Mel Bochner: Mel Bochner
Kendell Geer: BE/LIE/VE
Kay Rosen: Hello Again
The Spertus Institute in Chicago is running a series of site-specific pieces installed on a barricade outside the insitutute's construction for a new facility. Titled "The Language Barrier", the pieces play on both the medium as well as the message.

The 8 by 50 foot barricade is visible to both pedestrian and drivers alike and with the works acting as a changing landscape during the facilities' construction.

For this third installation, Mel Bochner chose 24 words from the Yiddish language for his piece entitled "The Joys of Yiddish".

As noted in a recent rebroadcast of an NPR interview with Michael Wex for his book "Born to Kvetch", Yiddish has entered the English vernacular in an almost transparent way - notably through shows such as Seinfeld but also commonly with words such as Kvetch, Chazzer (heard in Scarface no less), Shmooz, Plotz, Shlemiel and Shlamazel.

For this piece Mel Bochner is quoted as saying: "Yiddish is an outsider's language, a communal code developed to cope with a foreign and often hostile reality. As such it developed an ironic and picaresque view of human nature and its foibles. While capable of expressing the deepest of sentiments, it is also a language of intense self-criticism and moral invective-direct, unrefined, and indifferent to polite taste. My intention in The Joys of Yiddish is to foreground this complexity and to celebrate the language in all its humor and humanity."

Previous pieces in the series have included Kendell Geers "BE/LIE/VE" and Kay Rosen's "Hello Again".

The Art Institute of Chicago will be presenting the exhibition Mel Bochner: Language 1966-2006 from October 5, 2006 to January 7, 2007. Presented for the first time, the exhibition represents the last four decades of Bochner's work.

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