Mel Bochner
Put measurement, counting and the thesaurus on the wall, and made language look like paint.
Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940 and is generally credited with one of the first exhibitions of conceptual art, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, which he mounted at the School of Visual Arts in 1966 by photocopying other artists' studio notes into four ring binders on plinths. What followed was five decades of work in which measurement, numbering and language are the material: dimensions written directly on gallery walls, counting exercises, and from the 1990s the Thesaurus paintings, which take a word and run through its synonyms until they arrive somewhere blunt.
The Thesaurus paintings are the best-known body of work and exist as unique canvases, as monoprints, and as editions — three quite different price levels for what can look like the same image, so identifying which you have is the first task. Bochner's monoprints are individually varied within a series and are not editions in the ordinary sense; each is unique and should be described as such. The early conceptual works are often on graph paper or are wall pieces existing as certificates and instructions, where the documentation is the work.
If you own a work by Mel Bochner
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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