Language is its own catalyst, provoking and (re)producing itself in Mel Bochner’s new “Thesaurus” paintings. In these canvases, words trigger a litany of synonyms, painted in hand-scripted white capitals over large gestural AbEx fields of muted grays, browns, and dirty whites. Continuing a career-long fascination with rhetorical inventories established by his 1960s “word portraits,” each of the “Thesaurus” paintings on view takes a common word as the starting point from which numerous repetitions and variations extend in rows. The synonyms become progressively more colloquial, funny, and vulgar in tone, until the canvas is crammed full of charged verbiage. Bochner selects decidedly negative words—Vulgar, No, Obsolete, Fool, Uncertain, Liar, Indifferent (all 2007)—whose cumulative presence, painted over and combining with the strokes of the aggressive cover-up jobs underneath, reads as both jokingly self-deprecating and bitingly self-punishing. FOOL permutes through PATSY, STOOGE, JACKASS, BOOB, PUTZ, JERKOFF, and DIPSHIT (among others), before finally arriving at OLD FART.
Momentum and drama build as the listing gathers steam, generating about forty or so synonyms per painting. Though premeditated in notes beautifully drawn on paper (six of which are on display) with the help of Roget’s Thesaurus, Bochner’s language flows with the stream-of-consciousness ease and exuberance of running off at the mouth. Coming to the end of each painting’s list is cathartic, like the purgative release after a rant or the exhaustion following a concentrated bout of writing. In his systematic and exhaustive listing of synonyms, Bochner distills the process of writing into a searching project of repetition through variation that attempts to refine expression continually. This descriptive process of searching for the right word is communication’s perpetual challenge, the art writer’s primary work. As both painted and written descriptions, these canvases generously expand the space of meaning around an initial word, a space of possibility characterized by shades of gray, layered washes of nuanced differentiation, and countless subtle shifts of tone.
