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Spertus in the News
Mel Bochner has a way with words
Conceptual Art pioneer's works at Art Institute, Spertus
ART REVIEW
By Alan G. Artner
Chicago Tribune art critic
Published October 12, 2006
Every art museum would love to mount exhibitions that bring to light major but neglected aspects of the careers of important artists, and the Art Institute of Chicago has just done so with "Mel Bochner: Language 1966-2006," the largest installment to date in its contemporary "Focus" series.
Bochner, a pioneer of Conceptual Art, was one of the first visual artists from the mid-20th Century to make written language the basis of his work, and its achievement was immediately recognized, though no effort on the part of a museum was made before now to bring together only his key word pieces. The 50-some works on paper, paintings, sculptures, photographs and installations at the Institute -- many from the artist's own collection and never seen before -- additionally are joined by a new site-specific commission at the Spertus Museum, which challengingly takes Bochner's language pieces out of galleries into a broad public arena.
If the audacious purity of the works from the 1960s still cannot be beat, the play in more recent pieces raises them from a compromise with the marketplace -- where chromatically intense paintings of synonyms are bound to do better than personal or abstruse texts soberly hand-printed on paper -- to a plane of fierce good humor and bouncy visual gratification.
Take "The Joys of Yiddish" at the Spertus. There, on the 50-foot barricade to the Spertus construction site, is a boldly lettered list of 24 Yiddish terms that mean "wiseguy" to "troublemaker." Some of the terms, such as "nebbish" (sad sack) and "schmo" (fall guy), long have been used outside their community of origin. But others remain largely terms of communal self-criticism, and in amassing them publicly Bochner shares their vividness of spirit, sense, sound and color.
Likewise, the paintings from the last decade at the Institute, with their blocky letters offset by drips and dots, share lively surfaces (sometimes on velvet, no less) along with content whose expression occasionally becomes stronger and more raw as the artist's list progresses. Such wit is present in the early work, but there the gravity of youth -- most '60s conceptualists were as grave as penitents -- along with an art-world exclusiveness predominates.
The show presents such early classics as "Working Drawing and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art," a quartet of identical ring binders with reproductions of artists' sketches and ephemera, which has been termed the first Conceptual Art exhibition, and several installations including the beautifully honed "Prepositional Sculptures," which the artist has re-created especially for the Institute.
Forty years later these pieces have lost none of their sinewy leanness, and they cannot help but make much of today's work that has "concepts" tacked on to readily salable commodities look distended, Johnny-come-lately and inessential.
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"Focus: Mel Bochner: Language 1966-2006" continues at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., through Jan. 7. 312-443-3600; Bochner's "The Joys of Yiddish" continues at 610 S. Michigan Ave. through Spring. 312-322-1700.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune ART REVIEW
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