Mel Bochner, "Blah, Blah, Blah," oil on canvas
Mel Bochner, "Language is not Transparent," paint and chalk
Personally, I do not respond well to text-based art. I find the majority of it too limited, overly simplistic, and reserved for a specific group of people. I see the concepts behind them as answers contrived by viewers desperate to discover meaning where the artist failed to supply any. Of course, these are generalizations and I wouldn't condemn all text art, but still I have my doubts.I chose Mel Bochner's piece "Blah, Blah, Blah" for the inspiration in my own piece. I appreciate the juxtaposition between the traditional medium and the contemporary slang, as well as the humor derived from that. Still, I find myself bored and disappointed. Conceptually, it's a one-liner and lacking sustainable visual intrigue.
As one of the pioneers of text art, Mel Bochner must have felt obliged to make art in defense of his own. In his piece "Language is not Transparent" he writes in definitive capital letters with chalk on black paint, like a teacher writing his lesson on the chalkboard. I find this piece uninviting and annoyingly single-minded.
For my final piece, I decided to borrow Bochner's approach by using text, while injecting my own annoyance with text art into it. The result is "DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO," an angry and childish statement written defiantly, but nearly invisibly, on mylar. My aim is to make a piece that undermines Bochner's statement that language is not transparent by making it exactly that.
"DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO"
