Adam Pendleton. Yes, But, 2008; acrylic paint on wall; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans.

The immediate impact of Pendleton’s engagement with the architectural space of the institution invites visitors to understand his engagement with site as a form of occupation. The vertical space of each gallery is dramatically papered with the artist’s stark black-and-white materials—collages, posters, paintings, silkscreens, and acrylic texts swarm the walls, covering the visual field with appropriated and fragmented photographic materials that shout and stutter across three dimensions.[1] Viewers are continuously met with a cacophony of printed matter and textual fragments that tautologically enact Pendleton’s desire for hierarchies of aesthetic representation, production, and historical origins to cross-reference, and subsequently, re-signify.

This mode is powerfully introduced at the start of the exhibition with Yes, But (2008), a wall painting of quotes appropriated from the legendary French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard in the 2002 film The Future(s) of Film. Oscillating somewhere between portraiture, poetry, and fragmented non sequitur, Pendleton covers the wall with appropriated text—a gesture that nods to the French auteur’s critique of style and his embrace of the productive possibilities inherent in the accumulation of found content. Pendleton’s destabilization of authorship is a strategy that follows the structures and dynamic history of the avant-garde in the 20th century, and forms the conceptual foundation for a practice that expands from a dissolution between material and process.

Adam Pendleton. System of Display, X (EXPRESS/Poro secret society mask, Mano, Liberia), 2016; silkscreen ink on Plexiglas and mirror; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans.

The heterogeneous series of silkscreen works entitled System of Display (2016) present the ways that Pendleton lifts source materials to create an image that points to discourses of artistic and political emancipation rather than re-presenting them. By resisting the tendency to simply align and insert himself within the lineage of negational art—from Dada to Conceptual Art—Pendleton complicates this history of oppositional art and institutional critique by interrupting it with his own subjectivity as a politicized African American artist. Pendleton states, “I am working to establish a system of display, of organization. I want to create a situation where we’re inclined to rethink notions of the past and the future, as well as our ability to understand them enough to make reductive statements.”[2]

Adam Pendleton. Installation view of the series Untitled (Code Poems), 2016; ceramic. Courtesy of the Artist and the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans.

At the heart of this exhibition is Pendleton’s continual engagement with an expanded history and definition of abstraction as it has developed and cross-pollinated in the visual and poetic arts. A new series of ceramic floor works referred to as “code poems” gather a range of references to the interaction of visual form and language, namely a nod to the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics through an appropriation of Hannah Weiner’s experimental text Morse Code (2002), as well as the spatial elegance of Carl Andre’s minimal floor sculptures. Again, Pendleton’s appropriation of ready-made sources turns the act of referencing into an integral part of the creation of new systems of representation. Pendleton’s foregrounding of the processes of organizing, arranging, and classification—themes that are at the heart of Western modernism, and specifically the minimalist canon—are then mobilized, critically mined, and reopened to create new forms of consciousness that ignite with our present aesthetic and political moment. For Pendleton, abstraction is not a dead, empty visual language, and appropriation is not a form of meaningless relativism, but rather a charged set of assumptions and strategies that, when displaced, offer 21st-century viewers a vital affirmation of the possibility of new orders and narratives.

Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible is on view at Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans through June 16, 2016.

[1] Andrea Andersson’s thoughtful exhibition-catalog essay points to the ways in which Pendleton uses “incompleteness” of language and “dysfluency” (commonly known as stuttering) as a formal and conceptual strategy. See Andersson’s“The Disobedient Copyist: Adam Pendleton’s Language of Resistance” in Becoming Imperceptible: Adam Pendleton, exhibition catalog (New York: Siglio Press, 2016), 4–12.

[2] Quote lifted from the CACNO’s gallery guide, “Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible,” compiled by Dr. Andrea Andersson, Curator of the Visual Arts.

James Hoff: B=R=I=C=K=I=N=G, 2015; installation view, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Image © Traviesa Studio.

Bricking is a term that describes the overload of an operating system when infected by malware, a process that renders the system useless, or at least unable to work for its original purpose. Hoff infects JPEGs, PNGs, and TIFFs with specific forms of malware such as Skywiper and Stuxnet—viruses that have become synonymous with international cyberterrorism[1]—and then digitally converts them into image files that can be transferred to canvas or aluminum. The political weight of these viruses rubs against the formally expressive character of the final works, which seem to engage more with the history of abstraction and the cool, detached vocabulary of formalism than the language of computer code. Thin, horizontal striations of vibrant neon colors seem to liquefy and drip, creating an unusual grainy texture across the surface of the aluminum paintings, whose markings bear a kinship to rough textiles such as coarse, unprimed canvas. The cosmic forms, pulsating colors, and abrupt shifts in tone call up the rich history of pure abstraction, from the cosmic utopian canvases of Wassily Kandinsky to the colored depth of a Mark Rothko.

James Hoff. Skywiper No. 50, 2015; Chromaluxe transfer on aluminum; 60 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.

Despite the hostile process that Hoff uses to compose these works, each painting seems to domesticate the digital attack within the bounds of the frame, turning Hoff’s disruptive gestures into something lyrical. Skywiper No. 50 (2015) is a bacterial force field of battered digital saturations, where mysterious forms seem to bleed into each other, recalling biological arrangements or CGI environments. And yet these works stop short of creating the emotional pitch that abstract art seems to still depend on. The soft pastel colors and delicate fragility of line in a work like Skywiper No. 57 (2015) seem to run uncomfortably close to abstract kitsch, asking viewers to regard the difficult question that surrounds abstract painting today: Has it become a placeholder (or stock image) for pure presence, instead of a politically charged genre that worked to resist materialism? One is left with a disconcerting feeling that Hoff’s paintings are efforts to visualize the mundane, banal, and detached forms of political investment the West seems to depend upon as bombs from unmanned aerial vehicles continue to fall across the world.

James Hoff. Skywiper No. 57, 2015; Chromaluxe transfer on aluminum; 30 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.

An installation of Hoff’s sound work electrifies the gallery and expands Hoff’s serial corruptions in painting to another sensory mode, drawing the visitor’s attention to the relationships between the visual, the spatial, and the auditory. The lazy echoes and deep thumping cuts warm the environment for the works and the listener, as the sounds resounding through the gallery recall the empty, repetitive lulls of easy listening music or the earworms attributed to pop or house dance beats. Gently wooed by the audible materializations of these invasive mutations, one might leave the gallery disturbed and estranged from the works on display, pondering the dazzling efficiency of our digitally resplendent 21st-century society.

James Hoff: B=R=I=C=K=I=N=G is on view at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans through February 28, 2016.

[1] These malicious computer viruses are self-destructing worms believed to be jointly built by the American and Israeli governments in order to carry out undetectable attacks against Middle Eastern countries, and in particular Iran’s nuclear program by compromising Iranian nuclear centrifuges and other industrial electromechanical systems to shut down nuclear facilities and conduct espionage from 2005 to 2010. While there are many sources that prove Stuxnet to be the cause of the many breakdowns across Iran’s major nuclear facilities, security expert Bruce Schneier’s “Another Piece of the Stuxnet Puzzle,” published on February 23, 2012, is the most comprehensive. The article can be accessed at https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/10/stuxnet.html. The Guardian reports that Stuxnet was used as early as President George W. Bush’s second term under the administration of security company Symantec. See Charles Arthur’s “Symantex Discovers 2005 U.S. Computer Virus Attack on Iran nuclear plants,” published online February 23, 2013. Accessed at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/26/symantec-us-computer-virus-iran-nuclear. A report by Reuters has alleged that the NSA launched Stuxnet to sabotage North Korea’s nuclear program in tandem with the targeted Iranian centrifuges. See Joseph Menn’s “Exclusive: U.S. Tried Stuxnet-Style Campaign Against North Korea But Failed—Sources,” Reuters, May 29, 2015. Accessed at: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northkorea-stuxnet-idUSKBN0OE2DM20150529.