Mel Bochner, one of the pioneers of North American conceptual art, has died. As part of a generation that included Eva Hesse, Donald Judd and Robert Smithson, Bochner made a conscious break from painting, especially the prevailing fashion for Abstract Expressionism, embracing post-minimalism and text.
In 1966, Bochner was teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York when he was tasked with organising a Christmas drawing show. Instead, he approached Hesse, Judd and Smithson, as well as the likes of Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt and Jo Baer, for drawings that weren’t necessarily a ‘work of art’. These he then photocopied – an unusual proposition at the time – before presenting them in a uniform size in a series of pedestal-mounted books in the gallery. Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art has since been assessed by art historian Benjamin Buchloh as ‘probably the first truly conceptual exhibition’.
The same year Bochner created 36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams, a series which featured designs for a series of brick arrangements, alongside photographs of the arrangements (including the bricks placed in the shape of a swastika), but not the sculptures themselves; a riff on seriality and documentation within art practice, it was made much to the disquiet of the artist’s gallerist.
In 1969 the artist created his first Measurement Room at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich, Germany, a site-specific work again trading on questions of dematerialisation and minimalism, in which Bochner taped lines across the breadth of the gallery walls, annotated with the relevant architectural measurements.
Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940. After high school he studied art at Carnegie Mellon University and philosophy at Northwestern University near Chicago. He moved to New York City in 1964 and worked as a guard at The Jewish Museum before beginning to teach at the School of Visual Arts in New York two years later.
He had retrospectives at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 1985; the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 and 2022; Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, France in 2007; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Haus der Kunst, Münich; Fundação de Serralves, Porto in 2012–2013; and the Jewish Museum, New York in 2014. In 2019, Measurement Room was produced under commission for Dia: Beacon.
