Alternately a kibbitzer and a kvetcher, Mel Bochner (b. 1940) has deployed language as both image and subject in his painting and printmaking since the late 1960s. He uses language and words to vividly evoke his Jewish identity and as a fresh means to challenge the linguistic and political boundaries of public discourse. Mel Bochner grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Pittsburgh, where Yiddish was in daily use. He assisted his father, a commercial sign painter whose workshop was in the family’s basement, and demonstrated an early talent for drawing. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University, he moved to New York City in 1964, arriving at a time of radical change both in society and in what constituted art. As language moved from talking about art to being art itself, Bochner emerged as one of the leading figures internationally in the development of Conceptual Art in the 1970s.
As a source of words, Roget’s Thesaurus and The Joys of Yiddish are Bochner’s personal “Duchampian readymades” of found subject, image and process. He absorbs their words into his art, using a formal visual vocabulary of single word repetition, cascading lists of synonyms, or serial concepts, to create a two-fisted approach to artmaking in which the high minded and the bawdy go hand-in-hand. Freely mixing English and Yiddish in the work of the last decade, he constructs and orders an arc of words to create images that convey a carefully mediated descent of language from neutral to nasty, proper to vulgar. In these works, language and words combine with saturated color and materiality to engage and complicate the view’s experience at every level. Mel Bochner complexly probes the conventions of art and language to compel our attention to the unspoken double standards that underpin our engagement with the world. In his celebration of the plasticity of language, Bochner’s recent work both tracks and critiques with humor and sarcasm the downward spiral of contemporary language through its corruption in today’s public and political discourse.
Mel Bochner – ENOUGH SAID has been organized by the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education and curated by Bruce Guenther. The museum gratefully acknowledges Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation for making its extensive collection of Bochner’s graphic works available to the museum, and thanks Jordan Schnitzer for his generosity as a lender and donor to the museum. The museum also thanks Ruth Roth and the OJMCHE Craig E. Wollner Exhibition Fund for support of this exhibition.