The Brooklyn Rail

Throughout his career, Mel Bochner has signaled a stance on contemporary painting that has often placed him at odds with the medium’s exploration of illusionistic space as well as with the conventions associated with Abstract Expressionism. For his current show at TOTAH, ALL SALES FINAL!, Bochner skirts easy dichotomies like figuration/abstraction by making language an integral part of each work. The paintings on view (composed of enamels, styrofoam set in relief, and acrylics) refer to themselves as much as they allude to pressing social realities. Speaking themselves into being, as it were, the works exhibited in ALL SALES FINAL! have less to do with language per se than with how pictures can carry meaning, even when they seemingly negate the content they represent.

Whether situated on paper or canvas, the simplicity, even the vulgarity, of Bochner’s artistry belies the fact that his paintings are, in a deep sense, stripped of any illusionistic content. The fact that they verbally take a perspective on objective reality and incorporate nuanced shades of meaning is something he toys with in willfully derisive, comically indirect ways. In the canvas Wordy (2013), for example, capitalized letters enunciate: WORDS, WINDY, VERBOSE RAMBLING, REPETITIOUS, REDUNDANT, BEATING AROUND THE BUSH. While the significations here move in a linear way (from left to right, up and down), the lettering itself is only a surface, a kind of manifest content, which balloons with a host of latent meanings both personal and objective.

Bochner’s brushwork depicts language with all the gestural intimacy of handwriting; the drips and textures that emanate from certain words often steep them in fluid irony. Meanwhile, in terms of the materiality of paint and pigment, he engages in a deliberate dodging of direct, unambiguous reference. This makes the unfolding of language in ALL SALES FINAL! less a matter of deciphering and more an invitation to the impossible task of peering through the canvas towards some more concrete reality. One looks through Wordy, and many of the works exhibited, like the slats of a blind. And yet, as Bochner has pointed out throughout his career, “Language is not transparent.”

Bochner’s works on paper (painted in Work Day enamel) especially deride the comforting illusions paintings can often project. This, of course, partially originates from his long-standing conceptual practice. But there’s a decidedly painterly aspect to works like Nothing and Fucked Up (both 2012) that complicates their je m'en foutisme. In their lack of transparency, in the way each word seems glued to the backdrop it emerges from, in the gestural intrusions that decontextualize any literal interpretation of the expressions in play, Bochner seems to offer up wryly apocalyptic meanings. Fucked Up in particular laughs at itself at the same time as it moves obliquely away from its own literal message: FUCKED UP AND FAR FROM HOME, IN SOME DEEP SHIT ON QUEER STREET, UP TO YOUR ASS IN ALLIGATORS. The nihilistic tone of these phrases is wholly rerouted by the way they gesturally present in context. Their archaic diction, coupled with the sheer fact that they cannot be adequately reproduced on paper, cancels any pretense to literalness and shows that he’s doing something else.

Bochner cuts through the many forms of figurative imagery and symbolism available today and works with linguistic realities directly. After all, it’s language that structures cultural norms, and it’s language that challenges their hegemony. Meaning, in other words, is a bifurcated site of conflict. In Bochner’s works on styrofoam, clownishly metaphysical though they are, menacing, socially conflicted recriminations abound—not so much as allusions to anything, but as depictions of a troublous state of mind mapped out in relief. Remaining on view through mid-August, the strict and menacing formalism at work here is what lends Bochner’s paintings their momentous gravity. Untethered to any referent, they recreate an interior monologue turned inside out: an agitated feeling of entrapment bracketed by the edges of a canvas.

But there is a silver lining. Quite literally, in some cases. In the work Broke (2013), for instance, the lettering goes: BROKE, BUSTED, BELLY-UP, TAPPED OUT, IN THE RED, DOWN AT THE HEELS, ON THE SKIDS, HAVEN'T GOT A POT TO PISS IN, MORE PIGS THAN TITS. And at the end of all this there’s a silver line of paint to punctuate the cynical phrasing—a leitmotif lending the painting a comedic air. Here, as in other paintings exhibited, Bochner’s Conceptualist rigor, equally linguistic and opposed to any imagistic representation, twists language to operate less as a spatialized message and more as an environing landscape unfolding in time.