Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis finds itself both on the cutting edge of the international art scene and deeply committed to local artists in its new set of exhibitions that opened Friday, May 6.
The Contemporary opened the first St. Louis show for Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford just after he was announced as the United States’ representative at the Venice Biennale in 2017, one of the art world’s most elite international shows. In announcing Bradford’s selection, Christopher Bedford, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, described him as “the leading American abstract painter of his generation and a vigorous advocate for the interests of under-represented urban communities,” attributes that are very evident in his work at the Contemporary.
The centerpiece of Bradford’s local show is “Receive Calls on Your Cell Phone from Jail” (2013), a massive (169 foot by 110 foot) collage of 38 panels that he fashioned from what he calls “merchant posters.” More common in more dense cities like Los Angeles, these are large, ephemeral, paste-up advertisements. Bradford liberates these posters from their commercial environment and then works them in various ways – mostly by stripping them down, tracing over them, and building forms on them with things like string – until he arrives at a work of art. “Like a relationship,” Bradford told The American in an interview, “you always know when one is done.”
When finished, each piece resembles an abstract landscape. The collage of 38 such pieces – placed in no one set order, Bradford said – it becomes a crazy quilt of abstract landscapes with a cumulative, haunting visual power. Jeffrey Uslip, chief curator for The Contemporary, described it as “an allegorical, cartographic understanding of a city.”
“Receive Calls on Your Cell Phone from Jail” takes its arresting title from the text on the merchant poster that underlies the collage. On close inspection, each piece contains countless tracings of this deeply sad advertising message. Here we find his advocacy for “the interests of under-represented urban communities” that attracted the 2017 Venice Biennale curators.
“This one I found troubling,” Bradford said at a media preview on May 6. “You see here how the penal system tears families apart. You’ll receive a service, but of course they’ll charge you three or four times the rate. You get a service, but you get exploited.”
The Contemporary also has on display a piece of single-channel video art he made a decade before this collage, “Practice” (2003). It depicts him dribbling and shooting a basketball wearing a Los Angeles Lakers jersey and an improvised version of an antebellum hoop skirt that looks more like a parachute. It was shot on a gusty day, and between the wind and what it does to the parachute around his waist, Bradford has a hard time with hooping it. Adding to the strangeness of the imagery, Bradford is NBA-sized – “I’m the same height as Kobe,” he told The American (that’s 6’7 ½”). It’s a three-minute absurdist meditation on struggling against obstacles in the quintessential urban landscape of the open-air basketball court.
Local artist Lyndon Barrois Jr. used that same dramatic urban space as the basis for his installation “Of Color,” which also opened at the Contemporary on May 6. Barrois actually had a room of the museum paved with asphalt and a basketball hoop installed. Arrayed in the space, like players on a team, are sculptures he made out of printer toner boxes and images clipped from advertising. They are not basketball images, but rather hats, hairdos, sunglasses and shoes, though not archetypal basketball shoes. There is also a basketball laying on the asphalt as part of the exhibit, hand-lettered “ELJAY BITU.”
“Drawing parallels between athletic gestures and sculptural forms,” the Contemporary’s program notes reads, “Barrois Jr. connects ideas of sport and spectacle while raising issues of objectification.”
Barrois was one of three local artists selected for the 2016 Great Rivers Biennial by three national jurors. The other artists and their pieces are Tate Foley, “Post No Bills,” an installation of large-scale sculptures and videos that meditate on protest art and language, and Nanette Boileau, “Dakota Territory,” a three-channel video exploration of cattle in the American West and the industry that defines (and, ultimately, ends) their lives.
Also opening at the Contemporary on May 6 was “I Sing the Body Electric” by French artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar, two videos that feature her dancing in empty galleries following the close of the 2015 Venice Biennial, where her work was featured. It is fitting that this piece made in the aftermath of a previous Venice Biennial opened with Bradford’s St. Louis exhibition, which was in the works long before he was selected for the career-transforming Venice Biennial.
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis has never been more in command of the international contemporary art scene and , at the same time, never more committed to launching local artists with major shows in its enormous and attractive exhibition spaces. This show, on display in August 14, deserves large and engaged local and national audiences.
For more information, visit http://camstl.org/.
