ART-PRESENTATION: Adam Pendleton List Projects
Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist known for his multi-disciplinary practice, which moves fluidly between painting, publishing, photographic collage, video and performance. His work centers on an engagement with language, in both the figurative and literal senses, and the re-contextualization of history through appropriated imagery to establish alternative interpretations of the present and, “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist”.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MIT List Visual Arts Center Archive
The exhibition “List Projects: Adam Pendleton” features the artist’s most recent video portrait “Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer” (2016–17) alongside an installation of silkscreened mirror and glass works from his ongoing series “System of Display” (2008- ).Pendleton’s “Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer”, is thethird work in a series of portraits. Over a meal the dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, and writer Yvonne Rainer meet Adam Pendleton. The two artists get to know one another for the very first time. Over the course of their meal, the video records their unscripted conversation punctuated by poignant moments. Rainer leads Pendleton in partnered movement exercises. Pendleton invites Rainer to read from a script which combines writing from her published works with accounts and discussions of inequality, racism, and anti-black violence by such voices as Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Including footage from Rainer’s documentation of landmark dance “Trio A” (1978). “System of Display” (2008- ) is a series of silkscreened mirror pieces overlaid with glass facades printed with a word that is typically abbreviated to a single letter, Pendleton selects images from a wide range of historical and contemporary books, which he photocopies and then crops to create silkscreens. The mirror incorporates the viewer into the work, inviting him or her to establish new relationships between the text and image and turning the body into a site of engagement. Adam Pendleton’s work often involves the investigation of language, in both the figurative and literal senses and the recontextualization of history through appropriated imagery. Much of Pendleton’s art is underpinned by an idea artist calls “Black Dada”, which fuses race with the early 20th Century Avant-Garde. The title of Adam Pendleton’s series of paintings, “Black Dada” (2008-09), is borrowed from a 1964 work by the Beat poet and activist Amiri Baraka, “Black Dada Nihilismus”. This poem became a point of departure for paintings that presented fragments of the text through conventions of Conceptual and Minimal art of the .60s.
Info: Curators: Paul C. Ha and Jamin An, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge-MA, duration 3/1-11/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, https://listart.mit.edu
