AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRACTICE OF WILLIAM BRADLEY

by Vincent Honoré, Director of the David Roberts Art Foundation

Taken from the catalogue that accompanies murmurART's forthcoming exhibition in the upstairs galleries of 20 Hoxton Square Projects.

A DISCLAIMER

« When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing [...] Painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. »

- Jackson Pollock

« I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers... Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance... »

- Mark Rothko

William Bradley is not an Abstract Expressionist. Back to fundamentals: Abstract Expressionism's pictorial mark includes a longing for autographic - inimitable - gesture, a translation of inner feelings and emotional statements directly onto the field of the canvas through intuitive use of material and non-figurative content. Abstract Expressionism is situated between pure abstraction and Surrealism (Surrealism as a primitivist impulse open to the unconscious, the unknown, the unpredictable). Reading Bradley's paintings as Abstract Expressionism is a non-sense. « The Irascibles »1 laid claim to the originality, the signature (the Style): the romantic and petty-bourgeois modernist figure of the artist. In affirmation of the heroic and fallacious artistic ego, Bradley opposes a clear denial of both painting's singularity and authorial mark.

THE PROJECT

« I'm interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality. I'm interested in things which suggest things which are, rather than in judgements. The most conventional thing, the most ordinary thing [...] they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy. »

- Jasper Johns

William Bradley is a perverse Abstract Expressionist. Abstract Expressionism's restless promotion of the « style » shortly became a brand, quickly an exhausted academism. Only its perversion could lead to something fresh. Already in 1949 Motherwell scrupulously reproduced and enlarged an ink drawing from 1948, clearly denying Abstract Expressionism's intuition or free gesture. This lead to his lifelong Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Later, Jasper Johns started mimicking splashes but in encaustic, the slowest and most ancient medium, contradicting the immediacy of the « freely made ». In Factum II Rauschenberg painstakingly reproduced the accident of a first work, Factum I (1957).

If Bradley seems to borrow large scales from Rothko, forms or compositions from Gottlieb, colors and tones from de Kooning (from the 80s), his methodology is similar to Motherwell or Rauschenberg: his works are all but improvised. They exist firstly as carefully designed watercolours, reproduced and enlarged on canvas. The black lines for instance, typical of a post-war abstract gesture (Kline, early de Kooning and Soulages) are not single gestural strokes, but instead carefully transcribed patterns. Bradley's work is the result of a process in which he perverts a pre-existing vocabulary: he aims at using existing paintings codes, not at a singular expression and style.

CODES

« In parody the implication is the perverse, and I feel that in my own work I don't mean it to be that. Because I don't dislike the work that I'm parodying... The things that I have parodied I actually admire. »

- Roy Lichtenstein

Move from Rauschenberg to Roy Lichstentein: a charge of the banality, a hiatus. The signs of mechanically reproduced imagery are manually made, creating the paradox of the handmade readymade: Lichstentein is mostly known for the painted depiction of printed codes. What Bradley proposes is a painted depiction of painting codes: Abstract Expressionism, early Pop Art but also generic and peripheral paintings (borrowed from design, architecture, generic colors used in the 70s, etc). « The revolution at work in our everyday activities is indeed one evolving a general translatability of media, a thoroughly digital world where the image is re-formed ad infinitum in the world of codes. »2 This general codification of references questions the means and the ends of the act of creating artworks in the face of the overall normalization of works in circulation and production. « Image, form, colour and movement are, in empathy, caught in movements of incorporation, animation of the inanimate, in projective transpositions (...) where, to put it the way Gilles Deleuze would, the perceptible experience is deterritorialized. »3 Bradley does not operate in modernist ways (radicalism, progress, originality). Instead, he is using a conceptual strategy applied to a Modern legacy. Culture is a ready-made that is used not only as a displaced or slightly altered object or style, but as an editing tool allowing a mixture of different and sometimes opposite cultural / formal structures. Not a collage, but a cross fading, articulated by modifications, modulations and variations.

...CONCEPTUAL ART ?

« It is not the passion (whether of objects and subjects) for substances that speaks in fetishism, it is the passion for the code, which, by governing both objects and subjects, and by subordinating them to itself, delivers them up to abstract manipulation. »

- Jean Baudrillard

This structural passion for the code began in the 60s. For Benjamin H.D. Buchloh4, these alien or exotic, peripheral or obsolete elements of discourse « result from an authentic desire to question the historical validity of a local, contemporary code by linking it to a different set of codes, such as previous styles, heterogeneous iconic sources, or to different modes of production and reception. » There is no reverence or explicit reference: it is impossible to point out a clear source of Bradley's works. They are not indexing a singular work, but a field of memory, a style: a code. The visual signifiers, be they taken from high art or mundane reference, are simply used as visual or memorial codes entering the elaboration of another artistic codification. Bradley could be a conceptual artist? His work refers now much more to Ad Reinhardt, Blinky Palermo, Daniel Buren, and to a recent generation who (re)infuses conceptual strategy into painting.

AND BACK AGAIN

«The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity. »

- Giorgio Agamben

Repetitions of motifs, configurations of tones and structural qualities of assemblages generate an intellectual, cultural and optical spectacle. Order and hierarchy vanish into a generalised collapse under the sole dominance of the system, the image and the code. This ruin of the reference reflects on a sedimentation of time in highly codified cultural production that oscillate in a contradictory balance between the standardisation and the need for singularisation. The tension between singularity and standardisation is echoed in the temporal irresolution of the works. Like George Condo, Bradley is contemporary because his painting is « liberated from history. Liberated by what has come before. What I'm thinking about is what I call a « theory of relative language in painting » which basically proposes the idea that a single painting can have multiple language properties acting simultaneously to create a single entity. »

1. As pictured in Life Magazine in January 1951 : William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, etc

2. "Split Times Frames" in The Movement of Images, Frédéric Migayrou, Ed. Du Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2006, p. 37

3. Ibid. p. 40

4. Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry - Parody and Appropriation in Francis Picabia, Pop and Sigmar Polke pp. 343-348

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