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?