Amazing! Mel Bochner Prints

Book excerpt: For more than 50 years, American conceptualist Mel Bochner (born 1940) has been shaping dialogs between art and language through exhibition concepts, paintings and sculptures that embrace systems and structures to reveal their cracks and limitations, undermining the means we use to comprehend the world. Bochner created his first prints in 1973 at the invitation of publisher Robert Feldman of Parasol Press (who introduced a generation of minimalist and conceptual artists to printmaking through his work at Crown Point Press). Since then, Bochner has employed many different forms of printmaking, using and abusing its material possibilities and its unpredictability to counter the methodical fashion in which plates and stencils are cut, characters per line are fixed, or print runs set. This volume surveys Bochner's longstanding engagement with various types of printmaking, from aquatints to monoprints.