Adam Pendleton at the MMFA | visual philosopher

Adam Pendleton is one of the most influential artists of his generation. The 38-year-old American presents his first solo exhibition in Canada, What we did togetherat the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, until July 10.

Adam Pendleton’s works have been presented all over the world, from New York to Seoul via Paris, Tel Aviv and Hong Kong. Its installation Who is Queen?which has just left the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, has been acclaimed by critics.

Museum directors, gallery owners and collectors (notably the tennis player Venus Williams) are fighting over it. By chance, it was programmed this spring at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), just after its triumph at MoMA.

“He is one of the most significant and important artists of his generation,” says MMFA Director General Stéphane Aquin, who knew him when he was director of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. However, it was the MMFA’s chief curator, Mary-Dailey Desmarais, specifies Mr. Aquin, who invited Adam Pendleton to Montreal.

“Museums like the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts are important, outside of major centers like New York, for planting the seed of art,” believes Adam Pendleton, who grew up in Richmond, Virginia, before to leave the United States for Italy, at the age of 16, in order to follow his vocation.

“I finished high school two years early. At a very young age, I decided – or did I decide? – to become an artist. What does that mean exactly? Let’s say I’m engaged in a deep study of art,” says this bright-eyed scholar.

From the age of 20, a gallery in New York, where he had settled and lived since, agreed to exhibit his works. In the last two decades, his rating has continued to climb in the middle and the art market. A New York gallery owner had followed him to Montreal when we met him earlier this week. Other American gallery owners will follow in the coming weeks.

His first solo exhibition in Canada, What we did together, well worth the trip. There are four new monumental paintings from the series Untitled (WE ARE NOT) and seven drawings from his series black dada, made in the past year. Monochrome works, designed with spray paint, drawings and photographic montages, for so many games with words.

Adam Pendleton is a visual philosopher. A conceptual, multimedia, multi-faceted artist, who seeks in words, in their meaning as much as in their spelling and their aesthetics (he is particularly fond of the Arial typeface), the inspiration for his dense, complex, multi-layered works. of chaos and poetry. Paintings and drawings that he describes as “visual notes” of what he perceives around him.

In his manifesto black dadaan avant-garde artistic framework, inspired by Dadaism, which he has been exploring since 2008 and which deals in particular with representation and appropriation, Adam Pendleton wrote: ” Black Dada: we are not naïve/Black Dada: we are successive/Black Dada: we are not exclusive… (Black Dada: we are not naive / Black Dada: we are successive / Black Dada: we are not exclusive.)

The phrase “We are not” seems to have become a sort of leitmotif. We find it on the huge paintings ofUntitled (WE ARE NOT), which face each other and respond to each other in a way. Between different geometric shapes, slides and splashes, we can read, sometimes superimposed, the words WE ARE NOTbut also WE ARE or ARE WE NOT. “It’s an open-ended question, like an ellipse,” Pendleton explains. There is no finality. It is a statement of abstraction. »

The artist is interested, in his canvases, his films and his collages, in what is abstract. Starting with his thinking, which is not binary. He reflects in particular on this way that we all have, he says, of “generating our own representations”.

The deconstructed language of his work expresses his own rejection of the boxes and labels that have been imposed on him since the beginning of his career: African-American, gay, etc. Even though he has spoken publicly, in letters to the media, about the Black Lives Matter movement, and his recent exhibition at MoMA, Who Is Queen?, was referring to a homophobic slur he heard in his teenage years.

The last work of the exhibition What we did together – which is Adam Pendleton’s interpretation of “Inclusive Us” – is a poignant 13-minute short. Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer is an encounter between the artist and the octogenarian avant-garde dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, shot in black and white in 2016 in a having dinner from New York.

Yvonne Rainer, seen dancing the solo Trio A in 1966, read a moving collection of texts by activists Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, as well as the poet Ron Silliman and a friend of the choreographer, Barbara Dilley.

Adam Pendleton makes them speak with one voice, through a deft collage of lyrics from then and now, to tales of police brutality that claimed the lives of several African Americans, including Eric Garner and the young Tamir Rice. “Language and memory are things that interest me. Which voice emerges when multiple voices are played? What voice is heard? And when do all these words become those of the artist? »

He obviously prefers questions to answers. So he reverses the roles when I ask him if the Black Lives Matter movement has influenced his latest works. “I find it much more interesting to know how Black Lives Matter influenced you…”

I submit to him that, sometimes, some are excluded from the “We”. Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and many others were killed by the police because they were African-American. “That’s the problem,” he said. No one is ever excluded from ‟We”. It is the perception of the exclusion of “We” that is the violence, that is the problem. Obviously, from a pragmatic point of view, exclusions exist. But from a philosophical perspective, it’s very important, when you think of the human project, of humanity, that we all exist in a “we” that includes us all. »

In interviews, as in his work as an artist, Adam Pendleton remains sibylline and enigmatic. “I think it’s important for each of us to recognize what stories we’re connected to,” he says. To paraphrase public theologian and legendary civil rights activist Ruby Sales: the skin is empty. The skin means nothing. But historically, conceptually, socially, we have attached meaning to it. How do we exist in relation to this meaning and what do we ultimately hope to come out of it? It’s hard to say, because we already give meaning to this empty shell. But we need new meanings and new ideas to emerge, new stories to be told. »

Without forgetting the past, am I telling him? “The past is always in the present. One could almost say that it is easy to be ignorant, but perhaps difficult to forget. »

And these new ideas he talks about, do they emerge? He hesitates. “Yes… But we need to find a way to talk about something else,” he believes. We don’t want to give oxygen to old ideas. It’s part of the hesitation I have to answer your question. I hope for new conversations. Part of the solution is to dedicate yourself to something else, to new possibilities and configurations. Not to what has already been said and repeated, done and redone, in several spaces, countries and nations. »

Artists testify, perhaps better than anyone else, to the era in which we live. Between black and white, in Adam Pendleton’s discourse as in his monochrome works, there are many areas of gray. The nuances that make the richness of the conversations held, and those that remain to be held.