Mark Bradford

http://www.art21.org/videos/preview-mark-bradford-in-season-4-of-art-in-the-twenty-first-century-2007

My practice is décollage and collage at the same time. Décollage: I take it away; collage: I immediately add it right back. It’s almost like a rhythm. I’m a builder and a demolisher. I put up so I can tear down. I’m a speculator and a developer. In archaeological terms, I excavate and I build at the same time. As a child I actually wanted to be an archaeologist, so I would dig in my backyard. When I was six, I was convinced that I could probably find a dinosaur bone there, but after about a week I realized that it was only in particular places that you find dinosaur bones. It was not like my mother stopped me. She was very good about allowing me to do, as she called them, “projects.”

I never knew what the postmodern condition was before I went to art school. I never knew about Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Cornel West, or Henry Louis Gates, Jr. But even though I had never read those types of writings, I lived with people who were living those types of lives. I remember coming home and telling my mother, “You know, you’re postmodern.” She’d say, “Oh, that’s sweet.”

When I started thinking and reading about the postmodern condition—or fluidity—I saw it as taking independence. It was revolutionary for me that you could put things together based on your desire for them to be together. Not because they were politically correct, not because they are culturally comfortable or sociologically safe, but because you decide they’re together. If you decide those tennis shoes and those polka-dot socks are together, they’re together because you say so. I had always done that, but I was aware that it wasn’t always the “right” thing to do—not because I didn’t feel it was right, but because I was made aware by some people (in society, say, or in school) that that behavior was not correct. So, my mother and I would go to the store, and I’d get a G.I. Joe and a Barbie, and I’d bring them to school when we had Show and Tell. “So, which one is yours?” said the teacher. “Both,” I said. “Well, that’s not going to work,” she said. “Why not,” I asked. And she answered, “Well, what does your mother think about this?” I was always supported in the domestic realm, and I was always strong about standing up for myself, but there were still struggles in my life. Reading about these kinds of conditions made me realize it was about independence, about doing your own thing. And that’s a state of mind. It’s not an artwork or a book. It’s a state of mind. Fluidity, juxtapositions, cultural borrowing—they’ve all been going on for centuries. The only authenticity there is what I put together.

Who are Cornell West and Bell Hooks and Michel Foucault? What do they have to say about postmodernity, deconstruction, and race?

art and design

 Moholy Nagy
Laxzio Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian artist, a professor in the Bauhaus school. A painter and a photographer. The Bauhaus school is a very important place in the minds of designers.

Although it is hard to define art, it is not difficult to define its context: Exhibition spaces, galleries, museums, art magazines, art history, theory etc.

According to Experimental Jetset, a small independent graphic design firm in Amsterdam, striving toward a synthesis of art and design was quite an elementary characteristic of early modernism, possibly its most defining one. Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky were driven by the idea to unite art and the everyday , not as an added decorative layer but as something fully integrated into modern life.

Then there is Cy Twombly, influential friend of photographer Sally Mann.

and Turner and something I saw on the sidewalk











Experimental Jetset

Ultraviolet

David Whyte The Faces at Braga

THE FACES AT BRAGA

In monastery darkness
by the light of one flashlight
the old shrine room waits in silence.

While above the door
we see the terrible figure,
fierce eyes demanding, "Will you step through?"

And the old monk leads us,
bent back nudging blackness
prayer beads in the hand that beckons.

We light the butter lamps
and bow, eyes blinking in the
pungent smoke, look up without a word,

see faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above,
eye lines wrinkled in the hand held light.

Such love in solid wood!
Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence
they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.

Engulfed by the past
they have been neglected, but through
smoke and darkness they are like the flowers

we have seen growing
through the dust of eroded slopes,
their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.

Carved in devotion
their eyes have softened through age
and their mouths curve through delight of the carver's hand.

If only our own faces
would allow the invisible carver's hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.

If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,

we would smile too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone.

When we fight with our failing
we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.

And as we fight
our eyes are hooded with grief
and our mouths are dry with pain.

If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carver's hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers

feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.

Our faces would fall away
until we, growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration

to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver's hands.

Art and Social Justice 

Use an ART21 segment to ask questions, create a discussion and provoke an art making response to a socially relevant current issue involving race, class, oppression, feminism, politics, violence, or injustice. This presentation will include the viewing of the segment, but is not a report on the artist, even though the artist’s work will be evident and some facts about the artist may be important.   Your focus is on asking difficult questions and facilitation challenging conversations about important social issues. Include some kind of making activity. You may do a mix of ART21 and other media.

In addition to the presentation/discussion/experience about the artist, you will create a work of art that is influenced by this artist in some way.  It could emulate the style, be a direct or indirect copy, or an interpretation of one of the artist’s pieces. It should share the same big ideas, concerns, imagery or themes of your artist. 

Presentations Due  September 29