It’s the silence that gets under your skin. To wander around Bradford’s superb survey show at the Institute of Contemporary Art is to oscillate between the desire to get up close and even to touch (the impulse to run your fingers over their corrugated surfaces is almost impossible to resist) and a growing sense that you are in fact looking on from unreadable distances, like a general watching a chaotic battle from the top of a distant knoll, or an uncomprehending politician flying high over a disaster zone.
Ah yes. That.
Although his work is ostensibly abstract, this is an artist who also has politics on his mind. One room in the ICA show, which was organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, displays a series of works that constitute Bradford’s response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
They’re impressive. Look out, in particular, for a massive mixed media work called “A Truly Rich Man Is One Whose Children Run Into His Arms Even When His Hands Are Empty’’ and a vast grid of weather-beaten signs announcing propane deliveries to FEMA trailers. It’s called “Corner of Desire and Piety.’’ The same room contains footage of the construction of a large wooden ark plastered with tattered bill posters that Bradford made for Prospect New Orleans, a biennial of contemporary art organized in Katrina’s wake.
Bradford, 48, is African-American and gay. He came of age in the 1980s. He told Helen Molesworth, senior curator at the ICA, that the three biggest factors in his formation as an artist were the birth of hip-hop, the AIDS crisis, and the late 20th-century phenomenon of “identity politics.’’
How on earth, you may wonder, given all this, did he end up forging a brilliant career as an abstract artist?
On the face of it, the decision looks gloriously perverse. The ’80s seemed to sound a death knell for abstraction. Few artists were interested in it. Its possibilities seemed played out. People were hungry for content, for representation (in all its senses), for the righteousness and punch of politics.
Bradford was part of this. How, with his background, could he not be?
