On a beautiful morning last fall, I drove with Adam Pendleton to his studio in Germantown, a small village located in upstate New York.
A common thread running through the work of the New York artist Adam Pendleton (b. 1980) is an investigation on the origin and structure of language forms. His silk-screens and paintings, which often obey predetermined rules of composition, consist of two or three colours and are frequently built from an archive of Xeroxed ephemera or words and letters from pop culture. The subjects range from 1960s conceptual art to the Black Art movement, from experimental poetry to punk rock and from gospel to gay liberation. In his performances, Pendleton takes the stand as orator, wittily invoking multiple interpretations by exploiting the soft psychology of autobiography and combining specialized discourse and common knowledge in an at times very complex redistribution of cultural information. For Performa 07, the annual performance festival in New York City, Pendleton produced The Revival – a fusion of Southern-style religious revivals (including a 30-person Gospel choir) and avant-garde experimental writing practices. For his contribution to Manifesta 7, Pendleton delivered a live manifesto entitled BLACK DADA: A History of Art. In a repetitive built-up narrative, Pendleton unfolded a complex collage of source material compiled from existing manifestos and other (historical) texts, which extend from the Dadaists to today.
If you had to give a small statement about your practice, what would it be?
‘I guess it would consist of a series of obvious observations about the work, not in relationship to form but in relationship to process. That the work uses existing languages, forms and images as a basic foundation.’
In your new work, System of Display, you pull images from disparate histories, such as installation shots of the first Documenta and a photograph of a Nigerian burial mask and connect them to a text written by Andreas Spiegl on the work of Cerith Wyn Evans. Could you explain what ‘quotation’ means to you?
‘I think it changes depending upon what you’re trying to achieve. Critically, I think the idea of quotation is a problematic track. As an idea, it opposes a necessary engagement with pertinent critical forms or discourses. I think in the realm of language, appropriation is a very liberating idea, but quotation is a very limiting one. Within the sphere of art, it’s the other way around; quotation can feel more expansive as a position, whereas appropriation is more limiting as an operating space.’
Let’s talk about the perception of autonomy in your work. In what way does this notion concern your artistic production?
‘My work cancels out the idea of any kind of autonomy. It’s actually anti any kind of idea of separation. It much more concerns networks of knowledge and the connections between things – so there’s room for chance, or a swerve. I’m using that word specifically in regards to how the writer Joan Retallack speaks to this idea of a swerve in relationship to culture. Something happens that shifts our sense of reality. She particularly refers to people who she feels have altered our sense of reality or culture, like John Cage, Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein.’
Your recent series entitled Black Dada plays with the notion of painting as object and the object as painting in which image references and words dissolve in a performative abstraction. Could you talk about the literal and figurative use of language in your work?
‘That’s a very appropriate question because those are exactly the two types of languages that the work intends to address, or at least put into conversation with each other – particularly now, with the Black Dada paintings and the installations I’ve been doing with the black cubes. I’ve brought these two ideas of what language is within certain circles and what language can do together within the space of the work, so you have this intersection of these concepts of something that’s elementary but also alien and abstract. The work is pushing towards a more abstract space and a more literal space at the same time. Representing these ideas of blackness, literally and theoretically, and playing with the type of language associated with that kind of contemporary art production and then, within the same space, pushing our more literary or academic approaches and understanding of language forward. The less language represents its language-ness, the more it represents those two spheres of discourse. More specifically, Black Dada LC/AK/AA is a painting measuring eight by six foot. It is a diptych, which for me means a separation between something that is whole. It is the result of an image of a Sol LeWitt, Incomplete open cube from 1974, being Xeroxed on my copy machine. The Xerox is being cropped and edited so that one only looks at a specific part of the image of the cube. It’s no longer the image of the cube, it’s an image of the image of the incomplete cube. The Xerox is enlarged by a photographic process to the largest scale possible so that the object actually becomes a result of certain mechanical limitations, which is something people often don’t know about the work. I enjoy using certain mechanical limitations as a set of rules.’
As you mentioned earlier, your practice aims to create a re-historicized present. Could you expand on this?
‘Beginning at the beginning: A statement of the artist Julie Ault quoted in a Cerith Wyn Evans book. “The dangers of taking pleasure in the past and the benefits of remembering in order to reinvent are not clearly posted. There is a risk of peddling nostalgia, of getting lost and/or paralyzed in emotionally inflected territory in which recreation of the past obscures and replaces (or displaces) the present. To aid critical understanding of past specificities, and their effect in the present, it seems more productive to consider loose continuums of production than to provide a form of periodization as punctuation. How to balance multiple relations to history?... Historiography might be approached akin to artistic methodologies, utilize juxtaposition and artistic license, render ambivalently rather than declaratively, and ultimately acknowledge, not only in principle but as part of a historicizing method itself, that historiography is a creative as well as interpretive practice: that it is a form of production.”’
Is this your response to my question?
‘Well, I like what she says here in terms of history, particularly what she says towards the end, that history, creating historical narratives or trajectories, what you have – is a creative act itself. For me, history is perpetually a fiction. Part of my work is thinking about systems of display in relationship to historical representation throughout our culture. Much of the work is an attempt to manipulate these forms of presentation/representation. You hear Julie Ault saying in that quote that creating a series of juxtapositions can create alternatives, maybe not so much alternative histories, although it does that too, but alternative spaces for these histories. At least, this is how I interpret the text in relationship to my own work. It is about a plural rather than a singular entity or trajectory. Even though the work tends to be very reductive, the forms that are used in the work speak to the necessity of/for pluralities. I think that’s why I am so drawn to Sol LeWitt’s incomplete cubes and the fact that LeWitt referred to these “complete” works as “incomplete", something which provides possibilities to extend from. Through the Xeroxing and cropping, the editing of these very geometric lines, I end up extending these ideas of incompleteness. John Cage, in his essay The History of Experimental Music in America, quotes De Kooning as saying, “The past does not influence me. I influence the past.” I think the distinctions between past, future and present dynamics, as early as the 50s became an important part of many people’s conceptual logic, when you think of the theoretical dimensions of people’s work like Bucky Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. It’s about feedback loops, the “action” of cause and effect. I like the idea that things happen and they don’t stop happening, they continue. It’s our way of looking at things that change, without things ever having slipped into the past. I think that’s what De Kooning was trying to say.’
It’s almost like once is not enough.
‘Right. Which is kind of true, you know? And it’s interesting because repetition is such a huge part of the work. Repeating forms, repeating words.’
But I think it’s more about interpretation. And repetition is interpretation.
‘Yes, it is. It’s a means of interpretation.’
But aren’t you also questioning your position and your function within specific histories by using all these quotations?
‘Absolutely.’
Could you elaborate on the element of expectation and the language of the cliché in your performances? In The Revival, for example, you provoke expectations by using the form of a gospel sermon.
‘I think there’s an element of subversion in the work. A kind of dichotomy where I am thinking about playing with what people will expect from certain tropes and using those expectations to their full advantage, while at the same time introducing forms of disruption that aren’t normally found within certain existing forms (like a revival). What do people expect from a black artist? Expectation in relation to cultural assumptions does not move in one direction, so I am also projecting about the kinds of assumptions the audience or viewers are making about me as the maker of the work. But the work, particularly many of the texts, takes advantage of a suspension between fact and fiction in regards to me as “the maker”. I use these expectations to my advantage. For example, by using the term Black Dada, which I think creates certain expectations, the work puts the audience in an awkward position because, naturally, at times they want to be welcomed into the space of the obvious. Sometimes, particularly in the performances, I’ll use direct devices, statements, calling out to the kinds of assumptions, those of the audience and mine, as material: “fat bitch”, “old hag”, “faggot”. I am, at least intellectually, willing to lay myself bare.’
Your performances have a strong appeal in terms of the beauty of the language. You seem to attract and play with the emotions of the audience. Could you talk about the critical aspect of this?
‘Very purposefully, there were two things going on. In a sociological sense, many of the things that took place in The Revival were a comment on the distinctions that are perpetually made between mind and body – and body being the more visceral, pleasure, emotion-driven side, and mind being this more — cold is not the right word — but invested in more intellectually driven endeavours or pursuits. So from a critical standpoint, The Revival perpetually puts those two distinctions together – they are almost fighting with each other. While one is going in one direction, the other is going in another, and a lot of that relates back to the source material and their authors’ intentions. Almost no one whose text I used for The Revival, particularly when it comes to writers like Paolo Javier and Charles Bernstein and even somebody like John Ashbery, intended to create a space for transcendence, for overt outpouring of emotion; in fact, their intentions almost on the whole are the complete opposite. I understand one of their desires for language to be to hold emotion at bay, whereas the intention of gospel music is to pull the heartstrings to make you feel a certain kind of way, a wave of “transcendence”. Naturally, these are simplifications; the history of Gospel is quite complex and has less to do with words than an attitude, and most avant-garde writing practices are opposed to emotion as a sentimental instrument, as a conditioning tool, rather than “emotion” per se. The sermon at the centre of The Revival was a means to use a Brechtian model to explore these distinctions. I wanted to use the space of the performance to find a third truth or third way, basically where the structure isn’t either/or. It goes back to dismantling the Greeks, challenging their very binary either/or, asserting that the potential, the possibility lies in that coming together of those two spaces, those two kinds of intelligence.’
How does biography figure in your work?
‘I think biographies are used to really exploit people, to sort of affirm the obvious, or as a means to explain complex models or complex modes. We rely on biography when nothing is left, but I think biography is more of a thing embedded in language and discourse and appearance, so it’s always a projection. It’s a series of projections about somebody else’s experiences. Someone’s understanding of someone else’s biography relates much more to themselves than it does to the other person.’
Krist Gruijthuijzen is a freelance curator living in Amsterdam.
Works of Adam Pendleton are shown at the exhibitions:
- EL T D K
Haunch of Venison, Berlin
28 February – 25 April 2009
- The Generational: Younger than Jesus
New Museum, New York
7 April - 14 June 2009
Opinion
