Mel Bochner
BLAH
2024

About the Item

Mel Bochner, BLAH Mel Bochner is an American Conceptual artist best known for his text-based paintings. Bochner’s popular thesaurus painting series consists of lists of synonyms displayed in rainbow-colored palettes, often featuring a single word repeated in painterly capital letters, as seen in his seminal piece Blah, Blah, Blah (2008). “My feeling was that there were ways of extending, or re-inventing visual experience, but that it was very important that it remain visual,” he reflected on introducing text into his work. “The viewer should enter the idea through a visual or phenomenological experience rather than simply reading it. The theme of language as image dominates much of Mel Bochner’s work, and Blah, Blah, Blah is no exception. In bold letters of blue, purple and grey, the artist morphs the commonly used expression into a gride of shape and color, encouraging the viewer to question the term all together. In its density and repetition, “BLAH” is given weight and authority. The onomatopoeic word appears frequently in several forms across his oeuvre, sometimes presented in a similar blockish style and other times taking on a painterly, dripping form. Bochner’s choice of color becomes as much a character of the work as the text itself, a new combination of hues with each print. His pioneering unification of the textual and the visual earned his work its place among of the first truly conceptual art.

Creator:
Mel Bochner (1940, American)
Creation Year:
2024
Dimensions:
Height: 64 in (162.56 cm)Width: 51 in (129.54 cm)
Medium:
Oil,Monoprint
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
2010-
Framing:
Framing Options Available
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Miami Beach, FL
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU12014492782
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Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner experimented with a range of styles before finding his eventual success as a pioneer in Conceptual art. An audacious 1966 show at School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan that he presented, “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art,” remains a seminal touchstone for Conceptualism.

Bochner was born to a Pittsburgh sign painter in 1940. While attending the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon) in the late 1950s, he studied color theory and modernist movements as well as classical drawing, a balance that was formative in his career. After graduation, he moved to San Francisco, creating paintings influenced by Clyfford Still and Jean Dubuffet.

It wasn’t until Bochner “found his way out of the labyrinth of late Abstract Expressionism,” as he put it to The Brooklyn Rail, that he began to create his most meaningful work. Following a stint auditing philosophy classes after a friend introduced him to the work of Heidegger, Bochner relocated to New York, finding work as a guard at the Jewish Museum. In Manhattan, he ran in the same circles as Dan Flavin, Brice Marden and Donald Judd.

“One of the conversations going on in New York in the late ’60s was about the relationship of the object to the art experience,” Bochner said. “...Younger artists like myself were talking about what it would mean to eliminate the object altogether.” This idea would become the foundation of the Conceptual movement, in which Bochner was instrumental. The artist is probably best known for his text-focused paintings, including a series that plays with the phrase “Blah Blah Blah.” He produces work that regards art as an experience, rather than an object, centering on the process of creation and viewership as opposed to the finished product.

Bochner’s “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art” featured drawings, notes and outlines from the likes of Milton Glaser, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and others as well as pages from Scientific American. Bochner, then an art history professor at SVA, photocopied the assemblage of works, added them to binders and positioned them on pedestals for the exhibition because the show’s organizers lacked the funds to frame the pieces.

Bochner’s works can be found in the collections of many major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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