Mel Bochner, Visiting Artist Lecture 1973

Mel Bochner has a candid conversation with the students where he talks about how to sustain longevity as an artist. Bochner asks the students to reflect on what art means to them, how they want to create their art, and states that art will always be separate and special from reality. Bochner urges the students to rely on and define their own experience with art. Bochner asks the students to reflect on the following question: what is the activity that one could do to adjust the physical world that would also count as a sculpture, all while changing the physical world in the least possible manner?
Bochner then discusses how the work the students make will have a synthetic personality that will go along with them, becoming an alter ego. Bochner tells the students that they will always have an audience for their work, and sometimes the audience can be artists whose work they admire. Bochner reminds them that their work and process will be of some interest, and requires putting work into the world while relinquishing control. That they can’t control the audience response, nor should they, but instead be open to feedback which can enlighten them to their actions. Bochner then shares how his work uses language. Because of this, despite not including slides, he feels that he is sharing his work with the students through conversation. Bochner ends his lecture by telling the students that when they decide to be serious artists, they must look around at the current practices, what is apparent, and aim to represent the deepest thought that is in art at that moment. He describes this as a rapid process, as life and work as an artist are transient, with realistically only up to sixty years to work.