Mel Bochner

Last updated
Mel Bochner
Born1940 (1940)
Education School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University
Known for Conceptual art, Installation art

Mel Bochner (born 1940) is an American conceptual artist. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in New York City. [1]

Contents

Life

Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940. In high school, he won early recognition for his talent from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and studied with Joseph Fitzpatrick]. He studied art at Carnegie Mellon University and graduated in 1962. After leaving Pittsburgh, he studied philosophy at Northwestern University near Chicago. He moved to New York in 1964 and worked as a guard at The Jewish Museum. [2] In 1966, he was recruited by the influential art critic Dore Ashton to teach art history at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Bochner is Jewish and his work sometimes explores Jewish themes. [3] Starting in the 1960s, he evolved several of the exhibition strategies now taken for granted, including using the walls of the gallery as the subject of the work and using photo documentation of ephemeral and performance works. As Richard Kalina wrote in Art in America in 1996, Bochner was one of the earliest proponents, along with Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman, of photo-documentation work in which the artist "created not so much a sculpture as a two-dimensional work about sculpture."

His 1966 show at the School of Visual Arts, "Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art", is regarded as a seminal show in the conceptual art movement. Bochner photocopied his friends' working drawings, including a $3,051.16 fabricator's bill from Donald Judd. He collected the copies in four black binders and displayed them on four pedestals. The show was remade at the Drawing Center, New York, in 1998.[ citation needed ]

Bochner began making paintings in the late 1970s, and his paintings range from extremely colorful works containing words to works more clearly connected to the conceptual art he pioneered. For a 1998 work titled Event Horizon, for example, he arranged prestretched canvases of various sizes along a wall, each marked with a horizontal line and a number denoting its width in inches. Together, the lines appear to form a horizon, creating what Jeffrey Weiss in his catalog essay for Bochner's 2007 exhibit Event Horizon called a representation of "the world as a fantasy of quantifiable truth." Bochner made his first prints at Crown Point Press in the early 1970s, published by Parasol Press.

He taught at Yale University as a teacher's assistant in 1979 as senior critic in painting/printmaking, and in 2001 as adjunct professor. [4]

Exhibitions

In 1985, the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery organized a major survey titled Mel Bochner:1973-1985. Elaine A. King was the curator of this exhibition and it was accompanied by the publication of a catalog of the same title. This catalogue was given an award by the American Association of Museums. King wrote the essay "Building a Language," and Charles Stuckey contributed the piece "An Interview with Mel Bochner."The exhibition traveled to the Kuntzmuseum in Luzern, Switzerland and Center for Fine Arts, Miami. John Russell wrote in a New York Times article, Art View; The Best and Biggest in Pittsburgh,

The Bochner retrospective is divided between the university art gallery and the Hewlett Gallery in the College of Fine Arts, a short walk away. In the catalogue, Miss King and Charles Stuckey do a fine job of elucidation. Their time was well spent.

New York Times, November 17, 1985

[5]

In 1995, Yale University Art Gallery organized a retrospective, Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966–1973. The exhibit traveled to Brussels and Munich and was accompanied by the publication of a catalog. For his solo show at Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 2000, Bochner layered German and English versions of a text from Wittgenstein. In her review of the show for Art in America , Eleanor Heartney wrote:

In Bochner's work, perception constantly trumps idea, reaffirming the artist's belief that the sensuous is an essential element in even the most conceptual art.

In 2004, Bochner's work was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial and was part of OpenSystems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 at London's Tate Modern in 2005. His pieces are held in several major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 2011, a retrospective of his work was held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. [6]

A survey of Mel Bochner's work - entitled Mel Bochner: If the Colour Changes, was held at Whitechapel Gallery, London, Haus der Kunst, Munich and Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto during 2012. Tracing nearly 50 years of work, this exhibition commences with Blah, Blah, Blah (2011) a huge painting that encapsulates Bochner's ongoing fascination with language and with colour. [7] The exhibition is accompanied by a first comprehensive monograph, published by Ridinghouse, with essays by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Briony Fer, João Fernandes, Mark Godfrey and Ulrich Wilmes. [8]

Artists books and multiples

Singer Notes, 1968, 132 pages, 25.8 x 20.5 x 1.4 cm. Limited edition of 200 numbered and signed copies and 50 artist's proofs. Produced and published in 2017 by mfc-michèle didier.

Measurement Perimeter, Black adhesive tape (thickness 1.3 cm) placed on the wall (heigh 1.80 m). The total dimension of the room is indicated on the wall in Letraset (thickness about 6.5 cm). Dimensions depending on the size of the room. Limited edition of 3 numbered and signed copies. Produced in 2017 by mfc-michèle didier.

• From the seminal canvas in 2008 until 2012 Bochner executed a painting series titled BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! after the motif of the textual content of the works. [9]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Mellon</span> American philanthropist and horse breeder

Paul Mellon was an American philanthropist and an owner/breeder of thoroughbred racehorses. He is one of only five people ever designated an "Exemplar of Racing" by the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. He was co-heir to one of America's greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank created by his grandfather Thomas Mellon, his father Andrew W. Mellon, and his father's brother Richard B. Mellon. In 1957, when Fortune prepared its first list of the wealthiest Americans, it estimated that Paul Mellon, his sister Ailsa Mellon-Bruce, and his cousins Sarah Mellon and Richard King Mellon, were all among the richest eight people in the United States, with fortunes of between 400 and 700 million dollars each.

Brice Marden is an American artist generally described as Minimalist, although his work may be hard to categorize. He lives and works in New York City; Tivoli, New York; Hydra, Greece; and Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.

Philip Pearlstein is an American painter best known for Modernist Realism nudes. Cited by critics as the preeminent figure painter of the 1960s to 2000s, he led a revival in realist art. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus with paintings in the collections of over 70 public art museums.

Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Deborah Kass works in mixed media, and is most recognized for her paintings, prints, photography, sculptures and neon lighting installations. Kass's early work mimics and reworks signature styles of iconic male artists of the 20th century including Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Ed Ruscha. Kass's technique of appropriation is a critical commentary on the intersection of social power relations, identity politics, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world.

Matt Wrbican (1959–2019) was an American archivist and authority on the life of the artist Andy Warhol. He earned his BFA in Painting and MFA in Intermedia/Electronic Art from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he studied with Bruce Breland. He began working with the Warhol Archive in 1991 in New York City and became Chief Archivist of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He managed the Archive and Warhol's Time Capsules for more than two decades at the Warhol Museum, where he unpacked, processed, preserved, and documented an estimated 500,000 objects. His last book is A is for Archive: Warhol's World from A to Z. He also exhibited his artwork at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Galleries. He died on Saturday, June 1, 2019, after a four-year battle with brain cancer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University</span> Contemporary art gallery in Pennsylvania, US

The Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University is the contemporary art gallery of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Elaine A. King is a curator, critic, professor, and editor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Balcomb Greene</span> American painter

Balcomb Greene (1904–1990) was an American artist and teacher. He and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art and were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization. His early style was completely non-objective. Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian as well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse influenced his early style. From the 1940s his work "opened out to the light and space of natural form." He painted landscapes and figure. "He discerned the pain of a man, and hewed to it integrally from beginning to end…. In his study of the figure he did not stress anatomical shape but rather its intuitive, often conflicting spirit."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leopold Seyffert</span> American artist (1887–1956)

Leopold Gould Seyffert was an American artist. Born in California, Missouri and raised as a child in Colorado and then Pittsburgh, his career brought him eventually to New York City, via Philadelphia and Chicago. In New York the dealer Macbeth established him as one of the leading portraitists of the 20th century and his over 500 portraits continue to decorate the galleries, rooms and halls of many of America's museums and institutions.

George Earl Ortman was an American painter, printmaker, constructionist and sculptor. His work has been referred to as Neo-Dada, pop art, minimalism and hard-edge painting. His constructions, built with a variety of materials and objects, deal with the exploration off visual language derived from geometry—geometry as symbol and sign.

Stephen Greene (artist) American painter

Stephen Greene was an American artist known for his abstract paintings and in the 1940s his social realist figure paintings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Qualters</span> American painter

Robert L. Qualters, Jr. is an American painter, installation artist and printmaker based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work encompasses traditional painting, as well as murals, and collaborations with other Pittsburgh-based artists across several disciplines. He is associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement of Representational Painting.

Henry Koerner was an Austrian-born American painter and graphic designer best known for his early Magical Realist works of the late 1940s and his portrait covers for Time magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Lepper</span> American sculptor

Robert Lepper (1906-1991) was an American artist and art professor at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, who developed the country's first industrial design degree program. Lepper's work in industrial design, his fascination with the impact of technology on society and its potential role for artmaking formed the background for his class "Individual and Social Analysis", a two semester class focusing on community and personal memory as factors in artistic expression, which with his theoretical dialogues with his most promising students outside the classroom fostered the intellectual environment from which such diverse artists as Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, Mel Bochner, and Jonathan Borofsky would later build their art practices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kraus Campo</span> Roof garden in Pittsburgh

Kraus Campo is a roof garden and landscape design space in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is located on the roof of the Posner Center on the Carnegie Mellon University campus, between the College of Fine Arts building and Posner Hall. The Campo was designed and created by artist Mel Bochner and landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. The Campo consists of orange pathways surrounded by various species of shrubs, a central seating area, and a quotation tiled onto the back wall. It was commissioned by and named after Jill Gansman Kraus, a university trustee, and her husband Peter Kraus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norman Kleeblatt</span>

Norman L. Kleeblatt is a curator, critic, and consultant based in New York City. A long-term curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, he served as the Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator from 2005 to 2017.

Matt Keegan is a visual artist working across disciplines including sculpture, photography, printmaking, video, and independent publishing. Keegan's work is conceptual and multi-faceted, and it often involves the intersection of language and image, as well as collaboration. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Samuel Rosenberg (1896–1972) was an American artist and Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He showed his work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum in New York, the National Academy of Art in Washington, the Corcoran Gallery, and in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was a beloved art teacher, and some of his students were Mel Bochner, Philip Pearlstein and Andy Warhol.

Blah! Blah! Blah! is series of word paintings executed by the American conceptual artist and painter Mel Bochner between 2008 and 2012, featuring various chromatic and placement variations on the words and in concert the phrase "Blah! Blah! Blah!".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nathaniel Jacobson</span> American painter

Nathaniel J. Jacobson (1916–1996) was an American artist, educator and color theorist based in Boston. He began his studies Museum of Fine Arts School, followed by the Massachusetts School of Art. After graduating in 1938, Jacobson enrolled in Yale University's School of the Fine Arts, receiving his BFA in 1941. Jacobson enlisted in the army in 1943 and after serving, the themes of his paintings turned towards his experience in Europe during World War II.

References

  1. Yale faculty profile
  2. Mel Bochner interview with Phong Bui
  3. the algemeiner/Aug 2014 "As an American Jew, I see these words and realize how much Jewish culture has become a part of every-day American life."
  4. Yale faculty profile
  5. Russell, John (17 November 1985). "ART VIEW; THE BEST AND BIGGEST IN PITTSBURGH". New York Times . Retrieved 1 February 2013.
  6. Philip Kennicott (November 4, 2011). "Critic's review: National Gallery's 'In the Tower: Mel Bochner'". The Washington Post.
  7. "Mel Bochner Whitechapel Exhibition 2012" . Retrieved 4 October 2012.
  8. "Mel Bochner Monograph" . Retrieved 4 October 2012.
  9. Lakin, Max (26 November 2019). "A Conceptual Art Pioneer Who Doesn't Mince Words". The New York Times.