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...

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