"I think that the idea of accretion or accumulation is no different than modern day Rome, where archaeologists have found layers of ancient cities. In my work, often the viewer can only see the top layer which is not translucent, but the weight and the energy of what’s underneath there will pulsate."
In a captivating process of collage and décollage, Mark Bradford produces enrapturing and explosive abstract compositions through which he simultaneously creates profound remappings of urban space and invokes the gesture of Abstract Expressionism. Articulated by bold lacerations emanating across the canvas, exposing areas of vibrant pink, blue, ochre and black, I don’t care if he’s Captain America from 2018 is a superb exemplar of Bradford’s highly celebrated practice. Rooted in an exploration of American urban spaces and the city grid, Bradford has evolved his technique to encompass a highly personal methodology of layering repurposed paper materials found on the city streets and then carving back into his accumulations in an act of archeological reclamation. Borrowing various kinds of urban detritus and drawing inspiration from real city maps, Bradford explores urban space as inherently subjective and responsive to the real people that they encode. Created during a t.mes in which Bradford was exploring notions of the American hero and antihero through archetypes in comics, I don’t care if he is Captain America derives from the artist’s mature body of work and epitomizes Bradford’s use of abstraction to explore larger sociopolitical ideas.
Through his practice, Bradford primarily contends with the spaces in and around South Central Los Angeles, where the artist spent the his formative years. Growing up in his mother’s Leimert Park hair shop exposed Bradford to a culture of creativity and making from an early age. When the artist arrived at CalArts in the 1990s, he sought to develop his own pioneering language of abstraction, distinct from that of the dominant figures in the post-war period. Today, he is known for fashioning his own works with locational specificity and links to his racial, socioeconomic, and geographic background. First employing end papers, the waxy paper sheets that hairdressers place between a hot iron or curler and the client’s hair to create waves or other styles, Bradford developed a distinctive method of making that would become foundational to his career. The end papers operated as a segue for him to other forms of found paper and printed materials, which, too, would add lived human experience into his practice.
" …Historically abstraction has always belonged to the canon. It’s still the biggest export this country has made: big white men of the 1950s; Jackson Pollock… I said, ‘Wait a minute, now. We didn’t even get a piece of that pie.’ But I didn’t want abstraction that was inward looking; I wanted abstraction that looked out at the social and political landscape…"
A vivid exemplar of Bradford’s highly textured, dynamic compositions, the present work simultaneously conveys the rigidity of the city grid and the explosive reality of its lived urban experience. Bold lacerations stretch across the entirety of this large-scale composition, creating a lattice-like network. The cleaved surface exposes the highly physical methods of Bradford’s practice. Through his interventions, vibrant blues, pinks, black, ochre, and white rise to the surface. Viewing the composition firsthand, the viewer is transported into an aerial perspective, as if above the network of a city. Descended from the grids created with end papers in his works of the early 2000s, the present work is representative of the recent developments in the artist’s process-driven output, which include varied materials beyond end papers. Through his process, Bradford undertakes a kind of archeological exploration, exposing earlier layers of the artwork’s history in a manner referential to the cumulative histories of American cities. Through this process of excavation, Bradford allows for the oldest layers of the work to interact with the more superficial ones – invoking the way that the present circumstances of a place are acutely informed by its past.
Bradford’s resulting compositions are cartographic – reminiscent of the gridded city landscape of Los Angeles, the vein-like roads and clearly articulated zones that define its urban sprawl. Simultaneously, the textural complexity and physicality of Bradford’s compositions also evoke the actual undulating topography of a landscape or cityscape. While in some ways Bradford recreates maps with his compositions, he also questions their objectively and what they may inadvertently or purposefully conceal in their simplicity. In a 2018 interview, the artist asserted: “Maps are nothing but the biggest lies on the planet. They’re only physical manifestations of power.” (Mark Bradford in conversation with Anita Hill in: Mark Bradford, New York, 2018, p. 27) Many of Bradford’s most seminal works respond to moments of heightened racial tensions or instances of racial violence in the American urban landscape.
As with many works in the artist’s corpus of abstraction, the title, I don’t care if he's Captain America, is evocative, prompting the viewer to consider an archetypal American cartoon hero in relation to the composition. Sardonically making reference to a comic figure whose iconography – a white man clad in garish and militaristic red, white, and blue attire – propounds stereotypes of American exceptionalism, Bradford expands his exploration of space and division into the broader American landscape. The artist mocks the patriotic zeal that the cartoon reflects and, in dialogue with his cartographic composition, questions who is included and excluded from space of America that the character champions. In the decade prior to 2018, three blockbuster movies on the superhero had been released, likely influencing American media and advertising that would comprise Los Angeles’s urban detritus.
“Maps are nothing but the biggest lies on the planet. They’re only physical manifestations of power.”
Though the artist has cited the profound influence of the abstract expressionists of post-war America and Europe, he keenly asserts that his own practice is not so apolitical. Through his distinctive form of so-called ‘social abstraction,’ Bradford explores complex ideas of racial segregation, identity, and sexuality. While indexing the dynamism and gesture of abstract expressionism, Bradford also contends with the structural and lived inequities of urban space that he has experienced firsthand. Bradford’s practice was boldly foreshadowed by the work of Norman Lewis (1909-1979) and Jack Whitten (1939-2018), who, in their own t.mes s, revolutionized the possibilities of abstraction, inserting messages of social justice into the vernacular. Having taken up that mantle, Bradford’s work has been met by widespread acclaim. In 2017, the artist was chosen to represent the United States at the 57th Venice Biennale. His triumphant exhibition, Tomorrow is Another Day, spurred an even greater rise in his critical and commercial admiration, showcasing his work on a global stage. Created one year following the artist’s lionized exposition at the Biennale, the present work derives from a particularly salient moment in the artist’s mature career, demonstrative of his far reaching influence today.
