As Mel Bochner tells it, his longstanding engagement with language was inevitable. His seminal Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966) — a collection of notes and drawings from the likes of Dan Flavin, Alfred Jensen, Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt, among others, photocopied and arranged into four identical binders — considers the rules and seriality of communication systems, if not written language directly. At the time, the work signaled a broader paradigm shift toward Minimalism and away from Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, while also heralding the text-based work that would come to occupy Bochner for much of the next 45 years.
The Tower Gallery at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is currently exhibiting a collection of Bochner’s recent Thesaurus Paintings and preparatory drawings alongside his early and precursory text-based Portraits (1966-1968). In the Tower: Mel Bochner thus presents the artist’s reprising of his earlier work — much of which forms the foundation of Conceptual Art and Minimalism — as big, bold canvases inflected with painterly subjectivity. Or as NGA curator James Meyer observed of Bochner’s recent paintings, “a kind of American Realism has entered Conceptualism’s back door.”
Read the rest of the article in the New American Paintings blog.
