History Is Never Finished: An Interview with Adam Pendleton

Stuart Comer: Who Is Queen? began with a conversation you had with [curator] Adrienne Edwards around a decade ago. A couple of years after that, the three of us met to discuss the possibilities for developing it as a project at MoMA. By that time, you had a title and a very coherent but nonetheless loose-knit set of ideas and questions.

Adam Pendleton: A series of questions, which are a series of prompts, right? But what hadn’t been defined in the early days of the conversation is what form Queen would take.

I think Queen, as a concept, functions most productively when it’s pushing against something. When it was formless, it could be as fluid and as unfixed as I wanted it to be, which is a state in which I, as an artist, am quite comfortable. But there was a discomfort in having it actually designated to a site, which required Queen to manifest as something physical. It took a good decade to really pull apart these ideas and give them a visual life.

Can you talk about the genesis of the project?

Who Is Queen? has been shaped and informed by having its home be The Museum of Modern Art: the histories that are embedded in the space of the Museum, the residue of histories that activate and define the spaces are touched on by this project. Queen began as and is a visual project. For me, at the very beginning, it was an investigation into that language—Who Is Queen?—and what that language meant when it was hurled at me, and how I responded in that moment.

Can you say something about how that became a prompt for you?

It’s very interesting to think about what we can demand of anyone else at any given moment. We’re all constantly trying to reify or present ourselves in particular terms. And sometimes the world confirms what we want it to see, and other times it denies what we want it to see or how we want to be seen. There are all of these small moments of asking for permission and also disavowing something else. So, all of these decisions and choices are being made, and they coalesce around something we’re all familiar with, and that is a feeling of being vulnerable. What is found in that space at our most exposed and personal moments, and how can it be translated into a form but also into an interrogation of a social space, a visual space, and a historical and a theoretical space all at once?

I think from the beginning it was clear that Queen would be a visual project with different kinds of temporal realities shaping it. But it was not clear in any sense, not even in my mind, what it would look like, what it would sound like, or how it would feel. And I think that’s where the physical site that hosts the project became essential, because, as a concept, Queen functions most productively when it’s pushing against something. It was the discomfort of actually having a site that allowed the project to manifest in something that was physical and real. It took a good decade to really pull apart these ideas and give them a physical weight and a physical life.

As you said earlier, this work began with the phrase “Who is queen?” and then a problematizing of your own vulnerability in that provocation. From that place, you’ve developed a number of different paintings and other works using language. Could you talk about how they operate in this installation?

The individual components function in relationship to a process of accumulation, where something is transfigured or transformed into something else. So something that may be limited by a particular approach to how it might be read becomes more capacious and open within the space of the work. A simple phrase like “We are not” may seem blunt and simplistic, but in the space of the work it is broken down visually into something else that is full of possibility but also, I would argue, of a sense of vulnerability. So what is fundamental about the work is looking for different kinds of marks, gestures, even scars, different kinds of realities and material facts that can be upended, rethought, and approached and seen differently.

There’s a long trajectory of artists engaging with words and language throughout the 20th century that extends from Surrealist automatic writing to Conceptual art. And I’m wondering about the question of language in this work and where it sits within a longer history of artists engaging with language.

Let’s just go to the ’80s because that’s when I was born. Let’s talk about Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger. I think the way in which I approach language in my work is very different from the way they approach language in their work. And I think that difference lies in the way in which critical thinking revolves around language. I don’t say revolved, I say revolves, because this is an ongoing project. It is still being rethought and repurposed and reimagined by a slew of writers like Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Simone White, and others before them like Joan Retallack, Jena Osman, and Leslie Scalapino. Leslie Scalapino wanted to create a live space, a future sense, a kind of continual presence within the written work. So someone like her is essential to Who Is Queen? because that’s very much what I would like to do within the space of the exhibition. Writers influence by paintings almost as much as any visual encounter I may have.

The artists you mentioned were very much on the frontlines of feminist politics, asking questions about what should art’s engagement with the social should be. And that, to me, is a fundamental question at the heart of Who Is Queen?

That’s the same question that black artists were faced with during the Black Arts movement. People asked, you’re making abstract paintings, don’t you see what’s going on around you? I think that’s one of the questions that Queen approaches—this tension between abstraction and politics, and the obligation of the artist in that space, but it should be clear that abstraction is as political as anything else.

Can you give us a little bit of background about your interest in Resurrections City and how it began to figure into this project on so many levels?

I was drawn originally to Resurrection City through the photography of Jill Freedman. The way she captured the people who occupied and existed within that space, there was a quality to the act of documentation of seeing others, of being seen in others and by others, that I found very specific and rare. And so her photographs were what made me investigate this moment in American history. You know, Resurrection City is an instance of a political and even an aesthetic avant-garde, but it’s still fairly unknown, undiscussed. Sometimes we think we've experienced the avant-garde to the point that it becomes passé, and then you encounter something like Resurrection City. You know, if Rosa Parks is and was the avant-garde—what an incredible sculpture, what an incredible gesture, we just didn’t realize what it was. And so I think there are all of these moments, and, of course, not just in American history, that contain these alternatives and other languages and other modes of being. And that, for me, is what the avant-garde is. It’s an alternative. It’s the chaos. It’s the beauty of chaos.

Your work raises the question of opacity, of a refusal to be known.

What right do you have to make these demands of me, to have clarity about who I am or who I want to be or who we are? Why is that clarity necessary? And of course this demand raises the stakes on the institution, because for it to explicate is what people expect, but let’s create radically new expectations. And that’s why, in a way, I’m tired of talking about the work, because I don’t want to explicate. I don’t want to explain. I just want to be.