FILM

Spiderman (2015)

6 min

Mark Bradford’s Spiderman conjures the setting of a stand-up comedy act inspired, in part, by the era of Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, 1983, and Raw, 1987, comedy routines. Bradford, who is gay and black, recalls his anger when he attended one of Murphy’s live shows, notorious for their homophobia and jokes about AIDS. Spiderman puts the visitor in the highly charged sound space of a performance where the audience’s spontaneous (or nervous) laughter, silence, or outbursts reveal their values — shared or not. Bradford’s work also asks the art audience to question their own shared values by putting them in the more active, out-loud space of the performance audience.