Adam Pendleton was one of ten featured artists commissioned by PERFORMA to create a new work for PERFORMA 07. Taking the tradition and energy of the Southern-style religious revival and fusing it with experimental writing practices, Adam Pendleton's The Revival is a new form of community performance. The minimalist setting of a white floor scattered with black ceramic seating cubes creates a space for contemplation and reflection that builds via a live gospel, jazz, and pop score to a final crescendo. Pendleton's sermon, dream of an uncommon language, will invoke the power of experimental language to subvert the confines of everyday discourse. The sermon is constructed from text by the artist and a host of writers, including the playwright Larry Kramer and poets Paolo Javier and Leslie Scalapino.

Pendleton was joined by a community of singers, dancers, artists, and poets, including acclaimed jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran and vocalist and composer Alicia Hall Moran and including testimonials (confessions) by artist Liam Gillick and poet Jena Osman. Drawing inspiration from the Language Poets of the seventies, whose trajectory from Gertrude Stein leads through the Beat and New York Schools to Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews and others, as well as from a parallel school of conceptual artists who use language as image, from Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth to Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, Pendleton created an entirely new space for himself: pure language as visual theater.

Adam Pendleton is an artist, writer, and performer who approaches his projects as multi-disciplinary hybrids. Through extreme freedom of reference and quotation, as well as a rejection of conventional hierarchies between sources, Pendleton aims to create a perpetual de-historicized present tense, one that upsets and imbalances comfortably subjective interpretations of history and culture. He has exhibited extensively throughout the US, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2007), Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005), and The Studio Museum in Harlem(2005-6), and will also be performing at the tina b. Prague Contemporary Art Festival this fall.

PERFORMA's RoseLee Goldberg interviewed Adam Pendleton on November 7, 2007, in the AIR Clocktower studio.