CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — “Blah, blah, blah, blah, amazing, awesome, breathtaking, heart-stopping, mind-blowing, out-of-sight, cool, wow, groovy, crazy, killer, bitchin’, bad, rad, gnarly, da bomb, shut up, OMG, yes, nothing, nada, nix, zip, zilch, zero, slut, a fart, a fuck, a rat’s ass, all gone, defunct, kaput, pfft.”So began a lively evening last week with Mel Bochner at Harvard Art Museums, where the highly influential conceptual artist recapitulated in “Tangled Up in Words” his 50-year dalliance with the English thesaurus. This concatenation of linguistic fragments — read aloud by David Roxburgh, chair of Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, by way of introducing the night’s speaker — set the tone for the address that followed, in which Bochner presented 59 slides tracking his co-option of nonsense, or “drivel, drool, babble, blabber,” in service of his artistic practice... (read more at: hyperallergic.com)
