Collage part four: Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford's Venice Biennale USA pavilion

Mark Bradford's collages at first sight don't look like collages. The elements he collects from the streets around him are fused into huge shapes that can feel more animal like than a collaged collection of bits of paper and other street found materials. By welding together disparate elements with a rubberised solution and then sanding down the surface, the urban environment is sunk down into his abstract compositions and becomes the sinews of his work. The necessary tensions that are set up between the desire for compositional simplicity and using a process that is able to hold together masses of complicated stuff, creates a level of cognitive dissonance; his work has been described as having 'informal formalism, raw elegance and intricate boldness' as both emotional and restrained. The many layers and fragments of his collage, its patterns and dislocations, produces a practice that reflects the complex experience of city life, in many ways the built-up layers of materials also seem to echo the way the evolution of a city is reflected in its final shape. These images are exquisitely detailed, and have very distinctive shapes and patterns, compositions that have been described as like the aerial view of a city at night.

Mark Bradford in front of his work

Bradford’s huge collages are often compared to Modernist abstract painting. Yet his is an abstraction that comes more from the urban sprawl of his native Los Angeles than from art history: As Mark Bradford has stated, ‘There is an abstraction that happens in the city... a dislocation of reality when you have the Mexican taqueria next to the black wig shop across the street from the Korean nail shop’.

Los Moscos

Bradford's huge collage Los Moscos (2006) explores the structures of a city, its histories, cultures and economic systems. (The title translates as ‘the flies’, a derogatory term applied to migrant labourers in the San Francisco Bay area.) Composed from the signage of South Central LA, an area colonised by the entertainment industry, the work consists of hundreds of fragments of torn printed paper – posters, flyers, packaging – found by the artist in the streets surrounding his studio. Words and phrases appear and disappear throughout the picture surface, they emerge in a way analogous to the textural change as you walk through the area, the embedded materials that are revealed by sanding back the layers, capture the area’s cultural and historical multiplicity. 

Remnants of found posters and billboards, graffitied stencils and logos, and hairdresser’s permanent endpapers he’s collected from his other profession as a stylist, are all embedded into his dense surfaces. In this way personal history is intertwined with the on-going cultural interchange of commerce and social interaction. An old post-it note from an office computer screen, finding itself butted up against the remains of an AIDS awareness poster, that is itself sandwiched between a torn left over political slogan and a poster advert for the latest Mercedes car.

The devil is beating his wife

In 'The Devil is Beating His Wife', Bradford consolidates all these materials into a gridded composition of cultural cross-referencing. Built up on plywood, his 'painterly' collages can also be appreciated for their sensuous qualities, which can range from silky and skin-like to oily and singed.

Bradford uses a process of machine-sanding layers of street posters to make his abstract surfaces. However looking more closely at these surfaces made me think that he is also either rubbing into them bitumen or linseed oil, or changing the materials he is using to cement the layers together, so that as he sands down his collaged pieces alternative textual surfaces are revealed. When you walk up to these surfaces of Bradford's images, various secondary patterns come into view. The process of sanding through layers or peeling them off can reveal order in the chaos of collected street detritus. Sometimes these surfaces can look cellular and at other times they look as if they are star systems ripped out of a rubbish tip. He states: “I go between the micro and the macro, where the macro is policy change the micro is the local level. I go between helping one person and trying to change the policy.” The patterns of his images, echoing the patterns of his exchanges in his local community.

But he doesn't just make large abstract images. He is expanding his practice into a social direction by working with foster children and other at-risk communities. Two weeks before his Venice Biennial official opening, Bradford helped launch a new pop-up retail center in Venice stocked with handiwork by local female prisoners and a limited-edition bag he designed. He funded the pop-up, all proceeds from which go to Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a non-profit organisation that employs incarcerated women. “I don’t know if we’ve seen someone with the dexterity of De Kooning who is also committed to activism,” Christopher Bedford, co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion, told the LA Times, when the U.S. State Department announced that Bradford would represent the country. “That is unique to art,” he continued, echoing a widely-held artworld assumption that abstractionists are typically not socially conscientious.

Mark Bradford

Speak Birdman

The image 'Speak Birdman' is map-like in its structure, the 'Bird-man' in the title hovering over the city and seeing it as a vibrant map of pulsating life. The surfaces of images like these are wonderful to explore as you get close to them. I'm never sure as to how they are made, but they do suggest that he builds his collages up into a very thick initial layer, which is then I suspect 'filled' with some sort of grouting or filler, something that will harden as well as stick all the layers together; but what that is I'm not sure, you would have to do lots of testing to find out, but that in itself might lead to some interesting new surface possibilities. Once solid and dry he must use everything from an industrial sander to hand scrapers and simply pulling off layers with his hands to shape the surface and it's these processes that make the work so beautiful, so unexpected and which ties his work into a history of modernism. Modernism's concerns with surface and flatness are both embedded into the conceptual framework within which his work is theorised. Warhol's work was able to theorised as being both flat and about images. Warhol's work was 'painted' using silkscreen print processes and therefore all painterly gestures were rendered flat, his images were not illustrational because they were actual physical manifestations of photographic processes. Bradford's collages contain the 'matter' from which the city is made and therefore he is both able to represent a type of abstraction, one that is very flat, (but thick) and represent the all over compositional devices of artists like Jackson Pollock. He is able to hold within the work real content about the city, the collage elements and advance the cause of Modernism by demonstrating how colour and surface can be yet again re-energised and another formal game added to the Modernist project. Perhaps above all he has been able to restore an idea of the beautiful to the cannon of contemporary art. 

 Mark Bradford video 1


 Mark Bradford video 2

Mark Bradford video 3

Mark Bradford talks about his use of paper about halfway through this video

Collage: Part one


Collage: part two

Collage: part three

Collage part five

Articulated collage