Asger Jorn Untitled, 1967 Collage on paper Private Collection © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/ billedkunst.dk/ DACS 2016. Image: Bridgeman Images
‘I don’t collect all posters. I generally collect merchant posters because merchant posters talk about a service, and the service talks about a body, and that body talks about a community, and that community talks about many diferent conversations. So they’re very diferent. I scan when I’m walking, I don’t take every poster.’ (Mark Bradford as quoted in C. Avendano, ‘Merchant Portraits’ 2005, www.pbs.org) Mark Bradford’s The Father’s “No” is a work from 2007 made of up of six parts. Each part is derived from posters stripped from the streets of Los Angeles. Here, uniformity is balanced with diversity: a hotline for fathers to gain custody or visitation rights for their children is displayed on all of them, but the hue and texture with which this hotline is represented varies from one piece to the next. The text itself - ‘Fathers, do you want child custody • divorce • visitation. 866 -72, Daddy’ - has been torn, abused, and scoured; suggesting high emotional states at tragicomic odds with the proft-focused motivation behind its indiferent target-marketing. Its use of the word ‘Daddy’ tinges the pieces with an implacable sadness; here is an America in which guilt and loneliness are unashamedly transmuted into variables for lucrative fnancial strategies; an America so hostile and so hard that the cynicism of this is hidden only by its ubiquity.
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