Language 1966-2006

Language 1966–2006 surveys four decades in which Mel Bochner turned words into his primary material, treating a sentence the same way a painter treats a mark on canvas.

Published by the Art Institute of Chicago to accompany a retrospective there from October 2006 to January 2007, the catalog gathers more than sixty works, from Bochner's early Measurement pieces and photographic Actualities to the Thesaurus paintings that stack synonyms into dense blocks of color and type. Essays by Johanna Burton, James Rondeau, and James Meyer trace how Bochner's interest in the failure of language to fix meaning ran alongside his early experiments with photography, index cards, and site-specific installation. The book is a 148-page hardcover with more than one hundred illustrations, arranged roughly by decade.

Bochner emerged in New York in the late 1960s among artists such as Sol LeWitt and Dan Graham who treated the idea behind a work as its real material. He continued to mine language for the rest of his career, moving in later decades into the large, brightly colored word paintings, among them the profanity-laced Blah, Blah, Blah series, that brought his conceptual concerns to a wider audience.