Hammer Museum

Like Mark Bradford’s earlier multimedia works, the sound installation Spiderman addresses head-on the representation and formation of the black male subject. The character “Spiderman” synthesizes the traditions of African American stand-up comedians and performers noted for having a raucous onstage presence, such as Blowfly (Clarence Henry Reid), whose explicit albums anticipated the sexually charged rap music of the 1990s; Jackie “Moms” Mabley; Richard Pryor; and Eddie Murphy. 

Bradford cites Murphy’s 1983 cable television special Delirious, which he experienced as a member of the live audience, as an inspiration. In his routine, Murphy uses homophobic and misogynistic stereotypes to position “real” black masculinity as dialectically opposed to queerness, at a moment of increased scrutiny and misinformation following the emergence of AIDS in the United States. “Spiderman,” who identifies as female-to-male transgender, irreverently discusses aging, sexuality, and pop culture before addressing the incidents that linked AIDS to the black community—the supposed genesis of HIV in Africa and the death of the Los Angeles rapper Eazy-E (of N.W.A.) in 1995—and cautioning that “AIDS is still trending like a mothafucka.” This work continues the arc of Bradford’s early experiences as an artist emerging in the mid-1980s, informed by queer and feminist politics during the unfolding AIDS crisis. Challenging the social conventions of gender and race to present other possibilities, Spiderman situates humor and art as potent means to critique and redress cultural fear, ignorance, and misrepresentation.

Spiderman is on view through September 27: http://bit.ly/1Q0Uxp1

Mark Bradford, Spiderman, 2015. Sound installation. 5:00 min. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

"Moving to L.A. was really good for my practice. The time-base was different and provided a great opportunity for me to focus and build. Also, I became more aware of a wide variety of DIY, conceptual, feminist, queer, and community-based practices. I met people using dance, music, composition, writing, computer programming languages, physical computing, and other practices within their cultural production in ways that I had never before encountered."

3 questions with Made in L.A. artist Devin Kenny: http://bit.ly/1rTJD7V

Favorite place in L.A.? Up high.

3 questions with Made in L.A. artist A.L. Steiner: http://bit.ly/1m4A0zB

David Wojnarowicz, The Death of American Spirituality, 1987. Mixed media on plywood. Collection of John Carlin and Renée Dossick.

David Wojnarowicz’s life experiences—his early history of abuse, hustling, and drugs; his euphoric queerness; and his and his friends’ fatal struggles with AIDS—furnish the conditions of his artistic production. Identifying with the communities from the decrepit piers and underground East Village sites that he frequented, Wojnarowicz found in the personal and the social weapons to attack the dominant paradigms of a nation in the throes of the culture wars. Like much of his oeuvre, both of the works included here merge imagery from pop culture, history, and dreams to assemble distinctive narratives and historical allegories. The resulting surreal compositions point to and demand accountability from cultural conventions and egregious political actors—like American notions of “progress” and the participants in the Iran-Contra affair—in a chronicle of the wreckage of contemporary American society.

http://bit.ly/1myDxT7