First Comprehensive Exhibition of Mel Bochner Photographs Illuminates Development of Minimal and Conceptual Art in America

Cambridge, MA (February 7, 2002) – The first comprehensive survey of photographs by American Conceptual artist Mel Bochner (b. 1940) will be on display at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum from March 16 through June 16, 2002. The works, many of which have never before been exhibited publicly, will include 50 photographs, 27 related drawings, and a film projection. The exhibition will travel to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh this fall.

Although Bochner is widely considered among the pioneers of Conceptual art, the depth of his engagement with photography in the mid-to-late-1960s remains little known. Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966-1969 will demonstrate the centrality of photography within Bochner's artistic development and will provide a new understanding of the medium's role in the birth of Conceptual art at large.

Bochner's photographic works are intended to be engaging and full of visual drama. The viewer will see images captured from television screens, luminous Cibachromes of congealed violet substances and carefully lit shaving cream, prints of intricate block constructions, and large silhouette pieces with fantastic trompe l'oeil effects.

"This exhibition gives a rare look at a fairly unknown body of work by a seminal figure in the history of contemporary art," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Through his work in photography, Bochner helped pioneer the shift from Minimalism to Conceptual art."

Graduate student is guest curator
Mel Bochner Photographs was organized by guest curator Scott Rothkopf, a Ph.D. student in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University. He proposed the project after visiting Bochner's New York City studio in 1998 while still an undergraduate at Harvard College. A year later, Rothkopf received a research fellowship from the Art Museums that allowed him to live in New York and spend months at Bochner's studio, cataloguing previously unpublished work and conducting archival research.

"Unlike Bochner's widely exhibited drawings and installations, a large number of works in this exhibition have never before been shown," said Rothkopf. "Bochner was not trained as a photographer, but early in his career he turned to photography as a way of emphasizing the ideas or theory behind artistic practice, rather than the objects themselves."

Photography as a means, not an end
The first photographs in the exhibition are of intricate block constructions that Bochner built according to a pre-determined mathematical sequence. Once he finished a structure, he destroyed it and built another. "He never showed these structures as sculpture themselves," Rothkopf said. "Rather, he was interested in the relationship between the mathematical idea and the structure it generated. He struck on photography as a way to capture the changing series, thereby diminishing the importance of the blocks and foregrounding the idea or process behind them. This shift in attention led him to more generally consider the interaction between an art object and the ideas leading up to its creation."

Soon, Bochner began using photography to investigate a whole range of artistic phenomena, including the workings of scale, perspective, color, and texture as well as the veracity of photographic images and their ability to record time. While exploring the medium of photography, Bochner tried to keep his personal expression at bay, so he often hired professional photographers to take his pictures, a practice that recalled the commercial fabrication techniques of Minimalist sculptors. However, Bochner came to realize that the camera was not the impartial, "objective" tool he had imagined and that it could never perfectly illustrate an artistic concept without adding unforeseen distortions or accidents of color, shadow, scale, or perspective to the final print.

"Full of surprises"
Bochner's photographs are full of surprises, and they are rarely limited to the standard rectangular format one associates with black-and-white photography from the period. Many of the works are multi-panel pieces — one with 48 parts and another that spans more than 11 feet. His silhouette works are a particularly good example of his inventive approach to the medium. The edge of the photographic object is cut to correspond exactly to the object depicted in the image, and then the photograph is mounted on Masonite and hung a few inches off the wall. This treatment creates a striking effect, since the works appear to project into the room like reliefs and cast shadows on the gallery wall that play off those in the image.

"People often think that Conceptual art is hard to understand, and that it doesn't offer the viewers a lot visually," said Rothkopf. "Bochner, however, cared very much that his photographs be as interesting to look at as they are to think about. In that sense his approach to the medium differed from other Conceptual artists of the 60s, who generally avoided highly crafted photographic prints. Yet Bochner's elaborate set-ups and near endless manipulation of his negatives and prints has a lot in common with the constructed and digitally manipulated photography so common today."

The crucial role of photography in Bochner's artistic development as well as key issues in the relation of photography to Minimal and Conceptual art will be explored in an exhibition catalogue by Rothkopf to be co-published by the Harvard University Art Museums and the Yale University Press. The 192-page catalogue, titled Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966-1969, will include 119 black-and-white and 40 color illustrations, as well as an essay on Bochner's early experiments in film by independent scholar and curator Elisabeth Sussman.

About the Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums are one of the world's leading arts institutions, with the Arthur M. Sackler, Busch-Reisinger and Fogg art museums, the Straus Center for Conservation and the U.S. headquarters for the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, an excavation project in western Turkey.

The Harvard University Art Museums are distinguished by the range and depth of their collections, their groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of their staff. As an integral part of the Harvard community, the three art museums serve as a resource for all students, adding a special dimension to their areas of study. The public is welcome to experience the collections and exhibitions as well as to enjoy lectures, symposia, and other programs.

For more than a century, the Harvard University Art Museums have been the nation's premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars and are renowned for their role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.

Location and Hours
The Arthur M. Sackler Museum is located at 485 Broadway, Cambridge, near Harvard's Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums at 32 Quincy St. All are a short walk from the Harvard Square MBTA station.

Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Sunday 1 – 5 p.m., and the museums are closed on national holidays. Admission is $5; $4 for seniors and $3 for students; Harvard students and staff and those holding a Cambridge Public Library card are admitted free. The museums are free to everyone all day on Wednesdays and Saturday mornings, 10 a.m. until noon. More detailed information is available by calling 617-495-9400, or on the Internet at www.artmuseums.harvard.edu.