Mel Bochner, Blah, Blah, Blah, 2008, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24-1/4". |
Mel Bochner, the Kitchen Sink, and the Thesaurus Paintings |
Mel Bochner, No, 2007, Ink on paper, 11 x 8-1/2".
Mel Bochner, Obsolete, 2007, Oil on canvas, 89 x 68".
Mel Bochner, No, 2007, Oil on canvas, 80 x 60". |
Peter Freeman, Inc. These are Bochner's new Thesaurus paintings. One of the founders of Conceptual Art in the 1960s, Bochner remains an inventive, provocative and influential artist. Bochner investigates the intention of the work of art in terms of its perceptual and grammatical logic, in series of calculations, spatial adjustments and rhetorical inventories. In this latest body of work, Bochner continues his use of the thesaurus in exploring the limits of linguistic meaning and visual comprehension. The paintings in this exhibitiocontain a group of synonyms, starting with the simplest related words, and eventually devolving to vulgar colloquialisms and phrases. This lettered path from a single word to a roll-call of the vernacular reflects the discrepancy between "objective", meaning and the perception of a "subjective" individual. The aggressive, painterly litany of language presents other possible connotations and undercurrents that move understanding ever further away from the basic idea of the original word. The chalky white all-cap lettering "speaks" the text while the wet-on-wet ground threatens to drown it out, further contributing to a sense of a communication breakdown. As in so much of his work, Bochner deftly dissects commonly-held assumptions of objectivity and ideology. In Bochner's own words, "Whether in the public or the private domain, my recent work attempts to confront the ideologies and hidden agendas of language. Because as recent history has painfully taught us, all abuses of power begin with the abuse of language." Bochner (born 1940) received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in New York City and is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Starting in the 1960s, he evolved exhibition strategies now taken for granted, including using gallery walls as the subject of the work and photo documentation of ephemeral and performance works. As Richard Kalina wrote in Art in America in 1996, Bochner was one of the earliest proponents, along with Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman, of photo-documentation work in which the artist “created not so much a sculpture as a two-dimensional work about sculpture.” Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940. He studied art at Carnegie Mellon University and graduated in 1962. After leaving Pittsburgh, he studied philosophy at Northwestern University near Chicago. He moved to New York in 1964, and in 1966 he was recruited by the influential art critic Dore Ashton to teach art history at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His 1966 show at the School of Visual Arts, Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art, is regarded as a seminal show in the conceptual art movement. Bochner photocopied friends’ working drawings and a $3,051.16 fabricator’s bill from Donald Judd. He collected the copies in four black binders and displayed them on four pedestals. The show was remade at the Drawing Center, New York, in 1998. Bochner began making paintings in the late 1970s, and his paintings range from extremely colorful works containing words to works more clearly connected to the conceptual art he pioneered. For a 1998 work titled Event Horizon, for example, he arranged prestretched canvases of various sizes along a wall, each marked with a horizontal line and a number denoting its width in inches. Together, the lines appear to form a horizon, creating what Jeffrey Weiss in his catalog essay for Bochner’s 2007 exhibit Event Horizon called a representation of “the world as a fantasy of quantifiable truth.” In 1995 Yale University Art Gallery organized a retrospective, Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966–1973. The exhibit traveled to Brussels and Munich and was accompanied by a catalog. For his solo show at Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 2000, Bochner layered German and English versions of a text from Wittgenstein. In 2004 Bochner’s work was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial and was part of OpenSystems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 at London’s Tate Modern in 2005. His work is in several major museum collections, including Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mel Bochner's work was the subject of two major museum exhibitions in 2007: a 40-year retrospective of Bochner's drawings which finished a two-year museum tour at the San Diego Museum of Art in March; and a focused retrospective of his language-based works at the Art Institute of Chicago. A compilation of Bochner's writings, Solar System and Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007, will be published by MIT Press in May 2008. |
Mel Bochner, Blah, Blah, Blah (Maroon), 2008, Oil on canvas, 18 x 24-1/4". |
