Win! A Tribute to Mel Bochner

A version of this piece was initially posted on my Substack, Artfully Exercising.

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Artists have a unique status in the world where their work continues to embody a vital cultural role long after they’ve passed on. Mel Bochner’s sixty year long career has resulted in a strong body of artwork that I’m fairly certain will still be relevant six decades from now.

I have always stopped and mused in front of a Bochner painting at any museum that has had his work on display while I was there. One major aspect that makes his paintings so engaging is that you can comprehend them as both art and as literature.

Bochner’s painterly employment of scale, gesture and balance (among other elements of art), emphasizes the subtlety of the subjects and forms he paints; which happen to be words.

Painting and literature have a strong historical bond, with each discipline inspiring great works within the other. Bochner could claim the title of both a painter and a poet. His work is not convoluted, which makes it accessible to a wide audience, which is evident from the commissions he’s received to create art for stadiums and other non-art specific spaces.

One of the growing trends in the design of sporting venues is the incorporation of artwork. Art in sports stadiums needs to be simple, yet effective. It is not the main event so to speak, but a precursor to the action that takes place on the field. When done well, it serves as a motivator for fans to get hyped up to cheer on their team. But placing art in sports stadiums can also be a source of ire and polarization.

Proto-Pop artist Red Grooms, was involved in controversy surrounding the site-specific kinetic artwork he made for Marlins Park (now called LoanDepot Park), home of the Miami Marlins of Major League Baseball. Marlins owner, Jeffrey Loria commissioned Grooms, who is known for his playfully interactive and immersive combines (amalgamation of sculpture and painting), to create Homer, a seventy-three-foot-tall marine life themed sculpture that would spring into motion whenever the Marlins hit a home run. My beloved New York Mets have a similar celebratory element in their ballpark in the form of a giant apple that emerges from center field. While I’ve never heard a Mets fan utter a critique of the apple, Marlins fans were less receptive of Homer. It received mixed responses, and was eventually removed from the field to a plaza outside the ballpark.

This brief aside brings us to Bochner’s Win! which was commissioned in 2009 for AT&T Stadium, the home of the Dallas Cowboys football team. Win! is a mural-sized painting in Bochner’s signature thesaurus series, containing synonyms of the word “win.” Bochner noted that he conceived the artwork as a form of mantra that would resonate with fans who are coming into the stadium hyped up to cheer on their team. Win! is constructed in a grid format, and begins with comradely words like “Win,” “Vanquish” and “Clobber.” It builds up to more intense and expressive phrases such as “Beat ‘em to a pulp,” “Bring ‘em to their knees” and “Kick some butt.” This escalation is typical of Bocher’s sociopolitical subtext that exposes how language is used to express dominance and status in Western culture.

Bochner’s work encompasses the zeitgeist of bold and provocative language being widely vocalized by influential figures. He’s not making a blatant critique or politicizing such language, but rather asking us to consider how language triggers our thoughts, emotions and actions; and how the nuance and manipulation of language impacts our well-being.

Words are powerful, as we all should know by now. If we choose to understand and wield them with profundity, they can have enormous benefits; but if we let them go unchecked, they can cause immense harm. In Bochner’s own words, he described his art as a means “To confront the barrage of bullshit that daily threatens to drown us. Because, as recent history has painfully taught us, all abuses of power begin with the abuse of language.”