Mel Bochner is a New York City artist who, despite disliking the term “conceptual art,” is sometimes credited with staging the world's first conceptual art exhibition in 1966 (Bochner, 2008). With a background in phenomenology, an interest in the work of early minimalist artists, and inspiration taken from an artist-in-residence position at Singer Research Labs, Bochner's sculptures and installations took a turn toward spatial, numerical, and linguistic themes from 1968 through the 1970s. The common thread connecting his early work is a preoccupation with the kinds of abstract categories that relate objects to one another (rather than to the objects themselves) and how the mind represents such relations in distinct formats (e.g., boundaries, numbers, words). At that time, Bochner articulated a desire to create art “that did not add anything to the furniture of the world.” In part, this was a response to an art world “dominated by the...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
December 2013
December 01 2013
Thought Is a Material: Talking with Mel Bochner about Space, Art, and Language
In Special Collection:
CogNet
Alexander Kranjec
Online ISSN: 1530-8898
Print ISSN: 0898-929X
© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2013
MIT Press
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2013) 25 (12): 2015–2024.
Citation
Alexander Kranjec; Thought Is a Material: Talking with Mel Bochner about Space, Art, and Language. J Cogn Neurosci 2013; 25 (12): 2015–2024. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00465
Download citation file:
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.
Could not validate captcha. Please try again.
Sign in via your Institution
Sign in via your InstitutionEmail alerts
Advertisement
Cited By
Related Articles
An Integral Upper Bound for Neural Network Approximation
Neural Comput (October,2009)
Alfaville, or the Utopics of Mel Bochner
Grey Room (January,2003)
FastMMD: Ensemble of Circular Discrepancy for Efficient Two-Sample Test
Neural Comput (June,2015)
Dorothea Rockburne: Intersection
October (October,2007)
Related Book Chapters
Plenary Talks
Artificial Life IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems
Invited Talks
Logic Programming: The 1995 International Symposium
Invited Talks
Logic Programming: Proceedings of the 1996 Joint International Conference and Symposium on Logic Programming
Invited Talks
Logic Programming: Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Logic Programming