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| Mark Bradford, 'Gatekeeper' Mixed Media on Canvas, 2019 |
I found myself in London again, the other day - with my good friend, Susie, for a bit more strategic gallery-going. This time, the exhibition in question was Mark Bradford's 'Cerberus', currently on display in Hauser & Wirth's impressive Saville Row spaces [1.]. The visit proved well worth the train ticket, and - as with the Oscar Murillo show I viewed a few weeks back, 'Cerberus' both impressed and inspired. Indeed, it provided a further reminder (were it needed) that abstract painting, albeit in distinctly hybridised forms, is not only still alive - but positively thriving.
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| Mark Bradford, 'Cerberus', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2018 (And Details Below) |
I've been looking at Bradford's work for a while now - having encountered one of his large, heavily distressed canvases at Tate Modern, a few years ago. On that occasion, I was instantly drawn to his intensive multi-media approach, involving sanded, carved and tattered layers of collaged material, references to a kind of notional urban landscape - implied maps and found text fragments. The piece I saw that day, and the others I've seen on various screens since, spoke to certain works I had recently produced myself (not least my 'Maps') - and have continued to influence others I have produced more recently. I'm happy to acknowledge such correspondences, but can't claim to be operating with anything even faintly resembling the confidence, conviction monumentality (or, indeed - success) evident in Bradford's work,
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| Mark Bradford, 'Sapphire Blue', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2018 (And Details Below) |
And monumentality is definitely the impression one gains on first entering the larger of two galleries at H&W. The expansive space is dominated by two huge pictures, and another, truly immense, one. The largest (which also lends the exhibition its title [2.]) encompasses a vast panorama - emphasising that these works might most usefully be regarded as pieces of terrain. It's a sensation only magnified during the extended seconds it takes to pace its length at close quarters. One could really 'get one's steps in' with this work.
And, as with much of Bradford's previous work there's often the suggestion of looking down upon an urban sprawl, as if from some 'eye in the sky', whilst being simultaneously being pressed up against the ragged, textures and urban grit of its ghettoised underbelly. Predictably enough, I'm drawn to that vivid sense of an artist drawing directly from the streets, for visual stimulus, conceptual/emotional inspiration, and actual raw materials. And the reality is that Bradford is hardly a painter at all, in the purely technical sense. Some fluid, coloured media may be involved, but his works mostly coalesce from the accumulation of physical 'stuff' (much of it sourced in the field), and the varying degrees of violence he can bring to bear upon it.
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| Mark Bradford, 'A Five Thousand Year Laugh', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2019 |
And, it transpires, he knows plenty of what he speaks. Bradford's studio, and the streets to which he most often returns, are located in South Central Los Angeles - a stereotypically forbidding zone of disenfranchised minorities, social deprivation and infamous race riots. As a gay black man, raised during the Civil Rights era, but now embedded in such a gritty environment, it can feel superficially counter-intuitive to discover he has maintained a genuinely refined and cultured demeanour - whilst never shying away from the daunting realities of an environment which must have consumed so many others. In interviews, he has described the varieties of prejudice he encountered, growing up in the Liemert Park district, but is as quick to point out the strongly protective matriarchal context in which he was raised. In fact, for much of his early life, Mark worked in his mother's beauty salon - seemingly a nexus of female mutual support - before seizing the opportunity of a formalised art education, previously unavailable to other creatively-inclined family members.
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| Mark Bradford, 'Cerberus', Hauser & Wirth, London, October 2019 |
Possibly, he resembles the Colombian, Murillo in this respect. Both hail from the less entitled side of the social or ethnic tracks - yet now function at a high level within the elitist, top-dollar milieu of international 'High Art'. Instead of feeling excluded from a field as once abstruse and ring-fenced as abstract painting, they cheerfully hybridise its purist pretensions, and revel in its positives. Certainly, Bradford has turned it all to his own, far less exclusive, ends - re-energising a mode of expression once deemed a bastion of white privilege or entitled machismo, whilst remaining culturally grounded and politically engaged. He deploys its visual vocabulary with unabashed verve, and yet consistently immerses political or sociological themes within it. Further still, he has used his market leverage and increasingly elevated profile to instigate consciously inclusive art projects within his community and beyond. In reality, such a practice is all about confounding lazily entrenched stereotypes, both socially and artistically - and it's a pretty inspirational example. Even without the admirable element of community outreach - It still might just constitute the equally-weighted, 'have cake - eat-cake, equilibrium between the visual and the thematic/theoretical that I've long been yearning for myself.
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| Mark Bradford, 'The Path To The River Belongs To Animals', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2019 |
Anyway, to return to specifics, it seems that these new 'Cerberus' paintings also represent something of a departure in Bradford's overall oeuvre. As has often previously happened, The starting point was a map of both socio-historical, as well as geographical significance. In this case, it was made by the authorities, to chart the Watts riots, that brought violence and devastation to the L.A streets, in 1965. An important element of this was a series of colour-coded dots (referred to, by Bradford as 'hotspots'), plotting looted buildings, burnt-out buildings, and those where fatalities had occurred. But this time, as the work evolved, he allowed his subsequent additions, incursions and excavations to occur more organically than was previously the case. Many of those hotspots were removed - surviving as phantom memories of the events they once signified. The blocks and street grids that still remain (generally as relief delineations in some form of extruded mastic), rise only intermittently through far-more clotted and congested landscapes than ever before. In places, they suggest mere vestigial foundations (the remnants of some conflict or disaster, perhaps); elsewhere - the still just-visible roofs of inundated neighbourhoods.
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| Mark Bradford, 'Frostbite', Mixed Media on Canvas, 2019 |
If the pieces in the neighbouring room are generally smaller in scale - they are no less vivid. If anything, they feel less topographical, and even more visceral (in the biological sense). To locate oneself in these territories, is to wade, knee deep, through the very guts of a place. Any fragments of a community, that might remain, are merely glimpsed through an avalanche of overgrown detritus and shattered building materials. In a piece like 'Frostbite' one can imagine the city becoming submerged beneath the scummy surface of some freezing lake (I actually read this a something altogether more tropical, but I guess the clue's in the title). In other instances, it might be that its remains are obscured by a dense tangle of forest vegetation [3.]. These may then be the most apocalyptic examples of Bradford's work, to date. Certainly, they are the most organic - suggesting ruin on a more cataclysmic scale than ever before, it seems. But we should remember that Mark Bradford came up thinking about 'beauty', from an early age, and that he appears incapable of making anything without a certain degree of elegance about it. This work may presage apocalypse - but it's also possessed of a profound and terrible beauty.
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| Mark Bradford, Stills From: 'Dancing In The Street', Video, (2:50), 2019 |
Which makes it all the more appropriate to conclude by discussing Mark's accompanying video 'Dancing In The Street'. Interestingly, what initially appears to be the result of tricksy multi-layered video editing, was actually produced by a far more direct expedient. Archive footage of Martha and The Vandellas, singing their classic song [4.] was simultaneously projected and re-recorded from the open door of a moving van, as it drove around the streets of South Central (I really like the lower-tech simplicity of that). There's a definite historical resonance here, for many regarded that song's lyric as a call to arms during the racially-charged unrest of the mid 1960s. In Mark's footage, Martha's face shimmers across the facades of tawdry buildings which might so easily have been torched or looted in '65 - and which now bear the scars from subsequent decades of social deprivation and predatory economics. But there's a fragile and ghostly beauty at work there, too. We shouldn't forget that, for many, 'Dancing In The Street' was mostly just a perfect slice of Pop heaven - even in the most pressured of times. Cerberus may snarl like a hell-hound - but Martha sings like an angel.
Mark Bradford, 'Cerberus' continues until 21 December, at Hauser & Wirth, 23 Saville Row, London, W1S 2ET. I suspect that, as art experiences go, it may be pretty hard to top, for quite a while.
[1.]: It's only natural to be pretty cynical about the international art market, and the interests of power and wealth it so clearly serves. It is then, only fair to note that, even in a top-end gaff like this - Joe and Josephine Punter can still wander in off the street, and view such high-quality gear, absolutely free of charge.[2.]: That quasi-mythological title suggests a potentially infernal region - and some clear sentinel presence also. If we are to detect some socio-political context here (as we must - where Bradford is concerned), we should query the real function of such a border guard. Is it to seal the perimeter against alien incursion - or really to contain the Hell within?
[3.]: There's something distinctly Ballardian about this - I'm inevitably reminded of 'The Drowned World', for all its London-centricity.
[4.]: Martha and The Vandellas, 'Dancing In The Street' (M. Gaye, W. Stevenson, I. J. Hunter), Gordy, 1964
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