Fragments of big black letters sprayed on a wall create a web of broken messages in Adam Pendleton’s (b. 1984, Richmond/New York) spatially embracing wall work entitled Victim of American Democracy. Reminiscent of graffiti, the work relies on language as a main source, a language which is falling apart and being created anew. Black Lives Matter is an activist movement which has come about in the US in recent years as a reaction to the brutal deaths of African-Americans like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and many more, all victims to police violence. Its rallying cry “black lives matter” insists on stating the obvious – black lives should matter as much as anybody’s.
Pendleton’s work draws influence from a materialist approach to language that wants no more than to break down sentences from within. He is interested in “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist,” in his case in the form of painting, installation, video, and performance among other media. In Victim of American Democracy I and II, the language is deconstructed and each syllable is seen as part of a larger system. What does a word like democracy actually mean if you tear apart its foundation? What happens if you separate the letters from each other, alienating the obvious pronunciation? Pendleton’s silkscreens and photomontages explore the performative power of language to formulate the subject and create realities.
His conceptual project Black Dada, which started in 2008, is a new kind of Dadaism that both looks forward and keeps the past in active consciousness. Just like the European Dadaism of the late ’10s and ’20s, Pendleton plays with the irrational in order to reorder codes and go beyond normality, and “talk about the future while talking about the past.” Identity is always present as a vector in this, a notion necessarily under constant development. Among his Black Dadaists are poets and artists such as Hugo Ball, Joan Retallack, LeRoi Jones, Jean-Luc Godard, and Adrian Piper. MM
self-presentation:
If the function of writing is to express the world.
