Mark Bradford in "Paradox" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

MARK BRADFORD: You know 
what? Let’s just put it up.

SPEAKER: Then we adjust it later.

BRADFORD: Yeah, and if it’s a 
problem, all your fault. (LAUGHS)

Never on me. (LAUGHS)

SPEAKER: How do you do this 
because these were advertisements?

BRADFORD: Yeah, on the fences.

BRADFORD: I only take the advertisements 
that have to do businesses.

After the riot, so many buildings were burnt 
down that they put this fencing around it

and so everybody starts to use 
the fencing for these signs.

But you see the same things 
all the time in the ghetto.

Cash. For your houses. It’s 
like cash, we buy your houses.

I like this one.

Immigration papers in 30 days.

How is this possible?

Locks for hair. Black people and hair.

I take twine, you know, string, 
glue, all down around it

and then I take the billboard paper 
and I turn it on the back side,

not the good side, but the back side.

I lay it on and let it dry and 
it like...and then I sand it.

And some, I don’t, you 
can’t...the language is all gone,

a little bit gone, sometimes it works better.

Just...yeah, it’s just information in the city.

You see it all the time.

Found some...oh that’s nice.

Uh-huh. A head.

Put that over there.

My practice is both collage 
and décollage at the same time.

How would that look?

Décollage. I take it away, and then 
collage I immediately add it right back.

Sometimes you have to not put stuff on top.

You got to retrieve something 
that’s under the bottom.

Good. Where’s that S? I saved 
it. Make sure the color is right.

The line of my making or my art 
practice goes back to my childhood,

but it’s not an art background, 
it’s a making background.

Me making the sign of the prices 
in my mother’s hair salon,

I was in charge of that so I would do calligraphy.

I learned how to...teach…

I taught myself calligraphy 
so I could make them very…

very fancy on the wall.

So the hand...the hand was very early in my work.

Signage, texts, but not perfect.

It always got a little slimmer at the end 
because I wouldn’t measure it properly.

But it worked out. She always 
said oh next time, it’s okay.

When I raise the prices 
you’ll have another chance.

Yeah, the make...I’ve always been a maker.

In DADDY, DADDY, DADDY I was 
using materials that had memory.

Memory from working in the hair salon, 
and I was using a lot of end papers.

End papers are used when 
you are doing a permanent.

I was also thinking a lot about music at the time.

Music fragments, so DADDY, DADDY, 
DADDY kind of came out of that.

BLACK VENUS was one of the map-like paintings.

I was really thinking of mapmaking 
and also the history of abstraction

because in some ways I look at maps 
as sort of these abstract grids.

Baldwin Hills is where the sort of black, 
wealthy people of Los Angeles live.

So I went driving around and came to an address,

and I made up an imaginary 
story about who lived there.

I actually Googled and Google Mapped this address.

Then it just became more and 
more pushed into my imagination.

I love soccer, and I decided 
that I wanted to craft

my own sort of imaginary league of players.

GAME RECOGNIZES GAME,

it was the largest piece 
actually to date that I had made,

and I love the fragile, heroicness of it.

And it was all constructed of paper.

It was the first time that I put a 
painting and a sculpture in proximity,

and I was trying to sort 
of activate a third thing.

LOS MOSCOS was really me directly wanting 
to deal with issues of abstraction,

modernism, abstract expressionism,

it really kind of exploded for me.

People say that they’re collages, I 
just think that they’re paintings,

you know it’s on canvas, it’s a painting.

At CalArts, what I did 
discover was bodies of ideas.

I never knew what a postmodern condition was,

I never heard of it.

I never knew about Foucault 
and bell hooks and Cornel West.

I never read those type of writings,

but I lived with people who 
were living those type of lives

so I remember coming home and telling my mother,

oh you know you’re postmodern.

She said oh, that’s sweet.

So I...so I felt like I discovered friends 
in these books, these writers, I felt…

I discovered these revolutionary people

that were doing these really revolutionary things,

so it was the writings that got me

really, really, really, really enthusiastic.

I wanted to create the feeling of being 
outdoors and indoors at the same time.

As you walk in, one side is 
just covered with information.

On the opposite you have the 
reflection of these merchant posters

in the sort of mirror corridor.

You have this sort of funhouse effect.

This type of advertising which 
mainly you see on cyclone fencing,

has a relationship to the body.

It’s about the conditions that are going on at

that particular moment at 
that particular location.

You have “100% Roaches Gone” next 
to “Are you a licensed barber?”

but if you put “My child says daddy” right next to

“How to open a sober living 
facility” and “Lifetime Indian hair”

it’s really a story that starts to unfold.

As you move down this corridor,

you come into a smaller room and you hear music.

(MUSIC)

You hear people celebrating.

There are two videos on opposite walls.

One video is of the Martin Luther 
King Day Parade in Los Angeles.

And you see people who are 
remembering this political figure.

The other is of a marketplace in Egypt.

This actual night market is only for Muslims.

They’re on opposing walls but 
they are facing each other.

I go to the parade every year.

Certain details, you start to see 
over and over and over and over again.

Such as the policing.

There’s as much policing 
of the parade as a parade.

Every frame and it’s not that 
I tried to put police in it,

they were just in every frame.

To see so many black bodies in 
public space, it’s always political.

Always a political condition.

On the Cairo side, there was no police,

there was no policing,

these were just families enjoying themselves.

But the Muslim body has become so politically 
charged that the space therefore is charged.

They’re both politicized sites.

But at the same time they’re 
about celebration as well.

I noticed that my art practice 
is very detail, labor intensive

and I think that that’s a way of slowing 
myself down so that I can hear myself think,

so that I can hear the voices 
a little bit more quiet,

so I can hear maybe the decision that might 
come through that’s a little less large.

That quieter voice has sometimes the more 
interesting idea, if I can get to it.

I still don’t know how this is going to hang.

I still don’t even know…

to me, I like it with the tacks in it,

but well, maybe bright colored tacks.

I’m not sure how it’s going to hang.

I just thought to put it in 
a box, send it down there,

stack it up, and put it in a box.

Making this piece for Brazil.

And now it’s Brazil.

I mean you’re making a 
piece in your studio in L.A.

and you’re thinking about Brazil, you know?

You never been to Brazil.

BRADFORD: That’s it?

SPEAKER: Yeah.

BRADFORD: Well, I think 
it...I think it kind of works.

Ta da! (LAUGHS)

PRACTICE was a video that 
I did a couple years ago,

and I wanted to do a video 
of me playing basketball.

But I wanted to create a condition, a struggle.

I would create this huge antebellum 
hoop skirt out of a Lakers uniform.

My goal was to focus on dribbling 
the basketball and making the shot,

but obviously when you have an 
antebellum skirt fanning out

about four feet around you, 
that's going to be difficult.

And it was an incredibly windy day, one of those

Santa Anna, southern California, windy days

where everything was blowing.

What it created was this billowing of the wind.

It would catch underneath the dress.

It became almost like I was floating.

And I would fall and get up.

I would make the shot sometimes and 
I wouldn’t and I would always get up.

It was about roadblocks on every level,

cultural, gender, racial, 
regardless that they’re there.

It is important to continue.

You keep going.

You keep going and so that’s what it was.

And I made the hoop.

I made the shot.

I always make the shot.

Sometimes it takes me a 
little longer to get there.

But I always make the shot.