Online Circulation: 103,336
From Black Lives Matter to Godard: Adam Pendleton in New Orleans By Scott Indrisek | April 13, 2016
Installation view of "Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible" at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans.
Adam Pendleton’s practice is one of hyper-referentiality, appropriation, recontextualization, and purposeful mystery, if not outright obscurity. Entering the ground floor of the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans for his current exhibition, “Becoming Imperceptible,” one encounters an all-over environment: found photographs and text collaged and turned into a black-and-white vinyl wall-covering, over which hang various discrete works incorporating silkscreen techniques on canvas or mirror. Where to begin unpacking this surfeit of information and imagery?
It’s tempting to consider the pocket-sized “reading room” at the CAC — a regular, and often overlooked, addendum to exhibitions at the space — as something of an elusive master key to the artist’s larger project, which is intensely bound up with books. As his primary resource — to be quoted and copied from — Pendleton’s library is itself the generative well that he continues to draw upon. Everywhere in this show and its corollary materials, book- borrowed images recur, insatiably, at varying scales and in varying contexts. Here meaning is a thing constructed out of odd juxtaposition, or what the original Dada movement, in curator Andrea Andersson’s words, prized as “critical senselessness.”
The artist-book-cum-catalog for “Becoming Imperceptible,” co-published with Siglio, buries its critical essays within a textless, poetic photo-essay, incorporating archival images of everything from Congolese independence to Sol Lewitt sculptures. A sort of remixed excerpt from this catalog runs in the April issue of Modern Painters; many of its source photographs repeat in discrete works, or in the aforementioned vinyl wall piece (somewhat akin to the style of Pendleton’s presentation in the Belgian pavilion at the last Venice Biennale). It wouldn’t be crazy to conceive of the exhibition as a kind of deconstructed book itself, displayed in varying ways. Or, as press materials note: “the expanded field of this project… comprises the inhabitable spaces of the gallery and book alike and… the book’s potential to circulate broadly, to enter into new hands and new use, are a defining component of Pendleton’s practice.”
It’s hard to pin Pendleton’s work down as any one thing, but maybe easier to orbit around how it engages with abstraction, collage, graphic design, and systems of display. Racial politics and sampled iconography of the swelling Black Lives Matter movement are threaded throughout the exhibition, but the artist is equally apt to crib verbiage from Jean-Luc Godard as he is Amiri Baraka. A series of ceramic floor sculptures in the second floor gallery are based upon the work of Language poet Hannah Weiner; silkscreen-on-mirror pieces on the third sample Josef Albers’s photographs for their content. Throughout, Pendleton moves through a variety of visual styles; I don’t think it demeans the work to admit that it’s stylish — its cool, minimalist edge an invitation to seduction. (He often collaborates on projects with the designers Marc Hollenstein and Jaan Evart, and with studio assistant and fellow artist Sam Shmith.) A series of silkscreen- on-Mylar works, created with Hollenstein and Evart, are consciously conceived as a type of poster — in some cases, almost a form of highly abstract self-advertisement.
Top to Bottom: Adam Pendleton "Untitled," 2016, Collage on paper, Framed: 18 1/8 × 13 × 1 5/8 in; Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible (installation view), Center: “Untitled (1958),” 2016, Right: “Notes on Black Dada Nihilismus (proper nouns),” 2009
L to R: Adam Pendleton "Black Lives Matter #2," 2015 Vinyl wall work, Dimensions variable; Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible (installation view); Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible (installation view), Detail of “Black Lives Matter #3 (wall work),” 2015; Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible (installation view); Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible (installation view), Floor: “Untitled (code poem),” 2016, Ceramic: Dimensions variable Each: 6 × 12 × 1 1/2 (rectangle); Adam Pendleton “Untitled (code poem),” 2016, Ceramic: Dimensions variable Each: 6 × 12 × 1 1/2 (rectangle) Any discussion of Pendleton’s work invariably touches upon issues of legibility — which, of course, brings things back into the realm of the book: How do we read this exhibition? Barry Schwabsky, in an essay that discusses Glenn Ligon’s work (an artist whose monograph is included in the CAC reading room), quotes Ligon on the aesthetic effects of the Xerox, another preferred tactic in Pendleton’s practice. He says that he “started blowing it up [a news photo of the Million Man March] on a Xerox machine, and I realized that when you blow something up, it sometimes gets lighter and lighter, and at a certain point, the text disappeared. I thought, well, that’s kind of what I’m interested in — these images in which there’s something there, and it gets bigger and bigger, and then that something disappears.”
Pendleton’s museum-filling exhibition in New Orleans engages with similar ideas of visibility and readability, of the limits of our own perception, of when an image becomes unmoored from its specific history and becomes something more conflicted, or ambiguous. From the outside, the artist’s practice possesses an almost hermetic conceptual and aesthetic logic, yet that practice defies easy exploration. It remains, I think, something to be endlessly but fruitfully puzzled over, like a book which — through the Adam Pendleton "Magicienne #2," 2015 course of its reading — continues to add new pages, or to reorder its own Silkscreen ink on mirror polished stainless chapters. steel, 61 3/8 × 42 3/8 × 1 7/8 in.
Adam Pendleton’s “Becoming Imperceptible” is on view at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans through June 16. The exhibition travels to Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, on July 15.
L to R: Adam Pendleton "My Education: A Portrait of David Hilliard," 2011–2014; Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible (installation view) Right: “Untitled (water),” 2014, Silkscreen ink on mirror polished stainless steel 122 1/8 × 62 1/8 × 3 1/2 in.; Adam Pendleton “WE (we are not successive),” 2015, Silkscreen ink on mirror polished stainless steel, W: 46.81 x 61.475 x .625 in. E: 46.81 x 35.626 x .625 in.; Adam Pendleton “WE (we are not successive),” 2015, Silkscreen ink on mirror polished stainless steel, W: 46.81 x 61.475 x .625 in. E: 46.81 x 35.626 x .625 in.