New artist book by Adam Pendleton (b. 1984), As Heavy as Sculpture
follows Pendleton's 2021 installation of the same title and
exhibited at the New Museum in New York. The book collects, repeats and discusses more than
80 source collages, incorporating drawings, sketches, writings and
marks, often in combination with images. \n \nMuch of the
The language used in the collages is taken from the protests against the
Police brutality that swept the United States in 2020: Pendleton
transcribed slogans spray-painted on walls and windows,
combining with his own improvised language as well as photographs of objects
of art and artifacts (sculptures, masks and figures). The work highlights
the poetic pressure that the uprisings exert on language itself, the
compressing in some cases down to the simplest forms: sequences
simple as "ACAB" or "1312", still reducible to the elements "A, B, C", "1,
2, 3". \n \nIn parallel with these operations of decomposition and recomposition,
The collages of As Heavy as Sculpture have been duplicated, arranged on 30
sheets and folded into notebooks, thus creating new movements and
new cuts. This folding is in fact a fortuitous operation, a procedure
of recombination and translation, which results in non-standard image arrangements
planned in advance.
