Gould’s documentaries employed what he dubbed the ‘contrapuntal’ method: a technique borrowed from music in which independent melodies are played simultaneously.
Quern moma series#
In its construction, the piece is inspired by pianist Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy, a series of three-hour radio documentaries produced for the Canadian Broadcast Company between 19. His work straddles the liminal expanse where language both begins and ceases to function, all through the lens of a Black ontology.Īt MoMA, the sound component of ‘Who Is Queen?’ layers a recording of Amiri Baraka reading a selection of poems – among them ‘Not a White Shadow but Black People Will Be Victorious (For Black Arthur Blythe)’ – originally delivered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1980, over Hahn Rowe’s composition ‘Yellow Smile’ (1994) and phone recordings of a 2014 solidarity protest in New York, following the police murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. But his medium of choice is language, in all its permutations – be it text, sound, image, movement or space. Multiplicity is at the core of Pendleton’s thinking about art and life. As he is quick to point out: ‘I don’t think we speak in one tenor or tone: we all have this sense of multiplicity.’Īdam Pendleton, So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam, 2021, video stills. Much like his work, he is difficult to pigeonhole. I don’t really know what to do outside of making art.’ He tells me this with a smile, followed by his guttural laughter: ‘This is all pleasure to me.’ Beyond his gravitas, Pendleton is charming, jovial and lighthearted. He works exhaustively, with one eye constantly on the next project: ‘I don’t know what to do when I’m not working, so I’m always looking for something to do.
At the same time, he is unapologetically married to his craft. Pendleton’s tone is often serious: his work deals with important social issues, looking at the nexus of race and politics within the history of art. They represent an understanding of how we are living through these inflictions – the poetics of being.’ ‘I see paintings as documents of marks,’ he tells me during my visit to his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on a grey summer day, ‘like bruises and scratches. It even gives insight into his diction: Pendleton speaks slowly, judiciously, with a cadence that is both considered and lyrical. The phrase also helps explain, perhaps, who he is: not only as an artist, but as a person. This sentence, however, struck me as a perfect metonym for the artist’s practice – which spans bookmaking, drawing, painting, performance, sculpture and video – a dynamic mélange of expressive gestures and experimentalism grounded in research and executed with laser precision and focus. Pendleton often speaks in absolutes that are, at times, quite opaque yet irresistibly intriguing. ‘Poetry is exploring ideas with intention, not direction,’ Adam Pendleton tells me as he walks me through the build of his latest exhibition, ‘Who Is Queen?’ – a large-scale installation featuring sound collage, video, painting and sculpture – six weeks ahead of its opening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA).