Remembering Mel Bochner

Bochner’s journey into art was shaped by his early exposure to typography and sign painting, an influence inherited from his father. Growing up in Pittsburgh’s industrial landscape, he developed a keen awareness of structure, language, and spatial relationships. This foundation led him to pursue formal artistic training at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he earned a BFA degree in 1962.

Two years later, Bochner moved to New York City, where he worked at The Jewish Museum until he was recruited by the art critic Dore Ashton in 1966 to teach art history at the School of Visual Arts. This role positioned him at the intersection of emerging artistic movements, where he became deeply engaged with conceptual and minimalist art. Alongside artists such as Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson, Bochner sought to challenge the prevailing dominance of Abstract Expressionism, moving away from emotionally driven painting and toward an art form rooted in ideas, systems, and process.

Bochner’s Exhibitions

Bochner quickly became known for his pioneering exhibition strategies, many of which have since become standard in contemporary art. He was one of the first artists to use the walls of a gallery as both the subject and medium of his work, transforming exhibition spaces into active participants in the artistic experience. He was also among the earliest proponents of photo-documentation as an artistic practice, alongside figures such as Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman. His groundbreaking 1966 exhibition, Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art, remains a seminal moment in conceptual art history. In this show, Bochner replaced traditional art objects, instead photocopying working drawings, invoices, and notes from artist friends, including a fabricator’s bill from Donald Judd. These copies were compiled into four black binders and placed on pedestals, challenging conventional notions of artistic authorship, value, and presentation. The exhibition was later revisited at The Drawing Center in New York in 1998, underscoring its enduring influence.

A Return to Painting

By the late 1970s, Bochner returned to painting, incorporating vibrant colour and text into his works. This marked an evolution from his earlier conceptual pieces while maintaining his deep engagement with language and systems of meaning. Works such as his Blah! Blah! Blah! series playfully yet critically examine language’s repetitive and sometimes empty nature, while Event Horizon used measurements and geometric compositions to explore perception and spatial relationships.

One of Bochner’s most radical artistic innovations came in the late 1960s with his Measurement series. Bochner would mark physical distances on gallery walls and floors, inviting viewers to engage with the quantification of space. These works challenged the notion that art had to exist as an object, instead positioning it as an idea - one that forced audiences to reconsider their relationship to their environment.

Bochner’s fascination with language emerged as one of the most defining and innovative aspects of his artistic practice, shaping much of his work throughout his career. For Bochner, words were structures that both shaped and constrained interpretation, subject to fluctuations in meaning depending on context, usage, and perception.

Bochner’s Thesaurus paintings, which emerged in the 1970s, further emphasised the fluidity and instability of meaning. In these vibrant works, Bochner employed lists of synonyms, allowing the words to overlap and cascade in chaotic arrangements. These compositions underscored the idea that words are never fixed in meaning - they shift and transform depending on the context in which they are used. The Thesaurus paintings were not just about language, but about how language itself can be reassembled and reinterpreted, thus creating new associations and meanings that invite deeper thought. The bright colours and dynamic arrangements also contributed to the sense that language is not merely a passive tool, but an active and energetic force in shaping our understanding of the world.

Perhaps his most iconic series, Blah! Blah! Blah! (2008-2012), encapsulated Bochner’s critical view of language’s potential to lose meaning through overuse and repetition. The series features variations of the phrase “Blah! Blah! Blah!” rendered in vibrant colours and various sizes, arranged in a way that visually represents both the emptiness and the excess of language. The repeated phrase, often used to convey disinterest or dismissal in everyday speech, becomes a metaphor for the emptiness that can arise when language is stripped of context, reducing it to noise rather than communication.

Bochner was not simply using text to convey a message but using it as the message itself, forcing viewers to confront the limitations and possibilities of the linguistic systems that structure our world. His work offered a meditation on the complexities of language, revealing both its potential for clarity and its capacity for confusion, depending on how it is constructed and interpreted.

Bochner was a significant intellectual force in the art world. His critical essays in Artforum and Arts Magazine helped shape discourse around conceptual and minimalist art, offering insight into the movement’s underlying philosophies. Bochner was also a dedicated educator, influencing generations of artists through his teaching. He served as a teaching assistant at Yale University in 1979, later becoming a senior critic in painting and printmaking, and in 2001, he was appointed as an adjunct professor. His academic contributions reinforced his role as both a practitioner and theorist, continuously pushing the boundaries of what art could be.