Spotlight: Paige K. Bradley
Paige K. Bradley is an artist and writer based in New York. Her work has been shown at Blade Study, KAJE, Lubov, Somerset House, Kai Matsumiya, Theta, and the Broodthaers Society of America among many others. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, the New York Review of Architecture, and numerous other publications over the past decade and change. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts and in 2011 earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is an Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program for 2024–2025.
Paige K. Bradley is the author of Drive It All Over Me published by S*I*G-Verlag in 2023. The book addresses broad themes of subtextual narrative, authorship, and identity in text-based visual artworks while touching upon allegory, elaborately subtle jokes, and writing as a sculptural material. An edition of 10 signed copies is available today.
Drive It All Over Me was originally commissioned in late 2021 by the artists Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda as part of a long-form, critical response to their installation and book Bad Driver. In conversation with them, the essay was expanded to include sections on the late artist Jack Goldstein’s Selected Writings (1993–2000) as well as poet and attorney Vanessa Place’s Gone with the Wind (ca. 2009–15).
Works by Paige K. Bradley:
Artist’s Statement
My work is invested in treating compression as a feature, not a bug, of how images and writings are encountered, perceived, understood, and transmitted. Loss of quality, richness, information, and context is just part of reality. In that spirit, I’m going to present a compressed history of only a single piece from my practice. And to do that in a way true to my current interest in social art history, as well as my own history as it has been both understood and misunderstood by others, I have to start with someone else’s work.
This is a work by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda. It’s titled Bad Driver, and it was exhibited in January 2021 at Maxwell Graham’s gallery on Hester Street in New York. It consists of one book with multiple chapters laid out across the surfaces of 40/4 Rowland desk-chairs. A similar model to the chairs are in our studios at the Whitney program. You could sit down and read any of the books seen in this image. I didn’t have access to the artists’ intention when I saw the show, but I think it’s useful anyway to cite how they have since described this work as a “collection of historical writings that constructs a generalized picture of ‘Asians,’ following an outline made up of a constellation of fixed racial stereotypes.” I realized this on my own by reading the book’s various offensively titled chapters—“Worker Drones,” “Virtuous Maidens”—breaking into laughter in the gallery when it hit me that this whole installation was a completely savage joke about liberal Western institutions’ approach to knowledge production, especially in their self-regarding perspective towards “otherness,” so-called.
Here’s a bit from the preface to the book as written by the artists’ co-researcher and collaborator Kitty Chiu. “Though ostensibly a work about Asia, Bad Driver is essentially concerned with Americans. In fleshing out the misshapen effigy [of Asian Americans], the authors allow it to transcend the tired and boring dialectic of American racial categories. What are stereotypes—received ideas about groups of people—but a conspiracy theory by another name?”
I was commissioned to write about this work for Artforum. A short, at most 500 word review would have appeared in the March 2021 issue, the one with Lorraine O’Grady on the cover. It did not publish because an Associate Editor there at the time was, quote, “nervous” about what I had to say. I worked with this person for years, and once held his same job title, and yet he seemed to think he had some basis to assert I did not understand, quote, “the editorial process.” Let’s say we had an irreconcilable difference.
Here’s what happened next: Graham shared my unpublished writing with Jay and Q. Jay Chung emailed me in October 2021 to tell me that my reading of their work was, quote, “spot on.” He invited me to expand my piece into a larger thematic essay about subtext, or artworks where the literal meaning of a work is not apparent on its surface. I knew precisely what works I would want to address: Bad Driver, Vanessa Place’s Gone with the Wind project, and Jack Goldstein’s last work, titled Selected Writings.
The finished essay is about 20,000 words and was written over the course of a month and a half during the summer of 2022. I included a prepublication copy as part of the sculpture Chair Does Not Care :D feat. "Drive It All Over Me” in my 2023 solo show, titled “Of Course, You Realize, This Means War.” The main component of this work is a red-orange 40/4 Rowland chair. The entire gallery was also painted this color, consistency with the chair’s and the book’s color being only one of multiple conceptual reasons for that aesthetic choice. Soon thereafter, I signed a contract with the Somerset House in London for this work to be shown in a major thematic survey about the convergent “cute” and “kawaii” aesthetics in contemporary art and culture. Meanwhile, the essay was formally launched at Maxwell’s on October 4, 2023. I did not read from the book that night, but the writers Geoffrey Mak, Felix Bernstein, and Stephanie LaCava did. One in three.
I would have thought this was all quite good enough as an outcome, but the arguably funniest and strangest result was that my artwork was reproduced in Josh Kline’s “Best of the Year” feature for the December 2023 issue of Artforum. The same issue most contributors withdrew their work from in protest of David Velasco’s firing over his publication of an open letter in support of a ceasefire in Gaza. I was part of the first round of signatories to that letter and gave image permission and a fact-checking response the night before the letter went live on their website. And so, my writing on Bad Driver finally ended up in the magazine at the same moment that the publication ideologically collapsed under the weight of its own absurd contradictions. Sadly perfect.
As Adam Sandler said in the 2019 Christmas season crime thriller Uncut Gems, playing a charismatic jeweler who makes a high-stakes bet that could lead to the windfall of a lifetime, “This is how I win.”
My writing is part of Jay and Q’s art. My writing is my art. Both true facts. In his essay “Welcome to Girard” in the most recent issue of May Revue, Jay Chung writes about the importance of “discursive relations in which works respond to and elaborate on their contemporaries.” And furthermore, “if there is no means by which someone else’s work can further one’s own, art becomes a zero-sum game in which everyone else is an obstacle to realizing one’s own project or gaining the attention of audiences.” Which I interpret to mean that, if there is no possibility of dialogue, discourse, or generation of a true, complex and intertextual, even interpersonal response to art, then what, exactly, are we all doing? I know why I’m here; do you?
I might mention now that there are such things in English and other languages as grammatical moods. The subjunctive is one—relating to or denoting a quality of verbs expressing what is imagined or wished or possible. In a recent article for the New York Times, I was impressed by what the fiction writer Jean Chen Ho had to say about the subjunctive as an approach to life. “To live in the subjunctive is a manner of seeing the past not as a fixed story but as one that the present continuously acts upon. The present is what determines the past, not the other way around.” The subjunctive has something to do with how I live toward a future, and everything to do with the work I presently make in light of a past that I only have an interest in articulating insofar as I can address it through artist and writer—G-d rest her soul—Lorraine O’Grady’s terms of the counter-confessional.
Paige K. Bradley is the author of Drive It All Over Me. A limited edition of 10 signed copies are available now.
Learn more about Paige’s work:
Artist Paige K.B. joins Joshua Citarella to discuss three major exhibitions: “Cute” at Somerset House in London, “Poetics of Encryption” at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, and Simon Denny’s shows in New York.