Adam Pendleton


For Greater New York 2009 I made the installation Abolition of Alienated Labor. The title comes from a work by Guy Debord and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, where Debord painted the words in capital letters over an "industrial painting" by Pinot-Gallizio. The piece was a timeline of sorts. The Debord/Pinot-Gallizio work is from 1963; I'm standing next to a large mirror and glass work that made use of a film still from the 1966 Godard film, Made in U.S.A. There were two other mirror and glass works, and several Black Dada drawings. One mirror and glass work, the largest, was an image of Delegate A.A. Ochwada leading the men from the Kenya Federation of Labour, during the All-African People's Conference that took place in Accra, Ghana in 1958. There was also an audio component. I asked the vocalist Alicia Hall-Moran and drummer Nasheet Waits to "re-imagine" the Max Roach/Abby Lincoln collaboration Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace, which was recorded in 1960. You could hear the three of us discussing and rehearsing what that might mean while your image was reflected in the mirrors.