“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
Bold, striking, simple yet thought provoking: language dominates much of Mel Bocher’s work, and Blah, Blah, Blah is no exception. In bold colourful letters the artist morphs the commonly used expression into an highly tactile mass of shape and colour, encouraging the viewer to question the term all together. In this 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 colour becomes as much a character of the work as the text itself, a new combination of hues with each print.
Bochner invented his own method of printmaking to achieve the thick dimensionality of Blah, Blah, Blah. Produced in collaboration with Two Palms press, this unique monoprint was realised by filling a carved Plexiglas matrix of letters with viscous, gloopy oil paint before using a 750-ton hydraulic press to create unique prints on handmade, dyed paper. As the immense 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 organised nature of printmaking. The resulting thick, tactile forms of the printed letters verge into the realm of sculptural relief. We are enticed to reach out and touch the text, prompting a rumination on how we experience language and the unspoken codes that are entwined within our vocabulary.
“Words and numbers, because they belong to everyone, don’t belong to anyone. That seemed like a place to start... Something I could believe in.”
—Mel Bochner
Learn more about Bochner’s printing process here:
https://www.phillips.com/article/46424384/mel-bochner-monoprint
