I am standing in front of contemporary artist Adam Pendleton’s installation at MoMA PS1’s Greater New York show, in the heart of cultural (if not actual) capital, as it were. The work before and around me, The Abolition of Alienated Labor, takes its title from a 1963 work by the French Situationist Guy Debord, in which Debord painted the words “The Abolition of Alienated Labor” over an industrial painting by fellow Situationist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio. Directly in front of me is a large (five- by seven-foot?), boxy, black-framed object in which I can see the image of a man. The man is black and wears a headdress of some sort, with a feather protruding from it sticking straight up.
The image has an archival quality, as many of the images Pendleton uses in his Systems of Display series do. Pendleton seems to be attempting to evoke a feeling for history in his viewer, without necessarily telling you what any particular image is, or where it originates. The image of the man with the headdress is actually a silkscreen that has been printed upon a mirror set inside the boxlike frame.