“The Black Dada paintings, begun in 2008, take their name from a quotation from the 1964 poem by LeRoi Jones (later identified as Amiri Baraka) “Black Dada Nihilismus”- but never in its entirety. That is, in Pendleton's compositions, we are only every granted fragments of language, remaindered letters toward an impossible whole. And in the paintings, the individual letters figure alongside cropped, photographic details from a canonical work—Sol LeWitt's - Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes
(1974)—which takes potentiality and its counterpoint, fragmentation, as its subject as much as its form.”



—Andrea Andersson, “The Disobedient Copyist: Adam Pendleton's Language of Resistance,” in - Becoming Imperceptible
, exh. cat. Los Angeles/New Orleans: Siglio and Contemporary Art Centre, 2016, p. 6



In the - Black Dada
series, initiated in 2008, the making of paintings is loosely dictated by a set of rules. Each - Black Dada
work is a diptych that begins with a photocopy of an image of one of Sol LeWitt's - Incomplete Open Cubes
sculptures (1974). The photocopy is selectively cropped, scanned, and reduced to a pure edge. The result is silk-screened in black onto two 48 x 76-inch sections of black canvas, one above the other, creating a 96 x 16-inch diptych. The phrase “BLACK DADA,” set in Arial Bold, is implicitly placed within the composition, beginning from a corner; letters are then subtracted from the phrase until only one, two, or a few are left. These letters, too, are screen-printed in black ink on the canvases in their appropriate positions. What first appear to be nonsensical placements of the letters A, B, C, D, K, and L are in fact the coded bits of a whole that is never given in full.

LeWitt's - Incomplete Open Cubes
presented 122 ways of "not making a cube, all the ways of the cube not being complete.” - Black Dada
has an analogous iterative structure in which an ambiguous unit—“BLACK DADA”—is repeated in minimal or minimized fragments. The work dramatizes reduction, compression, and attenuation, a low-fidelity reproduction of an already deficient datum. Each painting is an entropic surface, a grainy black noise, marked by stray dots from the processed and silkscreened photocopy. It is also an act of self-annunciation: BLACK DADA, like DADA, perpetually saying its own name, perpetually manifesting, stuttering, incomplete.

Studio Adam Pendleton