Blah, Blah, Blah,

Bochner’s Blah, Blah, Blah, is far more pictorial than Language Is Not Transparent. In this painting—part of a larger series of works bearing the same title— Bochner repeats the word “blah” eight times total, in two rows of four. While each letter is executed with calligraphic precision, the artist’s subjectivity comes into view through his expressionist globs and drips of paint that swirl and mingle within the defined frames of the typographic characters.
The word “blah” evokes the irrational along with the familiar, typically used to generate meaningless babble to suggest that someone is speaking nonsense or expressing something so common that it is actually irritating to hear it uttered again. Read from left to right, the varied pigments that appear in the first column of the work eventually turn to shades of blue that almost blend completely into their velvet backdrop. This detail mirrors how an endless repetition of “blahs” ultimately fades into meaningless background chatter over time.
By choosing a seemingly empty word as the subject of this work and forcing viewers to confront it multiple times, Bochner asks us to question our use of language in contemporary communication and just how rational it is. When asked what his Blah, Blah, Blah, paintings mean, Bochner responds, “They say nothing but they can mean anything, or everything, or nothing. Operating at a sub-linguistic level, they are simultaneously sublime and ridiculous, hilarious and aggravating. Just another confirmation that Language Is Not Transparent.”