Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton’s Notes on Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer stems from the transcript of the script prepared by Pendleton for Yvonne Rainer to read during their day spent filming at the Ridgeway Diner in Chelsea. The text mixes citations from Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and excerpts from Rainer’s own published works; the film ends with the gospel song ‘I Am Saved’ by the Silver Harpes over the footage of Rainer’s now canonical Trio A, 1978. Pendleton's chapbook plays on the duality of meaning in the word ‘movement’, exploring the synchrony of art and politics, and shared potentials of language and the non-verbal.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.