Over the winter break I dropped by The Kitchen to check out artist Adam Pendleton's solo exhibit BAND. I've followed Pendleton's work for awhile, and have regretted having missed several earlier shows of his in Chicago, all word art pieces at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery--2007's "Rendered in Black and Rendered," 2005's "Gorilla, My Love," and 2004's "It's about memory"--so I beat a path to Chelsea to catch this one before it closed on December 23, 2010.
Curated by Rashida Bumbray, the Kitchen exhibition marked the US premiere of Pendleton's large-scale video installation and the final stage of a more extensive multi-platform exhibition, which debuted on September 17, 2009 at the Toronto International Film Festival and featured a rehearsal and live public concert by indie-postpunk band Deerhoof. A December 2009-January 2010 performance and reading in Amsterdam, featuring the first edit of Toronto event footage along with work-in-progress sequences based on texts directly drawn from Jean-Luc Godard's famous 1968 quasi-documentary, Sympathy for the Devil, such as ones by Eldridge Cleaver, along with more associatively linked works, by writers like Gertrude Stein, was programmed by and held at the Kunstverein/de Appel Arts Center.
Band reimagines film, replacing the Rolling Stones prepping and then playing their eponymous song with Deerhoof practicing and then performing the haunting "I Did Crimes for You" (from their new album Deerhoof vs. Evil, Polyvinyl, 2011) in refracted, multiscreen, asynchronous form. Pendleton's film also retains more than just the spirit of Godard's overtly radical, overtly politicized aesthetics in Sympathy, which juxtaposes imagined scenes of Black radicalism, informed by the work of Cleaver, Amiri Baraka and others with a performance by Godard's then-wife Anne Wiazemsky, as "Eve Democracy," an icon of Euro-American leftist politics and poetics. Band does also carry forward in formal and content terms this aspect of Godard's film. In post-production, Pendleton and editor Deco Dawson interlaced the Deerhoof footage with audio from a short documentary film entitled Teddy, created, to quote The Kitchen's press release, "as part of the Social Seminar, a multi-media training series developed by the National Institute of Mental Health with the U.S. Office of Education." Teddy, directed by Richard Wells and edited by Andrew Stein, portrayed a day in the life of a politically active 17-year-old black man; in Band Pendleton paired the audio track with clips from a late 1960s LA Police Department raid on a Black Panther office.
Curated by Rashida Bumbray, the Kitchen exhibition marked the US premiere of Pendleton's large-scale video installation and the final stage of a more extensive multi-platform exhibition, which debuted on September 17, 2009 at the Toronto International Film Festival and featured a rehearsal and live public concert by indie-postpunk band Deerhoof. A December 2009-January 2010 performance and reading in Amsterdam, featuring the first edit of Toronto event footage along with work-in-progress sequences based on texts directly drawn from Jean-Luc Godard's famous 1968 quasi-documentary, Sympathy for the Devil, such as ones by Eldridge Cleaver, along with more associatively linked works, by writers like Gertrude Stein, was programmed by and held at the Kunstverein/de Appel Arts Center.
Band reimagines film, replacing the Rolling Stones prepping and then playing their eponymous song with Deerhoof practicing and then performing the haunting "I Did Crimes for You" (from their new album Deerhoof vs. Evil, Polyvinyl, 2011) in refracted, multiscreen, asynchronous form. Pendleton's film also retains more than just the spirit of Godard's overtly radical, overtly politicized aesthetics in Sympathy, which juxtaposes imagined scenes of Black radicalism, informed by the work of Cleaver, Amiri Baraka and others with a performance by Godard's then-wife Anne Wiazemsky, as "Eve Democracy," an icon of Euro-American leftist politics and poetics. Band does also carry forward in formal and content terms this aspect of Godard's film. In post-production, Pendleton and editor Deco Dawson interlaced the Deerhoof footage with audio from a short documentary film entitled Teddy, created, to quote The Kitchen's press release, "as part of the Social Seminar, a multi-media training series developed by the National Institute of Mental Health with the U.S. Office of Education." Teddy, directed by Richard Wells and edited by Andrew Stein, portrayed a day in the life of a politically active 17-year-old black man; in Band Pendleton paired the audio track with clips from a late 1960s LA Police Department raid on a Black Panther office.
