calendario eventi  :: 

X

1/5/2014

Mel Bochner

The Jewish Museum, New York

organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum, with Stephen Brown, Assistant Curator at The Jewish Museum.

Across a selection of more than 70 works, Mel Bochner: Strong Language focuses on the artist’s career-long fascination with the cerebral and visual associations of words. In his spectacular recent paintings, Bochner juxtaposes the vernacular and the proper, the formal and the vulgar, and the high versus the low, using terms often appropriated from Roget’s Thesaurus.

A founding figure of the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s, Mel Bochner (b. 1940) has taken an unusual turn toward painterly expressiveness during the past two decades. The exhibition will present a broad selection of works—from often-witty early conceptual examples to vibrantly colored and lushly executed recent paintings—which show the artist's engagement with the possibilities of language as image, medium, and content.

The use of words as sources for painting stems from Bochner’s interest in philosophy on the one hand and humor and popular culture on the other. Bochner's use of the Thesaurus was pursued with increasing interest following the release of its latest edition, in 2001. Using a variety of techniques—paint on canvas and velvet, drawing, printmaking, wall installations—the paintings riff on words and meanings in countless permutations. For Bochner, the thesaurus is “a warehouse for words”—a mine of readymade text for his billboard-like pictures. Bochner uses word games, incongruities, and even visual slapstick to draw the viewer into linguistic, phenomenological, and social puzzles.

In his recent paintings, Bochner has explored painterly elements of high-key color, thick facture, and virtuoso brushwork. These works offer myriad pleasures for the eye, playing pictorial approaches against literary associations. Visual and verbal snares await the viewer, who is forced to negotiate a path between the opticality of color, the materiality of paint, and sometimes transgressive language.

Within the Western philosophical tradition, Bochner has long been interested in Jewish thought, with its emphasis on text, language, and wordplay. Yet the words he selects are hardly elevated or sacred—in fact, they are often mundane and secular. As in Roget, the formal and elegant and the colloquial and crude are lumped together. Bochner captures the language of the street, in which sources from Yiddish, queer theory, and hip-hop jostle one another.

The artist’s double vision proposes a unity between two sets of discrete symbolic systems—word and painting; the philosophical and the commonplace. Mel Bochner: Strong Language offers sensual delight, intellectual ferment, and an opportunity to reflect on this seminal artist’s exceptional contribution to the art of our time.

Exhibition Catalogue
In conjunction with the exhibition, The Jewish Museum and Yale University Press are co-publishing a 144-page catalogue by Norman L. Kleeblatt with a text by Mel Bochner. Mr. Kleeblatt discusses the evolution of Bochner’s art from his early word experiments through his return to painting, while Bochner offers a personal perspective. Both Kleeblatt and Bochner address the question of Jewishness in Bochner’s work, particularly the ways in which Jewish intellectual tradition embraces language as a visual expressive form. Featuring 101 color and 11 black and white illustrations, the book will be available worldwide and at The Jewish Museum’s Cooper Shop for $45.00.

The exhibition design is by Smithsonian – Cooper Hewitt National Design Award winners, Tsao & McKown Architects.

------------

Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings: Mel Bochner

In 1970, Mel Bochner created Theory of Boundaries on a wall in The Jewish Museum for the exhibition Using Walls (Indoors). It comprised four red squares: one rendered with precise lines, the other three made with imperfect or gestural strokes to form a border. The whiteness of the wall between each shape emphasized its straight or distorted edges. At the center of each square was a “language fraction,” written by the artist in chalk—word combinations that hinted at ideas of placement and displacement. Bochner used the wall like a notebook, offering notes toward a visual proposition.

Four decades after Theory of Boundaries, Bochner returns to The Jewish Museum with Mel Bochner: Strong Language, a survey of nearly 70 works. In conjunction with this exhibition, the Museum presents his commissioned painting Blah, Blah, Blah (2014). This is the second installment of the revived series Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings. As one of the artists in the original Using Walls exhibition, Bochner now takes part in the Museum’s exploration of its past as a source of curatorial and artistic inspiration.

Blah, Blah, Blah, a seven-panel painting on velvet, continues the artist’s ongoing use of text as image. It belongs to a larger suite of works centered on this repetitious phrase, a weary, inarticulate expression of boredom and jaded irritation. Other works feature the word BLAH written over and over in azure swaths of paint. Drips, erasures, and smears suggest an attempt to silence a cacophony of pointless chatter.

Here, the BLAHS, stacked and uniformly aligned, are crafted in vibrant colors, using the artist’s signature font of rounded capital letters. Expressionist brushwork and thick facture distort their shapes, building a staccato pattern of legible and illegible words; the effect is of a chanting chorus of annoyed (or perhaps amused) voices. As in Theories of Boundaries, Bochner plays with notions of borders and negative space, with meaning and the gaps in meaning, with the relationship of the material to the ineffable: As knowledge is to practice...no thought exists without sustaining support.

About the Series
Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings is a series of artist commissions at The Jewish Museum, initiated in 2013. Artists from around the globe have been invited to create new art or adapt a work for placement in the entrance lobby. The project builds upon Using Walls, a 1970 exhibition of commissioned artworks installed both within and beyond the gallery space of the Museum’s Warburg Mansion.

Forty-four years later, the Museum revisits this idea in Using Walls, Floors, and Ceilings, curated by Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, and Joanna Montoya Robotham, Neubauer Family Foundation Assistant Curator.

Mel Bochner: Strong Language is made possible by the Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art.

Image: Going Out of Business, 2012, oil on velvet, 93 ½ × 70 ¼ in. (237. 5 x 178.4 cm). Private collection, New York. Artwork © Mel Bochner.

Press Contacts:
Anne Scher/Molly Kurzius/Alex Wittenberg - The Jewish Museum 212.423.3271 or pressoffice@thejm.org
Andrea Schwan - Andrea Schwan Inc.917.371.5023 or andrea@andreaschwan.com

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10128
Hours:
Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm.
Museum admission is $15.00 for adults, $12.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for visitors 18 and under and Jewish Museum members. Admission is Pay What You Wish on Thursdays from 5pm to 8pm and free on Saturdays.

stampa

permanent link