Larne Abse Gogarty Feeling and Form in ’s American Pavilion

I. Introduction yellow tentacles of Oracle (2017, fig. 5), which ap- pear to overrun the central room over the Pavil- Mark Bradford’s Tomorrow is Another Day ex- ion, and the lyrical abstraction of 105194 (2016, hibition for the American Pavilion at the fig. 6). Before exiting, a short video entitledNi - Biennale 2017 immediately confronted viewers agara (2015, fig. 6) showed Bradford’s then neigh- with an enormous sculpture entitled Spoiled bour, a young black man named Melvin, walk- Foot (2016, fig. 1). After entering the Pavilion ing down the street in Los Angeles. Dressed in by a side door rather than the central portico, a white vest, yellow baseball shorts, white socks visitors were compelled to squeeze around the pulled high and black sneakers, Melvin treads edges of this tactile, monstrous lump which a path studded with litter and the same poster- seemed to emerge from the ceiling. Made up advertisements that compose Bradford’s works, of hundreds of posters tacked together, peeling from the visible stretches of Spoiled Foot to the off and distressed at their edges, Spoiled Foot is more tangible use of these in earlier works such predominantly black, also containing stretches as his Merchant Posters series. Rather than mar- of pale blue, white, crimson, orange and pink, keting aspirational commodities, the advertise- repeatedly studded with orange tacks. Its shape ments Bradford works with sell credit, paternity and texture is reminiscent of a ‘fatberg’: those tests, bedbug removal, immigration advice, legal huge subterranean objects occupying London’s services, and predatory house-purchase schemes aging sewers. Composed of fat, sanitary tow- (fig. 7). els, baby wipes, condoms, nappies and similar In Niagara, the perspective of the camera ex- non-compostable items found in sewer systems, acerbates the incline of the hill Melvin walks these monsters of human detritus have become down, and he eventually strolls out of sight. His a recent topic of fascination in the British press.1 yellow shorts match the posters and discarded Though built up by posters rather than sanitary cups littering the street, and he swings his arms, items and thus taking on a more colourful and walking with an ambling pleasure that solidifies far less grotesque hue, the resonance with the the reference made by the work’s title – Niagara – fatberg lies in the buried, yet eruptive aspect that to the 1953 film noir starring Marilyn Monroe. I will argue is central to how Bradford’s work en- Niagara is a film now best known for Monroe’s gages with histories of modernism. sashaying out of sight, the longest walk-away In the next room of the Pavilion, another captured on camera at the point of its release. seemingly putrefying, formless, yellow and black Melvin’s walk is thus an image of Los Angeles sculpture entitled Medusa (fig. 2) occupied the as the creation ground for cinema’s myths, as centre of the room, surrounded by a contrasting much as it is a representation of contemporary suite of serene purple, violet, and black gridded urban neglect, rendered in the litter, cracked works named after sirens: Thelxiepeia, Leucosia paving slabs and posters decorating his path. and Raidne (2016) (figs. 2–4). The dynamic be- This tension between fantasy and dispossession tween integration and wholeness, as well as dis- was pulled taut through Bradford’s Pavilion, integration and wreckage continued throughout moving from modernist grids and expressionist the exhibition, oscillating between the black and skeins to referencing the social world in which

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 519

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM these works are made. Bradford’s work therefore Following the renewal of a debate on expres- presents a means to rethink the social currencies sionism within communist circles after the initi- of art along lines that exceed the split between ation of the Popular Front in 1935, Bloch entered realism and abstraction that originated within into the fray in 1938.5 He stressed that Lukács had the inter-war avant-gardes, and has continued to largely relied on postscripts, introductions and shape critical theories of art. newspaper articles, but skirted around paint- A crucial debate in establishing this cleav- ing, music and most expressionist poetry in age took place in the 1930s, when Ernst Bloch building his 1934 argument. Through this, Bloch clashed with Georg Lukács over the meaning of contended that Lukács’s analysis “produces expressionism, with their discussion centred on only a concept of concepts, an essay on essays how artistic form could contest, or indeed sup- and even lesser pieces”,6 adding up to a polemic port the growth of fascism and the devastations that relied on the mechanistic concept of reflec- wreaked by capitalism. In 1934, Lukács wrote tion employed in dialectical materialism.7 In that expressionism is marked by an “extraordi- large part, their disagreement revolved around nary poverty of content [which] stands in crying the question of cultural heritage, with Bloch’s contrast to the pretension of its delivery, to the interest in expressionism partly resting upon exaggerated and over-intense subjective emo- the way it moved beyond the classical Western tionalism of its presentation.”2 For Lukács, the paradigm and instead drew on a diverse range failings of German expressionism partly lay in of sources including folk culture, primitivism, its bohemianism, its drive to mark itself out as non-Western art and art made by the mentally an alternative to bourgeois life, while all the time ill.8 For Bloch, expressionism’s recourse to other accommodating and feeding the world it claims traditions and cultures resonated with his con- to step away from, in its move from the battle- cept of history as a multi-temporal dialectic, the field of class struggle towards the “private realm means by which he had analysed the growth of of morality”.3 Lukács situated expressionism as fascism in 1932. Through Bloch’s theory of non- the aesthetic form paralleling Lebensphilosophie synchronous contradictions, he examined the in philosophy, and viewed these movements as uneven experiences and responses to capitalist politically cogent with the anti-war, reformist development and rationalisation, distinguishing ideology of the Independent Social Democratic between their objective and subjective form. Ob- Party of Germany (USPD). Writing in 1934 and jective non-synchronous contradictions were the looking back on the immediately preceding actual existence of older forms of life, modes of period, Lukács positioned all three – expres- production and belief systems that contradicted sionism, Lebensphilosophie and the USPD – as present-day, capitalist society while subjective symptoms of German imperialism, which in his non-synchronous contradictions described the analysis formed the bedrock of fascism. While response to this – ‘accumulated rage’ – fanta- he did not accuse expressionism of being in- sies of a lost social wholeness that supported the herently fascistic and acknowledged its uneven growth of fascism.9 But as Bloch also stressed, place for the National Socialists, Lukács wrote there was another form of non-synchrony that that its proponents “shared uncritically and sought to deliver a “subversive-utopian […] life without resistance in the ideological decay of the which never received fulfilment in any age”.10 imperialist bourgeoisie” meaning “their creative This romantic anti-capitalism, which guided method needed no distortion to be pressed into Bloch’s analysis of expressionism, was criticised the service of fascist demagogy, of the unity of by Lukács, who saw it as rendering cultural heri- decadence and regression”.4 tage into “a heap of lifeless objects in which one

520 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM 1 Installation view of Mark Bradford, Spoiled Foot (detail), 2016, mixed media on canvas, lumber, luan sheeting, and drywall, ­dimensions variable, part of: Mark Bradford, Tomorrow Is Another Day. Venice, Biennale 2017, U.S. Pavilion

can rummage around at will […] in accordance Bloch, reality was discontinuous, with the spread with the exigencies of the moment”.11 of capitalism producing multiple non-synchro- For Lukács, expressionism left the fate of re- nous contradictions that forms such as montage alism hanging in the balance. Where expres- could articulate.14 sionism was abstract, irrational and subjective, While rehearsing this almost century-old de- realism was capable of penetrating “the laws bate may seem an unlikely way to begin an essay governing objective reality” and uncovering “the on a contemporary artist, it assists in showing deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately per- how Bradford’s work in the American Pavil- ceptible network of relationships that go to make ion holds a number of the strategies Bloch and up society”.12 Conversely, for Bloch, it was pre- Lukács debated in tension: expressionist feeling cisely expressionism’s recourse to the emotive, and abstract form as well as realist representa- the irrational, to montage and abstraction that tions of social relations. In its mixing of these was most capable of exploiting “the real fissures forms and registers, Bradford’s American Pavil- in surface inter-relations and to discover the new ion thus reveals, once again, the fallaciousness of in their crevices”.13 Far more than being only a cleaving the social from abstraction, something quibble about expressionism, their split rested the artist has sought to override in describing upon a disagreement about totality. For Lukács, his practice as “social abstraction”, a term sum- the reality of capitalism produced a coherent to- marised by Bradford as “abstract art with a social tality, which realism could de-reify, whereas for or political context clinging to the edges”.15 As

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 521

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM during a period where we have seen the steady growth of fascism and nationalism.

II. Social Abstraction, or Fungibility and the Grid

Bradford’s category of ‘social abstraction’ is called up through his titling of works, which since at least the early 2000s suggestively weave a tapestry of references. In a breakthrough review by Holland Cotter from 2001, the critic recog- nises Bradford’s On a Clear Day I Can Usually See All the Way to Watts (2001) as a reference to ’s On a Clear Day print series (1973).16 As Bradford explains, such references partly function as “sugar cubes for curators”, leaving a trail that integrates his work within a modernist lineage, whilst also emphasising the social through the reference to Watts, a poor Af- rican American neighbourhood in Los Angeles which remains best known for the 1965 uprising.17 The ‘social’ in Bradford’s social abstraction is also rendered through his choice of materi- 2 Installation view of Mark Bradford, Tomorrow Is Another als, with his major artistic development coming Day. Venice, Biennale 2017, U.S. Pavilion In the foreground: Medusa, 2016, acrylic paint, paper, when he started to use hairdressers’ endpapers in rope, caulk, dimensions variable; in the background: his work. A third-generation hairdresser, Brad- Raidne, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 304.8 × 304.8 cm ford worked at his mother’s salon in South Cen- tral Los Angeles for many years, before alight- ing on the possibility of using permanent wave already suggested, Bradford’s American Pavilion endpapers as a material in his artwork; these are oscillates between integration and disintegra- rectangular, tissue-thin strips of paper that are tion, wreckage and repair, totality and fracture. used to wrap curls when doing a permanent wave. Through exploring this dynamic more closely, Their transparent and flimsy quality led Bradford I want to suggest that the split between realism to experiment with using hair dye on the sur- and abstraction too often leaves the violence at face and burning the edges, before gridding the the heart of the modern enlightenment proj- endpapers onto the canvas. In part an economic ect – which in fact binds these two categories – choice because of their cheapness, Bradford also unquestioned. In order to do this, I draw on remarks that he began using the permanent end- scholarship from the field of black studies, which papers for their capacity to denote a social fabric, assists in rethinking those central debates from a reasoning that also guides his use of posters, the 1930s and how they might bear on Brad- pulled off billboards in low-income, black neigh- ford’s social abstraction as working through the bourhoods in South Central Los Angeles. In legacies of high abstraction and expressionism, both the endpaper and poster works, Bradford

522 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM 3 Installation view of Mark Bradford, Tomorrow Is Another Day. Venice, Biennale 2017, U.S. Pavilion Left to right: Leucosia, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 259.1 × 365.8 cm; Medusa (cf. fig. 2); Raidne (cf. fig. 2)

tends to finish the canvas by using a sander to picture plane, undulating from more transparent smooth out and reveal the palimpsest-like lay- squares to opaque stretches. The bottom right ers. He describes this finishing process as akin section lightens up, as if the squares gradually to combing out a client’s hair after a wave, dye or ran out of ink. Through the repeated lines, the other treatment has been given.18 canvas appears like a frieze of text, or a squared In the siren suite displayed in the American Pa- notebook waiting to be filled. Thelxiepeia is the vilion, Raidne (2017), Leucosia (2016), and Thelx- most violet work, while Raidne lurches towards iepeia (2016), all mark a return to Bradford’s use a duller mauve, with frequent passages that are of the endpapers for the first time in thirteen heavily sanded over and thus flatter; the endpa- years. Of different sizes and shapes, these three pers completely flush with the canvas. In Leuco- canvases share the same gridded appearance sia, the tones are closer to indigo, and the more through the rows of endpapers, which have been heavily sanded sections appear luminous, as if coated in dye ranging from inky black tones the transparency of the endpapers allows light to through to purple-reddish tones and blueish-vi- pour in from behind. Leucosia is also the most olet hues. In Thelxiepeia, the grid is mostly regu- fractious, with an uneven white strip cutting lar, stretching across the horizontal length of the through the penultimate part of the canvas, be-

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 523

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM 4 Installation view of Mark Bradford, Tomorrow Is Another Day. Venice, Biennale 2017, U.S. Pavilion Left to right: Thelxiepeia, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 243.8 × 548.6 cm; Medusa (cf. fig. 2)

fore one more line of unbroken endpapers meets and the determination of the blues as tragedy”.21 the edge of the picture plane. Bradford describes Through this, Moten is concerned with the dy- how he “love[s] a cut that goes through matter. A namic between singularity and totality, and in painting is matter and the lines cut into it.”19 exploring Holiday’s manipulation of the cut he Bradford’s cut is the method by which his can- draws on the Russian avant-garde director Sergei vases put the sociality of their abstraction in high Eisenstein theorization and practice of overtonal relief. The cut fractures and reveals what the grid montage.22 In Moten’s discussion, these modes rests upon: the materials that denote the social. share a drive towards a “nonexclusive totality”, a As such, I see his cuts as akin to Fred Moten’s quality reminiscent of Bloch’s arguments against reading of Billie Holiday’s voice as a “cut” that Lukács’ theorisation of totality as closed, rather stands as “unprecedented communication”.20 than open.23 As Moten writes, Holiday’s “grained voice” cuts Eisenstein developed his theory of overtonal words: dividing, filling, cancelling and abound- montage as part of his editing practice and out- ing them, with this “cut” as unprecedented com- lined five types of montage: metric, rhythmic, munication standing as excessive, but illuminat- tonal, overtonal and intellectual, with the or- ing. Moten pays particular attention to Holiday’s der of these categories representing an ascent recordings of her improvisations of the blues, towards an ever-greater complexity. Overtonal addressing the relationship between improvisa- montage is a combination of metric, rhythmic tion and the “overdetermination of the recording and tonal montage that produces the capacity

524 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM for multiple associations, implications and con- sequences on behalf of the viewer, transcend- ing the separation between those categories to produce a new totality. For Moten, what is at stake in the nonexclusive totality of Eisenstein’s overtonal montage, and indeed Holiday’s “cut”, is “feeling” – a word he takes to denote a fleet- ing, contradictory proliferation of meaning that emerges through “opposition and relation of cut and suture”.24 This “feeling” denotes that which cannot be contained, “an abundance that ac- crues especially at moments such as these when things sound ‘edgy, maybe garbled at points’, when ‘ears literally burn with what the words don’t manage to say’”.25 Something, as in Brad- ford’s description of how the social “clings to the edges”, is happening at the margins in the feeling evoked by Holiday’s cut, spilling over, contra- dicting the whole, yet at the same time forming an organising principle. As Annette Michelson explains, overtonal montage extends its principle to “all parameters 26 5 Installation view of Mark Bradford, Oracle (detail), 2017, susceptible to organization”, and we can relate mixed media on canvas, dimensions variable, part of: this to Bradford’s statement that “the grid saved Mark Bradford, Tomorrow Is Another Day. Venice, my life” because it formed a “safe, organized Biennale 2017, U.S. Pavilion unit”.27 Yet, like most modernist grids, Brad- ford’s do much more than produce order and organisation. In Rosalind Krauss’s analysis, the the canvas with a sander to smooth out the sur- development and dominance of the grid within face. Yet, while smoothing out, Bradford’s sand- twentieth century art rested upon its “mythic ing simultaneously reveals the layers of the work, power”, which suggests “materialism (or some- foregrounding the materiality of the endpapers times science, or logic) […] at the same time it and the sociality that contradicts the grid’s flight provides us with a relief into belief (or illusion, into the realm of spirit. or fiction)”.28 The contradiction of the spiritual Building upon Krauss’s canonical reading, and the material within the grid was articu- and writing about Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in lated in how artists such as Kazimir Malevich Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974– 1975), and Piet Mondrian saw the form as a “staircase Steve Edwards develops what Krauss describes to the universal”, while it was also about noth- as a “centrifugal reading of the grid”, that is, one ing other than the collapse of the material and which moves outwards and views the form as aesthetic planes of the painting’s surface.29 In infinitely extendable and as compelling knowl- Krauss’s argument, the grid’s mythic status lies edge of the world beyond its bounds.30 In writing in the fact that it does not dissolve or resolve this about Rosler’s gridded series of twenty-one black contradiction, but rather covers over it, a quality and white photographs of the Bowery, which that might be related to Bradford’s finishing of are paired with poetic snatches of text, Edwards

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 525

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM suggests that the interchangeable and infinitely The entrance through the side door of the extendable qualities of the grid can be under- Pavilion is the most obvious way the visitor is stood through Karl Marx’s analysis of the fun- directed towards reading the history of transat- gible qualities of the commodity.31 However, this lantic slavery alongside the history of modern- should not be taken to displace the ‘spirit’ side of ism. Yet, unlike the associative open totality of the grid, but rather can be understood through the room with the siren suite and Medusa, the those passages in Marx describing the ‘won- shift of the entranceway leans heavily upon how drous’, capricious and even fantastical quality of art’s social currency so often rests upon its ca- the commodity form.32 In Edwards’ analysis, we pacity to invoke empathy. In Saidiya Hartman’s should understand the commodity as the root of discussion of the interplay between empathy, the grid’s mythic function, the idea that inspired abolitionist campaigns to end slavery and the this modernist trope.33 Yet, there’s one more fungibility of the slave, she begins by recount- direction in which we can push the analysis of ing the 1837 letters of John Rankin to his brother the grid, as it appears in Bradford’s siren suite. who was a slaveholder. In these epistles, Rankin Set within the American Pavilion, this proposal tries to persuade his brother of the evils of slav- takes on another dimension, as the grid comes ery by writing that his “flighty imagination” had to suggest the history of the transatlantic slave allowed him to think of himself and his family trade. as slaves, which in turn precipitated his empa- The American Pavilion was opened in 1930 thy for those in bondage. Striving to produce in the Giardini, designed by William Adams a shared sense of horror through detailing the Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich, ‘gentle- cruelty of “the lash” administered by a “morose man architects’ who modelled the building af- and capricious master”, but substituting the ter Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in slave for himself and his family, Rankin employs Charlottesville, Virginia. Jefferson’s Monticello this standard mode of empathetic identifica- was inspired by Andrea Palladio’s neoclassicism, tion to try and persuade his brother to heed the which adhered to Roman architectural and de- calls of abolitionists.35 Yet, as Hartman describes, sign principles. In making visitors enter through Rankin actually “begins to feel for himself rather the side door of the Pavilion, Bradford invokes than for those whom this exercise in imagination the historically occluded slave quarters of Monti- is presumably designed to reach”.36 This means cello, the passageways calling up what Frederick the ease of Rankin’s empathetic identification is Douglass described as “the blood stained gate, “as much due to his good intentions and heart- the entrance to the hell of slavery”.34 Here, inside felt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the Monticello-like pavilion, the fungibility of the captive body”.37 As Hartman clarifies, “the the grid’s component parts, built up through the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive endpapers in Bradford’s siren suite, thus takes body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to on new meaning. If the modernist grid, as Ed- the projections of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, wards suggests, denotes the fungibility of the and values”.38 commodity, the presence of this form within the Bradford’s recourse to the grid’s mythic power Jeffersonian architecture of the American Pavil- within the neoclassical confines of the American ion should direct us towards thinking not only of pavilion, surrounding the disordered Medusa coins or yards of linen, but of the enslaved as one (which I will come onto in more detail shortly), of the foundational commodities for the growth mark out a dialectical tension where the white- and development of capitalism and the Atlantic washed rotunda has always secreted the history world. of slavery, the sugar cubes of modernist referen-

526 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM 6 Installation view of Mark Bradford, Tomorrow Is Another Day. Venice, Biennale 2017, U.S. Pavilion Left to right: Niagara, 2005, video, colour, no sound, 3:17 min; 105194, 2016, mixed media on canvas, 322.6 × 365.8 cm tiality always soaked in the blood of the planta- test the planned removal of the statue of Con- tion. Yet, as visitors enter the side door to the federate General, Robert E. Lee from a public Monticello-like pavilion, informed by the bro- park in Charlottesville. In a short documentary, chure and the pavilion’s attendants that this calls a woman made the following statement after a up the passages of slavery, this forms a trickier white supremacist ploughed his vehicle through element within Bradford’s exhibition, unfold- the crowd, leaving one dead and many injured: ing directly onto what Hartman describes as the “This is the face of supremacy. This is what we “difficulty and slipperiness of empathy”.39 What deal with everyday being African American. is at stake here is a mode of passage that calls up And this has always been the reality of Charlot- slavery as a distinct historical phenomenon one tesville. You can’t stand in one corner of this might vicariously imagine, almost as a form of city and not look at the master sitting on top of performative historical re-enactment. Monticello.”40 But of course these histories are ongoing. If This statement seeks to emphasise that the not exceptional in the fact that the President violence of white supremacy that was made so is a white supremacist, recent U.S. history has stark on that day is not the exception but the brought the racial violence at the heart of Amer- rule, a quality that also runs through the his- ican life to the fore yet again. On August 12th, tory of modernism, with the recent X-ray anal- 2017, anti-fascist demonstrators clashed with ysis of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) white supremacists that had assembled to pro- evidencing this so directly as to feel crude. The

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 527

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM X-ray revealed an inscription referring to a rac- do the terms ‘social abstraction’ or ‘materialist ist joke authored by the writer and humourist painting’ act as critical and curatorial prophylac- Alphonse Allais in 1897, that captioned a black tics against the possible criticism that Bradford’s monochrome “Combat de nègres dans une cave success lies in the decorative qualities abstract pendant la nuit” (“Negroes fighting in a cave at painting can assume? Contra a Lukácsean com- night”). As the writer and artist Hannah Black plaint about abstraction’s lack of content, I see describes, the rupturing moment of Malevich’s this fate of abstract painting – it’s market success Black Square is therefore at the same time a taw- and so-called “zombie formalism” – as merely dry joke about “the illegibility of blackness”.41 As providing more evidence for the inherent social- Black elaborates, this means the painting that ity of abstraction because it lays bare the perpet- stands as an Ur-form for the artistic negation ual limit in how the art world calls up the ‘social’, of narrative and representation, winds up back the ‘real’ and the ‘authentic’ to designate mar- with representation, that is, the representation ginality, poverty, and racial difference, stopping of the negation of certain subjects.42 While for short of considering how the social world of the Malevich, the square formed a “refuge” freeing market is inseparable from the reproduction of art from “the dead weight of the real world”, this such oppression. While Bradford’s painting may “break for freedom (for art), this place of refuge call up the ‘social’ and ‘materialism’ through its (for the artist), is founded on or overlaid on top choice of materials, the preceding discussion of of black invisibility, itself unfree”.43 This story the grid should direct us to considering how ab- about Malevich’s black square, and Black’s take straction’s claims of autonomy were always para- on the matter, is not introduced here to delete doxical. the history of modernism because of its irrevo- cable racism, but rather to insist on not allow- ing the grid to once more cover over the para- III. Form, Feeling, Reform dox between spirit and materialism, social and abstraction, but instead to reckon with the force This question of autonomy leads me onto another and meaning of its mythic status. element of Bradford’s work for the Venice Bien- At best, this is what is at stake in Bradford’s nale 2017 that was not visible in the Pavilion, but category of ‘social abstraction’. However, along has surely informed the critical legitimacy ‘social with that categorisation, his work is described abstraction’ has gained as the adequate label for in the pamphlet for the exhibition and on the his practice.46 This is his collaboration with Rio website for the Pavilion, as renewing “the tradi- Terà dei Pensieri, a cooperative organization that tions of abstract and materialist painting”.44 This assists former prisoners and people under crimi- statement invokes the term ‘materialist painting’ nal judgment to (re)integrate into the workforce as if its meaning were self-evident, but it is not a through training in primarily craft-based labour familiar category. Perhaps these terms – social and services. A year prior to the opening of the abstraction and materialist painting – function Biennale, Bradford embarked on a six-year col- in order to clear a path for Bradford which lies laboration with the collective, which supports far away from what has come to be described their aim of increasing employment and train- as “zombie formalism”. This is a term coined by ing opportunities for prisoners and ex-prisoners. Walter Robinson in 2014, and designed to target A central facet of the collaboration so far has what seems to be a revival, but really just signals been Bradford’s role in establishing a shop in the permanency of abstract painting as a cher- Venice which sells soaps, bags, accessories and ished fixture of the post-1945 art market.45 How other goods made by prisoners, also providing

528 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM 7 Mark Bradford, Sexy Cash Wall (detail), 2015, mixed media, 223.5 × 1785.6 cm

employment opportunities for people recently tures and talks.48 In Benjamin Buchloh’s review released. As the collective explains, the shop of Bradford’s work in the American Pavilion, he intends to function as a hub, providing informa- praises the artist’s commitment to “proletarian tion on services available in the city, including audiences”, a claim he validates through refer- access to training, employment, housing and ring to his work with the Rio Terà dei Pensieri, health services, with all sales proceeds going to and elaborates this through describing the art- projects that provide work for Rio Terà dei Pen- ist’s attention to materiality and urban space.49 It sieri inmates.47 is important to register that for Buchloh, Brad- Bradford funds this initiative himself and is ford achieves this precisely through his separa- also one of the main donors to Art + Practice tion of his art practice from his activism. For (hereafter A + P), the organisation he founded Bradford does not situate his work with A + P, or in 2014 with his partner Allan DiCastro and the Rio Terà dei Pensieri, as an artwork, rejecting the philanthropist and collector Eileen Harris the notion that this work falls within the genre Norton. A + P is based in the historically black of “social practice”, meaning artworks that take neighbourhood of Leimert Park in Los Angeles engagement with social relations as their mate- and provides educational support services to rial.50 Bradford’s ‘social abstraction’ exists in a foster youth, alongside free art exhibitions, lec- conceptually and qualitatively different realm

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 529

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM from his work with A + P and the Rio Terà dei formers suggested a communitarian, Lord of the Pensieri, with the latter two projects not consid- Flies style descent into brutality, punctuated by ered as art by the artist. He simply acts as the moments of austere tenderness (fig. 8). conduit between these fields through his capac- If Bradford’s work is marked by real commit- ity to produce highly valuable objects, as well ment to “proletarian audiences”, Buchloh views as through his access to wealthy donors, thus Imhof’s communitarianism as merely a “youth enabling a steady financial stream for the social cult”, mired in the superficialities of fashion and projects. For Buchloh, Bradford’s separation “narcissistic delusion[s] of social redemption, of of the contradictory spheres of “art’s function having escaped one more time, if only by a hair, as the speculative investment of global surplus from the vulgarity of daily life”.53 Buchloh situ- value (and occasional philanthropic generosity)” ates Imhof’s relationship with her performers as and its “extremely limited social and political ef- inheriting Josef Beuys’ fashioning of the artist as ficacy” poses one current solution to the disso- a cult leader, describing Faust as inheriting “this lution, fracturing and discontinuity that marks particular German lineage, from Wagner via much contemporary art, qualities which in his Beuys to Imhof” that is marked by a commit- article addressing the 2017 , ment to “pretended or imaginary” bonds.54 For Buchloh associates most strongly with the work Buchloh, such bonds are always at risk of lurch- of Anne Imhof which appeared in the German ing towards the cultic, the authoritarian and the Pavilion and won the Golden Lion for best na- fascistic, incipiently striving towards a fantasy of tional participation.51 communal wholeness rather than the more pro- While Buchloh’s review situates Bradford’s visional, or improvised relationality he finds in work as an “authentic record of the conditions Bradford’s work. The chain of associations Buch- of American urban public space” he describes loh establishes between Wagnerian spectacle, Imhof’s Faust as an authoritarian fusion of “cult Beuysian communitarianism and Imhof’s fusion and corporate design”.52 Faust is a performance of “cult and corporate design” demonstrates the that ran intermittently through the Biennale continued presence of the interwar debates on and ranged from two to six hours in length. Set the dynamic between communitarianism, fas- in a hard-edged steel and glass installation, a cism and expressionism within contemporary cage with roaming Doberman dogs inside stood criticism.55 Indeed, if Lukács’s analysis of expres- at the exterior of the pavilion. Inside, the per- sionism informed Buchloh’s 1981 article Figures formers emerged subtly out of the crowd and of authority, ciphers of regression on returns initially moved together to a stirring soundtrack to representation in European painting, I see that then shifted from harsh bombast to a back- this as also haunting his assessment of Imhof.56 ground drone as the work progressed. Dressed in However, if Bradford’s social abstraction is pit- the ubiquitous London/Berlin artist wear of the ted against the authoritarian expressionism of moment (1990s monochrome sportswear flecked Imhof, how are we to understand the former’s with studio detritus, Reebok Classics, baseball recourse to formless skeins of rope, references to cap, doodle-tattoos) the performers wrestled, lit mythology, thickly layered shredded posters and fires, scurried underneath the floor into a crawl the dissolving, destructive qualities of Oracle and space, washed each other, yelled and hung precar- Medusa? And how do we match this up with the iously from a high ledge. Faust invoked authori- commitment to proletarian audiences apparently tarianism, punishment, austerity, unsentimental evidenced in his work with Rio Terà dei Pensieri? sex, dirt and violence, performed in a largely af- As the American Pavilion’s co-curator Chris- fectless manner. The engagement between per- topher Bedford states of Bradford, “I don’t know

530 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM 8 Eliza Douglas and Lea Welsch, part of: Anne Imhof, Faust, performance and installation. Venice, Biennale 2017, if we’ve seen someone with the dexterity of De “instinctual” expression upon the canvas simply Kooning who is also committed to activism”.57 worked to shore up the “reality of self”.61 These Such comparisons with Abstract Expression- criticisms – made during the height of abstract ist painters are frequent within the reception of expressionism’s hegemony within the Ameri- Bradford. Writing in artnet, Andrew Goldstein can art world – feel very close to both Lukács’s describes Bradford as “our ” and criticisms of expressionism, and the accusations more frequently, similarities with Clyfford Still Buchloh levels at Imhof. So unlike other con- have been suggested, particularly following a temporary critics, it is meaningful that Buchloh shared presentation of their work at the Denver leapfrogs over de Kooning, Still or Pollock, and Art Museum in 2017.58 I am making a leap here, of instead links Bradford with Eva Hesse and Ag- course, from German figurative expressionism nes Martin, artists that stood beyond, or at the to the American school of abstract expression- margins of abstract expressionism’s heroics. ism, but we know the two genres shared much in Because Bradford’s work in the American their recourse to the primitive and myths, as well Pavilion oscillates between integration and dis- as in their emphasis on individual expression.59 integration, wreckage and repair, this incorpo- As Leon Golub wrote in 1955, “abstract expres- rates an expressionist investment in feeling and sionism wants a very good thing indeed – the the irrational without this opening up a scale intensity of personal commitment without the that inevitably slides from bohemianism to fas- specificity such a view ordinarily entails”.60 For cism. To borrow Raymond Williams’ much-used Golub, the “direct impact” of a non-referential, phrase, the work’s structure of feeling denotes “a

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 531

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed so- of empathy through the use of the Pavilion’s side cial and material, but […] in an embryonic phase entrance compromises the political tone of such before it can become fully articulate and defined a project, Bradford’s project with the Rio Terà exchange”.62 This also returns us to Moten’s sug- dei Pensieri also sets limits. gestion that what is at stake in the nonexclusive totality of the “cut” is “feeling”, that is, a fleeting, contradictory proliferation of meaning, a quality IV. The Many-Headed Hydra I have argued shines through the siren suite’s po- sitioning in the American Pavilion.63 Feeling has As well as providing direct support to the Rio often been related to formlessness within debates Terà dei Pensieri, Bradford’s collaboration with on expressionism, with critics disavowing this as the cooperative is also, as he stresses, an attempt seeking to excise mediation along the same lines to make visitors to the Pavilion reflect on the as Golub’s complaint that the vitalist qualities problems of the prison system, particularly in in abstract expressionist painting merely repre- terms of its disproportionately repressive force sents intensity without commitment or specifici- within communities of colour. Yet the short- ty.64 But Bradford presents feeling with form and comings of the project lie in its affirmation of specificity through his choice of materials and the ideology of the criminal justice system as titles that combine the mythic with the prosaic. one that prioritises the inculcation of better Through this, my claim is that we can locate a work discipline among prisoners. The website disordered, unbounded quality in his practice for the project declares, “Prison work today has that works against expressionism’s authoritarian become a widespread reality that has spread to and cynical strain, with its emphasis on feeling almost every region” before going on to explain instead reaching towards invoking a mass or a that “even while incarcerated you can gain qual- hydra-like social form. Viewed from the vio- ity work experience” and “the opportunity to lated interior of the American Pavilion, as most have small pockets of freedom, exchange, and strongly expressed in Oracle’s takeover of the satisfaction”.67 But prison labour is still exploi- central rotunda (fig. 5), the work might then be tation, even bonded labour because of the lack understood as seeking revenge against the sys- of a wage paid to most prisoners. How this con- temic, dull brutality of national history, rather stitutes a “small pocket of freedom” seems ques- than only representing and recording a suppos- tionable, as little agency is given to prisoners edly temporary spoiling of democracy under the within their choice to perform or not perform la- U.S. President Donald Trump.65 This is, however, bour. This is of course a dynamic which is so se- a very different proposition to the timelessness verely racialised in the United States that it pres- suggested by the Pavilion’s curators, who sug- ents a direct continuity with the way that racial gest that Oracle “transports us back in time to terror was integrated within the emergence and the ancient grotto, a site between cave and al- growth of capitalism from the antebellum era, tar, between nature and culture, where oracles through Jim Crow, to the contemporary prison would deliver profound truth and predictions”.66 industrial complex.68 Writing about Bradford’s While this statement clearly works with myth work with the Rio Terà dei Pensieri, as well as his as a structure that de-historicises and univer- involvement with A + P, Dan Fox suggests that salises, I see Bradford’s American Pavilion as under President Trump, “we need, more than speaking directly to the material foundations ever, to be pragmatic and determined to push of the United States as a settler colony and slave back at a government hell-bent on taking away economy. But if I suggested that the invocation from the socially marginalized and vulnerable

532 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM their few state-subsidized safety nets and educa- a ‘scientific’ doctrine of monstrosity that justi- tional opportunities”.69 I would suggest that the fied violence and repression both at home and contemporary prison system and broader politi- within the colonies. Bacon’s doctrine drew upon cal landscape requires precisely not pragmatism classical antiquity, the Bible, and recent history but a mode of thinking and action that is much to elaborate seven “multitudes” that deserved more intent on refusal, disorder and rebellion. destruction: West Indians, Canaanites, pirates, The Rio Terà dei Pensieri unambiguously pri- land rovers, assassins, Amazons and Anabap- oritises the idea that the route to a healthy life is tists.72 In discussing these groups, Bacon took through work, a notion that first emerged within his terms from nature, including “swarms” and the growth of capitalism and building of the At- “shoals”, and applied these to groups of people lantic economy, but not without dispute. he saw as having degenerated from the laws In Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The of nature and taken “in their body and frame many-headed hydra, the authors describe how of estate a monstrosity”.73 Bacon called for the the classically educated architects of the emerg- study of monsters to understand these emerging ing Atlantic economy situated the coloniza- multitudes, and to him, monsters formed one tion of the New World as akin to the labours of of the divisions of nature, which were: 1) nature Hercules. If Hercules had been the unifier of a in course; 2) nature wrought; and 3) nature err- centralized territorial state for the Greeks, and a ing, with these categories respectively denoting symbol of imperialism for the Romans, the rul- normality, artificiality, and monstrosity. Mon- ers of the emerging states, empires and econo- strosity was therefore pitted as straddling the mies of the Atlantic world saw Hercules’ second natural and artificial, and emerged as essential labour, the slaying of the hydra, as particularly to legitimising violent processes of experiment resonant with their goals. The myth of the many- and control within the building of the Atlantic headed hydra formed a metaphor to describe economy.74 the difficulties of maintaining discipline over We see this discourse of monstrosity repeated the “motley crew” of dispossessed commoners, in contemporary descriptions of people arriving transported felons, indentured servants, reli- from Africa, Asia and the Middle East into Eu- gious radicals, pirates, urban laborers, soldiers, rope as a “swarm”, with this invective uttered by sailors and African slaves who formed the new former British Prime Minister David Cameron labour force.70 The hydra stood as a threaten- in 2015, or in the British chancellor Philip Ham- ing emblem of disorder and resistance for the mond’s description of “marauding” Africans, or imperialist, Herculean ambitions of the emer- in the use of the term “clandestini” in the Italian gent ruling class, with Linebaugh and Rediker’s press and by its politicians, a word that invokes analysis seeking to uncover the histories where illegality, priming the way for attacks by the far- these disparate heads on this hydra cooperated right, as well as criminalization by the state.75 Yet, against their rulers: through strikes, riots, mu- just as the hydra resisted then, it does so today, tinies, insurrections and revolutions. As they even mobilising the monstrous.76 The conjoined stress, “it would be a mistake to see the myth of and fungible quality of the hydra thus signal not Hercules and the hydra as merely an ornament only the brutality of capital but also the modes of of state, a classical trope in speeches, a decora- struggle and defiance that continually emerge on tion of ceremonial dress, or a mark of classical ships and shop floors, in fields, prison cells, hos- learning”.71 The myth went much further in its tels and camps. This is how I see the disordered material effects, as Francis Bacon and other in- quality of myth in Bradford’s America Pavilion tellectuals of the ruling class used it to produce working – therefore, in fact, working against the

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 533

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM reformism of his project with the Rio Terà dei ness and gender.80 This is how I read the room Pensieri – and I want to conclude with a closer with the siren suite surrounding Medusa. These discussion of Medusa to elaborate on this propo- works are borne through violence, but suggest sition. the potential to turn history in another direction, Medusa is typically formless, in ways that forming an insurgent collective. That Bradford’s the siren suite first appears typically formalist work assumes the position of black femininity is through its adherence to the grid. A roughly hu- also powerful when thinking through the ma- man sized and shaped tumble of black and yellow teriality of these works; the endpapers denoting rope, caulk, paper and acrylic paint, the work’s the social space of the hairdressers and the art- title as well as its form means that the sculpture ist’s place within that context as a gay man, the appears ready to unfurl its knotted tendrils in an names of the sirens giving each canvas its title instant. Hair, as with the gridded endpapers in denoting a mythic feminine archetype that, like the siren suite, is invoked again, foregrounding Medusa, render men incapacitated through their the bodily as excessive and maybe even danger- sexuality. ous through the yellow and black warning co- These myths – Medusa and the sirens – are lours of Medusa’s locks. The sculpture unleashes of course connected to stereotypical fears and a chain of associations, including Sigmund fantasies of black femininity as analysed by Freud’s famous analysis of the myth as about Spillers, standing particularly close to the “Sap- the “terror of castration” through the associa- phire” type, a dominant woman who usurps tion of Medusa’s snake-hair with pubic hair, as men’s power. As Spillers explains, “Sapphire” well as her capacity to turn men to stone.77 Freud sits alongside “Peaches”, “Brown Sugar”, “Earth also connects Medusa’s apotropaic powers with Mother”, “Aunty”, “Granny”, God’s “Holy Fool”, Rabelais’ description of how “the devil took to a “Miss Ebony First”, or “Black Woman at the Po- flight when the woman showed him her vulva”.78 dium” as an ensemble of markers which form the This is an action that Hartman also finds in an “meeting ground of investments and privations oral history with the former slave Fannie Berry, in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth”.81 recorded by the Works Progress Administration Taking Daniel Moynihan’s infamous 1965 re- Federal Writers Project in Virginia in 1937. Berry port The negro family: The case for national -ac described the behaviour of a fellow enslaved tion, which argued that “underachievement” by woman, Sukie, on the auction block, explaining black males was the fault of black females, Spill- how the slave traders “ ’zamined her an’ pinched ers’ analysis describes how “ethnicity” in Moyni- her an’ den dey opened her mouf, an’ stuck dey han’s report is situated as a mythical, dualistic fingers in to see how her teeth was. Den Sukie and unchanging category, which enables the hu- got awful mad, and she pult up her dress an’ tole man body to become a resource for metaphor.82 de nigger traders to look an· see if dey could find Moving from her discussion of how slavery ne- any teef down dere”.79 gated motherhood and kinship, thus meaning Here, the monstrous becomes powerful in the black woman has been situated outside the ways that correspond with Hortense Spillers’ ar- traditional symbols of female gender, she argues gument that African American women – long “we are less interested in joining the ranks of excluded from the sphere of gender through gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent the afterlives of how the middle passage turned ground as female social subject”.83 By “claim- humans into flesh – might gain the “insurgent ing the monstrosity” Spillers suggests “Sapphire ground” as a social subject through claim- might rewrite after all a radically different text ing monstrosity as a disavowal of both white- for female empowerment”.84

534 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM While art’s role is certainly limited in its ca- abstraction and emphasis on feeling. The best pacity to challenge the social conditions of rac- elements within Bradford’s Pavilion are not re- ism, mass incarceration and exploitation, its parative or instructive – unlike the slippery em- possibilities might still lie in its ability to step be- pathy prompted by the entranceway – precisely yond reformist pragmatism and to invoke such because they are capable of denoting the middle modes of insurgency. This not only bears upon passage as modernity’s foundation, refusing to Bradford’s work into the American Pavilion, cleave the two apart. Where this works most but also has implications for understanding the powerfully, the two tonal registers of form and limits of the artist’s collaboration with Rio Terà feeling consistently oscillate – meaning the cool dei Pensieri. Somewhat counter-intuitively, that grid of the siren suite is a modernist sugar cube project’s adherence to the careful, rational logic drenched in blood, the disordered expressivity of reform will always stand as an enclave-based of Medusa a revolutionary subject who refuses endeavour, even more so than the bohemian in- a singularising heroism, and instead forms part dulgences Lukács found within expressionism’s of the hydra.

1 For example, see Sean Coughlan, ‘Monster’ fatberg 16 Holland Cotter, Art in review: Mark Bradford, in: The to go on display in museum, in: BBC News, 12 De- New York Times, 9 November 2001, URL: https://www. cember 2017, URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/educa nytimes.com/2001/11/09/arts/art-in-review-mark- tion-42324932 (date of last access 14 December bradford.html (date of last access 22 August 2018). 2017). 17 Christopher Bedford and Mark Bradford, Like a loose 2 Georg Lukács, Expressionism: It’s significance and shawl [interview], in: Katy Siegel and Christopher decline [1934], in: idem, Essays on realism, ed. and Bedford (eds.), Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is another trans. by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass. 1981, day, New York/Berlin 2017, 94– 127, here 113. 87. 18 Ibidem, 118. 3 Ibidem, 96. The emphasis is in the original. 19 Katy Siegel, Biography of a painting, in: Siegel and 4 Ibidem, 113. Bedford 2017 (as note 17), 46 – 65, here 56. 5 For a short overview of the circumstances around 20 Fred Moten, In the break: The aesthetics of the black this debate in relation to the Popular Front, see Ernst radical tradition, Minneapolis 2003, 103. Bloch, Presentation I, in: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter 21 Ibidem, 120. Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, et al., Aesthetics and politics 22 Ibidem, 120 – 121. (Radical thinkers), London 72007, 9 – 15. 23 Ibidem, 121. Bloch writes that “Lukács’s thought 6 Ernst Bloch, Discussing Expressionism [1938], in: takes for granted a closed and integrated reality that Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, et al. 2007 (as note 5), 19. does indeed exclude the subjectivity of idealism, but 7 Ibidem, 22. not the seamless ‘totality’ which has always thriven 8 Ibidem, 24. best in idealist systems, including those of classical 9 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of our times [1935], trans. by German philosophy. Whether such a totality in fact Neville and Stephen Plaice, Cambridge 1991, 108. constitutes reality, is open to question.” Bloch 1938 (as 10 Ibidem, 112. note 6), 22. 11 Georg Lukács, Realism in the balance [1938], in: 24 Moten 2003 (as note 20), 122. The phrases “edgy, Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, et al. 2007 (as note 5), 54. maybe garbled at points” and “ears literally burn with 12 Ibidem, 38. what the words don’t manage to say” is quoted by Mo- 13 Ibidem. ten from Nathaniel Mackey, Bedouin Hornbook, Cal- 14 For an explanation of both authors’ views of totality, laloo Fiction Series, vol. 2, Lexington 1986, 34. see Martin Jay, Marxism and totality: The adventures 25 Ibidem, 122. of a concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley 1986. 26 Annette Michelson, Reading Eisenstein reading 15 Mark Bradford quoted in Calvin Tomkins, What else ‘Capital’, in: October 2, 1976, 26 –38, here 30. can art do?, in: The New Yorker, 22 June 2015, URL: 27 Bedford and Bradford 2017 (as note 17), 114. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/ 28 Rosalind Krauss, Grids, in: October 9, 1979, 50 – 64, what-else-can-art-do (date of last access 30 November here 54. 2017). 29 Ibidem.

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 535

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM 30 Ibidem, 63. curated four exhibitions a year. Such partnerships en- 31 Steve Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two able A + P to take out contracts with service providers inadequate descriptive systems, London 2012, 61. such as First Place for Youth, an organisation that pro- 32 Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy, vides life-skills training, access to housing opportuni- vol. 1 [1867], trans. by Ben Fowkes, London 1976, 63. ties, education and employment support to foster youth 33 This is also what led Lukács to deride the abstract living in Southern California. See Tomkins 2015 (as qualities of expressionism, viewing this as merely note 15). correspondent with the circulation of money and 49 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rock, paper, scissors, in: its place as the most “extreme form of abstraction in Artforum International 56, 2017, URL: https://www. the entire process of capitalist production”, whereas artforum.com/print/201707/benjamin-h-d-buchloh- realism formed a means of interrogation, and even a on-some-means-and-ends-of-sculpture-at-venice- reparative response. See Lukács 1938 (as note 11), 38. muenster-and-documenta-70461 (date of last access 34 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the life of Frederick 22 August 2018), footnote 9. Douglass: An American slave, in: Henry Louis Gates 50 See Katy Siegel and Christopher Bedford, Introduc- Jr. (ed.), The classic slave narratives, New York 1987, tion, in: Siegel and Bedford 2017 (as note 17), 8 – 15, 255–332, here 259. here 13; also Sarah Lewis, The art of productive dis- 35 John Rankin, quoted in: Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of sent, in: ibidem, 66 – 81, here 75. subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nine- 51 Buchloh 2017 (as note 49). teenth century America, Oxford 1997, 18. 52 Ibidem. 36 Ibidem, 18. 53 Ibidem. This clearly echoes Lukács’s 1934 claim that 37 Ibidem, 19. expressionism is marked by an “extraordinary pov- 38 Ibidem, 21. erty of content (which) stands in crying contrast to 39 Ibidem, 18. the pretension of its delivery, to the exaggerated and 40 See Elle Reeve, Charlottesville: Race and terror, pro- over-intense subjective emotionalism of its presenta- duced by Vice News, 14 August 2017, URL: https:// tion”, Lukács 1934 (as note 2), 87. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIrcB1sAN8I (date of 54 Buchloh 2017 (as note 49). last access 19 December 2017). 55 Buchloh also describes Imhof’s “cult of glass” as 41 Hannah Black, Fractal freedoms, in: Afterall: A Jour- hovering between the utopian transparency of ex- nal of Art, Context and Enquiry 41, 2016, 4– 9, here 6. pressionist design by Bruno Taut and Ludwig Mies 42 Ibidem. van der Rohe and “corporate architecture’s fascistic, 43 Ibidem. massive glass deployments, which pretend to offer 44 See URL: https://www.markbradfordvenice2017.org/ universal transparency but actually enforce total exhibition/ (date of last access 22 August 2018). secrecy and control.” Buchloh 2017 (as note 49). In 45 Walter Robinson, Flipping and the rise of Zombie For- this sense, it seems one could read Imhof’s Faust as malism, in: Artspace, 3 April 2014, URL: https://www. encapsulating the aspirations, the limitations and artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_ the co-opting of expressionism, a feat which clearly rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184 (date of last access warrants more exploration. Although developing this 22 August 2018). argument is beyond the scope of this article, I hope 46 The category is frequently cited by critics writing on it nevertheless contributes to a broader discussion on Bradford’s practice, see for example Tomkins 2015 the contemporary resonance of expressionist modes (as note 15); Leon Hilton, In the flesh: Mark Brad- and their relation to historical precedents. ford in the US Pavilion, in: , 19 May 56 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Figures of authority, ciphers 2017, URL: https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/ of regression: Notes on the return of representation news-features/news/in-the-flesh-mark-bradford- in European painting, in: October 16, 1981, 39 – 68. In in-the-us-pavilion/ (date of last access 16 December this article, he criticises neo-expressionists including 2017); Wendy Vogel, Reviews: Mark Bradford, in: Anselm Kiefer and George Baselitz as devoted to a Art in America, 27 January 2016, URL: https://www. “romanticization of exotic and primal experience” in artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/mark-bradford which art was positioned as an esoteric retreat from (date of last access 13 July 2018). the alienation and violence of capital. 47 See URL: https://www.rioteradeipensieri.org/en/pro- 57 Carolina A. Miranda, Mark Bradford brings ‘dexter- cess-collettivo/ (date of last access 18 December 2017). ity of De Kooning’ and a commitment to activism to 48 Before opening the project, Bradford, DiCastro and 2017 Venice Biennale, in: Los Angeles Times, 21 April Norton gained support from the Hammer Museum in 2016, URL: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ Los Angeles; the director Ann Philbin brought in fund- arts/miranda/la-et-cam-0421-mark-bradford-ven- ing from the James Irvine Foundation and established a ice-biennale-20160421-story.html (date of last access two-year partnership whereby staff from the Hammer 07 December 2017).

536 Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM 58 Andrew Goldstein, Mark Bradford is our Jackson Pol- 75 David Cameron criticised over migrant “swarm” lan- lock, in: artnet, 11 May 2017, URL: news.artnet.com/ guage, BBC News, 30 July 2015, URL: https://www.bbc. exhibitions/mark-bradford-is-our-jackson-pollock- com/news/uk-politics-33716501 (date of last access 22 thoughts-on-his-stellar-u-s-pavilion-at-the-venice- August 2018); Francis Perraudin, Marauding migrants biennale-957935 (date of last access 17 December 2017). threaten standard of living says Foreign Secretary, 59 For an exploration of the social and political role of in: The Guardian, 10 August 2015, URL: https://www. myth in Abstract Expressionism, see Michael Leja, theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/09/african- Reframing abstract expressionism: Subjectivity and migrants-threaten-eu-standard-living-philip-ham- painting in the 1940s, New Haven/London 1993. mond (date of last access 22 August 2018). ‘Clandes- 60 Leon Golub, A critique of abstract expressionism, tini’ is a favoured term of Matteo Salvini, the current in: College Art Journal 14, 1955, 142– 147, here 146. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior 61 Ibidem, 143. as well as leader of Italy’s Lega Party, see Frederika 62 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford Randall, Mattero Salvini’s March on Rome, in The 1977, 131. Nation, 12 June 2018, URL: https://www.thenation. 63 Moten 2003 (as note 20), 122. com/article/matteo-salvinis-march-rome/ (date of 64 See for example Hal Foster, The expressive fallacy, in: last access 22 August 2018). For an account of the rise idem (ed.), Recodings: Art, spectacle, cultural politics, of far-right attacks on migrants in Italy within this Seattle 1985, 59 –78, here 63. climate, see Richard Brodie, Italy’s new racist storm, 65 This is how a number of critics viewed Oracle, the in: Jacobin, 9 February 2018, URL: https://www.jaco- spoiled, central rotunda of the Pavilion. See, for binmag.com/2018/02/italy-election-migrant-racism- example, Mark Hudson, Strong art, but less spoon- macerata-attack (date of last access 22 August 2018). feeding next time, please, in: The Telegraph, 12 May 76 To give an example of how the monstrous has been 2017, URL: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to- mobilized culturally in recent years, we could refer to see/less-spoon-feeding-next-time-please-venice- the Ghanaian-Italian rapper Bello Figo, who mocks biennale-2017-review/ (date of last access 19 December the Italian right-wing reaction to demands for WiFi 2017). and better food by asylum seekers stuck within the 66 Inside Mark Bradford’s US Pavilion at the Venice Italian hostel system, as well as stereotypes of black Biennale, in: Phaidon, May 2017, URL: uk.phaidon. men’s laziness and sexual voracity in records such com/agenda/art/articles/2017/may/10/inside-mark- as Bello Figo ft. the GynoZz, I don’t pay rent, URL: bradfords-us-pavilion-at-the-venice-biennale/ (date https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ookGv44MMd4 of last access 22 August 2018). (date of last access 22 August 2018). I first heard of 67 Rio Terà dei Pensieri and Mark Bradford: A collabo- Bello Figo via Richard Brodie, who situates his music ration, URL: https://www.rioteradeipensieri.org/en/ in the context of struggles within the Italian hostel process-collettivo (date of last access 22 August 2018). system, in: We are Plan C, Zero Boars #3, 8 October 68 Among the extensive literature on incarceration rates 2017, URL: https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/zero- and the legacies of slavery, see Michelle Alexander, boats-3/ (date of last access 22 August 2018). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of 77 Sigmund Freud, Medusa’s head [1940], in: Writings on colorblindness, New York 2010, or Angela Davis, Are art and literature, Stanford 1997, 264–265. prison’s obsolete?, New York 2003, for their detailed 78 Ibidem. analysis of this logic. 79 Fannie Berry, cited in Hartman 1997 (as note 35), 46. 69 Dan Fox, Sign of the times, in: Frieze, 29 April 2017, 80 Hortense Spillers, Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An URL: frieze.com/article/signs-times-0 (date of last American grammar book, in: Diacritics 17, 1987, 64 – access 21 December 2017). 81, here 81. 70 Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The many- 81 Ibidem, 65. headed Hydra: The hidden history of the revolutionary 82 Ibidem, 66. Atlantic, London 2000, 4. 83 Ibidem, 80. 71 Ibidem, 6. 84 Ibidem. In Bradford’s own account, he describes the 72 Bacon cited in ibidem, 39. rapper Lil’ Kim as his Medusa, citing how she negoti- 73 Ibidem. ated the machismo of rap music during the 1990s. See 74 Ibidem. Bedford and Bradford 2017 (as note 17), 122.

Photo Credits: 1 – 6 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; photo: Josh White. — 7 Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. — 8 Courtesy: German Pavilion 2017, the artist; photo: Nadine Fraczkowski.

Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 81. Band / 2018 537

Brought to you by | UCL - University College London Authenticated Download Date | 5/28/19 1:56 PM