Mel Bochner, an artist who produced heady and often witty work in a multitude of mediums, exploring the boundaries of art — and the power of language — in drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, books, installations and public art, died on Feb. 12 in Manhattan. He was 84.

His death, in a hospital, was from complications of a fall, Lizbeth Marano, his wife, said.

In 1966, Mr. Bochner (pronounced BOK-ner) was in his 20s, living in a cold-water flat in the East 70s in Manhattan, writing mini art reviews for $2.50 apiece, teaching art history at the School of Visual Arts and trying to figure out what it meant to be an artist. He was making what he thought was “quite awful” work — triangles he cut out of Styrofoam, for example, and covered with fiberglass. The fumes from that process were awful, too, so he stopped.

When S.V.A. asked him to organize a Christmas show of drawings that year, he reached out to his friends Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson as well as other artists he admired, like Carl Andre, and asked them for sketches of their works in progress.

S.V.A. didn’t have the money to frame the drawings, so Mr. Bochner photocopied them — the school had a new Xerox machine — and collected them in four binders, along with copies of articles from Scientific American, mathematical calculations and other bits of information. He set the binders on plain white pedestals and titled the show “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art.”

It was an early salvo in the flourishing movement of conceptual art: the idea that an artwork didn’t need to be an object. Some say it may have been the first conceptual exhibition. Firsts are hard to prove, but it was a watershed moment nonetheless, and Mr. Bochner’s photocopied books inspired generations of artists.