Our Spring issue, available now, features “Thesaurus Paintings,” a portfolio of text-based paintings and drawings from Mel Bochner. They have a focus on ordinary language, specifically the “emotional trajectory” that emerges when one riffs on words and phrases of a certain theme. The direction, Bochner says, is evident in
how one gets from the first word to the last word—from the prim and proper to the crude and vulgar. I concentrate a lot on the sense and sound of the language. The flow of words has to have a certain kind of rhythm—or a certain kind of lack of rhythm. That’s how the narrative of the painting is constructed...