Barry Schwabsky on Adam Pendleton
Seeing Adam Pendleton’s exhibition “These Issues We’ve Achieved Collectively” so quickly after making an attempt to digest “Who Is Queen?,” his overwhelming, densely information-laden present that crammed the five-story-high Marron Household Atrium at New York’s Museum of Trendy Artwork, got here as one thing of a reduction. “The [MoMA] exhibition presents itself as an accumulation of labor,” stated Pendleton of the presentation—and the viewer’s labor, if not the artist’s, may appear Sisyphean. However the piece definitely succeeded in “efficiently fus[ing] a constructing and a scenario,” to cite a phrase from Pendleton’s 2008 Black Dada Manifesto.
The present right here is far simpler to soak up. The set up consists of 4 very massive work and fifteen drawings, all made between 2020 and 2021, together with an earlier video, all of that are executed in black and white. It’s unsurprising—although a bit retro—to see a video in black and white, however the full absence of chromatic coloration in work on an enormous scale is putting. Pendleton’s canvases embed the semantic area of writing, of textuality, inside a subject of energized drips and spatters harking back to Summary Expressionism—a motion that had its personal sturdy tropism towards the achromatic (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and naturally Franz Kline all felt it, as did their successor Cy Twombly, together with his blackboard works). Pendleton’s work are bluntly legible—the phrase WE ARE NOT seems time and again, an insistent negation. The phrases maintain flashing up like flares—a light-weight extra blinding than the encircling darkness. The artist’s use of silk-screen ink quite than oil and even acrylic paint retains his pressing marks bodiless, but totally corporeal of their optical depth.
A few of the drawings eschew the work’ textual armature in favor of extra summary configurations, however one group of seven, executed in black on a dark-gray floor (and put in in a room painted the identical grey) permits for half-legible fragments of writing to float out and in of signification, like wayward ghosts. What hangs over all this work appears to be a query about the place language comes from, and about who is talking a given utterance. This notion takes on extra direct salience within the video Simply Again from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer, 2016–17. Assembly in a Manhattan diner with the well-known filmmaker/choreographer, Pendleton asks her to learn a textual content he’s ready. The work collages excerpts from historic paperwork by Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X with accounts of current murders of Black individuals by police. As well as, the script accommodates descriptions of Rainer’s personal 1966 dance piece Trio A (which regardless of its title is a solo, as we see in footage from a efficiency of it that has been reduce in on the finish). Extra putting than Rainer’s voice is her gaze—her eyes all the time huge, her face open. And but I learn profound wariness in it, although not with out heat—a type of vigilant inside distance or neutrality that disappears for a second when she reads out the litany of crimes towards Black individuals, such because the killing of Eric Garner; on this event, one thing within her visibly breaks. “That’s a powerful doc,” she permits. On this occasion, when voice, textual content, and gaze paradoxically unite in a breakdown quite than a mutual reinforcement, I start to know what Pendleton’s artwork is aiming at, no matter medium.
— Barry Schwabsky
