Text and images by courtesy of Whitechapel Art Gallery
圖文提供: 倫敦白教堂藝術畫廊
12.10.2012 － 30.12.2012
Mel Bochner is one of the founders of Conceptual Art. Emerging in the 1960s from a generation of American artists including Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson, Bochner questioned the importance of painting as a medium and at the time when painting seemed outmoded, he became a pioneer in the use of language in visual art.
Bochner evolved several of the exhibition strategies now taken for granted, including using the walls of the gallery as the subject of the work and using photo documentation of ephemeral and performance works, a language that has been widely adopted by following generations of artists.
The Whitechapel Gallery presents Bochner’s first major British survey exhibition, tracing nearly 50 years of Bochner’s work from the late 1960s to today, showing his fascination with language and colour. Amongst the installations and large works painted directly onto the walls, a vast 30 metre-wide painting ‘Event Horizon’ 1998 adorns a gallery, the piece consists of pre-stretched canvases of various sizes along a wall, each marked with a horizontal line and a number denoting its width in inches. Together, the lines appear to form a horizon.
One of Bochner’s ‘Measurement’ pieces lights up the staircase where lines of 48 inches are randomly scattered across the wall, alluding to Marcel Duchamp’s last painting Nude Descending a Staircase. At the top of the stairs one of Bochner’s guiding principles, No Thought Exists Without A Sustaining Support (1970), is chalked directly on the wall, as if on a dripping blackboard.
The exhibition also presents his recent ‘Thesaurus’ paintings, colourful word chains including the piece Amazing! (2011), which features a 21st century language: from ‘awesome!’ and ‘groovy!’ to ‘gnarly!’ and ‘omg!’. As the eye reads the text, letters and words advance or recede according to the shade Bochner has painted them. The experience suddenly becomes about colour itself, while their humour reveals a subtle politics.
12.10.2012 － 30.12.2012
梅爾·波切內爾（Mel Bochner）是觀念藝術的創始人之一。20世紀60年代， 美國出現了一批藝術家，包括索爾·萊維特（Sol LeWitt）、伊娃·黑斯（Eva Hesse）以及羅伯特·史密森（Robert Smithson）。在那個油畫看起來似乎已經過時的時代，波切內爾對於油畫作為一種媒介的重要性提出了質疑，他成為了在視覺藝術運用獨特語言的先驅。
波切內爾發展出了多種展覽策略，比如使用畫廊的牆作為作品的主體，運用即時表演藝術的照片作為文獻來展示，這些藝術語言形式影響了後來的一代又一代藝術家們。
白教堂畫廊此次舉辦波切內爾首次在英國的大型回顧展，追溯了波切內爾自20世紀60年代至今的將近50年的作品，展示了他對語言和色彩的著迷。在其直接繪製在牆上的大型裝置作品中，一件 30米寬的巨大繪畫作品《事件視界（Event Horizon）1998》使得畫廊熠熠生輝，這件作品包含了不同尺幅的畫布，它們沿著牆面被繃好，每幅畫布標記了水平線和表示畫布寬度的尺寸數字。這些畫布上的線組合起來形成了一組巨型的水平線。
有一件作品讓樓梯間變得有趣，那就是《計量（Measurement）》系列作品中的一幅，這件作品由一條48英寸的測量線組合並散落在牆上，仿佛映射了杜尚的最後一幅作品《下樓梯的裸女》。在樓梯頂部的是波切內爾的指導準則之一，也就是其1970年的作品《沒有思想是存在於持續支持之外的（No Thought Exists Without A Sustaining Support）》，這件作品是粉筆直接寫在牆上的，牆面如同一個滴水的黑板。
此次展覽同樣展出了他最近的《詞庫（Thesaurus）》系列繪畫，展現了五顏六色的字鏈。其中包括2011年的作品《驚人啊！（Amazing!）》，這件作品由二十一世紀的語言組成：從“贊！”和“潮！”到“NB！”和“偶地神啊！”。當人眼閱讀這些文字、字母和單詞時，人們會由於波切內爾的繪製的陰影產生忽前忽後的錯覺。這種視覺經驗突然變成了色彩本身，而其中的幽默揭示了一種微妙的政治。
