Synthesizing text and image, Adam Pendleton's Untitled (WE ARE NOT) reverberates with the defiant conceptualism that characterizes his oeuvre. Exploring the intersection of Dada, Abstraction, Minimalism, and Street Art, Untitled (WE ARE NOT) reflects on text and visual culture within anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements. The present work is from the same series as Pendleton's current exhibition Who Is Queen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Part of Pendleton's signature Black Dada paintings, which he has been creating since 2008, Untitled (WE ARE NOT) explores the convergence of conceptual art and activism. Pendleton's Black Dada gestures to the avant-garde movement, simultaneously alluding to the conceptual vanguards and describing the radical activism of the present. Untitled (WE ARE NOT) examines appropriation, representation, and socio-political activism through the bold and visually captivating phrase 'We are Not'. Referencing Malcolm X's 1964 "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech, the captivating letters and overlaying text powerfully allude to the profound historical significance of this speech and the enduring importance of these words today.
Image © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
Art © Estate Brassaï—RMN—Grand Palais
Right: Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box),1934
Digital Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY
Art © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp
Inspired by the avant-garde movement of the early the twentieth century, Black Dada is conceptually engaging with varied histories and sociopolitical movements, situating these ideologies within the present context. As curator Adrienne Edwards describes, the process of reproducing and copying text emphasizes "blackness as material, method and mode, insisting on blackness as a multiplicity." (Adrienne Edwards, Blackness in Abstraction, New York 2016) Pendleton published his Black Dada Reader, a collection of essays that explore the conceptual framework of Black Dada, in 2017, situating Untitled (WE ARE NOT) within the context of Black representation and political engagement. The concept is invested in "looking at Blackness as an open-ended idea that is not just related to notions of race. It looks at Blackness in relationship to politics, in relationship to art, in relationship even more specifically to the avant-garde. It's kind of a framing device but it's fluid, and it's unfixed" (Adam Pendleton and Hilarie Sheets, "I Want to Get People's Attention: Artist Adam Pendleton on Taking Over MoMA's Atrium with a Monumental Tribute to Black Dada,” Artnet News, 2021). The work features the repeatedly layered spray-painted words "WE ARE NOT." One atop the other, each iteration of the phrase becomes a shadow of the one above it, creating a bold and galvanizing statement.
Adam Pendleton's Untitled (WE ARE NOT) examines abstraction and language, overlapping and underlaying the repetitive message and in doing so recontextualizes history. As Lucy Ives describes,"Pendleton's Black Dada is, on the one hand, a return to the politically charged nonsense of the Zurich Dadaists and, on the other, an exploration of the term Black as an "open-ended signifier," as he has said." (Lucy Ives, Critical Eye: Publishing Amid the Museum's Ruins, September 23, 2021) Evocative and engaging, Untitled (WE ARE NOT) encapsulates the resounding cacophony of contemporary racial, economic and ideological issues, encompassing in a single phrase, "WE ARE NOT," the determined activism of the present.
