Mark Bradford Exhibition in Boston - Review - NYTimes.com

Tracking Racial Identity, But Not Defined by It
By HOLLAND COTTER

BOSTON — A spin of the marketing wheel has brought abstract painting back into the spotlight, and much of the new stuff turns out to be rewrapped old stuff. At the same time there are enough artists seriously rethinking existing models that very basic definitions — What does abstract mean? What qualifies as painting? — are in flux. Mark Bradford, a 49-year-old Californian, is one of these rethinkers, and a lean, bright 10-year survey of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art here gives a sense of what he’s been up to.

Mr. Bradford first gained national attention in 2001 in “Freestyle,” the self-designated “post-black,” new-talent survey at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He was one of the oldest people in the show, but his art looked fresh, and it came with an intriguing history. He had a graduate degree from the California Institute of the Arts, known for its theory-intensive curriculum. But he supported himself as a stylist in his mother’s beauty salon in South Central Los Angeles and used hairdressing supplies — curling paper, gels — in his art, the large abstract collages that he called paintings.

One of the pictures that was in the Studio Museum show, “Enter and Exit the New Negro,” opens this retrospective. With its all-over linear grid and monochromatic silver-gray tone, it immediately brings to mind Agnes Martin’s graphite-line-and-wash paintings. But Mr. Bradford used neither paint nor drawing to make it. Instead he composed a grid from many small sheets of translucent, dark-edged paper arranged in rows on canvas. The paper is the kind used to wrap strands of hair for perms.

He bought it in bulk and lightly singed stacks of it with a blowtorch to get the dark edges, which form the grid lines. He then glued the sheets in place with gel, occasionally pausing to digitally photograph the grid-in-progress. He printed the photos and glued them to the canvas too, to create an effect of deep layering.

The title he chose added yet another unorthodox layer in the form of political content. In 1925 the African-American philosopher Alain Locke, a shaper of the Harlem Renaissance, told black artists to advance themselves by adopting modernist forms that would move them beyond racial stereotypes. Mr. Bradford’s art takes Locke’s idea and flips it around by creating modernist abstraction from everyday materials of black culture.

Soon afterward, in search of more painterly effects, Mr. Bradford began to experiment with color. For a 2002 picture, “Strawberry,” he scavenged advertising posters, most of them printed in Day-Glo orange and yellow, from the poor, crime-plagued neighborhood around his mother’s shop. He cut the posters into scraps, glued them down, and laid the translucent papers on top, so the colors showed from behind. The paintings radiated a kind of ethereal warmth even though everything about them was straight from the city street, including the title. Strawberry is slang for a female crack addict who supports her habit through prostitution.

Mr. Bradford’s art is of and about cities, the main one being Los Angeles, where he grew up black and gay in an era dominated by hip-hop, identity politics and AIDS. He lived in South Central until he was 11, then in a largely white neighborhood, and finally returned to where he started from, and stayed. After his mother retired, he turned the beauty salon into the studio that he still uses.

Los Angeles appears in his art primarily in the form of the quick-and-dirty printed posters that he routinely harvests in South Central. Most are ads for credit cleanup businesses, or DNA testing to establish paternity, or other services directly geared to social and economic realities of a particular place and time. Long after he stopped using the perm end papers, he continued to cover his surfaces with cut, torn and shredded poster paper, each scrap the equivalent of a paint stroke.

In a large piece called “Scorched Earth” hundreds of tiny cut-up papers are carefully lined side by side to suggest the buildings or blocks of a city seen in aerial view. Much of the center of the city, however, is bare of such structures, and ash black as if smoldering. And, in an addition rare for this artist, the top third of the piece, representing the sky, is covered with paint, fiery red.

Mr. Bradford made “Scorched Earth” in 2006 as a response to the American war in Iraq. But the precise reference he had in mind was to another war, one that had occurred almost a century earlier, in 1921, on United States turf, when mobs of white men torched an African-American neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., after rumors spread of an assault on a white woman. Technically “Scorched Earth” is abstract. Nothing in it actually identifies a historical event, but everything speaks of cities, violence and fire.

Several other pieces in this show were inspired by a more recent urban catastrophe, the devastation of New Orleans by natural disaster and governmental neglect. In 2008 Mr. Bradford spent time there working on a temporary public sculpture — an ark built from scrap materials in the flood-flattened Lower Ninth Ward — commissioned for the city’s new contemporary-art biennial, Prospect 1.

The only evidence of the sculpture in the retrospective comes in the video “Across Canal,” which documents its construction. But the sight of what amounted to an immense three-dimensional collage being fitted and hammered together gives a sense of how labor intensive Mr. Bradford’s art is, and how formally versatile his career has been.

The retrospective has several modest-size sculptures that tend to be fairly literal in their political allusions. Race is the unmistakable subject of “Crow,” and “Kobe I Got Your Back” plays with codes of masculinity. It consists of a basketball covered in black papier-mâché in which a string is embedded in what looks like a fissure, as if the ball were about to split open.

By far the strongest and wittiest of the nonpainting works, though, is the 2005 video “Niagara.” It’s based on a single famous sequence in the 1953 film of that name, the long-held shot of Marilyn Monroe walking into the distance as the camera focuses on her undulating posterior. Mr. Bradford’s Marilyn equivalent is a South Central neighbor, Melvin, who, wearing marigold-colored shorts, walks away from the camera and down the street with a wild, hip-swinging strut. In a departure from the 1953 model, however, Melvin’s body is pressed up against the camera when the sequence starts. And he is filmed in slow motion, which transforms his strut into a sensuous sashay.

But it is painting — or Mr. Bradford’s collagist’s version of it — with all the touching, shaping and editing that clearly engages him most fully. And he does not stand still with it. The most recent pieces, dated to this year, are both some of his densest and his most reductive. Made from multiple layers of inked, bleached and sanded newsprint, they have no apparent narrative subtext; they seem to be entirely about the material allure of their surfaces, alternately bumpy with raised relief and as smooth as watered silk.

Of course “pure” abstraction carries narratives of its own, about making choices and why, as Mr. Bradford is fully aware. If one had to point to bodies of historical painting with which his art is closely aligned, African-American abstraction of the 1960s and ’70s would certainly be one. I’m thinking of Alma Thomas’s pictures composed of blocks of color and infused with references to both dressmaking and urban life, and of the sewn, pieced and stained painting-sculpture hybrids of Al Loving, Sam Gilliam and Joe Overstreet, with sources in tailoring and quilting.

I’m thinking of the ways these painters and others, who wanted to avoid being trapped in didacticism — political, ethnic or formal — managed to incorporate their lives and histories into abstraction, often in symbolic ways. Jack Whitten used an Afro comb to texture his surfaces; Ed Clark pushed paint around with a broom; William T. Williams accompanied a solo show of abstract paintings with a jazz soundtrack.

In the 1960s cultural identity and abstract painting were still widely viewed as irreconcilable. As a result many of those abstract artists were insufficiently honored. Today such categorical barriers have pretty much evaporated. Mr. Bradford’s retrospective — originally organized by Christopher Bedford for Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and coordinated in Boston by Helen Molesworth, chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art — is an eloquent demonstration of that.

It is also an instructive example of what “post-black” art means: art that can choose to refer to racial identity — or to class, or gender, or aestheticism, or daily life — or choose not to. Mr. Bradford has opted to tackle the full spectrum of subjects, which is what makes his abstraction feel deep. And he does so to stay on the move, trying this, trying that, hands on, hands off, which keeps his art light and fleet.

Mark Bradford Exhibition in Boston - Review - NYTimes.com.