"[The concept is involved with] 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"
Exploring the innovative intersection between Dada, Abstraction, Minimalism, and Street Art, Adam Pendleton's Black Dada gestures to the avant-garde art historical movement, alluding to the conceptual vanguards whilst simultaneously describing the anti-racist activism of the now. In the present work, executed in 2008, Pendleton examines appropriation, representation, and socio-political activism; displaying a concern with language and historical narrative viewed through the lens of African American culture and aesthetics, in addition to his own disruptive theory dubbed Black Dada.
Presented in nine parts and curiously layered with a myriad of abstract monochromatic imagery and text, the present work examines abstraction and language, overlapping and underlaying the repetitive message and in doing so recontextualises history. As curator Adrienne Edwards describes, the process of reproducing and copying text emphasises "blackness as material, method and mode, insisting on blackness as a multiplicity" (Adrienne Edwards, Blackness in Abstraction, New York 2016).
“[The process of reproducing and copying text emphasises] blackness as material, method and mode, insisting on blackness as a multiplicity"
Pendleton published Black Dada Reader, a collection of essays that explore the conceptual framework of Black Dada, in 2017. According to the artist, 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).
During a 2010 residency at MoMA, Pendleton had begun to explore ideas of Blackness and institutional critique, Xeroxing passages of texts from an unexpected assortment of figures. The personal canon included Zurich Dada ringleader Hugo Ball, experimental writer Gertrude Stein, abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Afrofuturist jazz pioneer Sun Ra Black Power icon Stokely Carmichel and many more. The Black Dada Reader began its life as a spiral-bound book that lived in the artist’s studio, an attempt to create “a collage in book format” of texts that inspired him. Pendleton comments: “Originally it was an in-studio publication, in the sense that it wasn’t really meant necessarily for a wide distribution,” he explained. “It was really meant for me to refer to in the space of the studio while I was working on different projects. But I did hand out maybe a dozen copies, maybe more, to the people who would come to the studio, or people who were interested in the work and or the concept of Black Dada.” (Terence Trouillot, “What Is ‘Black Dada’? Artist Adam Pendleton Lays Out His Disruptive Theory in a New Book”, Artnet News, 4 October 2017, online).
“It was really meant for me to refer to in the space of the studio while I was working on different projects. But I did hand out maybe a dozen copies, maybe more, to the people who would come to the studio, or people who were interested in the work and or the concept of Black Dada.”
Synthesising text and image, Adam Pendleton's Black Dada from 2008 reverberates with the defiant conceptualism that characterises his oeuvre. Drawing connections between classic European Dadaist texts, which were responding to the violence and trauma of World War I and the writings of figures such as Black Arts Movement leader LeRoi Jones who were responding to the violence of racism in the 1960s. The present work is indeed evocative and engaging, encapsulating the resounding cacophony of racial, economic and ideological issues rife in today’s society.