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| A Truly Rich Man is One Whose Children Run Into His Arms When His Hands are Empty, 2008 (mixed media collage on canvas H: 102 x W: 144 in.) |
| Mark Bradford should not be familiar to you; rather his work should not be familiar to you. Bradford’s work is a reimaging of the blighted urban areas that he was raised in, and it is in this reimaging that he begins to draw out the dialogue between him, urban decay, and the typical museumgoer. His recent show at the Wexner Center for the Arts1 displays a decade of work, acculturating the viewer with fragmented collages of his hometown, South Central Los Angeles. The accessible nature of his work is a result of the rigorous manipulation, removal, layering, and pasting of found billboard advertisements. The resultant paintings evoke a certain primordial sympathy; Bradford ironically extracting from the culture of African-American art. Yet, aside from the farcic position of the African in American society, and Bradford’s own paternal issues, the exhibition marks a detailed lineage of his past ten years as a rising star in the field of contemporary painting. Bradford, a sort of hip and crafty hoarder-tinkerer, has given weight to his work over the past ten years through the experimentation of collage with found objects—objects familiar to his past as a hairstylist and objects that visually stimulate him in as he walks through his neighborhood. The interesting thing is that these visual stimulants, the advertisements on billboards, are marketed for the urban population. Bradford takes these underlying social contracts of subversion and displaces them as anecdotes for political and social discourse. It’s not that Bradford is trying to rise up as a figure with a political agenda; it’s just that he’s taking as his position one that is affected by the actions of political leaders. The results are paintings loaded with layers of history, politics, and society. All artists have a certain polemic or philosophy that they are trying to present, and it was at the Wexner Center that the past ten years of Bradford’s social ponderings came to fruition in the mode of conversational curation. The Wexner Center is designed to force into conversation the work that is placed within the gallery spaces; it is not a white box with plane orthogonal walls meeting at right angles. That is why Bradford’s work is perfect for the space of Middle America, the anti-South Central. The socio-cultural polemic is ripe for open dialogue. Upon descent into the Wexner Center the visitor is shown a rather generic title that foreshadows the quality of the work itself.2 Heading into the main gallery spaces presents the visitor with an option of left or right. To the left is the first gallery, which presents a series of pieces from his early work of 2003 to some of his most current work of this year. You are supposed to go left, but there is the option of taking the Wexner Center as one would Wright’s Guggenheim, by going right: up the stepped ramp to the very back of the museum. This isn’t the Guggenheim—you are not supposed to go to the top and descend down, but the video piece Niagara (2005) entices the visitor to continue on. The reason is because the video has been perspectivally oriented to have the exact same vanishing point as the view up the ramp, to the back of the museum. It is a layering system which matches the pristine quality of the wood and granite ramp to that of the concrete streets of urban Los Angeles. The actor in the video is Melvin; a figure seductively existing in his own phenomenological realm. The association again adds another layer, repurposing the very techniques Bradford uses in his paintings. The decollage in the video is the removal of sound. Sound would make the scene too accessible, thus destroying the dichotomy between the urban decay and Middle America. But that’s the choice between left and right. If you go right you jump too far into the future; his work becomes too conceptual. At the top of the ramp is his most recent and on going piece, an installation entitled Detail (2009-ongoing). This piece is and was built as a statement about the social and political atmosphere post-Katrina. The assembled pieces of plywood and the billboard advertisements mark a type of urban reverie on how the government has left certain unsatisfactory places behind. The salvation that is inherent to a government for the people by the people is made clear in the allusion to Christian lore and other mythologies about the semiotic significance of an ark. Where was the ark—the government—for the citizens of New Orleans, especially those of the 9th Ward? It’s pieces like Detail and Niagara that clutter the overall project of the past ten years of Bradford’s work. The curation of each gallery is not chronological. 2003’s are mixed with 2006’s and 2010’s. It is done in this way to produce a comparison of Bradford’s technical evolution. We see the fragmentation and transparency of his early work as a play on the standardization of geometric forms of found objects—billboard paper, permanent-wave end papers3, newsprint and carbon paper. We see in this dialogue his reevaluation of process of production. Each gallery continues a much similar referential dialogue. However, the work is marked as rather fashionable, it’s kitsch for the art world. Bradford’s good, but this work isn’t that smart. The polemics, no matter how layered he makes them, are rather cliché and predictable. A lot of artists try to make their work political, and they tend to address the same banal issues in the same banal way. It’s not his position on society that makes his work interesting, it’s who he is that makes his work interesting, and it’s where he’s taking his overall project that will sustain him in the young life of a contemporary artist. He won’t be gone tomorrow if he maintains what he is currently doing. Niagara and Detail are what’s current, and they are works that will sustain him. Though they’re under the guise of installation and film art, they still invoke the viewer into a much more intimate relationship with the art. It’s not to say that I wasn’t taken aback by the beauty of his paintings, moreover, it was overall theme of the project that failed my intimacy. There are two things you must remember. The first is the choice given at the beginning of the gallery, the choice between left or right, between the Wexner Center and the Guggenheim, between the reverie of Bradford and Melvin. The second is the choice about Bradford being the destroyer of the prophecy to which his father (and to his credit, society) assigned, the one which has signaled the phenomenological project that is Bradford’s future. Bradford is an African American, and he is 6’8”! Like it or not, our society has assigned certain roles for African American Males of that Height, and those roles are most closely associated with basketball players—this is the prophecy to which Bradford’s father assigned him. Yet, Bradford is the farthest from the norms of a basketball player. He’s gay, and he’s an artist. He failed his father. Therein lies the third piece to the puzzle that is the future for Bradford. Again, remember the choice on the ramp. If you went left it really wouldn’t matter, because you would have to come back to the beginning of the ramp anyway. Walking up the ramp, having seen Niagara, its parallel perspective now destroyed, your view is corrupted by the sliver of space that is the stair which takes you off of the ramp and into a piece specifically designed for the Wexner Center. The piece is a room completely covered in carbon paper newsprint. It is gridded so one still conceives of the process of appliqué; individual sheets of carbon paper are applied to the walls as a billboard artist would. Bradford is now reimaging his urbanity into three-dimensions; it is only a matter of time until some artist comes and rips his billboards down for recycle. What makes this third piece a member of his current work is the music that Bradford chooses to have playing in the room. The song is a fragmented version of Nancy Wilson’s “Tell Me the Truth” (1963). You never really notice the strange echo that this song has in the entire museum until you hear it in this room. And once you hear it, it never leaves you for the rest of the visit. The once silent Melvin now appears to sway gently in rhythm as he commands his urbanity. The dimness of the room contrasts deeply with the vague penetration of light filtering into the adjacent space of the ramp. The room is part of his current project Pinocchio Is On Fire.4 Remember that choice. It never mattered. Because you will ultimately come back to that room before you leave. And you are struck with an intense sadness. It’s almost empathetic. What the exhibition did was alleviate Bradford’s past, a past of adolescent angst; a past in which he was who he was and that was someone his father could never accept. The “ugly” nose that kept growing, Geppetto just had to chop off…yet it continued to grow. The three pieces, Niagara, Detail and Pinocchio Is On Fire, were offerings given up by Bradford for his future salvation, and in giving up who he was—the Melvin that strutted and swayed down the road—Bradford was able to marry his work to the space of the Wexner Center. And in doing so, he was able to make the building sing. 1 May 7- October 10, 2010 2 The title of the show is “Mark Bradford”. It is presented as a work of art familiar to Bradford’s technique of layering and removal. 3 Permanent-wave end papers are thin, and mildly transparent, sheets of varying sizes used in cosmetology to produce the effect of waves in the hair of the client. 4 Part of his current project, Pinocchio Is On Fire, read “Against Action” by Christopher Bedford. |
