But Bradford, 61, is an abstract artist. That there is nothing “pure” about his abstraction — that it is a notably capacious variety of the genre, incorporating snippets of text and occasional figurative imagery — doesn’t alter the fact that the look of his work, its colors, shapes, scale and textures, is what undergirds its success.
Soft, like worn velvet. Threadbare, like a sofa spilling its stuffing. Exposed, like a stripped-back billboard. Singed, scalded, soaked, like a warehouse after a midnight fire. Richly colored, monochromatic. Expansive, congested. Coherent, unkempt.
As with love, the meanings come. But they come later. What comes first is the works’ visual and physical impact. This has never been clearer than at the Los Angeles-based artist’s latest show at Hauser & Wirth — his first in New York in five years. In several cavernous rooms across two floors hang 11 massive works made with characteristically cheap materials (colored paper, caulk, rope, paint), alchemically worked and reworked into pulsing, bronchial veins of aesthetic gold.
Some, such as “Manifest Destiny,” powerfully extend themes familiar from earlier Bradford works, using urban posters and stenciled letters to evoke economic exploitation and civic breakdown. Others, including “Jungle Jungle” and “Fire Fire,” resemble richly colored tapestries and convincingly unify scattered figurative elements into their overall abstract design. The show’s most ravishing works are the diptych “Two Faced,” which is almost indescribably rich in its complex coloration, and “Johnny the Jaguar,” a thicket of rich pinks and golds out of which emerges, near the bottom (but ingeniously camouflaged!), a panting jaguar.
The large upstairs gallery contains an enlarged representation of Bradford himself, based on a 3D scan of his body, lying on the floor in a “death drop,” a pose popularized in gay ballroom culture. The sculpture is in poignant dialogue with a video one floor down — looping Super 8 footage of the artist, age 12, acting in a home movie, pretending to be struck by a bullet. I loved the way both playful irony and a profoundly political sense of mortality nest within the overt simplicity of these two self-portraits.
But Bradford’s “paintings” — which are in fact dense, vertically oriented accumulations of sticky, soaked, fibrous matter subjected to erasure, accumulation, overwriting and more erasure — are what make him such a spellbinding artist.
Since Bradford became a contemporary art superstar (he was featured on “60 Minutes” in late 2021, and he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2017), much of the talk about him has focused on his work’s social and political content and on his philanthropic work. The two distinct phenomena have almost become one, leading to the coining of a new term to describe what Bradford does: “social abstraction.” That is, abstract art — and an abstract artist — engaged with society and politics.
I’m not sure a new term was completely necessary. But the idea of social abstraction is a retort to the silent rebuke that has haunted abstract art for more than 50 years, ever since Philip Guston switched from his delicate, gauzy, postwar abstractions to his clunky, figurative, politically engaged art of the 1970s.
Guston was worried about the implications of painting pictures of nothing in a context of injustice and violence. He memorably articulated abstraction’s moral crisis: “What kind of man am I,” he wrote, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” How, in other words, can I continue to make art that ignores the political urgencies of my time?
Bradford’s simple, powerful answer? I won’t ignore it. Over the years, with works that deliberately resemble ravaged maps, charts, lists of place names and billboards, his abstractions have touched on everything from the AIDS crisis and the fallout from Hurricane Katrina to the “Great Migration” and economic devastation in parts of south-central Los Angeles.
At the same time — and admirably — Bradford has maintained a sense of art’s modest capacity to make change in the real world. So even as his art has touched on big issues, he has used income earned from a supercharged art market to help others find solutions to social problems. His philanthropic work has supported, among other things, foster youths transitioning into adulthood, a pragmatic program offering vital assistance.
All the while, Bradford has sensed the importance for contemporary audiences of attaching stories to his work. The Hauser & Wirth show, according to a gallery statement, has an overarching narrative hinging on “displacement and the predatory forces that feed on populations driven into motion by crisis.” The jaguar in “Johnny the Jaguar” is a symbol of these predatory forces. “Johnny was AIDS,” according to Bradford. “Johnny was the KKK. Johnny was God, the preacher in the pulpit telling me I was sinful.”
Some of the other works have titles that invoke Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional Mississippi setting for all but three of William Faulkner’s novels. Others allude to Blackdom, a Black homesteader colony in New Mexico in the early decades of the 20th century. And a series of works evokes the scope and scale of the Great Migration, one of 20th-century America’s most compelling national stories.
There is some irony in all this. Amputating art’s storytelling function used to be the whole point of abstraction. Abstract painting had strong spiritual and utopian origins, but its creation was most deeply inspired by music. Its originators wanted to escape their subservience to real-world referents and let shape and color act as a language all their own, like musical notes.
Today, however, the spiritual and utopian rhetoric around early-20th-century abstraction no longer carries weight. The existential philosophy of the postwar abstract expressionists is widely scoffed at. And the language of formalist criticism, as pioneered by Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg, is all but dead. People have kept on making abstract art. But lacking, like jazz, a clear purpose beyond enhancing interior ambiance, the pursuit has struggled to connect with the zeitgeist.
Bradford has helped resuscitate abstraction. He has given it new heft, urgency and relevance. But he has achieved this primarily not, I submit, by recourse to the slightly flimsy concept of “social abstraction.” He has done it by developing techniques and materials that dramatically expand abstraction’s possibilities, both formal and poetic.
His inventions haven’t come out of nowhere. They have emerged over many years of experimentation, and after close study of earlier breakthroughs by the likes of Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Norman Lewis, Jack Whitten, Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villeglé.
Bradford’s art expresses himself, his history and his surroundings. And that very obviously includes his experiences as a Black man and a gay man. The stories are real, they matter, they’re part of the work. But there is also something improvisational and, at times, disarmingly nonchalant about the way Bradford invokes certain more tangential narratives. “I just kind of made it up in my own phantasmagorical way,” he said in a recent interview with Sherrilyn Ifill.
The medium is not always the message. But Bradford’s use of colored paper is key. Paper, he recently said, is “unforgiving, opaque. You have to beat it into revealing what’s underneath.” It has, in other words, a built-in dialectic of revelation and concealment. That dialectic is part of Bradford; it’s part of all of us. To be mistaken for someone you are not (or not quite, or not all the time) can be liberating.
Even as they multiply and thicken, the stories Bradford attaches to his work, while not exactly decoys, protect the freedom that attracted him to abstraction in the first place: the freedom to remain uncategorized; to do as he pleases; to speak, to care, to love but also to be silent and unreachable; to go on making “pictures of nothing” (as William Hazlitt described J.M.W. Turner’s late, proto-abstract seascapes); and to escape, like smoke, the prisons of identity.
In that sense Bradford is, perhaps, our era’s Jackson Pollock, an artist who was never not making his own escape. There is, perhaps, just a little more substance to Bradford.
Mark Bradford: You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice Through July 28 at Hauser & Wirth, New York. hauserwirth.com.
