“Blah blah blah is a way of shorthanding a conversation... It’s a form of agreement. But it also carries a contradictory and critical meaning – what you are hearing or saying is in fact meaningless, it’s simply blah blah blah. It’s about the emptiness, the endlessness and the darkness of the discourse.”
—Mel Bochner
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.
Bochner invented his own method of printmaking to achieve the thick dimensionality that makes his collaboration with Two Palms on these monoprints so tactilely compelling. He makes each print by building a matrix of letters, laser-cut into acrylic plastic sheets. Instead of using traditional ink, he fills each cutout with oil paint, then presses the plate into handmade and dyed paper onto a hydraulic printing bed. As 750 tons of pressure on the matrix indents the paper and the oil seeps beyond its confines, the intentional yet subtly chaotic variability disrupts the typical clean and organized nature of printmaking. Each impression of Blah, Blah, Blah is unique, a record of the exact moment paint meets paper.
Learn more about Bochner’s printing process here: https://www.phillips.com/article/46424384/mel-bochner-monoprint.
