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"Who is the Queen" by Adam Pendleton? Full of great anxiety. Covering the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the towering presence of the installation is supported by a five-story black scaffold, which is a skeleton-shaped container containing two-dimensional screen-printed works and wooden sculptures. The core of the installation is the dialogue between the two films: "Notes from the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond, Virginia (pictured)" (2021) and "Film Notes from the Resurrection City" (2021). The third film "We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstein" (2021) intermittently intervenes in the narrative, and is screened at 12:30 and 4:30 every afternoon. Pendleton's installation is projected under bright and dramatic white light, turning the atrium into a stage, allowing the entire artwork to unfold wildly; the violent combination of film, sculpture and sound makes visitors immersed in the unstable throes of protest and struggle .
The theme of the installation centers on protest and resistance to the collision between the two locations. "Notes on the Robert E. Lee Monument, Richmond, Virginia (photo)" (2021) studied one of today’s most well-known signs of Confederate violence, which was transformed by the 2020 "Black People’s Fate" protests Visual file of objections. At the same time, "Film Notes of Resurrection City" (2021) turned to another protest location, the nominal Resurrection City, a grassroots tent city and anti-poverty demonstrations in Washington, DC after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The National Mall was erected.
But on the screen of the Museum of Modern Art, these two historical moments slipped into a picture of a long struggle. In fact, after entering the exhibition relatively unknowingly, I didn't realize that I had been watching two very different movies until I carefully observed the writing on the wall of the museum. However, I did not regard the lack of a clear distinction between the two films as a curatorial or artistic failure, but as a kind of generative penetration. When they slide together, the film reveals real pictures of history and struggle, which are chaotic and impure, rather than neat or easy to understand. The camera seamlessly transitions from the archival lens of the Resurrection City to the contemporary lens of the Robert E. Lee Monument. It is said that the gap between space and time that separates the two films is broken by their visual consistency: both films were shot in black and white, suggesting nostalgia for earlier periods. Although grayscale is unique to the lens in the "Resurrection City Movie Notes", the lack of color in the "Robert Lee Monument Movie Notes" reduces its simultaneity, between what Pendleton considers to be two historical moments Started a vague departure.
In fact, monochrome-Pendleton's main work-constitutes the entire installation. Monochrome is both fuzzy and meaningful in the text-based screen printing of decorative scaffolding. In the disaster of words, dense black and white graffiti-like words filled the panels, stacked one after another. We are left with screaming text equivalents: words and sentences are broken down into letters to compete for visibility, layers of text seem to yell at us, rejecting the legibility that our eyes desire. Immersed in this strong sound of calligraphy, I remembered Pendleton’s graffiti that appeared at the bottom of Robert E. Lee's monument in his movie-this kind of restless text display has become a rebellion. One of the signs. The sorting logic of white supremacy.
From Richmond to Washington to the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, I was swaying between these unique but vague historical moments. I also found myself swaying between multiple time experiences. This acceleration and deceleration made me fall into The whirlpool of movement and silence. Through the montage of dynamic video clips and still photography—most commonly portraits of people in camps—history has become both large and straightforward. As the footage of the Civil Rights Parade flickered between the images of Freedom Riders, time revolved before our eyes. Then, when the camera rests on the careful portraits of the residents and protesters of the Resurrection City, the film drops at a graceful intimacy speed. Sometimes the camera dared to break into the stone face of Robert E. Lee and stay for a few close-up shots. This kind of intimacy is almost incredible: under this firm and keen gaze, the monument becomes fragile, and for a moment it is almost deprived of its power.
The chaotic timeliness influenced by these visual arrangements exploded in the sound collage accompanied by Pendleton, which is a kind of counterpoint struggle murmur that sweeps the audience in the layers of music, spoken language, singing, and speech. Hahn Rowe's contemporary music adaptation called "Yellow Smile" (1994) runs through the two films, accompanied by the tense lyric of violin and electronic sound. In "Robert E. Lee's Movie Notes", Luo's work overlaps with the conflict of two apparently determined voices: the recording of poet and revolutionary Amiri Baraka in 1980 and the "2014" in Manhattan. The iPhone recording of the black people’s fate is also a fate. This has benefited me a lot from my own memories of various protests. The rhythm of Baraka's polemic intersects with the tide of the crowd and is cut off by it, and the poetry erupts in the voice of collective protest. We are pushed into the wave of sound starting today and yesterday, as the crescendo and fading of history. In Pendleton's crazy rhythm, history will not simply repeat itself. Instead, it jolts forward, stammers, pauses for breathing, and weaves around itself. This is an era when settlements or orders are rejected. Although I tried to keep up at first, I finally succumbed to the chaos and let the device wash me through all the chaos.
At 4:30 pm on the day I visited the Pendleton installation for the first time, time slowed again and made way for "We Move: A Portrait of Jack Halberstein," which follows the radical life of a professor of gender studies at Columbia University And work. The movie is enclosed in two movie notes, preceded by its own introductory text: a poem by TS Eliot, with the title from it. Eliot's appearance at the beginning of the film is very enlightening: Halberstein had a lot of exchanges with the poet. In his book "Wild Things" published in 2020, Halberstam theorized Elliott's four quartets as "a sense of disorder and orientation to time and life." This sensibility broke out in Pendleton's film, which fully embodies the slowness required to portray portraits. At the same time, this movie filled me with longing for the new vision of the world that Haberstam asked for is possible. "I believe in the collapse of things," Haberstam commented. "Rather than reject the monster's label... embrace it." The visual and sound noise of the Pendleton installation responded to this invitation. It insists on the terrible politics and aesthetics of disorientation and distortion of time, space, images, and sound in order to provide a prelude to the order that our world depends on. The scaffolding climbed up the inner wall of the Museum of Modern Art, engulfing the museum, and engulfing the audience in the ensuing hustle and bustle.
The anarchist aesthetics of Pendelton's works intoxicated us. At the same time, I found myself wondering whether this installation was completely successful in realizing its ambition to become a “holistic work of art”. Although the premise of the exhibition is that the public is better than a single and a chorus is better than a soloist, this installation makes me feel that the film is placed above other related media. To a certain extent, movies have an unfair advantage, that is, they have more "continuations"-images, sounds, and sports. But this difference between the media is only reflected in "Who is the Queen"? Although the film is full of sound and visual stimuli, the scaffolding does not seem to be fully utilized. As rich as Pendelton's text-based panels, the scaffolding itself feels full of a lot of negative space, and this lack becomes particularly evident given the size of the scaffolding and its sharp contrast with the white walls of the gallery. It feels like the lack of integration between the movies-it appears large on one wall-and the rest of the installation, the media problems have been more significantly alleviated. The chair faces the screen, encouraging the audience to sit down and experience the movie from a static position. But this installation requires the activity of the audience: experiencing it completely requires me to navigate the room and switch through multiple viewing angles, get closer to get lost in the details, then step back and stretch my neck to see the top recording scaffold. Sitting and watching the movie, then standing to accept the rest of the device, the tension between the active participation experience of the entire device and the more passive viewing of the movie has not been resolved.
The space itself has its own unsolved problems. Importantly, Pendleton’s exhibition consists of a third venue for protest: the Museum of Modern Art itself. For several months, the activist coalition in New York has recently held continuous protests at the museum, protesting its support for toxic charities and the links between several of its board members and the prison industrial complex and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Pendleton's project has a particularly worrying relationship with these institutional politics. The project not only occupies a building involved in the protest - or more accurately a monument - but Pendleton also conducted extensive museum-based Archive research to make this project possible. At the same time, the premise of the project is rooted in institutional criticism-its radical proposal depends on the contrast between the scope of the museum and the form of installation that is extremely incapable. Given the increasing calls for the world beyond museums and monuments, who is the queen? Caught in the crosshairs. Yes, the project itself is disturbing, but it is also caught in the tension of what it swallows.
Adam Pendleton: Who is the queen? It will continue to be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (11 W 53rd Street, New York, NY) until February 21, 2022. Curated by Stuart Comer, Danielle A. Jackson, Gee Wesley and Veronika Molnar.
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