Adam Pendleton: As Heavy as Sculpture

Adam Pendleton's (born 1984) new artist's book, “As Heavy as Sculpture,” follows Pendleton's 2021 installation of the same title, which was exhibited at the New Museum in New York. The book compiles, repeats, and processes more than 80 source collages, incorporating drawings, sketches, writings, and marks, often in combination with images.

 Much of the language used in the collages is drawn from the protests against police brutality that swept the United States in 2020: Pendleton transcribed slogans spray-painted on walls and windows, combining them with his own improvised language and photographs of art objects and artifacts (sculptures, masks, and figures). The work highlights the poetic pressure that uprisings exert on language itself, in some cases compressing it into its simplest forms: simple sequences such as “ACAB” or “1312,” which can be further reduced to the elements “A, B, C” and “1, 2, 3.”

Parallel to these operations of decomposition and recomposition, the collages in “As Heavy as Sculpture” have been duplicated, arranged on 30 sheets, and folded into booklets, thus creating new shifts and new cuts. This folding is in fact a fortuitous operation, a procedure of recombination and translation, resulting in arrangements of images that were not planned in advance.