A visit at Hirshhorn for one more look at Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960, a landmark exhibition closing in November, is the occasion to see Adam Pendleton's solo show in the circular gallery on the second floor. Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen assembles about forty of his most recent mixed media paintings and a nine-minute video.
With little previous exposure to the artist's work, I welcomed the informative wall text introducing the show, followed by an alignment of large canvasses grouped by two or three, interrupted by signs with titles and dates for each one, in a conventional display. All the canvasses have a black background with variations brought by shapes of monochrome colors on top. The white, red, green, blue... compositions evoke abstract expressionism, geometric abstract and street art. They result from an elaborate process starting with drawings and paintings on paper photographed to create screen-prints applied on a black-gessoed canvas. The layering of shapes creates depth and story. The succession of works along the slightly curved walls of the gallery becomes monotonous and ends with thirteen pieces of smaller size from the series Composition, courtesy of the artist. Using the same visual language of drips, sprays, splashes, peppered with Arial Bold letters or graffiti-like text, they are confined in thin black frames, cheapening their content. All the works are part of five series: Black Dada, Untitled (Days), WE ARE NOT, Composition and Movement. At first confused by the name Black Dada, an ongoing series started in 2008, I acquired the voluminous book published at the occasion of the exhibition Blackness, White and Light at the MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) in Vienna, Austria in 2023 to shed some light about the work from the conceptual artist. In her essay, the curator Marianne Dobner describes the birth and maturation of the series: "When Pendleton began making Black Dada paintings, in 2008, they were based on excerpts from Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes (1974), a work that explored all 122 ways the framework of a cube can be incomplete. For each painting, Pendleton selected a single line from LeWitt's photographs to use as the composition's foundation. He then positioned the words "BLACK" and "DADA" over them in Arial Bold type before printing some of the letters onto the canvass in black, leaving viewers to extrapolate the missing ones. In the new Black Dada paintings, Pendleton's own painterly gestures have taken the place of LeWitt's geometric forms. Drips, sprays, and splatters from his studio, documented in photographs, provide the new visual index on which the paintings are composed. With inks including green, blue, yellow, gold, and silver, they also introduce a chromatic element not found in his other paintings." The description of the elaborate process left me with questions about the conceptual significance of the works. The journalist Hanno Hauenstein who interviewed Pendleton writes: "he explained the working hypothesis behind his art, Black Dada. In his view, this term encapsulates the relationship between blackness, abstraction and avant-garde art... It also encompasses theoretical outlooks that have shaped his practice, including those of philosopher Fred Moten, queer theorist Judith Butler, and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard." In Pendleton's own words: "It was initially a kind of conceptual position that I function from as an artist... As a concept, Black Dada is generative, even generous. It opens up the same freedom and flexibility for the viewer as it does for me as an artist." The name Black Dada comes from the 1964 poem "Black Dada Nihilismus" by Amiri Baraka. Pendleton states that the two words merge into two ideas: "Dada meaning 'yes, yes' and Black as an open-ended signifier."
Overwhelmed by a rapid succession of images and voices drowned out by loud sounds, subjected to epileptogenic strobe lights and flashes, I missed the video's message blurred by the artistic effects of superimposed geometric shapes. Even its title Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?) (2024-2025) left me wondering about its content. Again, the wall text provided some light. The images come from archival documentation about Resurrection City erected in 1968 on the National Mall shortly after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The short lived tent city, part of the Poor People's Campaign, was built to underline social and economic inequities. The voice is a recording of Amiri Baraka reading his poem: "I Love Music: For John Coltrane."
It is clear that the conceptual artist is also an activist deeply involved through his multidisciplinary practice. The exhibition is only a sample of his artistic activities which include performances, videos, installations, photography, paintings, movies, poetry... His eclectic sources from French philosophers like Deleuze or Guattari to poets, filmmakers, diverse visual artists, muffle his own voice and his multiple references transform conceptual art into an elitist cryptic discourse.
Has conceptual art run amok?... confused at Hirshhorn.
photographs by the author:
"Untitled (Composition)" 2024-2026
"Black Dada (L)" 2024-2026
View of the series "Composition"
