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Thursday 6 February

Mark Bradford: The Archaeologist of Urban Memory

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Mark Bradford (born in 1961 in the United States) is one of the few artists who still gives me hope in this world saturated with egos and conceptual emptiness. While some marvel at white squares, thinking it makes them intelligent, Bradford literally digs into the flesh of Los Angeles to extract its essence.

I’m going to tell you about two fundamental aspects of his work that transcend the simple notion of aesthetics to reach something deeper, more visceral. Something that would probably make the bourgeois who confuse modern art with contemporary art in their gilded salons faint.

First, his technique of urban excavation. Bradford doesn’t paint; he tears. He doesn’t compose; he decomposes. His monumental works—some exceeding 3 meters in height—are created from successive layers of advertising posters, flyers, and papers found on the streets of South Central Los Angeles. He accumulates them, glues them, then partially tears them away with power tools, creating an archaeology of the present. This approach echoes Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the ruins of modernity, where each layer reveals a hidden story of the city.

But Bradford goes further than Benjamin. He doesn’t just observe the ruins; he actively creates them to expose what lies behind the polished facade of American society. When he uses an electric sander to attack the surface of his works, it’s as if he’s performing an urban dissection, revealing the scar tissues of a city marked by riots, poverty, and segregation. This recalls Guy Debord’s concept of the “society of the spectacle”, where social reality is mediated by images. Bradford literally deconstructs this spectacle, layer by layer.

The second aspect of his work is his social cartography. From afar, his works often resemble aerial views of urban areas, abstract maps of imaginary territories. But step closer, and you’ll discover that these “maps” are composed of pawnshop ads, paternity DNA test flyers, relocation offers… It’s an atlas of urban precarity, a geography of daily survival.

This cartographic approach is reminiscent of the “psychogeography” of the Situationists, but Bradford completely reinvents it. Where Guy Debord and his comrades drifted through Paris to reveal zones of emotional attraction and repulsion, Bradford maps zones of social tension, economic fractures, and the invisible boundaries segmenting our cities.

Take his work “Scorched Earth” (2006), an abstract cartography of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. At first glance, the work resembles a satellite view of a devastated urban area. But in reality, it’s a profound meditation on systemic violence and collective memory. The layers of burned and torn paper become a powerful metaphor for erased history, destroyed lives, and scars that never truly heal.

And while I see some collectors raving about his works, only discussing their “formal beauty”—as if beauty were the sole relevant criterion in contemporary art—Bradford continues his work as a social archaeologist. He digs, scrapes, and reveals. Every stroke of the sander is an act of resistance against collective amnesia; every layer of torn paper is a stratum of truth laid bare.

His works are urban testimonies that remind us that history is never truly erased, just covered by new layers of lies and forgetfulness. This is what Derrida called the “trace”, that presence-absence haunting our societies. Bradford makes these traces visible, tangible, impossible to ignore.

Bradford transforms ordinary materials into extraordinary documentaries. These cheap advertisements, these torn posters, become historical documents in his hands, material evidence of the daily struggle for survival in disadvantaged neighborhoods. There’s something profoundly Foucauldian in this approach, an archaeology of knowledge applied to contemporary art.

His monumental works—some reaching an impressive 15 meters in length—force us to confront social reality on a scale that defies any attempt to minimize or avoid it. It’s art that refuses to be ignored, demands to be seen, and forces confrontation.

When Bradford represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2017, some critics called him the “Pollock of our time”. What nonsense! Bradford is not Pollock; he is Bradford. He doesn’t need to be compared to white male masters to be legitimized. His work stands on its own, in its raw power and social relevance.

His installation “Mithra” (2008) in New Orleans—a monumental 21-meter-long arch constructed with reclaimed plywood panels—was much more than just a sculpture. It was a monument to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, a silent accusation against institutional neglect, a reminder that art can and must bear witness to its time.

What I admire about Bradford is that he creates works that function both as social documents and as autonomous aesthetic objects. He never sacrifices one for the other. The formal beauty of his compositions does not diminish their political edge; on the contrary, it strengthens it, makes it more impactful.

His use of end-papers—those little papers used for perms in hair salons—as an artistic material is not just an autobiographical reference to his past as a hairdresser. It’s an alchemical transformation of the mundane into the extraordinary, an elevation of the everyday to the level of art that would have made Marcel Duchamp smile.

Bradford proves that contemporary art can still have meaning, that it can still speak to us about our world, our struggles, our hopes. He doesn’t need to retreat into conceptual hermeticism or cheap provocation to be relevant.

So yes, his works sell for millions of euros. So what? The irony of the art market transforming social critique into a luxury commodity doesn’t detract from the power of his work. On the contrary, it only reinforces the relevance of his critique.

Bradford is the artist we need in these times of confusion and collective amnesia. His works are constant reminders that art can still be a tool of resistance, a means of preserving memory, a way to make the invisible visible.

And while some will continue to rave about Jonone in their salon conversations, Bradford will keep digging into the guts of our cities, uncovering their hidden stories, forcing us to face what we prefer to ignore. This is true contemporary art. Everything else is just aesthetic distraction for bored bourgeois.

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