Mel Bochner: Tangled up in Words (Lecture)

This artist talk features Mel Bochner (b. 1940), who is recognized as one of the leading figures in the development of conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and ’70s. Emerging at a time when painting was increasingly discussed as outmoded, Bochner became part of a new generation of artists, which also included Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson, who were looking at ways of breaking with abstract expressionism and traditional compositional devices. His pioneering introduction of the use of language in the visual led Benjamin Buchloh to describe Bochner’s 1966 Working Drawings as “probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.”

Bochner came of age during the second half of the 1960s, a moment of radical change both in society at large as well as in art. While painting slowly lost its preeminent position in modern art, language moved from talking about art to becoming part of art itself. Bochner has consistently probed the conventions of both painting and language—the way we construct and understand them, and the

way they relate to one another—to make us more attentive to the unspoken codes that underpin our engagement with the world.