Last month, I checked out the
Mark Bradford exhibit at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It will be closing as of September 18, but according to the exhibition’s
microsite, the collection will be making stops at a couple other cities, including the Dallas Museum of Art and SF’s MOMA, which is fantastic because the exhibit offers a visually stunning, contemplative collection on Mark Bradford’s journey as not only an artist, but as a black, gay man coming from the gritty streets of Los Angeles.
As a newcomer to his work, I opted to take the free museum tour of the collection, which surveys his work from 2001 to 2010. The tour proved very useful since it provided context that is otherwise not available to visitors. While I understand the limitations of plaques, taking the tour tremendously expanded my experience since the museum guide mentioned important (and perhaps controversial) details that really deepened the effect of his pieces. The failure of the plaques to truly inform and challenge the visitor was disappointing, but I’ll talk more about that later.
Our museum guide – let’s call her Susan – is a chirpy woman who tried hard to encourage interaction from the group. However, we are an unpromising looking group. One couple bears an eternal frown, despite the woman’s best efforts for polite laughs, and an unfathomably elderly lady speaks incessantly of her mother’s paintings. In addition, there is a large herd of small children being shepherded by a lone woman. She knows every child by name.
Tom - no hitting people. Sarah – quiet no giggling. But it becomes increasingly clear that a day at the museum should have come with pleather kid leashes, or perhaps a scary, taser wielding adult.
When Susan begins the tour, she starts with Pinocchio Is Rising. The piece is basically an entire white wall with deceivingly rainbow, happy looking text. Once we read the parable, however, we see that it is an adult retelling of the Pinocchio tale that brims with anxiety. The poor wooden boy must make a choice – the cricket tries to help – and as a reader you sense an ambiguous yet life threatening urgency that Pinocchio himself seems to be only vaguely aware of.
Susan explains that Mark Bradford specifically wrote the parable in order to foreground the collection as an ongoing, decade long conversation about identity, recognition, and acceptance, and the notion is contrasted by a stiff black crow ominously frozen in flight on the other side of the gallery.
On the wall with the Pinocchio story, the museum apparently uses it as an open canvas for its incoming artists. For his exhibit, Mark Bradford white washed the previous piece, obviously colorful and vibrant, and cut out text so that the previous layer would show through.
This is the first clue that the Bradford collection will be obsessed with layers and its varied connotations, both positive, negative, and ambivalent. It’s a theme that Bradford will basically run with for the next ten years, to great effect.
The next piece we stop at is full of quiet, but it gains momentum once we learn of its title –
Enter and Exit the New Negro.
Lines and layers of small white rectangles repetitively sweep across what seems like canvas – but it is not! The guide informs us that as one of Bradford’s first works, the piece is made from an old bed sheet since Bradford was too poor to afford canvas at the time. The whiteness of the image, almost glowing in the absence of color, leads to us to believe that it is a painting, but again Bradford has fooled us with his persistent layers. Susan says that for this work, as with many of his early pieces, Bradford worked exclusively with glue and paper materials, or more specifically, the small square hair perm end papers from his mother’s salon. The subtle undertones of all kinds of whiteness, the lighter, darker, sharper, brighter hues, drifting across the image lend an ethereal, albeit washed out effect. The subdued whiteness of the image creates a mysterious absence: where has the “new negro” gone? How have they entered, exited, and why? Or perhaps they are still there, invisible?
The many layers of white suggest that the “new negro” has been effaced, over written, buried, or chased away. At this point, it must be noted that the title alludes to the “New Negro” essay collection written by
Alain Locke during the Harlem Rennaissance. The “New Negro” essay collection reflected the social movement to resist the aesthetic of whiteness as the pinnacle of beauty, and importantly, to take pride in being a black American. The “painting” comments on the anti-climactic “enter and exit of the new negro” and how the movement to positively transform African American identity has ostensibly failed. The lingering whiteness, the sense of invisibility, points towards a radical breakdown in the creation of the “new negro”, suggesting that the “new negro” has either never arrived, been rejected in the failure to measure up to “whiteness” as a standard of beauty and success, or has become whitewashed, thus remaining indefinitely invisible.
The piece points towards a critical problem in American racial politics. How should ethnicity be expressed, and can it even be articulated honestly when whiteness remains the default overarching paradigm of beauty, values, social development? It is as if Bradford is stressing that whenever a particular ethnicity is invoked – for instance, black – it is merely another way of saying, (still) not white.
Next on our stop was “Black Venus”, another mixed media collage that utilizes the hair perm papers. It again looks like a painting, one which positions the viewer in a bird’s eye view of a city like grid of color and darkness.
Here Susan falters in explaining what the term
Black Venus actually means, since our herd of small children all happen to be black; by this time, the teacher has instructed them to sit quietly in front of the painting, and they are sitting as still as they possibly can. So to a group of young school children, Susan says in cautious voice that black venuses were once a pejorative term for black women who were used as prostitutes. The children blink. One boy rolls over on the ground and pokes another kid. Until a small boy asks –
what does perjormative mean? The teacher blushes.
It means a bad word, Dominic. (I think his name was Dominic, atleast.)
Susan exhales; political correctness crisis averted. The young black woman responsible for these children is still listening intently, and Susan makes continuous eye contact with her in order to gauge her success in being the racially sensitive white woman.
After a slight pause, she continues explaining that Bradford used a Google map as the basis for this painting. He chose Baldwin Hills, a wealthy neighborhood in Los Angeles that is comprised mostly of African Americans.
The painting is a somber work that plays on the imagery of the body. The female black body, a historically sexualized locus of white desire, is substituted here as the wealthy black neighborhood. The title sexually charges the painting with desire and lack. The blackness hovering in the center ambiguously suggests a growing void or mass. Having used a map as the basis for the painting, Bradford challenges the static nature of map imagery by infusing the work with movement. Intermittent reds, blues, and yellows pulsate from the center. Lines on the edges signifying roads or zones reflect a quiet desperation, like scrape marks.
In titling the painting as “Black Venus”, Bradford seemingly jabs the wealthy black neighborhood in its apparent satisfaction. Have they really made it? Have they fulfilled the American Dream? Was the realization of this dream pleasurable? How has wealth remarked or rezoned black bodies? Is economic fulfillment the climax of social pleasure? The painting ties the pleasure and exploitation of sexual bodies to the pleasure and exploitation within economics. It is a rich critique of time, place, and desire.
By the time we reach our next stop, we have picked up a few visitors, but the group of children has dropped off. We see the young woman leading her herd outside the gallery, probably because one of the boys (lightly) punched a painting (probably accidental). Which means that when we come upon Bradford’s electric painting, “Scorched Earth”, the museum guide is ready to come full force with the art nerd talk. And for good reason. It is a beautifully savage piece.
Susan tells us that “Scorched Earth” is a reference to the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot in Oklahoma. It was one of the most violent riots in U.S. history, yet the event has remained buried from public consciousness. According to
Democracy Now!,
“On June 1, 1921, Greenwood, a prosperous African-American community of Tulsa, was looted and burned by a white mob numbering in the thousands. This came after false rumors that a Black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator, and an editorial in the Tulsa Tribune calling for whites to "lynch a nigger tonight." Eyewitness accounts tell of aerial bombing, internment camps for Black men, and truckloads of corpses dumped into unmarked mass graves. Thirty-five city blocks were completely destroyed, and experts believe that as many as 300 people died. If this is so, then the Tulsa race riot of 1921 surpasses the Oklahoma City bombing as the largest mass murder of civilians on U.S. soil.”
The painting erupts in chaos and flame. Buildings topple, burying the carnage and memories that will irrevocably change race relations of an entire country. Enmeshing an aerial map and the profiles of collapsing buildings creates a sprawling scene of confusion and disarray, as if this was an abstracted vision of the apocalypse. It reminded me of Yeats’ poem,
The Second Coming, which was notably written after WWI in 1919.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This was the first work where Bradford decided to use paint. Susan tells us that he agonized over using orange paint but ultimately decided that it best captured the vibrant violence that enveloped Tulsa for months. The painting remains hauntingly beautiful in its abstract portrayal of a society under brutal dissolution. It is a still image of a region in a radical breakdown, in which “things fall apart” and “the centre cannot hold”. The map imagery that Bradford draws upon is buried, obscured by the networks of power, class, and race that overwrites, but never quite erases, these implied memories of violence and betrayal. On maps, Bradford says,
Given the painting’s attempt to conduct urban archaeology in excavating this forgotten event, one would imagine that the plaque on “Scorched Earth” would mention the Tulsa Race Riot. But the plaque carries on the silence of a smothered history. If Susan did not connect the painting to the Oklahoma riot, I would not have realized the connection since I myself had not heard much on the Tulsa Race Riot before. Instead, the plaque offers a bland explanation, giving the visitor no useful information in situating the painting as a reaction against the Tulsa Race Riot. To be honest, there might as well be no plaque, since the text was pretty much a waste of space. When it comes to contextualizing the pieces, we see the exhibition falter, since many of the plaques offered many words but no information in helping the visitor understand pieces. Without Susan, I wouldn’t have known about the hair perm papers, Bradford’s disinclination to use paint, or the critical reference to the Tulsa Race Riot. In an otherwise splendid collection, the plaques diminish the efficacy of Bradford’s emotionally charged work. However, I will say that the call in audio guide via personal cell phone was great in offering Bradford’s voice, but not so great in situating particular pieces.
From hair perm papers to aerial map collages, the collection moves on to Bradford’s merchant posters. In these pieces, Bradford takes merchant posters (paper ads essentially) from his neighborhood and glues them on top of each other, scrapes some layers off, and glues over and over again, ultimately creating en excavated, time worn aesthetic. The collection displays an impressive number of his merchant poster works, a medium which Bradford remains obsessed with. They offer glimpses of a city in constant flux by capturing the economic and thus social needs of a place, and in these pieces we see how ads function as a kind of camouflage for the root social ills of a community.
Susan tells us that to Bradford, the merchant posters most accurately reflect the actual reality of a given neighborhood, the needs, the lacks, the despair, the dreams. It is a kind of urban archaeology that Bradford remains committed to. The merchant poster collages, in their gradual evacuations of color, form, and text, reflect Bradford’s ability to abstract familiar narratives and images. The abstractions are aesthetically seductive images, rich in their layered implications.
The exhibit closes with some other non-painting works, including a giant ark made to raise money for Katrina victims (also boarded up with merchant posters), and a blackened basketball in reference to black masculinity as epitomized by Kobe Bryant. It is a quiet end to the visually stunning pieces of the beginning, but it remains full of intriguing questions on race and power, ethnic performativity, and the economic forces behind identities, such as the stereotypically athletic, macho masculine identity.
In showcasing Bradford’s work, the exhibit succeeds in impressing upon visitors his beautifully complex and layered visions of evolving ethnic, sexual, and urban identities. Visitors can’t help but become fans of Bradford even despite the lacking plaques, and it’s mostly because Bradford’s works are powerful enough to speak for themselves.
So should you check it out? This Hungry Owl says YES.
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