LOS ANGELES — Mark Bradford, one of America’s most acclaimed painters, could not figure out what to put in the grand rotunda.
This
artist, who is set to represent his country in May at the 2017 Venice
Biennale, found an unusual way of working long-distance. In a warehouse
in South Los Angeles, not far from where he grew up, he created a
full-size model of the Biennale’s United States pavilion, a stately
building with echoes of Monticello. Then he spent the last year testing out his ideas in it.
“This
a Jeffersonian-type space, something you see in state capitols,” he
said, pointing to its central dome. “I wanted it to feel like a ruin,
like we went into a governmental building and started shaking the
rotunda and the plaster started falling off. Our rage made the plaster
fall off the walls.”
With
a nod to its Palladian architecture, Mr. Bradford often calls his
pavilion the White House. As in: “I wanted to bring the White House to
me.”
Sitting on a crate, his long legs extended, Mr. Bradford, 55, was
confronting a pressing concern beyond exhibition plans: How can he
represent the United States abroad at a time when — as a black, gay man
and a self-proclaimed “liberal and progressive thinker” — he no longer
feels represented by his own government.
The broad social changes in America — from the police violence that
ignited the Black Lives Matter movement to the messages of hate that he
feels were unleashed by the November election — fueled a personal sense
of crisis that permeates much of his forthcoming show in Venice, “Tomorrow Is Another Day.”
He
remembered being invited to the Obama White House with other artists
two years ago and feeling that “our voices mattered — fast-forward, and
now they’re talking about cutting the N.E.A.,” he said, shaking his
head.
And,
aware of his own status as an international art star with
million-dollar sales, he expressed concern for those more vulnerable.
“I felt like a lot of the progress we’ve made to be inclusive, to make
sure young little trans kids are safe, was gone in the blink of an eye,”
he said. “Making this body of work became very, very emotional for me. I
felt I was making it in a house that was burning.”
Mr.
Bradford’s replica, Doric columns and all, gave him a chance to try to
bring something of the Giardini, the Venice park that hosts the national
pavilions, to South Los Angeles and vice versa.
In
the rotunda, he first tried lining the walls with silver paper. Then he
installed a colorful “waterfall” sculpture — a cascade of paper strips.
Finally,
nine or 10 versions in, he realized he needed to “keep it hot, keep it
urgent.” He plastered the walls with what looks like a decaying mural: a
gritty collage of fragmented images from cellphone ads scavenged from
the neighborhood, which target the friends and family of prison inmates.
“Receive calls on your cellphone from jail,” they say — in exchange for
what turn out to be predatory rates.
He
calls the merchant posters “parasitic” for the way they profit from
misfortune. And he sees his work as “a reminder: Don’t forget there are
people in need.”
Judging
from the mock pavilion, the Venice show could be his most urgent
exhibition to date. Inside, his roughly elegant abstract paintings have
erupted into sculpture, and he is pushing the limit of how much personal
and political weight an abstract canvas can actually carry.
Mr. Bradford built his full-size replica of the United States Pavilion in a South Los Angeles warehouse.
Credit
Joshua White 
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