[REVIEW] Mark Bradford's 'Be Strong Boquan' at Hauser & Wirth Addresses Eighties Club Culture, the AIDS Epidemic and Cultural Taboos Autre Magazine

11/24/2015 [REVIEW] Mark Bradford's 'Be Strong Boquan' at Hauser & Wirth Addresses Eighties Club Culture, the AIDS Epidemic and Cultural Taboos Autre Magazine
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[REVIEW] MARK
BRADFORD'S 'BE
STRONG BOQUAN' AT
HAUSER & WIRTH
ADDRESSES EIGHTIES
CLUB CULTURE, THE
AIDS EPIDEMIC AND
CULTURAL TABOOS
November 16, 2015
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text by Adam Lehrer
The color palette used by Los Angeles-based abstract
painter Mark Bradford for the work in his stunning new
show at Hauser & Wirth, Be Strong Boquan, is different
than the palette that comes to mind when I think of his
other work. While some paintings make strong use of the
dark and austere colors most associated with his work,
there are also bright pinks and yellows. Despite the
vivaciousness of these colors, there is still a physical
menace that emanates through them. Walking through
the exhibit, I was reminded of that indescribable feeling
that courses through your body just before you realize
that you are full-blown sick: goosebumps on your arms,
chills running through your spine, the inability to make a
fist, a feeling of faintness.
The feeling elicited was not at all unintentional on the
part of Bradford. Bradford has the uncanny ability to filter
societal woes through abstracted images. In Be Strong
Boquan, Bradford tackles issues personally important to
him: society’s false representation of the queer identity,
the brutality of the 1990s race riots in Los Angeles, and
the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. The show seems
emblematic of the fear of the deterioration of the body,
and the militant efforts to destroy the bacteria and
disease that infect the body.
Despite the heavy subject matter of his work, Bradford’s
persona is anything but dark. Standing at about 6 ft. 5,
Bradford has no problem talking about his work. In fact,
he revels in it, and loves gauging the reactions of those
that observe and examine it. He did just this the day of
his opening. Walking a group of collectors, admirers, and
journalists through the exhibition, Bradford illuminated on
some of his conceptual choices for the show. These are
some things I learned about Bradford.
Bradford harkened back to 1980s club culture for the
show, capturing the exuberance of the scene, contrasted
with the AIDS epidemic that was slowly, and later quickly,
killing off the peoples that made the scene exuberant in
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the first place:
“In this show, maybe I was thinking about this space
being the Roxy a little bit, but then I was also thinking
about nightlife and what was on the horizon as far as the
epidemic that was on the horizon, as in the AIDS
epidemic. Interestingly enough, Hauser and Wirth kept all
the roller skates from the Roxy and they shipped them all
to my studio about a year ago and I kind of hung them
from all the rafters and would roller skate around to find
something abstracted in the social.”
When you walk into the exhibition, the first thing you will
hear is the song‘Grateful’ by 1980s Disco performer
Sylvester that is accompanying the piece ‘Deimos,’ a
video installation. It gives you the feeling of the
substances just starting to wear off and the lights going
out at the club: the possibilities of the night coming to a
screeching halt. Of course this is amplified when you
realize the rest of the exhibition deals with possibility
snuffed out by disease. Fitting then that the exuberant
track is being performed by a musician who tragically lost
his boyfriends to AIDS, neglected to get treatment
himself out of devastation, and slowly saw his own body
deteriorate.
“The song is ‘Grateful’ by Sylvester, I think Sylvester was
in many ways ahead of its time. Anybody who lived
through that time is grateful, I feel, just to be here.”
Though the exhibit does not explicitly depict the human
body, the body is ominously present in each of the
paintings and the sculpture.
“The marks that you see are cells that I looked at under a
microscope that just became marks. The show does
have to do with the body even though the body isn’t
present. It’s more like a ghost body.”
He is interested in the time it can take for a monumental
social plague, such as AIDS, for people to come together
and speak out against the plague in a social
setting. “With the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s, it was pure
dying. It was almost political, God came down and
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brought this disease and it just wiped everyone out. In
the ‘90s it started to get political. I’m interested in the
military terms we use when it comes to things that
deteriorate and infect the body. “We have to wipe this
disease out.”
He has become interested in processes that involve
waiting and time, particularly his stain paintings that
make use of tracing:
“I used to work at a hair salon, and I used to trace the
prices on the wall. Sometimes I reduce my palette. It’s
like when you have a heavy meal so next you want to eat
a salad and drink some tea. Sometimes I feel like my
work can be so heady, so material. So I’ve been doing
the stain paintings, where I use a reduced palette and it
can become all about the trace and all about the times.
You do the paintings in about a two-hour time. As this
aged black paper, you pull it off, and it leaves traces. I
like that even though it’s a very reduced palette, it has a
lot of depth.”
The final piece in the exhibition, ‘Spiderman’ is a play on
the black comedy best exemplified by Eddie Murphy in
the 1980s. Murphy and other comedians often used
homosexuality as joke material. The piece features video
and the voice of an unseen comedian, a transgendered
man. The piece forces us to confront our complicity in
hate speech by laughing about dark jokes concerning
Eazy E’s homosexuality (“Only Eazy-E can make AIDS
gangsta,” says the unseen comedian) and the black
community’s battle with AIDS. Bradford is interested in
comedy’s ability to offend while simultaneously getting
people to talk about uncomfortable issues.
“I remember watching Eddie Murphy’s ‘Delirious’ in the
early 1980s. I wasn’t really interested in Eddie Murphy,
really. But I’m always interested in the developing of the
social contract. Like the “n” word. It is a part of the social
contract now, but there was a time when it wasn’t taboo.
When does something stop being taboo? I remember
Eddie Murphy making jokes, “faggot look at my ass.”
Everybody was just laughing! I thought if this is the early
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part of the AIDS epidemic, and this is now part of the
social contract. What I often find is I like to turn comedy
around. Like making the man the butt of the joke. I
wanted to address social change. I do think there are
things that just aren’t appropriate, like calling black
women bitches and ho’s.”
Bradford’s work is compelling in its aesthetic beauty
contrasted by its conceptual heaviness. He doesn’t know
how to make art any other way.
“I’ve seen a lot of hard stuff in my life, and I’ve seen a lot
of beautiful stuff in my life.”
Adam Lehrer is a writer,
journalist, and art and
fashion critic based in
New York City. On top of
being Autre’s fashion and
art correspondent, he is
also a regular contributor
to Forbes Magazine. His
unique interests in punk,
hip hop, skateboarding
and subculture have
given him a distinctive,
discerning eye and voice
in the world of culture, et
al. Oh, and he also loves
The Sopranos. Follow
him on
Instagram: @adam102287
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[REVIEW] Mark Bradford's 'Be Strong Boquan' at Hauser & Wirth Addresses Eighties Club Culture, the AIDS Epidemic and Cultural Taboos Autre Magazine

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