Meredith Malone - Böcker

Thaddeus Strode's vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. "Absolutes and Nothings" marks the artist's first major museum show, presented as part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum's "Contemporary Projects" series.Strode's images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist's own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode's aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic - and captivating - fantasies. Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, "Absolutes and Nothings" is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.

We are in the dawn of the drone age, a turning point in history when the United States and other countries are increasingly using unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor behavior, collect data, conduct surveillance, and wage wars. As the ubiquitous vision and remote engagement of drones redefine contemporary policing and warfare, their impact is filtering into art and visual culture, generating new investigations into issues of visibility, technology, and fear. Considering an international array of video, sculpture, installation, photography, and web-based projects, this volume, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, reveals the unique potential of art to further our understanding of, and give visual form to, modern drone warfare and digital surveillance. These essays illuminate how the drone embodies a far-reaching discussion about the rapidly shifting conditions of perception of seeing, and of being seen made possible by advanced technology. What is the relation of machine vision to human vision? And how do visual technologies affect our understanding of the agency of images, and of ourselves?Featuring scholarly essays along with texts by contributing artists Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl, To See Without Being Seen is a perceptive contribution to the emerging literature on contemporary artistic practice, war, surveillance, and technology.

A critical investigation of Adam Pendleton’s deep engagement with abstraction.  Adam Pendleton’s exploration of abstraction—through painting, drawing, screen printing, sculpture, language, book arts, and film—over the past five years constitutes the core of this study and the exhibition that spawned it. The book features essays by exhibition curator Meredith Malone and senior scholars Hal Foster and Joshua Chambers-Letson along with a conversation between Pendleton and the critic and theorist Isabelle Graw. These texts illuminate the artist’s fundamental understanding of abstraction as a conscious articulation of unimagined alternatives and a mechanism of both resistance and active engagement.  Painting is a central focus of Pendleton’s work, and Isabelle Graw, in her interview with the artist, elucidates painting as a “primary form” for Pendleton, noting how the medium conceptually and theoretically informs how he moves through and operates in other forms as well as how his works address viewers as “cognizant participants.” Hal Foster takes up Pendleton’s engagement with bookmaking as another form of activation, arguing that the artist’s creative compilations of texts and images activate readers and viewers, existing as resources to help us not only survive but flourish. Joshua Chambers-Letson’s close reading of Pendleton’s experimental film What Is Your Name? Kyle Abraham, A Portrait stimulates consideration of how artistic practice can be a means to negotiate with, dance with, and live with grief at the intersection of Black and queer love and loss. Meredith Malone contextualizes Pendleton’s recent work, examining his multifaceted approach to abstraction as a “philosophical disposition” as well as a device to realize a more expansive, chaotic, and fluid space for both artist and viewer.  With more than 1,400 high-quality reproductions and full transcripts of two of the artist’s recent films juxtaposed with extensive stills from each, To Divide By is Adam Pendleton’s most ambitious publication to date. It is published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis in fall 2023.