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“Instead, he is expropriating [the machine’s] capacity to encapsulate the black subject’s position in the development of the nation, a process in which, he reminds us, we are all implicated.”








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And here is where I believe that the physical and digital realms of Who is Queen? meet - in the employment of digital or mechanistic strategies to construct a hypertextual, spatial, abstracted topography in an exercise in border crossing. When in the installation, Pendleton is essentially asking audiences to try and decipher a map, yet the map denies objectivity. There are physical borders in both the space and Pendleton’s practice - the physical borders of the MoMA atrium - the border between book, photocopy, and book once more - the border between explicit textual reference and abstraction. Yet the pluralism of the hypertextual core of Who is Queen? is the key to diffusing these binaries and boundaries. Pendleton is not the first to engage in this hypertextual mode of experimentation:


“Border subjects, thus, live in two or more cultures at the same time. This has given rise to the notion of subjectivity defined in terms of multiple subject positions, which is a direct challenge to the earlier formulation of subjectivity as unitary and singular. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua elaborates on this radically new form of subjectivity in terms of the new mestiza which has a "tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity" (70). ... Donna Haraway proposes a new term for hybridity -- "cyborg"--that recognizes the complexity of identity which is never this or that, but constituted of "partial identities" and "contradictory positions." The postcolonial critique of unitary models of subjectivity reveals that all such models are based on binary thinking that creates categories like self and other, male and female, first world and third world where the first term is always the privileged term. Rejecting binary models, postcolonial theorists describe both subjectivity as well as experience decentered and pluralistic. The electronic media can be used as metaphor for describing what is happening to the culture at large as the Culture (represented by the dominant group) is being displaced by minority cultures which demand recognition of their histories as well as cultural productions. Just as in networked computers diverse, sometimes contradictory information, can exist simultaneously in hypertext format, so it is in culturally diverse societies with different, sometime contradictory narratives.” Read full text here.

The machine - the projector, the computer, the speakers, the cellphones - becomes the means of boundary refusal. Pendleton’s topology is inherently and self-consciously prismatic, becoming. The installation leans into its status as a cyborg, the machine becoming an essential part of its genesis and evolutionary life. And evolving it is. The sound of the installation integrates “dialogues organized by Pendleton featuring pairs of artists, writers, and thinkers will be released online monthly, and incorporated into the sound installation, which shifts and changes over the course of the exhibition.” Yet it’s essential to acknowledge that Pendleton’s sound collage is not the only noise in the atrium. The video is a backdrop. I visited on a Saturday afternoon, the atrium was packed. This specific curation as a collection of sound is the actual, complete sound collage, never to be the same on any given day, minute, second. Indeed it would defeat the point if the soundscape of any given moment was precisely replicable.