Waiting for Superman
Mark Bradford is more myth than man, vaunted to superhero status by the powers of the art world. But the only man of steel he’s interested in, finds christina ko, is the fallen idol
mark bradford likes to think big. He likes to read big books. He likes to make big art pieces. He has big ideas, and he executes them in a big studio in South Los Angeles.
But right now, Bradford is thinking as small as a single panel in a comic book. We’re standing in front of a big unfinished painting in his big studio, which has been made from layering paint and pages torn from comic books, and watching as he purposefully rubs out the figure of a classic comic-book trope using the pad of his right thumb.
Paper has always formed the base of Bradford’s work, from back when he was straddling the line between artist and full-time hairdresser, tacking endpapers used for hair perms onto canvas, staining them with hair dye and paint and calling it art. He’s also used billboard papers in the past, but his latest material fascination is with graphic novels. These form the base of the works he’s finishing up for two shows in LA and Hong Kong with his gallery, Hauser & Wirth, debuting in February and March respectively.
“It’s all about where myth and urban setting meet through superheroes. It’s dystopian — like Gotham, in a weird way. I feel like the world at the moment, it’s just gone so loopy. So why not go to something that is all about that? The graphic novel part is so dramatic and densely saturated with colour, and with mythology. Help us, Superman!” He pauses.
“But what would Superman be like without his superpowers? I’m always interested in the other, darker side. What happens to Wonder Woman without her lasso? I mean, we really think that Wonder Woman is doing something for the women’s movement, which I just don’t know how we relate the two at all. This kind of manufactured collective strength that superheroes have? I always saw just the opposite. I’m more interested in Wonder Woman who no longer has a superpower, who now has a job at Walmart. With five kids. Raised them on her own.” The wonder woman — women — with whom Bradford grew up. “I saw a lot of that — five kids, no husband, taking the bus. And all of them turned out amazing.”
Before Bradford, now 57, was churning out abstract, politically charged canvasses, he was a boy growing up in the same district in which his studio is still set, who liked to read, spent a lot of time in his mother’s salon, and was often called a sissy. “I was a little more sensitive than the other boys. I began to think that that was a problem — not for me, but other people said, ‘Oh, that’s kind of a problem.’ I have home movies and I would recreate Wonder Woman...and I would take things from the world and pull them into my room or into my living room. Alchemy. And then they would turn into this third thing.”
“I guess I’ve always been full of imagination and creativity and learning and being able. It’s funny, I’m not any different. Taking things from the world or taking materials from the world and dragging them into the studio to ‘alchemy’. I suppose I was always an artist.”
After switching to continuation school in his junior year of high school and skipping college altogether, Bradford spent most of his twenties between the nightclubs of Europe and the floor of his mother’s salon, having joined the family coif-and-cut business. He was gay and it was the Eighties, a great and scary time, when the reality and consequences of Aids loomed large but the disco scene was too good to turn down. Lucky for him, the partying got old and he found himself applying for a programme at the California Institute of the Arts, America’s very first degree institution created specifically for visual and performing arts. He was 30.
If he was worried about being the old guy at the club, he should have been more worried about being the old guy at college. “I felt unsure. I felt like I was wasting my time. I felt like I’m way too old, too insulated from the world. But all I knew is if I kept showing up, it would turn out better.”
He learned a lot of theory at Calarts, and he even continued through to a graduate programme. Afterwards, he found himself back at the salon. It wasn’t so different, he argues, from what he was doing at university.
“You come in, and you sit in my chair, and you say, Mark, I love Lupita Nyong’o’s hair. Now you are Asian, with dead-straight hair. You want to look like Lupita. So we go through an eight-hour process to make your hair look like Lupita’s. That’s all it is — taking some material, and willing it to do something else. You’re always dealing in imagination. It’s the same thing with paper — you deal with the reality of what it is, just paper, and my imagination says no, it’s paint. So how do you make paper look like paint?”
With fire, and with colour. Bradford started taking endpapers
home from the salon, where he would torch the edges to form patterns and then dip them in hair dye and paint. All these materials would find their way on to canvasses forged of bedsheets, becoming tremendous, grid-like pieces that resembled aerial maps. Over the years, his practice would evolve to include the use of merchant posters and stencilled letters and other tropes, but paper — the kind that’s found and has had a function in society — has remained central.
The vivacity and energy of his work made him, while not an instant success, an eventual one. “I’ve never thought of my life as being vertical,” Bradford muses. “I went from rags to riches, but I see myself as horizontal, and it’s constantly levitating, and I’m going to take everybody with me, my friends, my life. So I don’t have to keep staring at the [credit card] machine, not sure if it’s approved or declined. But more than an empirical building, not ground floor to top floor — [it’s] a landscape that can be infinite.”
Holding his hand for the ride is his partner of 20-plus years, Allan Dicastro, with whom he founded Art + Practice, which offers support services to foster youth in South LA and access to free, museum-quality art exhibitions and art lectures.
“I wanted to create a site where local communities could have access to contemporary art, contemporary ideas. And at the same time, I didn’t want to turn away from [crises] happening, like foster care. They can go together...and it heals every ghost that I’ve ever had growing up.”
Bradford has taken his social consciousness with him overseas, too. Last year, he represented the US at the Venice Biennale, at the same time inaugurating a six-year project with Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a facility that provides employment to prisoners, to open a shop selling wares handmade with found materials. But while some artists choose to weave social aspects directly into their tapestries, Bradford is conscious of keeping things together, but separate.
“You have to listen, build trust and respect, then build a project,” he says. “And it’s usually not the project that you think. It can’t just serve the art world, because then you’ve exploited them for the art world. If I have to overlook a community then it’s the art world, but not a community in crisis.”
In this case, the art is most definitely separate, in tone and execution, if not in message. Bradford has called his Venice piece an ode to those who live at the periphery. In the first gallery room at his Venice exhibition titled Tomorrow is Another Day, hangs Spoiled Foot, a sculpture that dipped from the ceiling reaching almost the floor like an oppressive pockmarked monster in black, red and neon orange, forcing viewers to scatter to the fringes of the room. This is clearly the intention of the 203-cm-tall artist, who has spent most of his life conscious of the sizes of doorways and ceilings. In another area, rope-like structures reach down along walls like a horror movie. But the exhibition ends with hope: Smaller paintings hang in a subsequent room, where neutral hues dominate, and the final piece is a video work in which a friend marches exuberantly down the street, seemingly walking in place at times. It’s slow-going, but it’s going.
Equally large in scale, and heavy in intention, is Pickett’s Charge, a cyclorama that’s being shown at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. To create this monumental piece, Bradford took reproductions of Paul Philippoteaux’s Battle of Gettysburg, interspersing it with coloured paper and scoring through the layers of paper to achieve eight panels more than 3.5-m-high and almost 14m long.
Bradford is happy to talk about his work and passionate about them during execution, but he’s known to liken finished works to relationships that have ended, whether it’s an emotionally draining and monumental site-specific like Pickett’s Charge, or a simple 10-frame hang at a local branch of Hauser & Wirth, which has been his representation for the last half a decade.
More than a dozen paintings currently hang in his studio, destined for one of two Hauser & Wirth shows in the offing: an LA one that opened last month and this month’s exhibition in Hong Kong as the gallery debuts its space at art hub H Queen’s. Bradford was an easy and intuitive choice for the launch. “There’s an insatiable appetite for Mark Bradford’s work because it speaks to people on many different levels,” says Iwan Wirth, who with wife Manuela Hauser runs the gallery known for its family-style approach and intimate soirees. “Firstly, it’s socially engaged, and Mark brings to light complex concepts with great clarity. But his true gift is that he does so through an incredible command of materials; his paintings stand as fine examples of accomplished craftsmanship.”
“When he walks into a room you can see people being literally drawn to him like a magnet. But this has nothing to do with ‘stardom’, instead it’s testament to his humanity and warmth. He makes time for everyone.”
It isn’t just the Wirth clan that enjoys these privileges. In the centre corridor of the studio, Bradford’s grown-up godson is varnishing a painting as Bradford pulls him into an affectionate neck grip.
“He’s shy,” he says. “He’s been here two days.” Others have been here longer, like Diego Lopez, an assistant Bradford has known since he was 11, and on whose opinion Bradford has come to depend — because even one of America’s top artists gets a little uncertain sometimes.
“I didn’t tell you about yesterday,” Bradford says. “I was completely unsure about everything. Drag this painting over here. Do that, drag that. I’m always surprised by the work that I make. It doesn’t look like the idea I have of myself, but if I’m totally honest with myself...i think I take very charged material, bring it into my studio, and through alchemy I try to fuse that with hope. So maybe I’m a very hopeful person, but I’m not naive. I know that there will be blood. But I do also believe there will be light.”