Abstract artists will often say that although their work isn’t representational or illusionistic, it nonetheless offers a picture of the world. Artist Mark Bradford, fresh from representing the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale last summer, has used a nearly 400-foot-long interior wall at the Hirshhorn Museum to make a colourful, clotted and peeling picture of the world he calls ‘Pickett’s Charge.’

The title of this Hirshhorn-commissioned work, which references a Southern general whose name is now synonymous with military disaster, is politically volatile. It references one of the more dramatic moments of the Civil War, when three divisions of Confederate infantry attacked Union lines across a wide, open field at the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. It was a dark moment for the South and is often cited as the turning point — the “high-water mark of the Confederacy” — in a war that until then had favoured the South.

Bradford isn’t interested in the drama of the war, but rather in how the narrative of that drama has been transmitted for more than 150 years. Embedded in his eight panels of thickly layered and torn paper is a reproduction of Paul Philippoteaux’s 1883 panoramic painting ‘The Battle of Gettysburg,’ which is still on view at the battlefield visitors’ centre in a purpose-built cyclorama auditorium. The Gettysburg cyclorama is one of the few remaining 19th century panoramas, and offers a rare chance to see what was then a popular, highly commercial and fully immersive spectacle that gave visitors a three-dimensional, 360-degree painted view of the entire battlefield.

Using billboard-size reproductions of the Philippoteaux painting culled from the internet, Bradford has created thickly layered palimpsests of paper, embedded with ropes and cords that create striations. In some places, these appear like the fluttering horizontal lines produced by an old television tube, as if we are getting a distorted picture beamed over fickle air waves, and in others like geological layers, curving in response to tectonic forces. Small details of the original painting, highly pixilated from the reproduction process, show through, though in a few cases Bradford allows what is supposed to be buried — the original Civil War painting — to come fully to the surface. In a panel called ‘Dead Horse,’ one sees a haystack, cavalry and a dead horse, enlarged as a poignant detail that threatens to destabilise the abstraction with a powerful, representational and emotional focal point. In other panels, remains of the Philippoteaux are visible only if you put your nose to the surface of the work and search for colours and pixel patterns that differ from the rest of the palette and textures.

“I’m forcing the viewer to actually look at the ‘Grand American Painting,’ “ Bradford has said of his work. The artist has been at work on this piece for about three years, during which time conflicts about race and racism (and in particular how the Southern memory of the Civil War is a proxy for racism) have turned violent. The nation’s first African-American president has been succeeded by a president who refused to disavow white nationalists in the wake of protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has defended racist symbols of “Southern heritage” erected during the darkest days of the Jim Crow era.

In an interview with Hirshhorn Chief Curator Stéphane Aquin, Bradford sounds despairing: “I would say that it’s absolutely impossible not to be angry. With all the things we fought for — to be more in the centre of the conversation, to be more in the centre of power... What we see now, though, is that we were escorted to the door.”

In one sense, Bradford is indeed forcing us to look at a “Grand American Painting.”

Bradford’s technique involves scraping and cutting and gouging into the layers of paper he has assembled, and the ropes and cords he embeds in the material are key to the larger meaning.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, in which the president spoke of “mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone,” was in the artist’s ear when he made this work (though this is not the first time Bradford has used this technique). Certainly the idea of a bond, something that ties us together but also is the root of the word bondage, which was a synonym for slavery, is heard in its richer, wider meaning.

Bradford’s choice of the Philippoteaux cyclorama is canny. Although it is a popular tourist attraction, and many Americans retain fond memories of visiting it while on family holidays (this was decidedly not the experience of Bradford, who didn’t visit until after he made his Hirshhorn work), it isn’t exactly iconic. The artist might have used photographs by Alexander Gardner or Mathew Brady, or the Civil War images of Winslow Homer. But his intent wasn’t to deface an icon of the Civil War in some echo of Marcel Duchamp painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Rather, it was to set up a powerful contrast between our desire to be fully and luxuriantly immersed in familiar narratives — the cyclorama experience — and the more anarchic and unsettling freedom of abstraction. It is in that sense that he has indeed created a picture of the world.

“Pickett’s Charge” is on view through November 12, 2018 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Avenue and Seventh Street SW, Washington, D.C.

By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 24th, 2017