Mel Bochner (1940–2025)
148Feb. 19, 2025
Pathbreaking Conceptual artistMel Bochner, whose painted, free-floating mathematical equations and contextless phrases reshaped the canon of contemporary art, died on February 12 at the age of eighty-four. His death was announced by three galleries representing him: the New York– and Paris-based Peter Freeman Inc.; Fraenkel Gallery, of San Francisco; and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, of Los Angeles. Coming to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s, when painting was struggling, Bochner brought language into the realm of visual art and through their engagement—in works that often vibrated with humor—reckoned with and sometimes exploded the myths surrounding both. “The artist has a gift for identifying platitudes or expostulations that, in being isolated, become transformed—ambiguous or strange,” wrote Jeffrey Weiss in the February 2020 issue ofArtforum. “For Bochner, painting’s material capacity for erasure, reversal, and other manipulations serves this condition. . . . The procedure is a remarkable method through which language and painting merge. In this way, painting, like language, also achieves an altered state.”
Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh on August 23, 1940, into a traditional Jewish home. His father was a sign painter. “I grew up in an atmosphere where paints and brushes and drawing and everything were around me all the time,” he said in a 1994oral history interviewfor the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. “In a sense, I had an apprenticeship, in the old- fashioned sense, because I always had to work for my father. So I learned all the techniques and tricks of the trade at a very early age.”
After earning his BFA at the city’s Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962, he moved to New York, where AbEx and Pop art were beginning to yield to Minimalism and Conceptualism. Bochner soon became part of a tight-knit group pursuing fresh ideas, whose members included Dan Graham, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson. Following a brief stint as a security guard at the Jewish Museum, which ended when he was caught dozing behind a Louise Nevelson sculpture, he took a job teaching at the School of Visual Arts. In 1966, he was charged with mounting the school’s Christmas art show. Bochner in response came up with the exhibition “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art.” The show took the form of four identical bound photocopied volumes compiling working drawings submitted by artists, choreographers, composers, engineers, and mathematicians, which visitors to the gallery could page through. Benjamin Buchloh, writing inOctoberin 1990, pronounced it “probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.”
Bochner’s own work of this time was marked by a concern with seriality and systems, as embodied by the 196636 Photographs and 12 Diagrams, comprising a board to which was affixed a dozen pen-and-ink grid drawings plotting configurations of wooden blocks, along with thirty-six gelatin silver prints of the blocks thus arranged, each grouping shot from three separate angles. The grid again took center stage inTransparent and Opaque, 1968, a dozen Ilfochrome prints of Vaseline and shaving-cream smears. For his 1969Measurement Room, appearing at Munich’s Heiner Friedrich Gallery, he placed strips of black tape along a room’s surfaces—walls, window bays, door frames—and interrupted these with numerals corresponding to the length of the measured architectural feature. He would go on to remake this work several times, most recently at Dia:Beacon in upstate New York, which in 2019 commissioned the largest iteration ofMeasurement Room.
Bochner in the mid-1960s began contributing criticism to publications, memorably penning “Art in Process—Structures” (1966) and “Serial Art Systems: Solipsism” (1967) forArts Magazine; “The Serial Attitude” (1967) forArtforum; and, forArts, a savage 1973 review of Lucy Lippard’s landmark volumeSix Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, which he dismissed as a “book-length pastiche.” Despite his own already elevated status in the realm of Conceptual art, he did not hesitate to tear at the supporting framework,proclaiming in a 1970 issue ofArtforum:
“For a variety of reasons, I do not like the term ‘conceptual art.’ Connotations of an easy dichotomy with perception are obvious and inappropriate. The unfortunate implication is of a somewhat magical/mystical leap from one mode of existence to another. The problem is the confusion of idealism and intention. By creating an original fiction, ‘conceptualism’ posits its special non-empirical existence as a positive (transcendent) value. But no amount of qualification (or documentation) can change the situation. Outside the spoken word, no thought can exist without a sustaining support.”
In the 1970s, Bochner turned to the painted text works for which he would become best known and which would occupy him until the end of his life. These took a form the artist had introduced in 1966 with “portraits” of his artist friends that consisted of tight concentric circles of words limning specific aspects of their work. Notable groupings include his thesaurus paintings, which featured lists of synonyms presented in rainbow hues; and works incorporating what the artist called “exasperations,” utterances of frustration stacked or scattered across a surface, as in the 2013–15 series “Blah Blah Blah,” which saw the titular phrase repeated on a billboard in Hatton, Missouri; the rolldown gate of a restaurant supply shop in New York City; and a parking-lot wall in San Diego.
“I think if your work is not misunderstood in some way, then it’s not very good,” he told the Brooklyn Rail’s Charles Schultz last year. “The work must have more than one interpretation, right? If misunderstanding stops being possible, then how can the artwork be engaging? I am very much in favor of ambiguity.”
Concurrent with his artistic career beginning in 1979, Bochner took a job at Yale, where he taught for decades, becoming an adjunct professor there in 2001. He was the subject of retrospectives at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (1985); the Yale University Art Gallery (1995); Art Institute of Chicago (2006 and 2022); Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan, France (2007); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2012; traveled to both Haus der Kunst, Munich, and Fundação de Serralves, Porto, in 2013); and the Jewish Museum, New York (2014). His work is held in the collections of institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Tate Modern, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. His most recent exhibition closed at Peter Freeman Inc.’s New York outpost in January.
“The things that I did in the ’60s didn’t even get reviewed, and suddenly it’s a historical work,” Bochner told the New York Times’s T Magazine in 2019. “What I realized was, at least in my own terms, history is what happens behind your back when you’re not looking. You set in motion a chain of events and you try to follow them to their conclusion, wherever they take you. Sometimes it’s something really interesting. Sometimes it’s nothing. You don’t know until you take the trip.”