography. For this exhibition, rather than showing his own art, he merely Xeroxed his friends’ drawings, then placed the photocopies in binders that were available for perusal within the gallery. “Working Drawings” implied that original artworks did not matter so much—it was the ideas, which may or may not be visible in their preparatory sketches, that held greater weight.

The exhibition launched his career, with shows at hallowed galleries such as Ace and Sonnabend in the years afterward. Of these presentations, his most ambitious was held at Munich’s Heiner Friedrich Gallery, whose walls and floors Bochner rigorously measured. He then denoted these measurements in the gallery, which was otherwise left empty of art. Bochner would go on to reprise the project at a much greater scale in 2019 at Dia:Beacon, the New York museum run by the Dia Art Foundation, which dealer Heiner Friedrich cofounded.

Bochner appeared in some of the defining exhibitions of the 1970s, including “Information,” Kynaston McShine’s 1970 Museum of Modern Art show, which is considered to have defined the Conceptualist movement, as well as Harald Szeemann’s Documenta 5 in 1972.

His work has since been surveyed many times over, including at the Yale University Art Gallery, which gave him a retrospective in 1995.

The curious contradiction of Bochner’s work is that it is easily legible while also being conceptually knotty and difficult to explain concisely. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

“I work by making up hypotheses, ‘What would happen if…’ and then working through the contradictions as they come up,” he said in his Brooklyn Rail interview. “It’s an inductive process and it has led me up some blind alleys, but that’s what makes being an artist interesting. That’s where the adventure is, in the not-knowing.”