look inside

paperback with 3 different dust jackets, 7.125 × 9.25 in.
144 pages, b/w illustrations throughout
978-1-938221-13-2
Copublished in 2016 with the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans
Out of print

Reframed, reconditioned, and perpetually reoccurring, found images have served as Adam Pendleton’s primary tools and source material throughout his practice. Becoming Imperceptible follows the logic of Pendleton’s museum installations, constructing social and aesthetic histories, comprised of images in process and inscribed in the structure of their container. Including Pendleton’s texts “Black Dada” and “Amiri Baraka, ” and drawing on a diverse archive that traverses European, African and American avant-gardes and civil rights movements of the last century—from Dada and Bauhaus to Black Lives Matter literature, from Language poetry to Black Power poetics, from Conceptual art to African Independence movements—Becoming Imperceptible frames a complex dialogue between culture and system. It also embodies Pendleton’s practice by inviting the reader in an unfolding conversation about race and history, art and form.

Becoming Imperceptible is the first in a collaborative series of artist’s books with the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans in which each year an artist is invited to intervene in the history and space of the book. All of the books in this collection will be different sizes, on different paper, with very different sensibilities and aesthetics, but each one will be a paperback with a reverse-fold dust jacket that features a poster-sized artwork by the artist as well as a booklet of critical essays about each artist’s work. The exhibition that this book accompanies took place in 2016.

“The Disobedient Copyist: Adam Pendleton’s Language of Resistance” by Andrea Andersson from the book

ADAM PENDLETON (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a conceptual artist known for his multi-disciplinary practice, which moves fluidly between painting, publishing, photographic collage, video and performance. His work has most recently been recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art with the installation Who Is Queen, among many other exhibitions. In 2016 Mousse released the first trade edition of Black Dada.