21 Sep 2009

Kunstverein & de Appel: Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton
"  EL    T  D      K   Amsterdam"

A three-part program comprising two performances and an exhibition in a collaboration between Kunstverein, Amsterdam and de Appel.

Adam Pendleton’s conceptual practice constructs formal templates in which he slots information. As a painter, writer and performer, he uses extreme freedom of reference and quotation, as well as a rejection of conventional hierarchies among sources, to create a re-historicized present, one that upsets and unbalances comfortably subjective interpretations of history and culture.


Part one
three scenes
23/09/09
Performed at 8 and 9 PM
Location: Kunstverein, Ruyschstraat 4 III, Amsterdam

Over the past few years American artist Adam Pendleton has written various performances in which he exploits the easy-psychology of autobiographical readings by using devices that render language concrete and contingent. Often he combines specialized discourses and common knowledge in a redistribution of cultural information. Previous performances range from the evening length 30-person gospel choir production The Revival to a series of manifestos such as the Black Dada Manifesto.

For three scenes Pendleton will evoke the notion of a retrospective by pulling, assembling and re-appropriating material from all of his performances to date.

The performance is commissioned as part of the official opening of Kunstverein.


Part two
grey-blue grain
11/12/09 – 31/01/10
Location: Kunstverein, Ruyschstraat 4 III, Amsterdam

A selection of projects from 2007-09 that deal directly with the abstraction and instrumentalisation of language and image through sculpture and wall-based work, including his one-color silk-screens derived from the code-based work of �?Clairvoyant Poet’ Hannah Weiner; selections from System of Display; and fresh configurations of the artist’s abstract and phenomenological alphabet, Untitled (Black Cubes).


Part three
BAND
13 and 14/12/09
Performed at 8.30 PM
Location: De Brakke Grond (Rode Zaal), Nes 45, Amsterdam

In March 2009 de Appel has left its premises that it has occupied since 1993 (Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 10) and is exploring new horizons.
While awaiting completion of her new home base de Appel celebrates the temporary disembodiment with a special programme under the title “The Future Will Last Longer Than The Past”. There is a radical scene change with the background becoming foreground, the white cube turns into a black box. The regular parallel schedule of performances, lectures, informances and publications, known as �?de Appel On The Side’, is now the main programme. The emphasis temporarily shifts from objects and images, to texts, the spoken word and gesture.

Adam Pendleton’s BAND is a form and content refashioning of Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil. Made in the aftermath of May ’68, the original film helped mark Godard’s break from his Nouvelle Vague period into a more committed engagement with the politics and class struggles of the time. It modelled the director's emerging political faith that radical formal complexity could undermine the bourgeois logic implicit to narrative filmmaking. Often read as a tribute to the Rolling Stones whose rehearsals form an ongoing motif in the film, the Stones were in fact emblematic of the mainstream counterculture from which Godard was attempting to remove himself. BAND will unfold in stages, beginning at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 17th with a rehearsal and live concert by the indie-rock/post-punk band Deerhoof. The Amsterdam performance/reading will present the first edit of footage from Toronto with work-in-progress sequences from texts based on the work of authors explicitly related to Godard’s film, such as the Black Panther’ Eldridge Cleaver; or tangentially related, such as Gertrude Stein. The final stage of BAND  will occur at The Kitchen, New York in Fall 2010.

Co-producers: Wayne Baerwaldt, Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary; Noah Cowan, Toronto International Film Festival, Future Projections; Ann Demeester, de Appel, Amsterdam with additional support from Rashida Bumbray, The Kitchen, New York.


For further information, please contact:

de Appel

arts centre
Post Box 10764

1001 ET Amsterdam 

Tel +3120 6255651

Fax +3120 6225215

press@deappel.nl
www.deappel.nl

Kunstverein
Ruyschstraat 4 III
1091 CB, Amsterdam
+31 (0)20-4277603
office@kunstverein.nl
www.kunstverein.nl