Mel Bochner

All images and text quotations are copyright by the Art Institute of Chicago. They are provided here under the fair use exception of the copyright laws for educational purposes.

For some reason the image of the Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966, although showing in the html is not appearing on my screen. It is available on the Google Images link below.

For those of us who work with textiles, exploring text within our art is a fairly recent occurrence. Mel Bochner began his investigation of art, words, and semantics in the early 1960s. "he expressed 'interest in formal and semantic reversals, . . ' as well as "trying to make objects function as language in another discourse."

Sadly, the work that had the greatest impact on me, Language Is Not Transparent, 1970, is not shown. It "provides perhaps the most lucid example of this Written in chalk over a section of black paint that Bochner allowed to drip, the work vacillates between an expressionisticlly painted field and a cold declaration of fact. The Phrase 'Language Is Not Transparent' signified that words are never a simple representation of thought - they are always colored by the subjective and undisclosed ideologies of the speaker."

"Bochner used language to explore the ambiguity of spatial terms, revealing the often self-contradictory relationship between description and reality.

I've provided some hotlinks for exploration. Many thanks to the Art Institute of Chicago for an interesting and thought provoking exhibition.

Google Images

Barbara Krakow Gallery

ArtNet.com

TheArtists.org

The monograph, by Mark Pascale, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, ends with Bochner's statement, NO THOUGHT EXISTS WITHOUT A SUSTAINING SUPPORT.