“I like to walk through the city and find details and then abstract them and make them my own. I’m not speaking for a community or trying to make a sociopolitical point. At the end, it’s my mapping. My subjectivity.”
Imbued with rich cultural memory, Mark Bradford’s A Thousand Daddies thoughtfully considers personhood within the Los Angeles area and beyond. Executed in 2008, A Thousand Daddies is a remarkable example from Bradford’s Merchant Posters, a series of décollages and works on paper in which the artist draws conceptual inspiration from local advertising signs he collects from his South Central Los Angeles neighborhood. Advertising child custody services, the signs in the present work reflect times of personal hardship, offering a window into the immense challenges facing urban communities. Carefully arranged in an expansive grid, Bradford manipulates the surface of each sign by repeatedly adding and removing elements, such as layers of acrylic paint and heavily collaged weathered paper. What remains are traces of each poster’s text, hovering like flickers beneath the surface. Featuring text advertising a hotline for fathers to gain custody of their children, the work reads “My child says, Daddy. Child custody. Divorce, visitation. 866-77-Daddy.” Repeated 60 times, each rendered in different colors and material applications, Bradford forces the viewer to look more closely. Bradford’s labor intensive and process-oriented works that address timely and urgent social and political issues such as A Thousand Daddies have earned him a reputation as one of the most important American artists working today.
In the mid-2000s, Bradford expanded the focus of his work to examine the broader economic and racial geographies of the communities in which he lived. Retrospectively commenting on the occasion of Bradford’s major 2010-2012 traveling exhibition, Robert Storr identified three foundational subjects of abstract art that Bradford has addressed in a highly personal way: “Art itself; the city; and utopia” (Robert Storr, "And what I assume you shall see…," in Exh. Cat., Ohio, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University (and travelling), Mark Bradford, 2010, p. 59). The Merchant Poster paintings that Bradford began in 2006 stand amongst his most iconic, taking inspiration from advertisements hung and pasted informally around inner-city areas. Using posters, pamphlets and bulletins from the streets of the Leimert Park area that he himself occupied, Bradford recapitulates the tradition of décollage. Drawing from a revolutionary technical legacy inaugurated by the Dadaist collages of Kurt Schwitters; the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; the collage paintings of Robert Rauschenberg; and later by Mimmo Rotella and the Nouveau Réalisme movement, Bradford turns away from the mainstream newspapers and movie posters to harness the expedient metamorphosis of a specific, local consumer culture.
" …Historically abstraction has always belonged to the canon. It’s still the biggest export this country has made: big white men of the 1950s; Jackson Pollock… I said, ‘Wait a minute, now. We didn’t even get a piece of that pie.’ But I didn’t want abstraction that was inward looking; I wanted abstraction that looked out at the social and political landscape…"
A Thousand Daddies confronts the viewer with intricate layers of billboard paper, collage and paint that have been sanded down until they reveal just fragments of the original phrases. Displayed in a monumental grid, the work mirrors those sites where such ads are typically found within urban environments. In heavily working the surfaces of the signs and reimagining their content and imagery, Bradford pushes each image further towards abstraction and largely removes the original purpose of advertising a service. Each sign’s original utility partially disintegrates, leaving behind remnants of the message in the background, heavily disguised, yet eternally present. In the glimpses of truncated texts, Bradford constructs a cacophonous conversation of an ordinary yet diverse neighborhood economy, functioning away from sanitized chain stores and uniform commercial establishments. It would seem that the artist crafts a vision for an alternative utopia based on grass root networks. Yet, as the artist explains, these signs also signal the fragility of such a concept and the vulnerability of a tight sense of community in the face of homogenized consumer capitalism: “these signs are very clearly speaking to the needs of the people in the community who are passing them by every day. It’s not like popular culture, where it’s all globalized. This is very localized. And what’s fascinating about it is that it changes so rapidly…Now, in two or three years in the community, there are going to be other needs and other parasitic systems that are going to come and take advantage of them. It’s in a constant state of crisis here, a constant state of fluidity” (The artist cited in Ernest Hardy, "Border Crossings," in Exh. Cat., Aspen, Aspen Art Museum, Mark Bradford: Merchant Posters, 2010, p. 9)
"I think that the idea of accretion or accumulation is no different than modern day Rome, where archaeologists have found layers of ancient cities. In my work, often the viewer can only see the top layer which is not translucent, but the weight and the energy of what’s underneath there will pulsate."
A Thousand Daddies elevates us from the street view of local merchant posters, providing a celestial map that physically overwhelms the viewer in its vast urban topography. In a labor-intensive process of tearing and overlaying, Bradford delineates zones like veins that run through and over the surface to articulate an aerial view of structures and passages that disrupt the web of images below. Marrying geometric abstraction and organic forms, the artist furiously overwrites, erases, and reveals both word and image through successive gestural layering. His result is a labyrinthine web of collaged paper that offers an investigative metaphor for the regenerative vibrancy of metropolitan life.
