Lecture – Tangled Up in Words with Mel Bochner

October 19, 2017 – Menschel Hall, Harvard Art Museums Mel Bochner (born 1940) 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 langua