Courtesy of White Cube
About the Work
Pinocchio Is On Fire is a limited edition, vinyl LP that features a recording of the artist speaking in the guise of a quick-witted performer who is being interviewed for a fictional radio program. Interspersed with a funk/soul soundtrack, Bradford’s entertainer is a combination of Pinocchio and Teddy Pendergrass, the legendary soul singer of the 1970s, whose stage persona was one of exaggerated heterosexuality. Pendergrass's image was destabilized after he was involved in a car accident with his passenger, who was a transsexual model.
Bradford conflates the narratives of Pinocchio and Teddy, and introduces aspects of his own autobiography to create a third character, whose heart reveals a social, ethnic, and cultural absence, and which Bradford compares to "that moment of finding the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain."
About the Artist
Mark Bradford’s work addresses the spontaneous systems and networks that materialize within cities, such as displaced communities, patterns of violence, and black-market economies. Visually complex and often cartographic in form, Bradford’s paintings incorporate elements of the everyday—from end papers used for perming hair to billboard poster remnants, polyester cord, caulking, bleaching agents, and carbon paper—to draw attention to what he refers to as the “invisible underbelly of a community.”
Ostensibly abstract, Bradford's paintings are less commentaries on consumerism than they are examinations of specific conditions that shape communities. For his Merchant Posters series, he collected billboards affixed to cyclone fencing and derelict buildings in his neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. He then used these advertisements—hawking, in bold graphics, services targeted directly at local inhabitants, from foreclosure assistance to paternity testing—to make collages.
Most recently, his projects have dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. They include a 2008 installation on the rooftop of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, in which he spelled out the words “HELP US” in white stones, and Mithra, a three-story “ark” made from stacked shipping containers covered in the battered signage left around the city in the wake of the disaster, made for Prospect.1 New Orleans.
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