MB: Tweets! You would tweet from your world to the next world. And they would tweet from the next. So that’s really where it came from. At first I thought, I’m going to have all the different solar systems. And then I thought, wait a minute. No. Actually I’m going to have this one, and I’m going to turn this one into a solar system.
WTD: Or one planet, they’re all Planet Earth, right?
MB: Yes.
WTD: So I love these new large-scale black and yellow paintings that are on the wall. They remind me a lot of your famous work at the US Pavilion in Venice, ‘Oracle’. In my mind, they are a bit like Oracle’s children. Are they related in your mind?
MB: They are ‘Oracle’’s children. I was wondering how to make them into that and it was just so spontaneous. In Venice, I was really responding to the architecture and this kind of vaulted ceiling. These are really my walking down the road of Dante’s ‘Inferno’. This is me. This is just a first step of me walking down that road and trying to develop a kind of material language around that story.
WTD: And obviously, the yellows and the burning, the oxidation and the burning of the yellow, and Oracle’s kids relate to the landmasses in all of the Globes. Is the world on fire?
MB: Yes. The world is on fire.
WTD: Indeed it is. This is the most sculptural show of your career so far. It includes ‘Mithra’, the Globes, the largest Waterfall you’ve ever made, and the Buoys. Although they are quite different formally, each relates to different aspects of your painting. Is there a relationship in your mind among the different series of sculptures?
MB: They all come out of painting. The material really comes out of an American-ness to materiality. I mean, you can go back to Rauschenberg and this kind of material. Maybe my idea of painting might go back a little further to the Classics, but they all come out of painting. I don’t know exactly how.
WTD: It really is all an extension from when you attach the soccer balls physically to the paintings. You can almost see that the Globes are attached to, and have a resonance with, let’s call them, ‘Oracle’s children.’ I know you’re going to come up with titles later. Now I’d like to ask you about the smaller paintings you’ve made for this exhibition. They are something we haven’t seen before. How did you make them?
MB: Actually, I struggled with making them individually, and then when I just put them all up as one grid and made them as individual components within a grid, it got easier.
WTD: But the technique is something new…
MB: I would lay down whatever material, or whatever shapes, and then I wanted it to erase it. Like Richter uses the squeegee. So I took all of them, the paint, all of the papers, and put a lot of glue in it. And then I just dumped it on top of each one of them and it dried. So in a way, it’s like when you drop a big splatter of paint on concrete and it just kind of takes over? That’s what I did on each one. To kind of erase it or push it back.
WTD: They’re beautiful. And like I said, we’ve never seen anything like it before.
The text paintings are incredible. The language comes from the great song ‘Dancing in the Streets’, which is also the name of the video you’re making for the exhibition. Music has always had an important role in your work. Why are you drawn to this song now?