Painting After All: A Conversation with Mark Bradford

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Mark Bradford has emerged on the global stage as one of the most visible and successful painters of his generation thanks to his trademark canvasses built of multi-layered paper—often sourced from posters and billboards in South Central Los Angeles—that suggest the historical, the cartographic, and the architectural while remaining resolutely abstract. At the same time that he has been credited with a vital reanimation of painting, earning him honors such as a 2009 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, Bradford has continued to work in a range of media including video, installation, and sculpture, all of which reflect his long-standing interest in simultaneously building bridges between and deconstructing notions of the common and the cultured. Recently, he has embarked on an ambitious new project, the Art and Practice Foundation, which aims to forward that same imperative in the social sphere, providing a space where international artists and local youth in foster care might exchange ideas about contemporary culture. On January 14, 2014, I spoke with Bradford at his former studio in Leimert Park, a 10,000 square foot space that will be the hub of the Art and Practice cultural complex. Our conversation explored many aspects of his capacious art, life, and work, though we consistently returned to his investment in painting and the worlds it makes possible.

COPELAND:

I’ve often been struck by the richness and allusiveness of your titles: Niagara, James Brown Is Dead, and one of my recent favorites, With That Ass, They Won’t Look at Your Eyes.¹ The affective resonance of such names can be poignant and punning, bearing an oblique or a direct relation to the objects themselves. I wonder how you arrive at these titles, as well as how you imagine them relating to the material construction of the works? In other words, how do you think about your objects and their names being read together and the kind of cross references they create, particularly given that the titles often evoke black history and its imbrication with modern art and culture?

BRADFORD:

When I first started making work, I never thought much about titles, especially being a painter. I did notice how an artist like Agnes Martin would make very minimal paintings with very strong feminist titles, allowing her to redirect the gaze from modernism as such to social relationships. But that kind of move really was only in the back of my head; early on, most of my titles came from popular culture or music,

Art and Practice Foundation, interior and exterior rendering

Image courtesy of Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford, James Brown Is Dead (2007)

Image courtesy of Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford, Los Moscos (2004)

Image courtesy of Mark Bradford

particularly hip hop. Eventually, I started rethinking hip hop, especially those strands of it that I felt held very unhealthy attitudes toward the black female body, since I didn’t know if I wanted to be part of that discourse. Nowadays, the way that I usually work is that I come up with an idea and then begin to research. For instance, I’m working on a suite of paintings for an upcoming show all based around Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers, so I went on Amazon and got a lot of art history books and texts on that artist and that period. I find that usually when I’m reading at night and I’m working during the day, there will be texts that jump out at me and I can extrapolate something from the text that then becomes a title. There’s also an emotional relationship to the work and to the text that I’m reading, so through the naming and the form of the works—I use paper instead of just old paint—I want the viewer to think more broadly, to think about the social implications of the material, and maybe the social implications of the...