Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen A Reader

(Paperback)

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Description

Adam Pendleton (American, b. 1984) is a conceptual artist who uses historical and aesthetic content from visual culture to explore the ways in which context influences meaning. Drawing from a substantial archive that references both artistic and cultural movements, including Dada, Minimalism, Black Power, and the Civil Rights movement, among others, Pendleton reconfigures words, forms, and images to provoke critical questioning. Published to accompany a multimedia installation at MoMA, this reader serves as a primer and handbook to the exhibition and features an artist intervention of photocopied textual sources, many of which directly relate to the content and programming of the exhibition. The project questions the notion of the museum as repository, and addresses the influence that mass movements, including those of the last decade such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy, can have on the exhibition as form. Drawing on the work of figures as disparate as Michael Hardt, Ruby Sales, and Glenn Gould, Who Is Queen seeks to explore the nexus of abstraction and politics.

Reviews

Bristles with colossal unrest.--Zo Hopkins "Hyperallergic"
Resembles a University course reader and a designer's process book and includes influential thinkers who linger on abstraction and the complexities of political histories and language. It asserts that Pendleton is as much a book designer as a painter and video maker.--Marcus Civin "AIGA"
"Who Is Queen" gathers material that addresses a host of contemporary topics. It is prompted by a challenge to the personal identity of the artist, who is Black and gay -- the expression "you're such a queen," once tossed at him in a way that got under his skin. But he has broadened the concern to American society as a whole -- where it is headed, and whether we must all remain shackled to narrow identity labels.--Siddhartha Mitter "New York Times"
Generate[s] original, inter-media, transdisciplinary modes of reading--Lucy Ives
Singular works - representative of different voices in harmony and, perhaps at that time, in discordance with each other - are brought together to form a whole.--Terrence Trouillot "Frieze"

Author Bio

Stuart Comer is The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Adrienne Edwards is Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Danielle A. Jackson is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Media and Performance at MoMA. Mario Gooden is a principal and founder of Huff + Gooden Architects. Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist works in a wide array of mediums (painting, collage, video, and installation), Pendleton's methodology is known as "Black Dada," a process that brings together disparate voices while simultaneously addressing the codes of representation and abstraction, the aesthetics of blackness, and the uses of language. Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic.