Introducing Mark Bradford.

The devil is beating his wife, 2003.

Across 110th street, 2008

The work of this artist inspired me to start making large scale collages mixing printed advertisements with paint. He therefore deserves an introduction.
Mark is based in the United States (where else?).  In particular, in Los Angeles.
His monumental compositions mix billboard advertisements with paint, resembling giant maps. His materials are found on the street, making his work a kind of street art made by a studio based artist. His relationship to the french 'Decollage' group (Francois Dufrene, Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella, Jacques de la Villegle) is apparent, although in Mark's case the work is composed so that it becomes something other than merely a record of the process of the accumulation and destruction of urban posters. Not reality, but a transformation of reality is what he is interested in.
In the resulting compositions, what I find particularly fascinating is the look of a city struck by natural disaster.

Much has been written about his work. For example, the racial issues raised or the mixing of popular culture with high art. What is interesting for me however, is considering his work in the light of what  Frederic Jameson defines as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in his  "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism".
In this text, Jameson argues for a kind of art that will raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern. This is in response to the increasing alienation felt in the postmodern city, where people are unable to map in their heads the space in which they live in , or  the sociopolitical totality that organizes and shapes this urban space as an experience.
Moreover, this results in a difficulty to connect private experience to the experience of the city and the difficulty to internalize or make one's own, the problems of our cities or the information about our world provided by intermediary authorities, such as the politicians and the media.
We are not actors in the space we live in, and therefore we are alienated from this space. Disalienation, for Jameson, means "the practical reconquest of a sense of place, plus the construction or reconstruction of place. An articulated ensemble which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories".
Works like Bradfrord's, work towards disalienation, if only in play.  This happens because by collecting, reassembling and restructuring mass media images which make up the public communication of the city, this information is personalized. By appropriation and creation, the role of the passive city-dweller who cannot act to change his/her circumstances is overturned in the artist's case and questioned for everyone.


Mark Bradford's site is really interesting. I have particularly enjoyed the option of zooming in to his works.
http://www.pinocchioisonfire.org/

Jameson, F. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991. Available in

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm

 Finally, some more images

Noah's Third Day, 2007.

Orbit, 2007.

May Heaven preserve you from Dangers and Assassins,