Mark Bradford

Pinocchio Is On Fire (2010) is a three-part multimedia installation on the fourth floor of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) by artist Mark Bradford. I have chosen to focus on the dim room at the intersection of three other spaces, where I’m sitting on one of four black beanbag chairs and where the short, black high-traffic carpet beneath is soft as it gives to the load of crossed legs under my worn boot. The walls are papered in sheets of newsprint—each is pressed in a way that produces a state of imperfect blackness; each individual space is ripe with potential and bound by its margins. Over one hundred of these three-foot-wide rectangles within rectangles cover the entire room. They are unified by the frailty of the material, the way the prints are wrinkled from the application of the paste, and the audible bounce of Nancy Wilson’s rich vibrato delivering an emotive ballad through two small black speakers above one of the three doorways. The visual relationships between the black prints in their intra-acting chains begin to expose a skeleton of so many extruded appendages of communication.

The vast quantity of pasted newspapers, all rendered black, reflects a negotiation with the contradictions of print media. The language normally printed in newspapers is unable to communicate the numerous and incompatible perspectives that compose each story. There are many vastly different conditions that make up the lives and relationships between a newspaper’s readers and non-readers alike. This problem is brought to bear in the immersive multi-sensory experience

Mark Bradford. Pinocchio Is On Fire, 2010; multimedia installation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. © Mark Bradford.

in which Bradford has removed the closed symbols of language and replaced them with an open symbol of everything or nothing: blackness. Unlike language, here, blackness has no concrete structure and is not relied upon for congruency. Black is relative. As such, the installation functions as an anti-map, where the viewer is the key. With these newspapers, the print does not attempt to make meaning but show how meaning is made.

If Bradford’s collages are an intervention with heavily coded print media that he re-figures into an expression of urban life, then the Pinocchio Is On Fire installation is an open application of that same process. Bradford is not just showing us black-life, he is using black to show us life.

Mark Bradford is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 17, 2012.

Henry Witecki is an emerging visual artist, writer, and aspiring curator. Educated at the San Francisco Art Institute and Alfred University, he will receive a dual master’s degree from California College of the Arts in Visual Critical Studies and Fine Art in 2013.