Paratactical Haunting: Adam Pendleton’s Diasporic Images

Adam Pendleton Who We Are 2 3 Galerie Max Hetzler Contents 6 Introduction 17 Plates 41 Ishmael in the Garden: A Portrait of Ishmael Houston-Jones, 2018 42 Plates, continued 169 Paratactical Haunting: Adam Pendleton’s Diasporic Images Omar Berrada 179 Une parataxe hantée : les images diasporiques d’Adam Pendleton Omar Berrada 189 List of Works 5 Endpaper, Munken Lynx rough, 120 gm2 pp. 152–168, Munken Lynx rough, 120 gm2 Paratactical Haunting: Adam Pendleton’s Diasporic Images Omar Berrada In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.1 In African Art as Philosophy, Souleymane Bachir Diagne points out that André Breton’s endorsement of Aimé Césaire was not simply a claim to literary paternity.2 Reading Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), Breton had an astonished recognition of “the true stakes, here made plain, behind the wordplays of surrealism.”3 For Diagne, black poets in or from French colonial territories, living in a kind of ontological exile, had to lay claim to the colonizer’s idiom in order to overcome their own diasporization. But the forced encounter between Africanity and the French language translated into “the impossibility of syntax.” Gaps opened up between and underneath their words. They became “natural masters of parataxis.”4 By dint of dissident usage, they hoped to purge language of its exclusionary core. In “Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto” (1916), Tristan Tzara concedes that “DADA remains within the framework of European weaknesses.”5 The phrase reappears, updated, in Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada” manifesto (2008): “White Dada remains within the framework of European weakness.”6 Tzara’s weaknesses suddenly sound petty, as they are turned into one abyssal, foundational weakness that overdetermines “White Dada.” In a characteristically subtle détournement, Pendleton acknowledges the importance of Tzara’s document even as he signals its shortcoming. Elsewhere, commenting on the relationship between abstraction and liberation, Pendleton insists that “all conceptualism of a certain lineage is afro-conceptualism, whether it knows it or not,” that afro-conceptualism is not just “another instance of conceptualism; instead, it names the material encounter—the record of which is the conceptual project—as such.”7 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in Black Dada Reader, ed. Adam Pendleton (London: Koenig Books, 2017), 46. 2. André Breton, “A Great Black Poet: Aimé Césaire,” in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, ed. Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 1996), 191–98. 3. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Léopold Sédar Senghor: L’art africain comme philosophie (Paris: Riveneuve, 2007), 24, translation mine. 4. This phrase, quoted by Diagne, was used by Senghor in the context of his landmark Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry, published in Paris in 1948. 5. Tristan Tzara, “Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto,” in Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries (London: John Calder, 1977), 1. 6. Adam Pendleton, “Black Dada,” in Black Dada Reader, n.p. 7. Pendleton, “Afterward,” in Black Dada Reader, n.p. 169 He also points out that “at the Meredith March in June 1966, a year before LeWitt wrote Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Stokely Carmichael arguably laid the foundation for the Black Power Movement.”8 Sol LeWitt looms large in Pendleton’s pantheon. For instance, each work in Pendleton’s ongoing series of Black Dada paintings and drawings, initiated in 2008, starts with a photocopy of one of LeWitt’s incomplete open cubes. Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) is a serial work that explores all the possible ways of making a cube with one or more of its twelve edges removed. One of the forms it takes is 122 unique three-dimensional structures arranged in a grid. Rosalind Krauss saw in this work a demonstration of mad obstinacy, “with its precision, its neatness, its finicky exactitude, covering over an abyss of irrationality.”9 At first sight, Pendleton’s series seems to strongly emulate LeWitt’s in its reliance on synecdoche: each Black Dada painting contains a cropped, hence incomplete, Incomplete Open Cube, as well as an incomplete version of the phrase “BLACK DADA,” represented by only a few of its letters, as if gaps had opened up between them. But there are crucial differences. Given LeWitt’s algebraic compulsion, incompleteness notwithstanding, autonomy emerges as an unavowed horizon of his work. “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”10 No such thing with Pendleton, compositional rules notwithstanding. Far from covering over the abyss of irrationality, he homes in on it. He gives incompleteness a grounding—by tethering it, both conceptually and materially, to what Julius Eastman called “that which is fundamental, that kind of thing which attains himself or herself to the ground of anything.”11 Incompleteness, in other words, is a name for the ontological exile that is black life. LeWitt’s cubes recede to the background, acting as formal means toward an end more akin to Adrian Piper’s: “My work is an act of communication that politically catalyzes its viewers into reflecting on their own deep impulses and responses to racism and xenophobia.”12 Acknowledging the radical necessity of incompleteness, Pendleton turns it into what he calls a site of engagement. “In part we grew by looking back at you.”13 In part we grew by looking back at you. The Black Dada drawings and paintings are but one series within a body of work entirely placed under the expansive and expanding rubric of Black Dada. 8. Pendleton, “Black Dada,” in Black Dada Reader, n.p. 9. Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” October 6 (Fall 1978): 46–60. 10. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum (June 1967): 79–83. 11. Eastman on his use of the N-word in some of his works’ titles, in a preconcert talk at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, in 1980. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2XtFZMpwm0 12. Adrian Piper, “The Joy of Marginality,” in Black Dada Reader, 88. 13. Pendleton, “Black Dada,” n.p. The sentence originally appears in June Jordan’s first book of poems, Who Look at Me (1969), in which the text runs alongside and responds to paintings picturing Black Americans. 170 171 The face sings, alone / at the top / of the body […] For hell / is silent, at those cracked lips. Recurring characteristics include the predominance of black and white, the visual use of language, the centrality of abstraction, the pervasiveness of appropriation, the horizon of black liberation, and the systematic recourse to photocopying as a starting point. Black Dada is a conceptual parataxis. As such, it is a performative idea. It eludes definition, but it can be activated. Black Dada is what Black Dada does. “What can black dada do for me do for me,” says the cover of Black Dada Reader (2017). What it does for me is bring about an emotion that words fail to describe. While the structural elements of Pendleton’s work are rigorously defined, my position as spectator feels unresolved. Clearly, something is expected of me, but will I rise to the challenge? With cool seduction and unassailable authority, the works keep me at a distance even as they are calling me in. In the field of contemporary poetry, Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge—an excerpt of which is included in the Reader—produces a somewhat similar effect. Lorenzo Thomas calls it “the art of Billie Holiday, at once intimate and impossibly distant.”14 Take the hollow-eyed Dan mask that fills several of Pendleton’s recent Mylar works with its unsettling, watchful presence. A “swarthy spectre,” W. E. B. Du Bois might say.15 “The face sings, alone / at the top / of the body […] For hell / is silent, at those cracked lips.”16 Pendleton uses this mask repeatedly. He layers it with diverse ink patterns that imbue it with an intense vibrancy— the stammer of a becoming-subject. After decades of neglect within the calcified classifications of European books on “The Arts of Africa,” the mask is recontextualized and re-semanticized17—it is staring back. “Some images have insides and experience themselves from the inside.”18 In “Africa’s Diasporas of Images,” John Peffer invites us to view objects as “surrogate bodies, like persons with biographies,” and to see that “African art objects, in their way, have a history that parallels Africa’s many historic diasporas of people.”19 Writing from Accra in 1964, Malcolm X exposed “a gigantic design to keep Africans here and the African-Americans from getting together.”20 Like the poets of Senghor’s 1948 anthology did with the French language, Pendleton seems intent on purging 14. Lorenzo Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 232. 15. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” 44. 16. Amiri Baraka, “A Poem for Willie Best,” in SOS: Poems 1961–2013 (New York: Grove Press, 2014), 59. 17. For more on the necessity to re-semanticize and re-socialize African art objects, see the report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics, trans. Drew S. Burk (Paris: Ministère de la Culture, 2018), http://restitutionreport2018.com 18. Gilles Deleuze, “Three Questions about Six fois deux,” in Black Dada Reader, 80. 19. John Peffer, “Africa’s Diasporas of Images,” Third Text 19, no. 4 (July 2005): 339–55. 20. Malcolm X, May 11, 1964, in Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 62. 172 173 the European gaze of its exclusionary core. The mask is black, alive, and looking at us. Black Dada dramatizes a face-off between Euro-American avant-gardes and that which Western modernity systematically exploited and excluded in order to establish itself. Black Dada names a blind spot of modernist aesthetics, a fissure in the historical fabric of visuality. Black Dada is a seam, ever so elegantly bursting open. The imagination of French Dadaists and Surrealists was famously captured by a passage from The Songs of Maldoror (1869), in which Lautréamont evokes “the chance encounter on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing machine.” Pendleton’s stitching together of Black and Dada has nothing to do with chance. It is a deliberately staged encounter, with a carefully constructed genealogy indexed by Black Dada Reader. W. E. B. Du Bois had a premonition of Black Dada,21 Amiri Baraka named it,22 Harryette Mullen enacts it,23 Julius Eastman personifies its tragically exhilarating horizon…24 Black Dada Reader functions like a collage, making heterogenous texts coexist within the same time-space. A collage brings together incommensurable elements, without trying to blend them into one. It asks you to linger in the cuts, the breaks, the hinges. A good collage vibrates with the energy of unresolved tension. It embraces untranslatability while creating the conditions of resonance, but it does not pacify. Black Dada is a possible name for the refusal to pacify. Each Black Dada work is a new attempt at describing the unfigurable. Black Dada is not bound in finitude. It has the uncanny presence of a becoming. Pendleton’s collages, like his other works, rely on photocopying. Besides creating a duplicate, the photocopy “democratizes” images into the sameness of a poorly defined black and white. Pendleton’s process is centered on the archive that is his personal library but does not fetishize the archival material. On the contrary, the origin(al) is systematically jettisoned. The reproduction is the unoriginal origin. Besides the layered elements, what counts in a collage is the layering’s compositional grammar, which each new work reinvents. Deleuze would call it “the creative stammering, the foreign use of language, as opposed to its conforming and dominant use, based on the verb ‘to be.’”25 subordinated to the police, where subjects appear to each other and create a politics and, through this politics, prefigure a future.26 A temporary space where nobody can lay a definitive claim on meaning or value. Photocopying is fast and easy, yet it can function as a decelerator. By isolating one page within a book, it interrupts narrative and removes context. Clearly, Pendleton is an avid reader, yet I cannot picture him reading novels. I imagine him to be a page dweller rather than a page turner. In his work, pages from certain books keep returning—rather than turning—like visual rhymes, as if constantly looking for new collage companions. Through the double movement of decontextualizing and recontextualizing, each new work is the promise of a world remade. If each canvas is akin to a poem—a spatial arrangement across the space of a page—the multipart Mylar works look like storyboards: non-expository tales made by combining “carefully-honed incommensurabilities” within a given frame; ominous whispers of a black-and-white script projected as a kind of protocinema on the wall.27 Pendleton’s videos, which the artist presents as portraits, enact a complementary movement by stilling the lure of linear narrative. Instead, their montages diffract duration, dramatizing the resonances between our present and the pasts that inform it. In Ishmael in the Garden (2018), Ishmael Houston-Jones shares a litany of moments of intimacy, some remembered, some possibly fictional. In Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer (2016–17), Yvonne Rainer reads lines from her 2006 memoir, including a notebook entry titled “A List of Shameful Conditions and Occurrences” (1981–83), and shares with Pendleton a movement she developed with Steve Paxton in the 1960s. Both videos highlight a form of presence that lives between memory and performance. Each of them is the portrait of In Pendleton’s multipart works on Mylar, diverse arrays of triangles, squares, and circles appear, disappear, and reappear on the surface from one frame to the next, as though each series was a musical fugue meant to put the creative stammer on orbit. The point is not really to make all the available elements coexist in the same space. It is to make visible the different ways in which they appear in relation to one another. Perhaps Pendleton’s site of engagement relates to what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls a space of appearance, a space that is not 21. “Two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” 42. 22. Baraka, “Black Dada Nihilismus,” in Black Dada Reader, 61–64. 23. “I hope that my work continues to challenge that deadly distinction between ‘blackness’ and ‘humanity’—or ‘universality’—that is still imposed on black human beings.” Harryette Mullen, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 12. 24. Pendleton quoted in event description for “Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental,” at the Kitchen from January 19–February 10, 2018, https://thekitchen.org/event/julius-eastman-that-whichis-fundamental. “Julius Eastman created a space for new kinds of language and bodies in relationship to minimalism, and his presence, as a composer, disrupts a historical cannon that might otherwise be too easily articulated. I’d like to think, that by virtue of being a gay guerrilla I can also rightfully claim to be a crazy nigger.” 25. Deleuze, “Three Questions,” 82. 26. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Appearance of Black Lives Matter (Miami: Name Publications, 2017), https://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter. 27. Ron Silliman, “The New Sentence,” in Black Dada Reader, 131–61. 174 175 As though, looking for his own face, he encountered a screaming African mask. an encounter, a touching portrayal of inchoate affection. In them the artist is allowing his voice to enter the space of the work. “Writing poetry for me is more a matter of texture than form,” says Harryette Mullen.28 The formal rigor of Pendleton’s work is so striking that one tends to disregard the importance and complexity of texture within it. In the elegant surfaces of the Black Dada paintings and the mirrored depths of the System of Display works, blackness operates “in abstraction,” as a texture to be grappled with, a texture on which isolated fragments of meaning float out of reach.29 In the recent multilayered collages and in the gestural intensity of Crazy Nigger (After Julius Eastman) (2018–19), a wall work, as well as in the Untitled (Who We Are) (2018–19), Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2019), and Untitled (After Julius Eastman) (2019) paintings, we are witnessing a superimposition of multiple framings—historical, discursive, cultural—as if the dense abstraction of the earlier works was revealing layers it had been withholding all along. As if the apparent foundational abyss between The Revival (2007) and the early Black Dada works (2008), between stage performance and wall-bound image, was being bridged before our eyes. As though Pendleton was going public.30 As though he was seeking a lineage, and finding it in a defiant “we” that is both conceptually situated and existentially uncertain (“Our Ideas,” “Who We Are,” “We Are Not”). As though, looking for his own face, he encountered a screaming African mask. A face without a face. Or rather, a face that holds many faces within. A palimpsest of features. The haunted parataxis of diaspora. 28. Mullen, The Cracks, 16. 29. Adrienne Edwards, “Blackness in Abstraction,” Art in America 103, no. 1 (January 2015): 62–69. 30. Among other examples: since 2015, Pendleton has embraced the flag and the language of the Black Lives Matter movement in several of his works, including in his installation at that year’s Venice Biennial and in 2018 in his project for Frieze New York. In 2016, Pendleton decided to appear onscreen alongside Yvonne Rainer in the video portrait he made of her. In 2017, the Black Dada reader was finally published as a book after years of circulating as a spiral-bound packet among a small group of friends. 176 177