Mel Bochner
Blah, Blah, Blah, 2015
1111 Prospect Street (back side of building)
“We live in a world that is oversaturated with empty language - small talk, tweets, texts, leet speak, chit-chat, pop–up ads, telephone-answering messages (“your call is important to us…”), warnings on medicine bottles (“if you have an erection lasting more than four hours…”). If there is no escaping this linguistic tsunami, the Blah, Blah, Blah paintings subvert it from below.”
Mel Bochner’s mural, Blah, Blah, Blah, repeats a rhythmic, graphic pattern that slowly reveals itself as a textual play with words. At first glance, the work appears as stark, bold, abstracted shapes. Once the viewer engages the piece more closely they can identify the phrase “Blah, Blah, Blah” scrawled repeatedly. Bochner deploys this phrase instead of the singular use of the word “blah” for new effect. It seeks to reflect a critical commentary on the blather of advertisers, politicians, bloggers – while also critiquing the social media world of texts and tweets. Bochner creates a parade of words, shamelessly demanding for attention.
Mel Bochner was born in 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He obtained his BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962, and in 2005 received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art. Bochner was among the first artists to examine the complex relationships between language and the visual arts. His 1966 “ Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art” is considered a launching point for the Conceptual Art movement.
Along with fellow artists,Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, and Robert Smithson, Bochner’s work sought to renegotiate the artist’s relationship to ideas and their expression. His work subverts and critques the contemporary world through wit and bold symbolism. He has had major retrospectives at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His works are held in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Bochner lives and works in New York City, New York.
18' x 108'
Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann