The artist’s visual language challenges legibility and sense-making, continuously writing and overwriting itself. His drawings feature sketches and visual “notes,” as well as images of African art and other reproductions from books in his library. In his paintings, Pendleton creates layered fields of unresolved text, marks, and gestures, built up from spray-painted and brushed “originals” that have been photographed, photocopied, and enlarged for screenprinting.
The artwork hanging on the scaffolds-on the front, in between, and jutting out from the sides-form a spatial collage. “ Who Is Queen? is Adam Pendleton’s most ambitious project to date, interweaving the many strands of deep research and experimentation that have distinguished his career,” said Stuart Comer Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at MOMA. “Working across poetic, spatial, architectural, linguistic, painterly, sonic, cinematic, and political means, this ‘total artwork’ reverse-engineers the idea of the museum, breaking down entrenched models of history into building blocks that can be remixed into new possibilities for the future.” It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas.” -Adam Pendleton That is to say, it is not black or white, and locates each within the other. “ Who Is Queen? is undergirded by a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by an abiding Afro- pessimism,…It is optimistic in a deeply American sense of the word, and pessimistic along those same lines. Forming an alternative structure for the examination of history as an endless variation, the installation is a Gesamtkunstwerk-a total work of art-for the 21st century. The modular scaffolding systems are built from four basic units designed to resemble the balloon framing typical of American domestic buildings, and they serve as supports for layers of exhibited artwork: paintings, drawings, a textile work, sculptures, moving images, and a sound piece.
This construction, visible from every vantage point within the Museum that overlooks the Atrium, extends outward into the Museum and reframes visitors’ experience of the space. Drawing on the work of figures as disparate as pianist Glenn Gould, political philosopher Michael Hardt, and activist and public theologian Ruby Sales, this monumental installation sits at the nexus of abstraction and politics.ĭeveloped over the past decade, Who Is Queen? transforms the Marron Atrium into an monumental floor-to-ceiling installation consisting of three vertical, black scaffold towers that each span five stories. Who Is Queen? questions the traditional notion of the museum as a repository, and addresses the influence that mass movements, including those of the last decade, such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy, could have on the exhibition as a form. Adam Pendleton’s (American, born 1984) paintings, drawings, and other works use linguistic, political, and historical material in unlikely forms and configurations to explore the relationship between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde.