Mythic Rebellion For Venice Biennale
LOS ANGELES — Mark Bradford, one of America’s most acclaimed painters, could not figure out what to put in the grand rotunda.
This artist, who is representing his country at the 2017 Venice Biennale, which opens this month, found an unusual way of working long- distance. In a warehouse in South Los Angeles, not far from where he grew up, he created a full-size model of the Biennale’s United States pavilion, a stately building with echoes of Monticello, the estate of Thomas Jefferson. Then he spent the last year testing out his ideas in it.
“This is a Jeffersonian-type space, something you see in state capitols,” he said, pointing to its dome. “I wanted it to feel like a ruin, like we went into a governmental building and started shaking the rotunda and the plaster started falling off. Our rage made the plaster fall off the walls.”
With a nod to its Palladian architecture, Mr. Bradford often calls his pavilion the White House. As in: “I wanted to bring the White House to me.”
Mr. Bradford, 55, was confronting a pressing concern beyond exhibition plans: How can he represent the United States abroad at a time when — as a black, gay man and a self-proclaimed “liberal and progressive thinker” — he no longer feels represented by his own government?
“I felt like a lot of the progress we’ve made to be inclusive, to make sure young little trans kids are safe, was gone in the blink of an eye,” he said. “Making this body of work became very, very emotional for me. I felt I was making it in a house that was burning.”
Mr. Bradford’s replica, Doric columns and all, gave him a chance to try to bring something of the Giardini, the Venice park that hosts the national pavilions, to South Los Angeles and vice versa.
In the rotunda, he first tried lining the walls with silver paper. Then he installed a colorful “waterfall” sculp- ture — a cascade of paper strips.
Finally, he realized he needed to “keep it hot, keep it urgent.” He plastered the walls with what looks like a decaying mural: a gritty collage of fragmented images from cellphone ads scavenged from the neighborhood, which target the friends and family of prison inmates. “Receive calls on your cellphone from jail,” they say — in exchange for what turn out to be predatory rates.
Mr. Bradford’s exhibition, “Tomorrow Is Another Day,” is not explicitly political but is shaped as a journey that can be read in mythological or biographical terms or both at once.
The mythological references first appear in a poem by Mr. Bradford hanging on the pavilion’s facade, written in the voice of Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire, metalworking and sculpture. He encounters Medusa: “Mad as hell/I looked her dead in the eye/And he knew her.”
Mr. Bradford drew from one version of the Hephaestus myth, in which the boy breaks his foot when cast out of Olympus for trying to protect his mother from a punishing Zeus.
His own life has a bit of an Olympian arc. His single mother raised him in a boardinghouse in South Central Los Angeles while building her business as a hairstylist. Later, as a young gay man, he wandered, feeling no reason to plan for a future when he saw so many men with H.I.V. dying. Finally he went back to school, studying art in community college, then at the California Institute of the Arts.
He was in his late 30s and working in his mother’s salon when he created his breakthrough paintings: Agnes Martin-inspired abstractions made from the white endpapers used in perming hair. “I liked how they pointed to the world,” he said. “And I could get a whole box of endpapers for 50 cents. I would affix them to bedsheets, because I couldn’t afford canvas.”
One of his galleries in Venice features a sculpture, “Medusa,” made of black paper rolls shaped into coils that recall the snakes of Medusa’s hair. Three new paintings, each named for a Siren, hang on the walls. Christopher Bedford, who runs the Baltimore Museum of Art, sees this gallery as an “homage to the black women who were the ballast of Mark’s life in the beauty salons before he could stand on his own two feet.”
Mr. Bradford said: “I had to ask myself when I got this pavilion, what do I want to do with this? I knew I did not want to stand on the mountaintop as Mark Bradford but find a way to help build different relationships.”