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Adam PendletonTo Divide By

Mildred LaneKemper Art Museum

Exhibition Prospectus

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Exhibition Description

“What is your name?” “Where are you from?” “How did you end up here?” “Can you feel it?” “Does it hurt?” With these and other questions, the American artist Adam Pendleton’s solo exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum sets up an elaborate network of call-and-response that critically examines the resonance of ideas from varied cultural per-spectives, including social resistance movements, Dada, Conceptual art, minimalism, the Black Arts Movement, experimental poetry, and perfor-mance. The exhibition will showcase a polyvocal assemblage of recent works that together reveal Pendleton’s intrinsic interest in conversa-tion—exchanges between people, between aesthetic and social histo-ries, between media—as well as his belief in the capacity of abstraction to destabilize, obscure, and reimagine our history and our future.

Pendleton’s work is centered on his evolving concept of “Black Dada,” which he describes as a “way to talk about the future while talking about the past; it is our present moment.”1 The term is borrowed, in part, from “Black Dada Nihilismus,” a 1964 poem by Amiri Baraka (1934–2014, formerly known as Leroi Jones), and it reflects the artist’s particular interest in the black radical tradition, the projects of emanci-pation, and avant-garde artistic movements. Premised on an approach that is asyntactic and combinatorial, Pendleton’s art addresses the codes of representation and abstraction, the aesthetics of blackness, and the visual, political, and literary uses of language.

His artworks are all about speaking, listening, learning, and being heard, but also importantly about an inability to articulate, what he describes as a “kind of stuttering.”2 In resisting ready legibility, Pend-leton leverages the abstract possibilities of language, generating uncertainty and ambiguity as a productive means of recalibrating and reimagining the rules and conditions for representation. In the video What Is Your Name? Kyle Abraham: A Portrait (2020), for instance, Pend-leton explores the space between abstraction and testimony. The latest in the artist’s ongoing series of video portraits, the work begins as a poetic exchange of language between Pendleton and Kyle Abraham, an acclaimed American choreographer known for probing the relationship between identity and personal history through a hybrid of traditional

1Adam Pendleton, “Black Dada,” in Adam Pendleton: Black Dada Reader, ed. Stephen Squibb (London: Koenig Books, 2017), 338.2 Pendleton, in “Alec Mapes-Frances in conversation with Adam Pendleton,” in Adam Pendleton (London: Phaidon, 2020), 22.

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and vernacular dance styles. Pendleton poses a series of questions to Abraham, many of which are drawn from the artist’s Black Dada man-ifesto (2008), a foundational text to which he returns again and again. The questions begin as straightforward— “What is your name?” “Where are you from?”—and soon transition to a more abstract and sensual character: “Is it alright? Is he there? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Does it weigh much? Do you have to carry it far?”

Pendleton reiterates the questions in a rhythmic manner with slight variations in their order that solicit shifting responses from Abraham, pointing to the complexities of personal recollection. As in previous portraits of Lorraine O’Grady, David Hilliard, Yvonne Rainer, and Ishmael Houston-Jones, Pendleton’s portrait of Abraham attempts to compli-cate, even obfuscate, rather than simply reveal its subject. Abraham’s movements underscore this; as he dances his body morphs into dif-ferent personas, enacting a type of code-switching through his pos-ture and overtly expressive gestures. Near the end of the video, Pend-leton recites his poem “divide by,” repeating this incomplete phrase again and again while stacking up synonyms, antonyms, and other full

infinitives—“to stand up,” “to sit down,” “to divide,” “to protest,” “to express,” “to assemble,” “to break up,” “to love,” “to function,” “to protest”—in rapid succession. The verbal play of the poem constantly pivots potential meaning while underscoring the shifting power of the dancer’s body in motion. Throughout the video, repetition (of lan-guage, of movement, of imagery) and montage are employed to inter-rogate the logic of identity and the limits of representation.

At 19 feet tall, the monumental video projection of What is Your Name? will uniquely frame and direct the space of the exhibition, anchoring its discourse. Different series of Pendleton’s works will sur-round the video portrait’s elongated black box viewing room, including two recent series of paintings, Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2019–ongo-ing) and Untitled (Who We Are) (2018–ongoing), as well as a selection from his System of Display (2008–ongoing), extending and sharpening

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the formal and thematic concerns expressed in the video. While the address in the video portrait of Kyle Abraham is toward a singular “you” (“What is your name?” “Where are you from?”), it shifts to a collective “we” in the artist’s paintings, moving from an individual to a shared subjectivity.

In both the Untitled (WE ARE NOT) and Untitled (Who We Are) series, Pendleton combines pointed social content with free-form exper-imental investigation. To create the former body of works he first produces a spray-painted original made up of variations of the words WE ARE NOT layered one on top of each other, a phrase that also links back to his Black Dada manifesto. Using the democratic medium of spray paint, these works directly evoke the spirit of resistance found in graffiti and protest art. The immediacy of the mark is intentionally

displaced, however, becoming the source for silkscreens that Pend-leton uses to apply ink to large-scale canvases. The collective enun-ciation “WE ARE NOT” becomes destabilized through this mediated process and its overlapping layers, with affirmation slipping into negation and vice versa. The paintings exist, as Pendleton states, as “incomplete postulates.” “Like the voices of a multitude, they do not accede to an identity. In their combinatorial repetition, they unfold a multiplicity of negative identities: not-beings, not-nots, and being-nots.”3

3Pendleton, quoted in Stuart Krimko, “One-On-One: Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT),” David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, https://www.davidkordanskygallery.com/viewing-room/one-on-one-adam-pendleton2, accessed September 2020.

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Untitled (Who We Are) also features spray-painted markings, in this case black vertical lines applied directly to a canvas to form a ground that is then densely overlaid with the abstracted phrase “CRAZY NIGGER.” This violent phrase is taken from the title of a composition by the experimental composer and performer Julius Eastman (1940–1990). In the late 1970s, Eastman completed a series of compositions layering confrontational language and implicit commentary with his predominantly formal and structurally rigorous minimalist compo-sitions. In each of Pendleton’s paintings the layering of this phrase is rhythmic, an overlapping series of language, line, and texture that, like Eastman’s composition, moves in and out of synchronization.

In both series of paintings Pendleton applies various modes and mechanisms of abstraction and mediation. The spray-painted marks and repeated phrases are variously photographed, copied, printed, and ultimately presented as painting again—a set of procedures resulting in visual noise and distraction that verges on obliteration, yet paradoxically forces the viewer to focus. Abstraction here acts as a provocative means of reorientation.

The System of Display series builds on such reorientation through Pendleton’s open and absurdist method of accumulating and arrang-ing material from his vast personal library such that we are inclined to question what we think we know. The artist appropriates images from the pages of art publications, exhibition catalogs, historical source texts, other printed matter, and language, creating an experimental index or archive that destabilizes conventional museological prac-tices of interpretation and display. The appropriated images are pho-tocopied, enlarged, cropped, silkscreened on mirrored surfaces, and individually framed in wall-mounted black boxes. Each box is covered by a glass pane and printed with a single letter from a longer word that is registered in the title of the work. Pendleton’s use of a reflec-tive mirror surface invites the viewer into the historical image itself, reanimating the image’s negative space with the vitality of the pres-ent moment while also serving as a reminder that meaning is contin-gent upon relational context and is thus always fugitive.

Another work in the exhibition is a multipart grid of silkscreened ink on Mylar works, The Now I Am / But Now I Am, 2020. The composite presents a broad lexicon of appropriated images, fragmented texts, and geometric motifs that slip between representation and abstrac-tion. The imagery echoes that found in Pendleton’s System of Display

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Artist Biography

Adam Pendleton was born in 1984 in Richmond, Virginia. He has pre-sented his work in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Le Consor-tium, Dijon (2020); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2020); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2018); the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017); the Baltimore Museum of Art (2017); and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2016). His work was featured in the Belgian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale as well as in numerous thematic exhibitions internationally. In fall 2021 he will present Who Is Queen, a major new project in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Pendleton lives and works in New York.

Exhibition Catalog

A catalog will accompany the exhibition, edited by Meredith Malone, associate curator, in conjunction with Adam Pendleton.

Exhibition Tour

The exhibition’s tour will begin in fall 2023, with the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum as its first venue and two additional venues.

September 2023 – January 2024

Spring/Summer 2024

Fall 2024

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis

Available

Available

works, notably including reference to twentieth-century documents of colonialism and decolonization, as well as the entanglements of European and African modernisms. In these layered and mediated compositions, tagged with language and marks, Pendleton offers a visual field within which assumed identities become unfixed. The components making up this large-scale work are variously repeated, reshuffled, and recontextualized across other facets of the exhibi-tion, holding the potential for seemingly infinite permutation and inventiveness.

Across these diverse bodies of work, it is the process of transforma-tion—a perpetual becoming-different—that fundamentally interests Pendleton. The commingling, fragmenting, repetition, and radical juxtaposition of images and language that are the hallmarks of his work, and that encompass this exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum, point to the artifice of being any one thing. What possibilities unfold, the artist asks, when we embrace complexity and inclusivity, when we defer to poetics and abstraction, when we are vulnerable, when we enter into conversation?

Images:

Stills from What is Your Name? Kyle Abraham: A Portrait (2020)Projection room of What is Your Name? Kyle Abraham: A Portrait (2020)Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2019–ongoing)Selection from The System of Display series (2008–ongoing)