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Pendleton's work is supposed to look like photocopied art history, a zine of bricolage referent, and in this repetition we are told is some new space that "renews the instability of discourse and identity" or "refashions history into something that opens out into the new." But this new space that art continuously opens always seem to be more trophy abstraction.
You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors.
see too: Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München
