Adam Pendleton Rethinking the Museum


The Museum of Modern Art’s Marron Atrium is a large, strange void that rises from the second floor to the sixth floor. Since opening in the middle of MoMA’s 2004 expansion, many projects – but very little as complex as “Who is the Queen?by ” Adam PendletonComing on September 18.

In a matter of months, the artist built three black scaffolding structures 60 feet high from the walls, like an endoskeleton. Each forms a layered, irregular grid with internal stairs and landings. The community ignites references – De Stijl, Le Corbusier’s Unités d’Habitation, Manhattan apartments. But the use of timber – by twos etc. – it evokes a modest house-building, and the overlaps where the planks are bolted together create a kind of sparkle and rhythm.

Pendleton, 37, is best known as a painter of abstract canvases. black and white style that challenges how we read language. They bring together photocopied texts, words taken out of context, scrambled and repetitive letters made using spray-paint, brush and screen printing processes. Here, his large paintings are scattered on piers at different heights, some deliberately hidden by the trellis.

But there is much more. “Who is the Queen?” includes drawings and sculptures; On a giant screen, run three video works, including his new portrait. Jack HalberstamHis work in queer theory offers an alternative history of sexuality. A sound collage fills the space with the following sounds: Superintendent Baraka reading poetry, music by violinist Hahn Rowe, Black Lives Matter rally, dialogues with academics, jazz pieces.

The museum channeled the Gesamtkunstwerke of early Modernism, channeling the project into the “21st century. He calls it a total work of art for the 21st century. “This idea of ​​total artwork that engages all your senses was really important to the avant-garde,” said Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance, who organized the show.

Pendleton put it differently. “I try to overwhelm the museum,” he said.

“Who is the Queen?” collects material covering a range of contemporary issues. It is set in motion by a challenge to the artist’s personal identity, who is black and gay – the phrase “You are such a queen” in a way that once got him under his skin. But it did broaden the concern to American society as a whole – where it’s headed and that we shouldn’t all be chained to narrow identity labels.

It’s never less than more Pendleton. The artist grew up in Richmond, Va., studied art in Italy as a teenager, and came to New York at age 18. He avoided college or traditional art school in favor of learning by doing and emerged as a leading multidisciplinary thinker with a compelling aesthetic. .

His work has been widely shown in a groundbreaking performance,”Revival”, at the 2007 Performa biennial and in a number of major exhibitions since. Two-person shows paired him with Papa Joan Jonas. L and David Adjaye.

“The man is a sage,” said Adrienne Edwards, director of curatorial affairs at the Whitney Museum, who has followed his career closely. He called his work a rigorous yet elegant and open-ended “fouled Conceptualism”.

But the job is never easy. For his art, Pendleton claims a privilege—an obligation—which the French Caribbean scholar Édouard Glissant calls “necessity.” opacity right: not being legible, not having to explain oneself.

“I don’t mind being misunderstood,” he said. “You can see it in my work – in these areas of stuttering language. It is a refusal but also an invitation.”

On a recent summer night, Pendleton offered a close-up look at his process. He had gone to Richmond to shoot his images. Equestrian statue of Robert E. LeeIt is an indicator of the current American climate, with its pedestal covered with protest messages that became an important gathering place in the midst of the 2020 riots.

Movie “Queen Is Who?” would work in Archival footage of Pendleton and the Poor People’s Campaign held on the National Mall in 1968. term papers by photographer Jill Freedman.

It was an engagement with the familiar terrain.

“I’ve passed this street countless times,” the film crew said as they sat on a grassy median on Monument Avenue. He remembered growing up somewhat accustomed to his statue, forming a kind of shell against the Confederate circle like many Black Southerners. “It’s gotten a little commonplace,” he said.

Now. Although the city had removed other statues of Confederate leaders, Lee’s continued: It came under state jurisdiction, and the matter was stirred up in court, while governor Ralph Northam promised to take it down. (21 feet on Sept. 8 Statue standing since 1890 finally removed; pedestal stands for now.)

But for Pendleton, the monument in its ephemeral state, splendidly embellished with messages celebrating black, brown, queer and trans lives, denouncing police brutality and more, constituted a remarkable text in itself. Even after putting the city chain link fence Around January, it still radiated vital, unruly signals.

“He writes, rewrites, overwrites,” he said. “This is what is visually embodied here.”

As night fell, team members placed powerful spotlights on the statue. They lit up Lee’s head, the horse’s ass, a bit of sky. Moving on the pedestal, they threw light medallions showing the jumble of graffiti and slogans in perfect circles. It was a different way of “reading” the sculpture – similar to how Pendleton’s canvases transformed written material.

“This is how I think when I’m working on a painting,” he said. “It is both a document and a response to a document with gestures and signs. That’s why I love this moment and this surface.”

For some shots, an actor, Thai Richards, stood shirtless and indifferent on a platform with the statue on his back. Lights swept over her body, set it to glow, then handed it over to penumbra – hyper visible, then invisible.

Pendleton guided the dance of the beams. “Use it like your eye,” he said, urging spot operators to slow down their movements, to find a rhythm. “

Summer night intensified. “We’ve been looking at this for hours,” Pendleton said. It wasn’t a complaint. “One of the most important things art has to do is make you look, not just for 10 seconds,” he said.

“Who is the Queen?” Ten years in the making, first sparked by conversations with Edwards; In addition to Comer, the organizers include rising curator Danielle A. Jackson (currently at Artists Space) and assistant curator Gee Wesley. architect Frederic Tang worked on the structure and DJ Jace Clayton on sound.

The installation highlights Pendleton’s work beyond painting – video portraits, for example, an ongoing series that also includes the artist. Lorraine O’Grady or the choreographer Ismail Houston Jones – but even more so to his process.

His is a collageist method guided by a principle he calls ‘.black dad“quotes and juxtaposes writing, imagery, and music in the service of a social sense, especially Blackness in America. (The term is reminiscent of European Dadaists and Baraka’s poignant 1964 poem “Black Dada Nihilismus.”)

Pendleton will leave a mark for years to come. For example, his relationship with MoMA goes back to his residence there in 2012-2015; studied the history of the exhibition, down to analyzing its audio guides.

Meanwhile, his research into the visual aspects of social movements crystallized around 2011. Occupy Wall Street and its branches later drew him to study historical premises as he followed Black Lives Matter and traveled to protest sites.

These interests converge in the MoMA setup. Edwards observed that the project’s longevity made it “a kind of inclusive that has marked the past 10 years of societal inquiry.”

While drinking coffee in Richmond the morning after shooting, Pendleton recalled the event that inspired “Who’s the Queen?” It was a fleeting moment in conversation, he said, but it brought up “the idea that someone else could name you or claim you, and the vulnerability that comes with it.”

The project is “probably my most profound autobiographical work to date,” he said.

Perhaps characteristically, rather than dwelling on microaggression, Pendleton accelerated his extensive research into how easily the urge to categorize socially takes root and restricts hard-won freedoms.

“Here’s the Man, in his thirties, Black, male – wouldn’t it be nice to live outside of all that?” said. “And I think that’s what draws us to art; at best it is the other, outside of fixed and finite spaces.”

Pendleton said that queerness is the “permanently misunderstood position”, that it is at once both precarious and full of possibilities. But even the discourse around queer identity risked becoming silos. “Has queer theory itself become an institutional field?” said. He said that anxiety drew him to him. Halberstam, a transgender professor at Columbia University His latest book, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, explores living beyond categories.

In a phone interview, Halberstam described being filmed by Pendleton as a kind of adventure, an intimate process outside of traditional documentary. At one point, Pendleton said she asked him to write 200 words on any topic and then read them. In another, Pendleton wanted to film Halberstam naked in the shower.

Bilgin accepted the process openly. “It was closer to therapy than biography,” Halberstam said. “I think Adam’s goal is to delve into the subconscious of contemporary politics. Beneath the surface of socially enforced discourse, he looks for these wild unscripted plots.”

For all his intellectual prowess, Pendleton’s project carries a secret stream of melancholy. The MoMA installation includes two paintings from a new series based on a sentence that he made up and then disassembled. It reads: “They will love us all, queens.” But the sentence seems disorganized and incomplete.

“Expression is never fully resolved in the field of the picture,” Pendleton said. “And it’s somehow extremely personal and unresolved for me.”

In Richmond, Pendleton said he knew he wanted to throw a black male actor in front of the statue, then waited for the obvious question: “Is this a substitute for me? I’m asking myself that question.”

No matter how radically ambiguous Pendleton embraces, “Who is the Queen?” In a period of intense questioning by museums’ artists and audiences and their commitments, programming and practices, it landed in a specific time and place – MoMA.

In the spring, a series of activist sit-ins and rallies were held. hit the MoMA it raised many issues, from staff cuts to the financial interests of board members, and ultimately to the existence of the museum itself as a “monument.”blood-soaked modernity

Poet, critic and theorist Fred Moten video panelcursed the museum. Moten is one of Pendleton’s inspirations and “Who’s the Queen?” It is included in the source book prepared instead of a catalogue.

Now Pendleton’s installation will be MoMA’s most visible exhibit this season in scale and central location. Curator Comer saw this as an opportunity. “Museums need to be critiqued and rethought from the ground up, and I think Adam is one of the artists who can help us do that.”

Pendleton seemed ready for it.

To put pressure on a space, as Occupy or Black Lives Matter in their own way oppresses power-filled spaces.

In a sense, he built his own museum inside MoMA – an experiment in change from within, offering a radically different method of display in institutional galleries than the chronological unfolding of the Modernist canon.

“Can art complicate the politics of love or joy?” He asked. “To answer these questions, I have to enter the museum’s space. But my intention is to overwhelm him, to force him to be something else.”



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