New York Times: Venice Biennale: Mark Bradford’s concern: How can he represent the United States when he no longer feels represented by his government?

The artist Mark Bradford in Venice earlier this month

(Filippo Massellani for the New York Times)

Mr. Bradford built his  full-size replica of the United States Pavilion in a South Los Angeles warehouse. Credit Joshua White

A view of the rotunda replica, which Mr. Bradford has treated like a ruin with images from cellphone ads. Credit Joshua White

 

The “fourth gallery” in the replica features paintings created by sanding layers of paper. Credit Joshua White 

 

The New York Times 

Sunday, April 30, 2017

By Jori Finkel

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.