ELEMENTS OF ME—Adam Pendleton’s installation now on view in Boston—”considers the relations between (geometric) abstraction, blackness, and languages of collectivity,” utilizing what the artist describes as “radical juxtapositions, to disrupt established history and open up new potential associations.”*
Pendleton has created an artist’s book-exhibition catalog for the show. See links below for details.
Located at the gallery’s two New York locations and online, more than 100 artists are participating in the project, including Rita Ackermann, Kelly Akashi, IdaApplebroog, Genesis Belanger, Lynda Benglis, Katherine Bernhardt, Huma Bhabha, Carol Bove, Katherine Bradford, Sam Falls, Charles Gaines, Maureen Gallace, Joanne Greenbaum, Mona Hatoum, Mary Heilmann, Camille Henrot, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Shara Hughes, Rashid Johnson, Joan Jonas, Sanya Kantarovsky, June Leaf, Simone Leigh, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Sam McKinniss, Marilyn Minter, Sarah Morris, Angel Otero, Adam Pendleton, Elizabeth Peyton, Jack Pierson, R.H. Quaytman, Deborah Roberts, Ugo Rondinone, MikaRottenberg, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sherald, Cindy Sherman, Amy Sillman, Laurie Simmons, Taryn Simon, Lorna Simpson, Avery Singer, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker, Mary Weatherford, and the estate of Anne Truitt.
This week, Adam Pendleton and Performa present an online screening of the artist’s work JUST BACK FROM LOS ANGELES—A PORTRAIT OF YVONNE RAINER as well as a conversation with Pendleton and Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg. See links below for details.
They’re beginning to see what they used to only look at…
I remember the breathlessness of the lifting section
I remember your Martha Graham story and your voice rising, and I got worried you were going to talk about whether she ate cock or not and Steve starting to read on the other mic and changing the atmosphere.
I remember the opening bars of the Chambers Brothers and doing Trio A slow, very slow, and Steve joining me and then fast, with and against Steve’s tempo.
I remember… you grinning at the pleasure we had.
Oh, and the wings.
I remember watching the pillow solo and then during Trio A the wings would sometimes flap in my face.
I remember talking to you in the hotel, before “stoned,” and you said I was always wanting to get someplace and that I should just be where I was…
and only there… and that was what happened in the performance.
I remember standing around waiting to start the run-thru, and you were talking and then you turned and said, “What are you waiting for?”
and Doug saying what I had been doing, which was waiting for you!
I remember the pleasure of huddling in the rolls and Steve coming down on me with his self-conscious silly grin.
And I remember being out of it thru Becky’s solo, then toward the end seeing her so totally there with that changed and changing body of hers…
I remember the box improvisation with David.
The specter of crisis was also bolstered by the cops’ simple inability to stop killing black people. Just prior to Brown’s murder, forty-six-year-old Eric Garner of State Island, New York, unarmed and minding his own business, was approached by police and then choked to death as he gasped eleven times, “I can’t breathe.” Two days after Brown was killed, Los Angeles Police department officers shot and killed another young black man, Ezell Ford. Months later, autopsy reports would confirm that Ford was shot multiple times, including once in the back, while he lay on the ground. In a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, police shot to death John Crawford III, twenty-two years old and African American, while he was talking on his cell phone and holding an air gun on sale in the aisle of a Walmart. And as the nation waited to hear whether a grand jury would indict officer Darren Wilson for Brown’s death, Cleveland police killed thirty-seven-year-old, African American Tanisha Anderson when they slammed her to the ground, remaining on top of her until her body went limp. The following week, police in Cleveland struck again, murdering a twelve year old boy, Tamir Rice, less than two seconds after arriving at the playground where Rice was playing alone. Making maters worse, the two Cleveland police stood by idly, refusing aid, while Tamir bled to death. When his fourteen-year-old sister attempted to help him, police wrestled her to the ground.
I remember the breathlessness of the lifting section
I remember the opening bars of the Chambers Brothers
I remember… you grinning at the pleasure we had.
I remember watching the pillow solo and then during Trio A the wings would sometimes flap in my face.
I remember talking to you in the hotel, before “stoned,”
I remember standing around waiting to start the run-thru, and you were talking and then you turned and said, “What are you waiting for?”
I remember the pleasure of huddling in the rolls and Steve coming down on me with his self-conscious silly grin.
I remember the box improvisation with David.
Whenever one writes about a problem in the United States, especially concerning the racial atmosphere, the problem written about is usually black people, that they are either extremist, irresponsible, or ideologically naïve.
What we want to do here is to talk about white society, and the liberal segment of white society, because we want to prove the pitfalls of liberalism, that is, the pitfalls of liberals in their political thinking.
Whenever articles are written, whenever political speeches are given, or whenever analyses are made about a situation, it is assumed that certain people of one group, either the left or the right, the rich or the poor, the whites or the blacks are causing polarization.
The fact is that conditions cause polarization, and that certain people can act as catalysts to speed up the polarization; for example, Rap Brown or Huey Newton can be a catalyst speeding up the polarization of blacks against whites in the Untied States, but the conditions are already there. George Wallace can speed up the polarization of whites against blacks in America, but again, the conditions are already there.
Many people want to know why, out of the entire white segment of society, we want to criticize the liberals. We have to criticize them because they represent the liaison between both groups, between the oppressed and the oppressor. The liberal tries to become an arbitrator, but he is incapable of solving the problems. He promises the oppressor that he can keep the oppressed under control; that he will stop them from becoming illegal (in this case illegal means violent). At the same time, he promises the oppressed that he will be able to alleviate their suffering—in due time. Historically, of course, we know this is impossible, and our era will not escape history.
A line is the distance between.
They circled the seafood restaurant singing “We shall not be moved.” — Adam Pendleton, Just back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer, 2016–2017
THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN, a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “brings together contemporary art works inspired, consciously and unconsciously, by Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century’s most original and enigmatic thinkers. Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is an undergraduate art-history staple, but true Benjaminiacs consider his massive, unfinished Arcades Project to be the writer’s magnum opus. What began as a short essay on the glass-ceilinged Paris Arcades of the mid-nineteenth century (the modern shopping mall’s ancestor) spiralled out into a warren of notes, citations, and commentaries forming a restless survey of modernity.”*
Benjamin’s Arcades Project—the notes for which he left with Georges Bataille before killing himself on the Pyrenees in 1940 after leaving Nazi-occupied France—was made up of thirty-six folders on such subjects as “Fashion,” “Mirrors,” “Panorama,” “Dream City and Dream House,” and “Flâneur,” (a term Benjamin popularized). For THE ARCADES exhibition, curator Jens Hoffman (assisted by Shira Backer) has brought together works by Walead Beshty, Andrea Bowers, Chris Burden, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Collier Schorr, Cindy Sherman, Taryn Simon, and James Welling.
THE ARCADES: CONTEMPORARY ART AND WALTER BENJAMIN, through August 6.
THE JEWISH MUSEUM, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, New York City.
A view of The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, at the Jewish Museum. Artwork, all by Adam Pendleton: Black Dada Reader (wall work #1), 2016; what is…?/Chagall (study), 2017; Dada Dancers (study), 2016.
Photograph by Will Ragozzino–Social Shutterbug
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