william pope.l - Catherine Bastide

Transcription

GALERIE CATHERINE BASTIDE
Rue Vandenbrandenstraat 1 - B-1000 Brussels – T. +32 2 646 29 71 - F. +32 2 538 61 67
[email protected] - www.catherinebastide.com
WILLIAM POPE.L
WILLIAM POPE. L
Born 1955, Newark, New Jersey.
EDUCATION
1983-1985
1979-1981
1977-1978
1975-1978
1973-1975
Mabou Mines Re. Cher.Chez. Theater Intensive, New York City
Mason Gross School, Rutgers University, M.F.A.
Whitney Museum Independent Studio Program, New York City
Montclair State College, New Jersey, B.A.
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York
SOLO SHOWS
2013
Forlesen, The Renaissance Society, Chicago
2012
Reenactor, Williams Center Gallery at Lafayette College, Easton, PA
Three Projects, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium
2010
William Pope.L (solo presentation) Mitchell-Innes & Nash, FIAC, Paris
landscape + object + animal, Mitchell-Innes & Nash
color isn't matter, Samson Projects, Boston, MA
2009
The Black Factory, Art Projects Art Basel Miami Beach,
Hauser & Wirth, NY
Corbu Pops, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Harvard University
2008
Animal Nationalism – Grand Arts - Kansas City, MO
October Projects – Mitchell-Innes & Nash - NY
Biting through innocence –Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium
2007
Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Snow, spraypaint, hair, sperm & baloney, Kennu Schachter rove , London,, UK
Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid..., Santa Monica Museum of Art Santa Monica, CA
The void show, MC, Los Angeles, CA
The Black Factory and Other Good Works, Yerba Buena, San Francisco, CA
2006
Trophy Room, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria
Under All, Above Most, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
2005
Some things you can do with blackness…. Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK
Props & Propositions. Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH
2004
Five Ways to Say the Same Sadness. University Art Museum, University at Albany, NY
eRacism:electronica, Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, St. Louis, MO
reFunct.The Project, New York, NY
eRacism, Part 1, Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, NJ
eRacism, Part 2, Artists Space, New York, NY
2003
Foddah. Drew University, Madison, NJ
Some: Of Place and Desire. ArtHouse, Austin, TX
eRacism. Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR
eRacism. DiverseWorks, Houston, TX
2002
Incontinent. Wood Street Gallery, Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburgh, PA
What’s Inside a Boy, The Project, Los Angeles, CA
eRacism, Maine College of Art – ICA, Portland, ME
2001
Hole Theory.The Project, New York, NY
2000
Eracism: White Room. ThreadWaxing Space, New York, NY
The Hole Inside The Space Inside Yves Klein’s Asshole. Concordia Univ, Montreal, Canada.
Eating The Wall Street Journal And Other Current Consumptions. Mobius, Boston, MA.
1999
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA
1998
Recent Work, The Project, New York, NY
1996
Fayerweather Hall, Amherst College, Amherst, MA
Touchstone Theater, Bethlehem, PA
1995
Franklin Furnace, New York City, NY
1994
Horodner Romely Gallery, New York , NY
1993
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York, NY
Drew University, Madison, NJ
1992
1991
Horodner-Romley Gallery, New York City, NY
Franklin Furnace Gallery, New York City, NY
GROUP SHOWS
2013
Against the Graine Wood in Contemporary Craft and Design, curated by Lowery
Stokes Sims, Museum of Art and Design, NY
2012
Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts
Museum Houston, Houston TX
superHUMAN, Central Utah Art Center, Ephraim, Utahe traveling to Aljira Center
for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ
2011
Prospect.2, New Orleans, LA
White Flag, St. Louis, MO
2010
The Last Newspaper, New Museum, New York, NY
2009
Allan Kaprow, Yard featuring reinventions by William Pope.L, Josiah McElheny and Sharon
Hayes, Hauser & Wirth New York. NY
Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, curated by Sima Familant, Sikkema Jenkins & co, New York, NY
Troubles aux frontières, in collaboration with Caroline Bourgeois, Galerie Mariann Goodman,
Paris, France
2008
30 Americans, The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL
Paul Thek: In the Contexts of Today's Contemporary Art (PART TWO). Sammlung Falkenburg,
Hamburg, Germany
Black Is, Black Ain't. The Renaissance Society at University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Criminal: Art and Criminal Justice in America. The International Center for the Arts at San
Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA
Informal Architectures (Pt.2). Winnepeg, CA
Retail Value, Dorsky Gallery, Long Island City, NY
2007
Holiday, Prague Quadrennial, Prague, Czech Republic
Informal Architectures, Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada
Conceptual Paper, Arndt & Partner Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
The San Francisco World’s Fair of 2007, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
Plug, Sister, Los Angeles, CA
2006
Civil Restitutions, curated by Jeffrey Uslip and Simon Preston, Thomas Dane Gallery
2005
Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970, Museum of Contemporary Arts Houston,
Houston, TX
2004
The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA
Watch What We Say, Schroeder Romero, Brooklyn, NY
The Big Nothing, ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 1954-2004, Gallery 138, New York, NY
2002
Video Jam, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Bach, FL and New York Center for
Media Arts, New York, NY
Art & Outrage, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
2000
Pix, Lance Fung Gallery, New York, NY
1998
warming, The Project, New York, NY
Out of Action, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Freedom, Liberation and Change, Bronx Council, New York, NY
1997
Habitat for Humanity: Birdhouses, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
Available Culture, Here Art Gallery, New York, NY
1995
Ed Art, Artist Space, New York, NY
1994
Outside The Frame, Cleveland Contemporary Art Museum, Cleveland, OH
1993
Exquisite Corpse, Drawing Center, New York , NY
Various Objects, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Transient Decor, Roger Smith Hotel, New York, NY
Horodner-Romley Gallery, New York, NY
1992
Art In General, New York, NY
1991
Artefacts, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC
PERFORMANCES
2013
Pull! 25th anniversary of the Cleveland Performance Art Festival. Spaces
Cleveland, Ohio
2011
Blink at Prospect.2, New Orleans, LA
Flux This! with Pope.L and Special Guests, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
2007
In the Cabin. House of World Cultures (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Berlin, Germany
Holiday / Dovolená. Prague Quadrennial, Prague, Czech Republic
2006
Condoleezza Rice Day. Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy
In the Cabin! Mobius at Midway Theater, Boston, MA
The Black Factory. various venues, USA
Poor Piece. Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM
Singing the House. MIT, Boston, MA
Santa Fe Crawl. Santa Fe, NM
2005
White Room #4: Wittgenstein and My Brother Frank. Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK
Bringing the Decarie to the Mountain. Montreal, Canada
The Yeti and the Case for Contemporary Photography. Cologne Art Fair, Cologne, Germany
Angel-Vision. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead Quays, UK
2004
White Room #2: Moby Dick. Roosevelt Island lighthouse, New York, NY
White Room #3: Music Appreciation. PS-1, Queens, NY
Negarkuisse Part 2. House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany
Negarkuisse Part 1. House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany
2003
Anglo-Vision. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Coon. Cinema Texas, University of Texas at Austin and Arthouse, Austin, TX
Candy Mountain. Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR
Freedmans Town Crawl. DiverseWorks, Houston, TX
2002
The Great White Way: 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street. New York, NY
Eracism, Portland Stage Company, Portland, ME
Portland, Maine Crawl. Portland, ME
2001
I Love Japan. Tokyo, Japan
Shopping Crawl. Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan
Bringing the Homeless Back to Shinjuku. Shinjuku Station, Tokyo, Japan
2000
Eracism (Version 3), Threadwaxing Space, New York, NY
Eating the Wall St. Journal, Sculpture Center, New York, NY
Eating the Wall St. Journal, Mobius, Boston, MA
The Hole Inside the Space Inside Yves Klein’s Asshole, VAV Gallery,
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Selling My Grandmother. Yard Sale, New York City Lab School, New York, NY
Boston Common Group Crawl, Boston School of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
1999
The Black Body and Sport, Berlin, Germany ; Prague, Czech Republic ; Budapest, Hungaria ;
Madrid, Spain
The White Mountain (Wonder Bread). Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY
Raymond (version 2). Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL
My Niagra #3 (Paint). Los Angeles, CA
The Buddy Performance, Here Performance Space, New York City
1998
My Niagra #2 (Bed), The Project, New York, NY
My Niagra #1 (Paint). Fells Point, Baltimore, MD
Thunderbird Immolation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Eracism (version7), 7alld Festival, Toronto, Canada
The Buddy Performance, College of the South, Sewanee, TN
1997
ATM piece, Chase Manhattan Bank at 42nd St., New York, NY
Sweet Desire, Maine Arts Festival, Brunswick, ME
Eracism, Mobius, Boston, MA
1996
The Buddy Performance, Touchstone Theater, Bethleham, PA
Sweet Desire. Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME
Member. Harlem, New York, NY
1995
The Buddy Performance, PS 122, New York, NY
The Buddy Performance, Ko Theater Festival, Amherst College, MA
1993
Levitating the Magnesia, Horodner Romely Gallery, New York, NY
1991
How Much Is That Nigger In The Window?, Franklin Furnace (30 solo performances), New York,
NY
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
2012
Diaz, Eva. Prospect.2 New Orleans, Artforum, February
2011
2009
Nathan, Emily. Prospect.2 New Orleans: Beating Heart Biennial, artnet.com
H.Merjian Ara, William Pope.L, Artforum / Critics picks, March 06
2008
Silke Tudor, Art and Criminal Justice in America, SF Weekly / Today’s calendar pick, Feb 16
Cotter Holland, The Topic Is Race : The Art Is Fearless, New York Times, March 30
Dubois Colette, William Pope.L, <H>ART / Galerie gerecenseerd, #36, p25
2007
Antebi Nicole et al, Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices, Los Angeles, CA, 60-61,
62-65, 144, 147-148, 176, 180-183, 216.
Chasin Noah, Robert Wilson”, Time Out New York, February 8-14, 2007, issue 593, p76.
William Pope.L. Trophy Room, Kunsthalle Wein. October
2006
Lepecki Andre, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. Routledge
Storey Natalie, On Your Knees! Sunday, The New Mexican Magazine, Santa Fe, NM
Van Cleve Emily, Performer Makes an Art of Humiliation The Journal Santa Fe
Sayer Laura, Undies to See the Light. The New Record, Cincinnati, OH, January 5-8
Chase Alisia, Learning to be Human, Afterimage, January-February
Agans Elizabeth, Think Again. Rutgers Magazine, Winter
Time Out New York / Listings, July 20-26, issue 564, p70
The New Yorker / On The Horizon, June 19, p26
2005
Firstenberg Lauri, Profile: Tapping the energy of Predicament, Contemporary Magazine, New York
McKanic Arlene, JCAL’s Relics and Remnants. The New York Amsterdam News. November 3-9
Pope.L William, Letter to a Young Artis,. Art on Paper, July/August
Dischinger Mark, The United Colors of America. RFT: Riverfront Times, St Louis, MO, June 15-21
Thorson Alice, Highlighting ‘Blackness, Kansas City Star, Kansas City, MO, June 12
Sedgewick Augustine, Perspective: William Pope.L, The Possibilities of Difference, Sun Journal,
June 12
Delgado Jerome, Amener l'Autoroute a la Montagne, La Presse. Montreal, Canada, June 2
Harthill Daniel. Shazam! Sun Journal, Lewiston, ME, May 30
Lamarche Bernard, Toucher Son But, Le Devoir, Montreal, Canada, May 15
Pope.L William, The “Looking for Miss Black Factory” Contest. Art Journal, Spring
2004
Kley Elisabeth, William Pope.L, ArtUS, June, p46-47
Stillman Nick, William Pope.L – eRacism, The Brooklyn Rail, February
Budick Ariella, Extra Sensory Conceptions, Newsday, Sunday, January 18
Village Voice / Voice Choices, January 14 – 20
Thompson Chris, Afterbirth of a Nation. Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory
Tousignant Isa. Crawl for Your Life, The Hour, Montreal, Canada, November 4
Cotter Holland, Hometown of Utopia and Dissent, The New York Times, New York, NY, July 23
Trainor James, Ain’t No Such Thing As Superman, Frieze, London, England, May
Daily Meghan. William Pope.L, ArtForum, April
Osei-Bonsu Aufa, The Art of Contraries: William Pope.L. Afrique, Chicago, IL, April
Smith Roberta, William Pope.L. The New York Times, January 30
Calo Carole, Gold. Public Art/Private / Art Review/ Crossroads, Fall-Winter
2003
Owens Clifford, Notes on Critical Black U.S. Performance Art. Fylkingen Net Journal, October 23
D.K. Row. Covered In Chocolate, An Artist Dances 'For Democracy', The Oregonian, June 12
Pope.L, William. Sandwich Lecture 8, LIVE Culture, Tate Gallery, London, UK, Spring
Stillman Nick, The Value of Not Knowing. New York Fine Arts Quarterly (NYFA), Vol 19,
n° 2, Spring
Pollack Barbara, The Art of Public Disturbance. Art in America, May
Trainor James, Walking the Walk: The Artist as Flâneur, Border Crossings, November
Mass Performance by William Pope.L in Portland, Artnet News, May 30
2002
2001
America's Friendliest Black Artist; William Pope.L, interviewed by Chris Thompson" PAJ, A Journal of
Performance and Art, September
African Art, Fall Winter
Artnet News, July 24
Bessire Mark H. C., William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America. MIT Press,
Pope.L William, Voices from the Field. The Visual Art Critic, Columbia University, New York, NY
Cohen Ted, Crawling to Learn. Maine Telegram Sunday, Portland, ME, October 6
Cotter Holland, Tombs, Pop Tarts, and Parties, The New York Times, August 23
Connors Philip, The Man Who Ate the Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal, April 9
Pollack Barbara. Superman Enters the Culture Wars, Village Voice, New York, NY, January 15
Cotter Holland, Noted Performance Artist’s Work Slows to a Crawl, International Herald Tribune,
January.
Pogrebin Robin, Warhol Foundation Finances Work Rebuffed by N.E.A, New York Times,
December 21
Associated Press. N.E.A, Grant is Denied for Noted Maine Artist. Boston Globe, Boston, MA,
December 20
2000
Carr, C, Generation Gap: Three Performers and a Waterbed. Village Voice, July 18
Rush Michael, Performance Hops Back Into the Scene. The New York Times, NY, July 2
Robinson Dash. Consumer Demand: William Pope.L, Cambridge Tab, Needham, MA, January 14, .
Hour, February 10-16
The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 11
The Boston Sunday Globe, January 30
Sun Journal, January 30
CNC, January 14
Boston Sunday Globe, January 9
Anatomie intime, Arts Visuels, 2000
1999
Crawford Cair, My Niagra #2 (Bed), Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, Issue 10, Summer
Volk Gregory, Rolo Castillo, William Pope.L, The Project, Flash Art, March-April,
1998
Lusitania Press , Food and Nostalgia issue
Eracism (script), P-Form Magazine, Chicago, IL
1997
Carr, C. Some Kind of Protest. Village Voice, New York, NY, March 4
Weiss Allen S., ed. Taste Nostalgia, Lusitania Press, New York, NY
Black Domestic, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, #21
Notes on Crawling Piece, Art Journal, Winter
1996
Wilson Martha, William Pope.L. Bomb Magazine, New York, NY, Spring
Anti-Autobiography (fiction), Global City Quarterly,
Notes on Community, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, #15
1995
Bill Cosby’s Head, New World Project, Exit Art Gallery, New York, NY
1994
Rap Street Performance Journal, Franklin Furnace
Anglo-Vision, New Works Project Journal, BACA Downtown
GRANTS
2007
Tiffany Foundation Award
Nancy Graves Foundation Award
2006
USA Rockefeller Fellowship
LEF Foundation Bellagio
2004
Guggenheim Fellowship
2003
Rockefeller Foundation
2002
Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art
2001
Japan – U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship
The Andy Warhol Foundation
Creative Capital Foundation
2000
Franklin Furnace/Jerome Foundation Fund for Art
Tanne Foundation Fellowship
1999
Maine Arts Commission Fellowship Grant
1995
NEA Visual Art Fellowship
1994
NEA Individual Collaborative
New
England Regional Initiative Project
Maine Arts Commission Fellowship Grant
1993
NEA Solo Performance Fellowship
Art Matters
1992
Franklin Furnace/Jerome Foundation Fund for Art
New England Regional Initiative Project
1991
Mid Atlantic Residency
1990
Art Matters
RESIDENCES
2000
Yaddo Artist Colony, New York, NY
1999
1997
Tennessee William Writer-In-Residence, College of the South, Sewanee, TN
Yaddo Artist Colony, New York ; NY
1996
Ko Performance Festival, Amherst College, Amherst, MA
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME
1995
Ko Performance Festival, Amherst College, Amherst, MA
Rue Vandenbrandenstraat 1 - 1000 Brussels - Belgium
www.catherinebastide.com - [email protected] - T+32 2 646 2971 - F. +32 538 6167
Forlesen Renaissance Society, 2013
The Renaissance Society presents Forlesen, an exhibition by William Pope.L, on view April 28 through
June 23, 2013. In his work, Pope.L investigates how difference is demarcated economically, socially, culturally
and politically, most prominently in the opposition between blackness and whiteness. With this project, the artist
furthers his exploration through multiple media, including drawings, sculpture and a video installation. Titled
after a short story by the celebrated science fiction writer Gene Wolfe, Forlesen features a ten-foot-high wooden
sculpture titled Du Bois Machine, roughly 50 new «skin set» drawings, and a video work of abstract imagery that
is derived from bargain-bin VHS tapes—set within an elaborate architectural configuration of the artist’s design.
Pope.L was intrigued by the structure of Wolfe’s story, which resembles a parable whose lesson is illustrated
symbolically and is wholly open to interpretation. Rather than plot-driven, the short story Forlesen is a string of
bizarre episodes that add up to a story only through the reader’s subjective decoding. Pope.L wanted to create
an installation with this same effect: the relationship of the artworks within the installation to one another, and
ultimately to the exhibition as a whole, is ambiguous and continually in question. skin set drawings: the space between the letters, 2013
ballpoint, correction fluid, marker and pencil on white art paper
9 x 11.5 inches
skin set drawings: the space between the letters, 2013
ballpoint, coffee, and correction fluid on white art paper
9 x 11.5 inches
Forlesen, Exhibition views, 2013
Du Bois Machine, 2013
Wood, bondo, amp, speaker, mp3 player, text spoken by Eden Strong
Rue Vandenbrandenstraat 1 - 1000 Brussels - Belgium
www.catherinebastide.com - [email protected] - T+32 2 646 2971 - F. +32 538 6167
William Pope.L, Frieze NY 2013
Together with the residues of a painter at work and the idea of what a painting can be White Pickle White Fuck takes the medium’s highly held status as both form and content. Model Painting: White People Wifi is a re-painted canvas which originally composed the centrepiece of Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning Pope.L’s solo exhibition at
the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007-2008. Elements are concealed and painted over though the intention is to draw
attention to hidden acts, for a realisation to occur.
Meanwhile, a residual critique of cultural identity, particularly in regards to the black body, is a throwback to Pope.l’s
former performance pieces where his own body becomes a tool. In turns visceral, stimulating, ironic, provocative,
deprecating and humourous. Pope.L brings to the foreground issues of categorisation (of which race is a subset),
power structures and the essential role of those ‘without power’ to confound their position in assertive transgressions
of readily accepted social and cultural norms. Most recently turning his hand, and that of many others, to notions
surrounding collective labour – Pull! encourages the citizens of Cleveland to manually pull an 8 ton truck through
the city; an empowering contravention of the city’s reputed lack of work.
Lack is a presiding principle in Pope.l’s practise. Addressed through a rhetoric of consumption, sometimes literal, the
differences defined by lack are unpicked; disempowerment in relation to Western aesthetic principles and its contradictions; the absurdity of social and race-related cultural models, reflections on the nature of beauty and notably
here, the tangible lack of the artist himself as he shifts from public guerrilla acts to a direct metaphor of insider surfeit
at the Art Fair.
William Pope.L - Installation view at Frieze NY 2013
White Pickle White Fuck, 2013
Mixed media on kraft paper, wood, neon light - 274,3 x 240 cm
White Pickle White Fuck, 2013 (details)
White People Wi-Fi, 2013
Mixed media on kraft paper - 120,7 x 120,7 (45,5 x 45,5 inches)
Pope.L's second exhibition at Catherine Bastide Gallery is entitled 'Three Projects' and is
comprised of actually four projects.
From the ceiling, the artist has hung a large fragmented figural work that drips chocolate and is
called 'A Vessel In A Vessel In A Vessel'. Two works ring the walls of the space: 21 drawings
from Pope.L's ongoing racialist drawing enterprise entitled 'Skin Set'. Interspersed between the
drawings at uneven intervals is Polis, a set of intimately scaled shelf pieces; each holds a single
painted onion.
On the floor is a tall glass of milk entitled WELL.
At the entrance and at the far end of the gallery two season drawings are hanging very low to
emphasize the contrasting ways children and adults perceive the world around them.
Pope.L continues his longtime interest in the use of organic materials, a playful dispersal of
media, format and language in order to create an exhibition that hovers between ideas,
sensibilities, artworks and projects without loyalty to any.
WELL, 2012
Glass of milk
"WELL is a few things: a stand-in for a performer; a place-holder for a sculpture; the
frame and the liquid for a painting; the image for a slideshow; a pillow for an
emperor, a pixel for a value system. The piece is a performance of ways of making.
In terms of time, it is a moment indexing many moments and each one is a
conflation of strategies, techniques, wishes and propositions evaporating into each
other."
A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On, 2007
Sculpture - Pirate lady statue, Martin Luther King Jr plaster bust, wood, pump, light, chocolate
304 x 91 x 91 cm
Ed. 1/3
Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action (Belgian version), 2012
Painted onions on wood shelves
Extract of The friendlist Black Artist In America by Mark H. C.Bessire
(MIT.press, 2002)
About :The Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action
The combination of simplicity and complexity in The Polis or the Garden or Human Nature
in Action(1998) exemplifies the many layers of meaning Pope.L constructs through
accessible and ephemeral materials. In this time-based, laboratory experiment-like
installation, onions are painted black on one side and white on the other. The onions
initially develop under a growth light and over time adjust themselves on a shelf or fall off as
they sprout and then decay. The experiment studies decay, the artist has suggested, as a
means to "obliterate the line between white and black:" "decay produces or flattens or
equalizes difference [and] at the same time it can emphasize it." The polis was the Greek
decision making body on which the u.s. government is modeled. This work investigating
and exposing difference reveals the laboratory science approach of the artist and his interest
in creating a dialogue between notions of whiteness and blackness and the absurdity of their
polarization in American culture.
Summer, 2008
Part of the set– Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
Photocopy drawing
Paint on photocopied drawings on wood planks
25 x 17 cm
Winter, 2008
Part of the set– Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter
Photocopy drawing
Paint on photocopied drawings on wood planks
25 x 17 cm (each)
Skin Set is a drawing project I began in 1997. The impetus for the project was curiosity, despair
and willfulness concerning how we understand racialized language and, ultimately, language
itself. People who use racialized language, like all languages of bigotry, are very comfortable in
the certainty that what is asserted about the world is unassailable because the truth claim is
brutally fundamental. Brutality is necessary because the truth claim is, at bottom, uncertain and
requires pain to shore it up. The language of bigotry is the language of lack. In the first blush of
the project, I estimated 3,500 drawings, and that each would be created on graph paper 8.5" by
11". Well, so much for promises; the honeymoon has been over for some time.
THE PROCESS SHOW
37-A Gallery
march 4 - 28 2010
Gallery 37-A is pleased to present WIlliam Pope.L "The Process Show"
A collection of new work and excerpts from the last twenty plus years of William Pope.L's
storied, challenged and championed art making practice.
"The Process Show" is open from March 1 – March 31, Opening Reception First Friday March
5th 6-10pm.
William Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist whose work has been widely exhibited
internationally and in 2002 was the subject of a nationally toured retrospective organized by the
Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. "The Process Show" at Gallery 37-A will
present a selection of Pope.L's sculpture, installation and drawings in an unusually intimate
environment on Wharf Street in Portland, Maine. As Pope.L describes, "The selection of work is
meant to be impressionistic, and playful not exhaustive; and demonstrates a continuing interest
in gravity, oxidation, and the body…." This show is a unique opportunity to experience the
internationally acclaimed work of William Pope.L at Gallery 37-A.
The Process Show
William Pope.L, Lewiston, Maine, 2010
When I think of process I think of change, interaction, time and material. A concept can also be
a material. The work in the show spans from the late 80’s to now in order to set out a very
limited case for where things were and where they are now. Included are excerpts from drawing
projects, sculptures made of painted vegetables, wall pieces composed of empty sardine cans
and boxes that cannot be opened during the exhibiton. The selection of work is meant to be
impressionistic, and playful not exhaustive; and demonstrates a continuing interest in gravity,
oxidation, and the body as representation and representation as embodied. In addition, all the
work poetically treats the representing of a thing as a force; as a circumstance that compels other
circumstances. For example, a penis is a tube of skin containing superstition and mythology. Or,
a grid organizes by subsuming, disappearing whatever it contains. Or, a potato painted black is
symbolic of a condition which inevitably shows itself in all of us but may not be apparent upon
first impression.
This exhibition is not an explanation or a retrospective though, to some extent, retrospection is
involved. I imagine it more as a head; the inside of a head, not necessarily mine but the space I
am making when I make anything. It always takes me a while, too long, and I end up tossing
and turning, returning and delaying and aborting and rescuing and regretting. So it is an
unkempt head no matter what it looks like on the outside. My mother used to yell at me for not
combing my hair. One day she asked me, why don’t you comb your hair? I told her; I comb it
with my claims.
Maybe, 2009-2010
Sardines cans, board, power cord, plastic bag, nails
243,8 x 243,8 x 45,7 cm
Again, 2010
Paint, potatoes, shelf
Varianle dimensions
Box To Not Be Opened During This Show, 2010
Wood, Cardboard
73,9 x 47,6 x 47,6 cm
LANDSCAPE + OBJECT + ANIMAL
Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery
May 8 –June 9, 2010
New York, April 16, 2010: Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to announce landscape + object +
animal, a solo exhibition of William Pope.L in the Chelsea gallery from May 8 through June 19. This will
be Pope.L’s second solo show with the gallery and his first in the Chelsea space. The works in the show,
dating from the 1990s to the present, range across media including video, sculpture, painting and
drawing.
The dynamic of any exhibition is the difference between a field of activity, a particular activity in the field
and any result
stemming from the activity per the animal working the scape, making plans, drawing castles with snout
flexed at the heretical, the political, the critical, the magical on the grease of breeze in the mourning air,
the tail of the creature coccyx-like almost not a tale at all except for the intention, the goal in every
swatted i—
Pieces were chosen to fit a rickety lattice spliced into a spiral set into a box of powder detergent.
'Snow Crawl' is a performance video viewed by looking down a mirrored chimney. 'Cusp' is a group
endurance performance in which a set of performers, one by one, hour by hour, don oversize pajamas,
an Obama mask and grip a cup brimming with green ink while standing on a dirt mound attempting to
remain perfectly still for 75 minutes. Wall works consist of paintings, several with negro ideas, on pvc
and vinyl, drawings on found and discarded paper or inscribed with mayonnaise, bas-reliefs of stuffed
animals slathered in peanut butter and hung on the wall or sliced open, filled with vegetable oil and set
on the floor.
No theme is paramount except via the hoodoo of time, material and staging. Tone: melancholic. Most
recent book read: Remarks on Color by Thomas Bernhard and Robert Farris Thompson. –
William Pope.L
COLOR ISN’T MATTER
Samsøn Project
February 5 – March 20, 2010
Samsøn is proud to present a solo exhibition by William Pope. L titled Color Isn’t Matter
opening February 5 until March 20, 2010. Performances of Cusp will happen during gallery
hours on February 5, 20, March 5 & 20. Performances of Cusp will also occur at Mobius (725
Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA) Feb. 13 from 12 to 6PM and March 5 from 5 to 9PM.
The only way to get at something is to circle it like an appointment on a calendar or an opponent
in a wrestling ring or a very small bird, above an endless ocean, ;searching for a place to light.
People say color is light. If so, then matter is an understudy. Our eyes, a fanclub. Our brain, our
brain, our brain —an IMAX where phenomena gets its script. People say: "Color doesn't matter."
as in "Color doesn't matter, I'm not a bigot." Is this idea cousin to the notion: "Color isn't matter"?
And if so, how so? Perhaps in terms of possible worlds: People who say color doesn't matter
have an implicit belief that color is in the theater of the beholder. Lift the curtain, sift the ocean,
what do you perceive? A plethora, a process that surrounds us, is inside us, behind, before and
beyond us. Color isn't matter, it's the transmission of bending, rending and longing; the prismatic
messiness of the original lens.The works in this show are located at various points on a wobbling
spiral and circumscribe my interest in how we use color concepts to create a sense of the world.
Aquarium is a fish tank filled with red water and inks. Plaster models of the renowned French
architect Le Corbusier's Carpenter building are dunked in the tank and 'marked' by the
experience to create a set of 'Monoprints'. Plant is a cactus coated with many, many layers of
different colored spray paint. Cusp is a group endurance performance in which a set of
performers, one by one, hour by hour, don oversize pajamas, an Obama mask and grip a cup
brimming with green ink while standing on a dirt mound while trying to remain as still as
possible for 60 minutes. The wall works range from the mid ‘90's to now. Like the 3D work,
there is no specific thematic connection between them except the gyre of desire. This is best
exemplified by the Failure Drawings made from maps and usually picturing birds eye or multiple
views in one work. The drawings are created on found surfaces discovered while traveling and,
and once the artist returns home, developed over many months sometimes years. Hojiki is a blue
plastic curtain, a sort of vertical ocean that can be performatized by the visitor like a theater set.
the negro in all of us... is an audio work influenced by the sound environment of supermarkets
and television commercials of pharmaceutical products. --- Pope.L
William Pope. L was born in a tiny log cabin on Broome St. in Newark, NJ between a bread
factory and a cleaners. His father operated the large pressing machine at the cleaners while his
mother worked at the factory twisting hunks of dough into crullers. Pope. L’s three uncles were
respectively: a murderer, a carpenter and a sailor.
Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of
contraries. He prefers the word ‘contraries’ rather than ‘contradictions’ because the former
suggests difference and fluidity whereas the latter suggests opposition and rigidity. He has
created multi-disciplinary work since the 1970’s, and exhibited internationally, including New
York, London, Los Angeles, Vienna, Brussels, Montreal, Berlin, Zurich & Tokyo. Select recent
projects have been sited at Art Institute of Chicago, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Galerie
Catherine Bastide, Sammlung Falckenberg, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, the Carpenter Center for
Visual Art at Harvard University and most recently at Hauser and Wirth, NYC where he staged a
reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s Yard. He is a featured artist in Intersections edited by Marci
Nelligan and Nicole Mauro and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness by Darby English.
An upcoming project involves time-lapse photography of butter sculptures of architectural
structures.
Aquarium , 2009-2010
fish tank, water, inks, plaster miniatures of Le Corbusier's Carpenter building, chain, pulley, florescent light
dimensions variable
ALLAN KAPROW – YARD
Hauser & Wirth New York
September 23 – October 24, 2009
Filling the entire first floor of the gallery, Pope.L’s
reinvention of Yard will comprise an enveloping
interactive landscape of more than 1,200 tires rising,
falling and rising again; gleaming, stacked body bags;
mirrors and continually shifting light effects; closed
circuit video and a soundscape composed of lapping
waves, distant train whistles, and a voice evoking the
cadences of Barack Obama, reading a poetic and
politically-inflected text that re-contextualizes
Kaprow’s own instructions to “rearrange the tires.”
Regarding his reinvention, Pope.L said: “For Kaprow,
with Yard in 1961 the notion of moving the tires was
the end in itself. Visitors moved the tires and didn’t ask
why. Today people will ask why and I’m interested in answering that question with my version. I’m
interested here in a sense of loss and art as a means of representing loss within the social fabric —
within the layers of our lived lives — and the loss that comes out of lack.”
William Pope.L went to Rutgers, where Allan Kaprow taught. He is an inheritor of the late artist’s
lineage, known for a highly original blend of installation, instigation and performance. He is
represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
Yard, 2009 – installation views
Yard, 2009 – installation view
OCTOBER PROJECTS
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
September 18 – October 24, 2008
May 29, 2008
New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash announces an exhibition of work by William Pope.L, on
view at 1018 Madison from September 18 – October 24. The exhibition will comprise a large
selection of Pope.L's Failure Drawings, an ongoing series he began in 2003. A solo show of
works from this series was recently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. This will be the
artist's first show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
The Failure Drawings number over 1100 works of varying size. Pope.L produces the drawings
while he is traveling, using the materials he has on hand at the time – from hotel stationery to
airline napkins or pages from a newspaper. Often including words and depicting landscapes,
they refer both to the everyday elements of travel, and highly personal and figurative journeys.
Pope.L is a multidisciplinary artist who creates visual art and performance pieces that confront
issues of race, sex, power, consumerism, and social class. Among his best-known works are the
"crawls," a series of performances staged since 1978 in which he crawls for long distances
through city streets. The crawls represent an attempt to bring awareness to the most
marginalized members of society.
William Pope.L was born in 1955 in New Jersey. He currently lives in Lewiston, Maine, where
he is a lecturer on theater and rhetoric at Bates College. He received his M.F.A. from Rutgers
University in New Jersey, and studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Pope.L has called himself
the "friendliest black artist in America," a designation that became the title of a 2002 book on
his works published by MIT press. His work has been exhibited and performed at venues
including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art
(Los Angeles), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and Artists Space, among others.
Installation views, 2008
BITING THROUGH INNOCENCE
Galerie Catherine Bastide
12 avril - 24 mai 2008
Cher visiteur,
Ceci est un communiqué de presse pour la première exposition du travail artistique de mon fils
William Pope.L à la galerie Catherine Bastide, à Bruxelles (Belgique).
Les œuvres présentées empruntent à divers médiums : pink liquid antacid1, espaces à langer et à
changer2, monuments miniatures à la gloire du futur, matelas, vêtements d’enfants, aquariums,
dessins et vidéo. La plupart ont été réalisées en 2008, bien que certains travaux particuliers datent
de 1998 et de 2002.
L’exposition a pour thème l’innocence. Cela renvoie au manque de confiance de mon fils. Il ne
pouvait en être autrement, puisque même lorsqu’il était enfant, mon fils mordait et grinçait des
dents. Il mordait et grinçait des dents à l’époque, comme il le fait aujourd’hui. Sa mère vous dirait
la même chose. Eh oui, les gens, tout comme mon fils, ont du mal avec la pureté.
Par exemple, mon fils croit qu’on fait du sentiment autour de notions telles que « l’enfance » et
« l’avenir ». Il pense qu’on valorise ces concepts en les évidant de toute incertitude. Selon lui, leur
véritable force tient à leur vacuité intrinsèque, plutôt qu’au vide qu’on leur inflige. Ce vide infligé
est facile, poli, et apolitique.
Je ne partage pas son opinion, mais il n’en reste pas moins mon fils ; c’est pourquoi je le
recommande sans arrière-pensée.
William Pope, père de l’artiste,
Le 21 janvier 2008 à Chicago, Illinois, USA.
William Pope.L à la galerie Catherine Bastide :
Au printemps 2008, l’artiste américain William Pope.L présente une exposition à la galerie
Catherine Bastide à Bruxelles, qui surprend d’entrée de jeu. Par son titre tout d’abord, Biting through innocence,
un titre induisant immédiatement un type particulier de rapport au visiteur. Par son « communiqué de presse »
ensuite : en l’occurrence ce texte que l’artiste donne à lire à tout un chacun sur le site Internet de la galerie, de
même qu’à l’entrée de l’exposition sur une feuille volante, telle celle dont le visiteur désireux d’en savoir plus
peut traditionnellement disposer dans la plupart des galeries ou musées.
1
NDT: le pink liquid antacid est une sorte de plâtre buvable de couleur rose, contre les brûlures d’estomac, dont
l’utilisation banalisée est presque un cliché outre-atlantique.
2
NDT: cette formulation n’est malheureusement qu’une adaptation approximative de l’expression changing stations
qui, dans la version originale en anglais, désigne les relais nurserie des gares et aéroports, mais recouvre également une
idée de transition chère à l’artiste. En outre, le terme “langer” accorde une trop grande importance au corps de l’enfant,
au détriment du corps humain.
Ce court texte en l’occurrence s’avère être une lettre apparemment rédigée par le père de l’artiste. Elle
est adressée au visiteur de l’exposition bruxelloise de son fils (ici, comme par l’intermédiaire du titre, on se
trouve curieusement sollicité). Et on y lit une sorte de présentation du thème de cette exposition, mais en
filigrane on y décèle surtout la nature des liens qui unissent ce père à ce fils, des liens semblant pour le moins
frappés de tensions, de contradictions. Et ainsi le projet est lancé, la compréhension des pièces s’en trouve
aussitôt influencée.
Dans l’espace principal de la galerie, on découvre des œuvres de diverses espèces. Il y a là trois sculptures,
faites de tables à langer murales : ces tables à langer dont les mères peuvent se servir dans certains lieux
publics, tels les aéroports, tout spécialement aux Etats-Unis. Le principe est qu’on peut les ouvrir pour s’en
servir ou au contraire les laisser fermer, afin qu’elles prennent moins de place. Ici, elles sont béantes et trois
coussins démesurés reposent sur leurs niveaux horizontaux respectifs. Apparaît de cette façon un problème
d’échelle, de dimension ; ces coussins sont de toute évidence bien trop grands. L’un d’entre eux, en outre, est
partiellement déchiré et de lui s’échappe une partie de son rembourrage…
Au centre de la salle se dresse également un aquarium posé sur un haut socle de bois, ensemble plutôt
inattendu. Au milieu de cet aquarium se distingue une sculpture blanchâtre, représentant une montagne que
couronne une ruine. Cette ruine, selon la volonté explicite de l’artiste, n’est ni plus ni moins que la ruine,
hypothétique, d’un bâtiment emblématique de Bruxelles, à savoir l’atomium, édifié en 1958 à l’occasion de
l’exposition universelle organisée à l’époque dans la capitale belge. Cette montagne, cette ruine, des poissons
noir et blanc la contemple. On peut suivre leurs incessants déplacements à travers l’épais verre de la cuve, dont
le fond est empli de sable.
Sur les murs, en sus des tables à langer, sont aussi accrochés deux séries de dessins. Des dessins confrontés les
uns aux autres, qui se trouvent accrochés à diverses hauteurs ; les uns très bas, les autres plus haut, comme il en
de l’appréhension du monde selon que l’on est enfant ou adulte. Ce sont des dessins à l’encre sur papier, d’une
part, et des dessins esquissés au moyen d’une peinture colorée d’autre part. Peinture pâteuse appliquée à même
des tissus, ou plus exactement sur des serviettes de toilette, paraissant anciennes, usagées. Autant de
témoignages, renvoyant à un passé familial, intime.
Par ailleurs, dans cette même salle, un autre détail retient particulièrement l’attention. L’une des parois de
l’espace se trouve dédoublée d’un faux mur, et de celui-ci s’écoule goutte à goutte un épais liquide rosâtre qui
descend le long de ce mur pour aboutir dans une cuvette en acier, fichée dans la masse de celui-ci à une
cinquantaine de centimètres de hauteur. Et d’apprendre qu’il s’agit en fait d’un produit pharmaceutique que
l’on administre notamment aux nourrissons pour traiter régurgitations et vomissements…
Une seconde version de cette œuvre, également installée dans le corps d’un mur, se trouve dans la deuxième
salle de l’exposition. Cette salle plongée dans l’obscurité est toute peinte de noir et on y projete un film.
A l’image de l’ensemble de l’exposition, il y est aussi question de la famille, de sa hiérarchie, des relations qui
lient ceux qui la composent. Des relations toujours complexes, toujours changeantes. Et, certes, des relations
inévitablement émaillées de conflits, tant est conflictuel le seul fait de notre venue au monde, puis de notre
existence à celui-c
Little Flood, 2008
(Aquarium, poissons exotiques, icône de l’atomium, sable)
Changing station ( Form ) 2008
(Plastique, aluminium, matelas en coton fait main)
Changing station ( shape ) 2008
Plastique, aluminium, matelas (carte des état unis) en coton fait main
Changing station ( Depth ) 2008
Plastique, aluminium, matelas en coton fait main
Vues d’installation
Pierce 2004/2008
(Vidéo – 20 mn)
Saliva ( gastronomic version ) 2008
Gaviscon, moteur et appareil, bol
Saliva (gastronomic version) - Détail
Saliva ( Anxious version ) 2008
Gaviscon, moteur et appareil, bol
Vue de l’installation
William Pope.L
Animal Nationalism
Grand Arts
September 5 October 18, 2008
Topsy Turvical: William Pope.L in Kansas City In a culture that has produced P.T. Barnum, 19th century
road shows and freak shows, George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. (who invented a famous wheel), Coney
Island, Wild West City in New Jersey, Holy Land Experience in Florida, Disney extravaganzas, Las Vegas
at night rising out of the desert, and Kansas City’s own Worlds of Fun, it may also be possible to speak of
an advanced carnival art, which accesses, but also seriously transforms, carnivalesque showmanship,
excess, and spectacle. Bruce Nauman springs to mind, with his famous video installation Clown Torture
(1987), in which four videos show the performers in various (and excruciating) conditions of frustration,
abasement, and punishment, and with his harrowing Carousel (1988), in which steel and aluminum
sculptures, cast from taxidermy molds of five wild animals, rotate on a circular steel contraption and
sometimes drag across the floor. Vito Acconci has a streak of the coercive, seedy barker, notably in
Seedbed (1972), when he repeatedly masturbated under a raised floor while intoning fantasies of the
unseen audience above him, while his more recent outlandish architectural projects include Park Up a
Building (1996), a public park that isn’t outside a building, but that instead precariously clings to the side
of the building, like some death-defying attraction at the amusement park.In his own eccentric,
trailblazing work, William Pope.L has also consistently used and transformed willful buffoonery and
carnivalesque spectacle, including sideshows, freak shows, enticing signage, costumes, masks, and
marvelous feats of derring-do. When Pope.L’s Black Factory rolls into town (an in flux product design
studio/exhibition/think tank/meeting ground in a specially designed truck) it’s his own weird version of a
corporate marketing campaign, but you’re also reminded of the small traveling circuses and rattling
shows that once crisscrossed America as a matter of course. Instead of offering escapism and
entertainment, Pope.L’s homemade road show (and he’s the CEO of this intrepid enterprise) inspires
viewers to act as participants and cohorts, donating items which he then fashions into new objects and
products, questioning and investigating what blackness is and means, what their own biases and
opinions are, who defines the connotations and for what reason. When Pope.L, wearing a business suit,
crawled across Tompkins Square Park in New York while pushing a potted flower, and crawled up
Broadway wearing a Superman suit with a skateboard strapped to his back, he was a wacky, antic figure,
but one evincing real suffering, endurance and resistance. He also confronted and upended a great host
of assumptions and power relations predicated on race: a black man inching his way by choice across
the dirty ground in a Wall Street costume (typically worn by powerful white men) and in superhero garb
(worn by a fantasy figure who’s the most powerful white man of all). These street performances, which
despite their seeming nuttiness are carefully constructed and formally precise, are wonderfully multilayered, and this includes Pope.L’s own position; he’s energetic and courageous undertaking his oddball
private voyage through a public sphere, but also exposed, vulnerable isolated, and subject to ridicule
and danger. The remarkable thing is how Pope.L’s unflinching works are also gleefully absurdist and
richly human, evoking aspirations and frailties, connection to and alienation from others, how difficult
and necessary it is to continue with dreams intact as one is inevitably walloped by what the poet
Theodore Roethke once memorably called “this kingdom of bang and blab.”No matter how eccentric,
these works start from something so familiar and mundane that under normal conditions we’d hardly
give it a second thought: companies go on the road to promote their products all the time, guys in
business suits cross urban parks all the time, and people from all over the world constantly stroll up
Broadway (also called The Great White Way, which is the title of Pope.L’s work). In fact, Pope.L’s
maverick art (which does not square neatly with an art world and raging art market that celebrates
commodifiable art objects) depends on a constant exchange between what is routine and what is
startling and transformative, and here it is worth considering the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin—
whom Pope.L has cited as an influence—and specifically Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival, which he
applied to literature (especially to Dostoevsky’s novels) but which can also be fruitfully applied to certain
kinds of visual art. In Bakhtin’s terms, the “carnivalized moment” or the “carnivalized situation” are those
moments when the normal rules, values, hierarchies, and modes of apprehension are temporarily
suspended or subverted in favor of a brand new freedom, which can be simultaneously ungainly and
exhilarating, bewildering and liberating. Excess, exaggeration, hyperbole, exuberance and parody are
intrinsic to these carnival situations, which also scramble distinctions between high and low, sacred and
profane, human and animal. Importantly, carnival life does not seek to transcend normal life. Instead,
both exist together, and one moves between the two, entering a “topsy turvical” (to borrow a term from
Vladimir Nabokov) carnivalized situation in order to experience rampant eccentricity and radical
freedom and then returning to one’s normal life—perhaps shaken, perhaps deepened—with some of the
wisdom that one gained.It is, of course, entirely normal to encounter an American flag on a pole outside
a municipal building, perhaps on a windy day. It is, however, not normal at all to encounter an extra
large flag, buffeted by winds from an elaborate wind-producing apparatus, on a pole and illuminated
inside a municipal building, where it becomes a mesmerizing focal point. This work, interestingly called
Trinket, is one of Pope.L’s two projects for Grand Arts, and it is, quite simply, wonderful; it is especially
apt right now, in this convulsive, anxious, much-questioning era, and it is also a work for the ages. A
great deal of research and effort went into this project. Engineers were consulted, prototypes were
constructed, and the finished work is also linked to all sorts of other blatant simulacra and attractions in
this entertainment-addled culture: Disneyland’s ersatz Matterhorn, museum dioramas, electrical
waterfalls at the upscale mall, ingenious props invented for the movies, Quicktime movies on websites.
Pope.L’s big flag gusting in fabricated winds is hilarious; it’s a hyperbole, an exaggeration of a
conventional object that becomes a disruptive, wild card force. It is also searing. Illuminated in the
darkened hall, this flag is in constant, agitated flux and is eventually ripped to shreds. You also begin to
wonder exactly what these blowing winds connote. A controversial war, perhaps, along with grim stories
of scandal and wartime torture, which have so shaken the nation. A restless sense of impending threat.
Ecological upheaval and economic fear. Enduring racial conflict, and hesitant tries to address conflict
and misunderstanding, brought to the forefront by Barack Obama’s unprecedented campaign for the
presidency (on January 29, 2008, Obama spoke in the same building where Pope.L’s flag is installed).
Stark poverty contrasted with massive wealth, religious strife, the way that ringing endorsements of
democracy sometimes conceal much more selfish, and much less noble, motives. An avidity for the
future undercut by trepidation about what that future really holds, and an abiding faith in basic
democratic values undercut by an awareness that the cards are seriously stacked against very many
people in this country. Personally, it is tough for me to imagine a work more apt and welcome in terms
of what life feels like right now, in this complicated country. Pope.L’s flag flaps violently, incessantly,
unnervingly, and gorgeously, and as it does it channels our raw anxiety and stubborn hope, our intensity
and confusion, our adoration for and alienation from what Walt Whitman termed these “democratic
vistas.”Pope.L and the Grand Arts team chose the site well for his flag. The Municipal Auditorium is a
landmark in the heart of Kansas City. Kansas City is in the heart of the country, and like so much else in
America it is a city divided, between black and white, immigrants and native-born, poor and wealthy. It
is likely that Pope.L’s agitated flag will invite a frankdiscussion of civic issues, and of what democracy
really means to us, and it is very likely that this flag will signify very different things to different people,
for instance to school groups from the Westside or from Blue Valley. This sculpture doubles as a cathartic
force, asking difficult and necessary questions of who we are, what our democracy is, what rives our
communities and what we share.Pope.L’s Trinket, in which a famous symbol discloses all sorts of
complex possibilities, is linked to his video and performance Small Cup, shown at Grand Arts. The video
was shot on two days, a sunny summer day and an overcast and snowy winter day, in and around an
empty factory in Lewiston, Maine, and this site perfectly suggests a national sense of loss and worry, in a
time when many factories have closed, jobs have been outsourced, and the promise of a better future
seems not all that promising. The title refers to architectural cupolas invented in Italy, which have long
since been adopted in America as symbols and projections of durable power and pride: the U.S. Capitol
sports a famous one, and cupolas adorn many other government buildings across the land. Using a
variety of stationary and tracking shots, which result in drastic and disruptive shifts between images,
along with audio, Pope.L’s video masterfully voyages through the empty factory, which seems at once
bereft and suffused with palpable memory and history. You see a painted theater backdrop, and hear
banging, footsteps, and spoken words from behind it, but you can’t really discern what’s going on. There
are mysteries here that elude one’s comprehension.Slowly, incrementally, the camera ventures behind
the backdrop to disclose an architectural structure, which is a goofy, homemade version of the U.S.
Capitol’s cupola dome. Disrupted from its familiar position on high, this lumpy cupola now rests on the
floor. Atop it are a column and a Barbie doll, instead of the statue in Washington sometimes called the
“pregnant squaw.” Pope.L has cut a famous architectural structure down to size; he’s miniaturized it,
made it fragile and preposterous. Ritual (and humorous) acts of debasing what is powerful are crucial for
the carnival and have been so for centuries; they feed into its spirit of radical freedom and equality.
Hilariously, animals appear, in the form of several chickens and goats, and while there is something dear
about these creatures, there is also something eerie, as if they’ve inherited a place that we once owned
and thought would last forever. They peck at the structure, lick it, butt against it, wriggle inside, following
their appetites and instincts. As they do, they slowly undo it, topple it, lay it low, accompanied by
metallic screeching sounds. At Grand Arts, a trumpeter plays a variation on Taps at the end of each day’s
screenings: a military song typically played at sunset, but also at the funerals of fallen soldiers. Pope.L’s
video becomes a powerful meditation on pride and privilege, how both are soluble in time, how
cherished symbols of our mastery are themselves fragile and ephemeral, and how nature will trump us
and our accomplishments in due time. It is also functions as a ritual act fusing destruction and creation.
As with so many of Pope.L’s works, this video is comical and ridiculous—the high and mighty
undermined by cute goats and nervous chickens—and also extraordinarily large-minded, dealing with
both personal and civilization-wide cycles of hubris and comeuppance, achievement and
eclipse.Gregory VolkAugust 2008
G
rand Arts would like to thank the following for their generous support of this project: L. Scott Miller, Vista
Productions, Giuliano Fiumani and Full Scale Effects, Richard S. Robinson, Stanton Kessler and Al Pearson.
William Pope.L, The Great White Way, 22 miles,
nine years, 1 street, New York, NY, 2001– ongoing.
Photo Credit: Pruznick/Grey
William Pope.L, preliminary sketches for Trinket, 2007-2008.
William Pope.L, preliminary sketches for Trinket, 2007-2008.
William Pope.L, Trinket production test,
Los Angeles, CA, June 2008. Photo: Lacey Wozny
William Pope.L, Small Cup, video still, 2007-2008.
William Pope.L, Small Cup, video still, 2007-2008
WILLIAM POPE.L : AFTER WHITE PEOPLE : TIME, TREES & CELLULOID …
Santa Monica Museum of Art
September 8 - December 23, 2007
From September 8 through December 23, 2007, the Santa Monica Museum of Art will present William
Pope.L: Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid..., the first major West-Coast museum
exhibition by the artist. Pope.L will alter the museum space with works created especially for
SMMoA—a large-scale installation—The Grove —an interior garden of thirteen to fifteen feet high
potted palm trees, hand-painted and power sprayed white; a set design and video, APHOV (A
Personal History of Videography); as well as The Semen Pictures, a set of digital scans of magazine
collages made with human hair and semen placed within light boxes. All three of these interventions
investigate themes of time, theater, masking, and transformation. Ironically self-dubbed the “friendliest
black artist in America,” Pope.L has consistently worked on the edge of the art world, often literally
integrating his vision into the physical fabric of the social landscape. His twenty-five year practice has
continually challenged and confronted social inequity and the bogus construction of difference with
dark humor and biting critique. Art After White People will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog
published by SMMoA, that will feature the most in-depth interview to date with the artist by exhibition
curator Lisa Melandri, and essays by LAXART director Lauri Firstenberg and environmental historian
Wade Graham. Pope.L teaches Theatre and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston,Maine.
SNOW, SPRAYPAINT, HAIR, SPERM & BALONEY
Kenny Schachter Rove
June 11 - August 17, 2007
At some point while moving through William Pope.L's second solo exhibition at Kenny Schachter
ROVE entitled snow, spraypaint, hair, sperm & baloney, you will encounter the artwork Stuff Animal
Training. Like many works in this exhibition Stuff operates between representations and occupies a
space which is a network of attitudes, practices and materials.
The conglomeration that is Stuff seems to return all stares. Whilst its single eye gives it a sense of life,
its trash and junk hindquarters suggest it is closer to detritus. Its center is occupied by a wistful,
truncated and barely recognisable hippopotamus resplendent in an ill-fitting toupee torn from a glossy
magazine.
Stuff is a member of a family of artworks Pope.L calls Semen Pictures. These works are stacks, spills
and piles of flotsam and jetsam culled, assembled, photographed, scanned, enlarged and now hover
between sentience and objecthood. Stuff suffers and sings, floating amidst coffee grounds, hair,
medium, bits of wire, torn photos, cum, burnt matches and nail clippings - some of the artist's
favourite materials and easily found around his home where most of the “Pictures” were incubated.
For this exhibition, Pope.L stages the tension between the brute fact of things and our insistence to
reconcile a state of “between” into a common sense.
In Documentary, he layers processed sandwich meat and photocopies of ubiquitous foreign food
businesses. The juxtaposition is very direct. Each slice of meat displays a photo of a different
establishment, and is arranged, one after the other, like the frames of a film. Oxidation and gravity
cause the slices to weep, the photocopies to yellow and blur, uniting the image which is surface (flesh)
and the surface which is image (photo).
William Pope.L's 30 year multi-disciplinary art practice adapts unconventional materials and
approaches to render explorations whose pleasures are philosophical, emotive and the everyday, for
example: change, dissolution, melancholy - and the quiet, fierce human will to play in the space
between the death in what we know and the life in what we cannot imagine.
THE VOID SHOW
MC- Los Angeles
March 3 – May 12, 2007
"The Void Show," is a combustible mixture of irreverence, desperation and wit
that captures the tenor of our times. You don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Suspended upside-down from the ceiling is a larger-than-life hollow plastic
statue of a saucy pirate babe, her stance and dishabille suggesting eternal
Mardi Gras. Her head has been lopped off and replaced by a plaster bust of the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., slightly smaller than life-size and coated with gold.
Incandescent light glows from the interior of Pope.L's recycled pirate, and thick
chocolate syrup drips from the top of the civil rights leader's head, pooling on
the floor in an ever-expanding puddle that resembles spilled blood. On the
serving tray in the pirate's hand, Pope.L has affixed a mirror, allowing viewers
to catch their reflections against the backdrop of dark, glistening syrup. Strictly
speaking, "A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On" is a clunky chandelier.
Or a supersize, nonstop syrup dispenser for some misbegotten ice cream stand.
Or a ceiling-mounted vanity for someone who has everything. And that's the
tip of the iceberg. Things get complicated when the metaphors loaded into
Pope.L's piece spill out and draw in viewers. To my eye, the sculpture does not
mock King. But it does raise profound questions about his legacy, his place in
history and, most important, in public consciousness. Sexuality — and what
people make of it — also enters the picture, with the endless supply of sugary
sweetness oozing from the upended bust like an overflow of libido. And humor
plays an essential role. The piece is both utterly ridiculous and right at home in
our topsy-turvy world. It also raises questions about art's place in life, and
where politics and entertainment fit in. Pope.L's sculpture takes its place
alongside Jonathan Borofsky's "Ballerina Clown," affixed to a Venice building
facade, another piece of wicked genius that combines comic authority and
tragic pathos. A second installation fills the rear of the gallery, turning what first
appears to be a small monochrome painting into a hole in the wall and then
into utter nothingness: pitch-black emptiness into which viewers pour their
fears and fantasies. Two small drawings round out the show, their wiry
scribbles recalling the acerbic absurdity of H.C. Westermann. Pope.L's four
pieces are certainly ridiculous. And they might be sublime. But that's for each
viewer to decide.
A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On, 2007
pirate lady statue, Martin Luther King Jr plaster bust, wood, pump, light, chocolate
304 x 91 x 91 cm 3 x 3 x 10 feet
The Void Piece, 2007
room, wall, black hole
dimensions variable - Edition of 3
DRAWING, DREAMING, DROWNING
The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007
Relational Painting aka If Black Is Beautiful …, Instatlltion view
details of installation Relational Painting aka If Black Is Beautiful...
THE BLACK FACTORY
2002-2009
At once a mobile marketplace that trades in provocation and a nomadic laboratory for crafting
consciousness, the Black Factory gathers, shapes, and repackages materials and experiences
that challenge us to see the creative potential nested within the polarized politics of race in
America. Whenever the Black Factory appears and sets up operations, it catalyzes a
participatory process of public engagement with issues of cultural difference. It combines
sculpture, installation and performance to pose questions about identity, community, and
consumption that get under our skin and stay there where they belong.
By collecting, recycling and peddling the ingredients for re-thinking blackness, the Black
Factory transforms the tensions and contradictions of race into a dynamic field of possibility.
The Factory performs an inward-reaching outreach effort. It encourages us to take hold of the
stereotypes of race and class which bind us to our indecision and apathy and to turn them
inside out. It challenges us to grapple with the habitual ways in which we consume products,
identities and ideologies. It extends open arms to those who feel certain that they have already
settled all of these difficult questions, as well as to those who are still actively struggling with
them. It asks us to rise to the task of collaborating in the creation of a community built not upon
erasing but rather embracing our own differences and contradictions.
The Black Factory previewed at the Bates College Museum of Art last May before leaving for its
first official stop at MassMoCA, where it was part of the exhibition Interventionists: Art and
Social Change. It will be parked at Bates through the end of May, when it embarks on the 2005
nationwide tour.
The Black Factory does not make blackness, it performs blackness. Sometimes the performance is a
conversation, sometimes a provocation, sometimes its a commodity, sometimes its losing your
commodities and sleeping at the shelter, sometimes its working in the soup kitchen of that shelter,
sometimes the performance of blackness is simply an idea bearing on some distant resemblance
from which I will always say: From here I dare to begin.
The most recent version of the Black Factory was an appearance at Miami Basel 2010 in which the
physical truck itself was buried in and sinking into several tons of gleaming black glass beads of that
blasting compound. From within the body of the truck emanated the sounds of scratching and the
plaintive cry of a woman's voice. At other times, the truck would fall dead silent, then suddenly
erupt into a thunderous noise which would almost shake it apart and lift it seemingly up into the air.
The buried vehicle, with its trapped voices, and metalic thunder evoked both bodily threat and a
sense of loss simultaneously.
Pope.L
The Black Factory, Installtion view at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2010
GMC 'step van' truck, mixed media and audio
Truck: 2.74 x 6.71 x 2.59 m. (9 x 24 x 8 1/2 ft.
The Black Factory, Installtion view at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2010
The Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action 1998/2012
Painted onions (aged 10 weeks), on metal shelves, with mirrors on wall behind shelves.
Onions each painted half black and half white. Or Half Red, half White
The Polis or the garden – Human nature in action- 1998
Civil Restitutions
08 Sep - 03 Oct 2006
Curated by Jeff Uslip and Simon Patt
A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when
the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance...
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Thomas Dane is pleased to present Civil Restitutions, a group exhibition of 11 inter-generational American artists
positing a reclaimation of civil liberties and socio-political mores within the lattice of US history. These works
challenge contemporary notions of otherness through painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media
installation. Civil Restitutions, through its conceptual and existential matrix, proposes a renewed compensation
and indemnification in the body, landscape and in urban conditions. Here, the diverse practices spanning four
decades, aim to unmute the oppressed voice through a complex historiographic analysis.
Civil Restitutions presents emancipated forms, through their inherent deviance and intuitive approach to
artmaking, evade limitations and stealthily avoid objectification. Through their radical hybridity, embody
revolution, challenge hierarchy, reverse a cultural amnesia and denature authority. The artworks elaborate on
materiality's mercurial, perishable, shape-shifting characteristics by investigating the entropic quality of
materiality; the sculpture's materials are transformed in the process of making.
Civil Restitutions tackles the integration of fact and fiction as a tool for revisiting, remembering and recovering
from trauma. Complicating the legibility of race, class and gender in America, the artworks supersede category
and each become indefinable, non-locatable free agents. Through the lens of "abject formalism", these works
challenge America's position in the world, constructed and mediated identity, and notions of lack. Civil
Restitutions does not manage history, instead it applies a visceral approach to incite self awareness; as Rushdie
states "we simply could not think our way out of our pasts…" Artists include: Ken Gonzales-Day, Jimmie Durham, David Hammons, Leslie Hewitt, Mary Kelly, Ana Mendieta,
Maria Nazor, William Pope.L, Michael Queenland, Kelley Walker, David Wojnarowicz
The Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action (UK version)
Installation at Tomas Dane Gallery, 2006
The Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action (UK version)
Installation at Tomas Dane Gallery, 2006
The Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action
Installation at Galerie Catherine Bastide, /Frieze Art Fair, 2007
Installation at Galerie Catherine Bastide, /Frieze Art Fair, 2007
Le Printemps de Septembre de Toulouse - Musée les Abattoirs 2011
« Comme un shaman africain qui mâche des grains de poivre et crache sept fois en l’air, je crois que
l’art re-ritualise le quotidien et nous révèle quelque chose de neuf à propos de nos vies. Cette révélation
est vitale et nous confère le pouvoir de changer le monde. »William Pope.LArtiste pluridisciplinaire
connu pour son art conceptuel, très souvent adossé à la performance, William Pope.L se confronte dans
ses travaux à des questions de race, de sexe, de pouvoir, de consumérisme et de classes sociales. Se
proclamant lui-même « le plus amical des artistes noirs en Amérique », Pope.L invite au dialogue par le
prisme de ses performances, installations et objets d’art provocants.L’une des séries de performances
qui l’a fait le mieux connaître, Crawls, initiée en 1978, est l’un des éléments constitutifs de son plus
large projet « Racism Projects »: il investit l’espace de la rue en s’y frayant un lent chemin éprouvant,
rampant sur le ventre, les genoux, le dos, les mains, tentant d’attirer sur sa détresse l’attention de ceux
qui détiennent le pouvoir sur les plus faibles.À la demande d’Anne Pontégnie, il réactive et revisite The
polis or the garden or human nature in action (1998). Dans le hall des Abattoirs, des centaines
d’oignons germés, chacun soigneusement peint en noir et blanc, reposent sur des étagères dont les
fonds sont faits de miroirs – un détournement organique du vocabulaire de l’art minimal.
Installation at ‘Le Printemps de Septembre’, Toulouse, 2011
PERFORMANCES
Blink
2011
Performance at Prospect 2, New Orleans
Cusp (Kafka Version)
2010
Performance at FIAC, Paris
Cusp
2010
Performance at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Performance, lumber, soil, sanbags, pijamas, mask, coat rack
CORBU POPS
February 19–April 5, 2009
Carpenter Center for Visual Arts
Performance by the Corbu Pop Singers and reception Thursday, February 19
following the 6 pm Carpenter Center Lecture by William Pope.L
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts has commissioned an installation by artist William
Pope.L that will engage its uniquely modernist structure—famed architect Le Corbusier’s only
North American building.
William Pope.L, Corbu Pops, 2009. Image courtesy of the Carpenter Center for the
Visual Arts and William Pope.L. Photo by Shiloh Cinquemani.
Pope.L’s installation, Corbu Pops, will open on February 19 at 6:00 p.m. with a lecture by
Pope.L, followed by a performance piece by the artist and Harvard students. The work takes the
Carpenter Center itself as its starting point in an erstwhile investigation of modernism, utopia,
nonsense, blackness, purity, and factory production. Such a laundry list of ideas, culled as it is
from the bowels of Western civilization, is typical of Pope.L's working method. Paying close
attention to the structures and systems that create our built and lived environment, Pope.L's
work uses avant-garde strategies such as the readymade, performance, and collage to question
the institutionalization of philosophical ideas such as art and the psychic disturbances
provoked by industrialization and modernity. In both the performance piece and the installed
work, Pope.L will attempt to recast the building (both literally and metaphorically). As Pope.L
has said of the Carpenter Center, “As a felt environment, as I moved through the building,
around it, and it moved through me, the building ‘textures up’ like a ‘confusing machine,’ a
machine that manufactures disorientation in the form of a dark viscous liquid. Unlike a washing
machine, this machine creates opacities.”
William Pope.L, artist at work on Corbu Pops, 2009. Image courtesy of the Carpenter Center for the
Visual Arts and William Pope.L. Photo by Shiloh Cinquemani.
Further debunking vestigial notions of genius and mastery, the “Corbu Pops” will be not only
the pieces Pope.L makes but will also be a set of entertainers, dressed up in “Le Corbusier”
outfits, who will perform after the opening night lecture, flirting with the animation of the
inanimate (a cross between puppetry and commodity fetishism). These bespectacled
entertainers will be a group of Harvard undergraduates chosen to sing and compose, under the
tutelage of Pope.L, a dada-esque score of musical “nonsense.” The score will be created in part
with the kinds of information gathered by the Image of the Black in Western Art Research
Project and Photo Archive housed at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African
American Research at Harvard University
William Pope.L, performance of the "Corbu Pops", 2009. Image courtesy of the Carpenter Center for
the Visual Arts and William Pope.L. Photo by Shiloh Cinquemani.
William Pope.L, performance of the "Corbu Pops", 2009. Image courtesy of the Carpenter Center for
the Visual Arts and William Pope.L. Photo by Shiloh Cinquemani.
William Pope.L studied at the Pratt Institute before receiving his BA at Montclair State College
and an MFA at Rutgers University. He participated in an independent study program at the
Whitney Museum of American Art and in the Mabou Mines Re.Cher.Chez Theater Intensive in
New York. His solo exhibitions include Awesome things you can do with blackness at Kenny
Schachter Rove in London, Five Ways to Say the Same Sadness at the University Art Museum at
the University of Albany, and the eRacism touring retrospective. He has also participated in
group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and has presented performances
and “crawls” across the United States, at the Whitney Biennale, and in Tokyo, Madrid,
Montreal, and Budapest. Pope.L was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller MultiArts Performance Grant, a Japan Artist Residency Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship in Visual Arts,
and has been an artist-in-residence on four separate occasions at Yaddo.This show is organized
by Helen Molesworth, the Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at
the Harvard Art Museums. Molesworth has previously organized three shows for the Carpenter
Center: in November, 2007 the Felix Gonzalez-Torres candy pour "Untitled" (Placebo –
Landscape – for Roni), 1993; in February of 2008 the group show Two or Three Things I Know
About Her; and most recently, in November of 2008, Paul Chan: Three Easy Pieces.
Corbu Pops is made possible with additional support by the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Fund
through “Learning from Performers,” a program of the Office for the Arts at Harvard University,
and by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard
University. William Pope.L is the 2008-09 Peter Ivers Visiting Artist at the Office for the Arts.
William Pope.L
The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 5 Years, 1 Street
2000/2003
Single channel DVD
Edition of 3 + 1 AP
William Pope L.
Eating the Wall Street Journal
February, 2000
documentation of performance at Mobius in Boston, MA
William Pope L.
Eating the Wall Street Journal
February, 2000
documentation of performance at Mobius in Boston, MA
William Pope L.
European Crawl Tour/Budapest
July 1999
documentation of performance
William Pope L.
Crawl Piece
July 1996
documentation of performance
TEXTES
62 Chaussée de Forest – B-1060 Bruxelles – T. +32 (0) 2 646 29 71 – F. +32 (0) 2 538 61 67 - [email protected] -www.catherinebastide.com
Robert C. Morgan, “Performance and Spectacle” ch. in Art Into Ideas: Essays on Contemporary Art,
Cambridge University Press, pp. 195-202
The Friendliest Black Artist in America©
By Mark H. C.Bessire
CLAIMING TO BE THE FRIENDLIEST BLACK ARTIST IN AMERICA©,
William Pope.L confounds and conflates the public's "expectation" of a black artist. In this role he
negotiates the history of America's relationship to difference, for example whiteness and blackness, a
site he has been mining for over twenty years. Pope.L's practice, made up of abjects, street
performances and installation/performances, also illuminates the American des ire to consume and
neatly package ideas and behaviors that construct identity and bogus racial stereotypes. Lowery
Stokes Si ms has sug gested that his practice be viewed as a "hybridization confronting the specter of
the black male as menace," in light of the American expectation and receptian of the black mate and
black artist.' Ta un pack these issues, make them visible and to address the margins between the
"haves and have-nots," Pope.l consumes The Wall Street Journal, paints in peanut butter, sells
mayonnaise, negotiates decay and the abject, and is unafraid to confront such American icons as John
F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Two of his recent projects, the Black Factory (2001 )and the Black Drawings (2001-02) continue to
map his interest in "how the other is contained and controlled through hierarchical definitions of
status"~ by revealing that constructions of social categories are shaped by contradiction. For
example, blackness is defined as much through its protection, validation, and enshrinement as through
its isolation, imprisonment and obfuscation. One position daims that race is everything and
the other, that race is not theoretically tenable.' For Pope.L, it is not a matter of choosing one, but
rather of acknowledging both and constructing a space such as the Black Factory where these forces
can interact or blur. His specifie concern with race is a subset (but not less important) to his umbrella
concern with cate gories. For Pope.L, if it is the powerful who rule, make the laws, and define the
limits of society, then it must be the mission of the powerless to question and transgress. In the White
Drawings (2000) whiteness does not refer to a people, Pope.L suggests, but to a system of laws,
representations, institutions, psychologies, and behaviors whose function is to shore up the invisibility
of whiteness,~ While negotiating these positions and attempting to blur boundaries between
certainties, the friendliest black artist in America creates art that is conceptual and accessible as well
as vusceral and prosaic.
Issues of race and the "oscillating relationships between different states of lack" are central to the
artist's work and these are often addressed through metaphors of consumption. America consumes
products just as it accepts or consumes racial categories and definitions of marginalization. Pope.L's
work challenges the fixity of cate gories and he frequently uses humor and unexpected juxtapositions
to undermine the seriousness of his message. And with Pope.L, the message is multifaceted. "Bottom
line," the friendliest black artist in America has suggested, "artists don't make art, they make
conversations. They make things happen. They change the world.
A Fisherman of Social Absurdity
Pope.l draws on humor to seduce and confuse his audience. The artist has articulated that "in the case
of humor, it is not just about confronting, but also seducing and lubricating as well as confusing
(intentionally). I am after the mixed signaL"ln the performance pieces The Egg Eating Contest (1990)
and White Baby (1992) (both part of the larger project How Much is That Nigger in the Window) and
the White and Black Drawings, the artist reveals how being black and male in America is both
"a consumer's hell on earth, and also "a lack worth having." During The Egg Eating Contest, a white
man named Mr. Cau-Casian asked Pope.l te "Please show our audience your instrument." This
immediately raised the myth of the black phallus.lnstead ofreveaJing his member, Pope.L's lap was
suddenly lit up by a 25-watt light bulb under his pants. In typical Pope.L fashion, he used the humor
of the unexpected light to disarm his viewer who anticipated something else. For Pope.L humor is a
means of transgression and a loaded tool of visual and performance discourse. He lulls the audience
into a comfortable place before they realize that the issue at hand is serious and profound and located
in what C. Carr describes as the "discomfort zone."
Pope.L also uses humor to expose cultural conventions. The work is less a rebelion than an
examination and exposure of existing conditions. In the monologue of White Baby, performed and
installed at the Clevelandd Performance Arts Festival in 1992, Pope.L comes as close as he ever has or
probably will to unambi guously discussing his practice :
In White Baby, Pope.L entered the performances space drag ging a white doll behind him like a
child with a baby doll. He then walked up to a podium and explained : "I am being chased down the
street by a little white baby with no clothes on. It is a nice baby. A little white baby. I do not like it;
yet, I am tied to it. Now i want to hide from the little baby. Instead, I pull it along the neighborhood
like a little dog gie."" Using the leash he proceeded to throw the doll up and around a pipe suspended
from the ceiling so that the doll hung from the neck swinging in the air. Not an innocent image. Yet
Pope.L's performance and practice are not a rebellion - he claims not to be a revolutionary, but a
reminder.' And to this end, he frequently evokes a carnival atmosphere and manipulates humor in the
face of seriousness to jolt his viewer. Umberto Eco has argued that carnival "parodies rules and rituals,
but to be understood, rules must be recognized and respected."' While inviting the audience to
address his politics, Pope.L creates an image of unspoken rules that resonate for viewers through a
disarming interpolation of humor and seriousness as a bundle of contradictions. These contraries came
into play in White Baby, where the artist claimed: "I am white culture. Yet it's the Negro in me that
makes me what i am. I believe my work is about disruption throwing a wrench into our hope for
common sense when we know deep down in our hearts that that's just another form of fast food
nonsense."' ln such statements and performances, Pope.l simultaneously recognizes the unspoken
rules of hierarchy and challenges their definition. Eco could have been referring to Pope.L's talent as
a "fisherman of social absurdity" when he suggested that humor "does not fish for an impossible
freedom ... it is a true movement of freedom. "'Through humor, Pope.l reveals that social conventions
need to be exposed in arder to open the doors for a "true movement of freedom."
One needs to look no further tha Menber (a.k.a "Schlong Journey") (1996) to see how humor is used
to raise an awareness of the uncertainty of definitions. In street performance, an outrageously
exagerated white penis attached to his groin blurred the boundary between the artist's black body
and the whiteness of the fantastical codpiece. The obtuse juxtaposition of a long white phallus on a
black male body opens a dialogue or "conversation" for the wiewer.
Consumin g Race
Pope.L also addresses issues of race through the metaphor of consumption. In this way, he exposes
tho American desire to accept and consume packaged ideas and products that mask more voltile {and
discomforting realities. This includes not only how race, for example, the black male body, is
consumed as a social construct, but also how the consumptiotn of certain products can serve as a
metaphor for the estrangement of the disenfranchised. The artist further plays with this notion as he
physically consumes products while fore grounding how a viewing audience consumes him as an
object.
Consumption and marginalization were addressed in Pope.L's exhibition at The Project in Harlem in
June of 2001. At the gallery, a grid of White Drawings (2000), an ironie, text-based work celebrating
and ridiculing pero ceptions of whiteness, were displayed across From Broken Column (for Eva)
(2001), a series ofbroken mayonnaise jars encased in wood and cellophane leaning against a wall
below a pink billboard banner with the text "RACE BECOMES YOU." The notion of whiteness in the
guise of consumable foods, such as mayonnaise, milk, white bread, and flour, is digested everyday by
consumers. In Pope.L's work, such products serve as metaphoric bundies of desire and disdain. An
important formal property ofthese products is their whiteness or lack of color evoking Ralph Ellison's
symbolic literary creation, the Liberty Paint factory. The factory's marketing slogans were "Keep
America Pure with Liberty Paints" and "If it's optic white, It's the Right White," which reminded
Ellison's protagonist in the Invisible Man of a childhood jingle, "If you're white, you're right"'. Like
Ellison, Pope.L is attracted to the simple elegance of the imagery, the open-endedness of the
wordplay combined with the knottiness Inherent in racial categories themselves. Pope.L uses the
imagery of spilled milk in Milk Pour (1999), a temporary street installation that transformed a gutter
into a landscape of milk creating a visual and symbolic reference to the "puddles of milk"
made when rioters commandeered a Borden milk wagon and smashed quarts of milk in the Invisible
Man. Using another white substance, in A Negro Sleeps Beneath the Susquehanna (1998). Pope.L
consumed and immersed himself in fifty pounds of flour and rinsed off the fleeting nature of
manufactured whiteness in a river while carrying a broken mirror brilliantly reflecting nature and
light.
In describing his first contat with whiteness, Pope.L recalls that at first he didn't see whiteness (no one
does). It was like being white myself. Then i had mu nigger moment (you know, someone called me a
nigger) and everything came into a certain focus. Not a clarity, but a disparity-worth-having.
Because it could not be avoided. Because it made me : black. And black was worth having because i
was told i was worth having. And why would my family lie to me ? They loved me. They saw that i
was in pain. And to help me feel better; they told me i was worth having as a black person.
Pope.L confronted another version of whiteness in the early seventies when he first viewed the white
monochratic painting of Robert Ryman in New York. Initally he didn't recognise the whiteness as a
social construction; he saw the work as he had been taught in graduate school, as extreme, abstract
minimalist expression. He first thought that Ryman "must think he's some kind of super-hero who only
eats white food and help white people by making only white culture". The image shifted, however,
and Pope.L sug gested that "each time i encoutered a new Ryman, i saw a new possibilities for artmaking. Indeed, i saw these possibilities in art practice that, by definition, was doomed according to
certain critics to a dead-end of stagnant self definition and pointless tautology."This experience was
crilical to Pope.L's practice, as he articulated that white was not a color, but a strategy. For Pope. L,
Ryman's work revealed the problematic nature of whiteness in visual terms even if this was not his
intention. "In fact, l'm sure he didn't intend this," sug gests Pope. L, "but one can not choose one's
parents nor one's influences. It almost seems that Ryman acts in my art-life as an absent father. Stern
and unpredictable. Showing up with gifts unannounced. The gifts always too big or too small. A teetotaler drunk on absence. A king of something that's a fantasy to the son but even more so to the
father." The experience realigned Pope.L's practice as he saw how these monochromatic works
constantly pushed the definition of painting as medium - its physical structure, its context, its very
existence, more than any other artist since Marcel Duchamp. Pope.L unmasked and transformed these
explorations to issues of race: the white monochromatic painting dispersed, spoiled, and reconfigured
in the guise of mayonnaise, flour, and milk.
ln the painting fstimate (1997), Pope.L cames dangerously close to acknowledging and mocking
Ryman as a rebellious son might mimic and ridicule a father. White paint is lightly applied to a roug h
wood panel, the grain of which is visible beneath the paint. Along the bottom of the board painterly
letters like those developed in the White Drawings read: "MILK PENIS AS SEEN FROM PLUTO."
Perhaps Estimate is a conflation of the myth of the black phallus (configured here in the guise of the
irreproachable myth of Martin Luther King Jr.) and Pope.L's first encounter with Robert Ryman when
Pope.L said "Ryman's got a lot ofballs, throwing this much white around. Who the fuck does he think
he is. The white drawings be gun in 1997, the sa me year as Estimate, are an on-going series of text
based drawings that also question notions of whiteness and myth through such ironic phrases as "White
People Are A Disaster That Has Already Happened" and "White People Are Below Freezing." But
with Pope.L's work, whiteness and blackness are, he suggests, "both forms of representation, even
though, politically not equals." As cate gories of social being he treats them as equal, for example, the
Black Drawings make such statements as "Black People Are Children" and "Black People Are The
Diamond 'Chitlin'." ln his ever-expanding practice, Pope.L is also at work on series of Red, Yellow
and Green Drawings.
Consumption, Decay, and the Abject
Commenting on Eating The Wall Street Journal (2000), an installation and performance work in which
he chewed, consumed, and re gurgitated the newspaper, Pope.L suggested that "our consumer
society promises power and wealth simply by owning certain abjects, which harks back to primitive
magic and voodoo. I figured if i also eat it, just imagine how much power 1 can drain from this
fetishized object." Pope.L also articulated the space of consumption in fat Notes (2000, volume 2), a
literary compendium to another version of Eating The Wall Street Journal installed and performed at
Mobius in Boston:
Consumin g is a people-thi n g and
what we do to fil! ourselves up.
Consumin g is a food.
Consumin g has to do with what we
take into ourselves; our lives. How
we replenish our soul ... . Consumi n g
is openin g onese[f up. As in sex.
Lettin g oneself go. As in defecation.
Mayonnaise, white bread, peanut butter, sugar, milk, and ketchup were the foodstuffs of the artist's
childhood when the presence of food was sometimes uncertain. Many of these products have become
media for his object making. He considers the condiments as adhesives that make up the sandwich, a
collage where you can resolve scarcity with a little imagination. ln the performance work How Much
is That Nigger in the Window (1990-91), the artist spread mayonnaise on his body creating an object
of his body. And when Pope.L applied peanut butter to a large phallus attached to a jock strap in The
White Mountain (Wonder Bread Performance) (1998) and romped through loaves of wonder bread,
he conflated body and condiment.
While consumable foods are a theme in Pope.L's work, it is also their decay that plays into much of his
practice. Many of the food products used to create his abjects and installations are 50 full of
preservatives that the works decay slowly without any assistance from bugs which are inhibited by
the chemicals used to process the food. In this sense, the works are time-based science experiments
exposing visually how these processed products, like social hierarchies or race, are unnatural
constructions. Processed foods such as mayonnaise, hot dogs, and Pop Tarts seem to laugh in the face
of anyone who might believe that they would decay naturally. Decay and the unspoiling nature of
processed foods have a historical precedence for the artist. Pope.l has suggested that growing up,
food was defined through circumstance as much by scarcity and decay as by nourishment and
presence: "I had to think about whether there was going to be enough [food to eat]. The idea that
food was some kind of warm, nourishing entity that i understand. But i also see it as always possibly
spoiling, disappearing or somehow going bad. My take on food involves those two things:
nourishment and presence - spoiling and lack."
Using mostly peanut butter and latex, Pope.L has painted multiple versions of Why i Don't Go to the
Island Anymore (1998 and 1999) directly onto a wall. In some versions of this work, Pope.L culls
images from Iynchings and World War II racist cartoons, representations of blacks that enga ge notions
of the commodification of racialized black pain. Peanut butter, an invention of George Washington
Carver, is the artist's chosen medium to present these appropriated loaded images. For Pope.L, the
medium is intertwined with the subject matter. Peanut butter is an unforgiving medium. It cannot be
erased or painted over. It tends to slip from its surface over time and compromises the material on
which it is painted. In this case, the medium created by an American icon, peanut butter, cannot be
erased, cannot be obliterated; yet, the obliteration of blackness was one objective of Iynching. The
artist has also articulated that it was "not simply the obliteration of blackness, but also the obliteration
of memory; getting drunk on spectacle to forget (expunge) what one is actually doing; Iynching was
[in this sense] also a celebratory event." These paintings, Pope.L suggests, raise the notion of "who
brings the pain and who possesses it," as they reveal in ail of their gloppy, aromatic painterliness the
harsh realities of racism.
Map of the World (1999-2000) is another time consuming, time-based construction that plays with
notions of representation and identity in a medium of decay. The map, an inverted view of the United
States, is a collage of hot dogs adhered to the wall by nails and affixed ta each other by Elmers (white)
glue. The perspective could be interpreted as a proscenium view, that of the actor or object gazing
out toward the audience rather than the viewer at the stage. The inversion invites viewers to consider
their own positionalîty, underlining Pope.L's consistent interest in audience. The messy decay of this
particular object serves as a metaphor for American self-centeredness and what Pope.L calls the "disease" and awkwardness that lies beneath that arrogance.
Pope.l's most popularized object is the Pop Tan Frieze (1998), which Îs placed in a position of
suspended decay in The artist's studio or basement laboratory with fixatives. Painted on the individual
Pop Tarts are racist cartoons, similar to those appropriated in Why i Don't Go to the Island Anymore.
Frozen in their moment of decay, these mass-produced, ephemeral objects of breakfast ritual are
perhaps an unlikely medium for such serious subject matter as racism. Yet, Pope.L consistently
challenges his viewer to consider race through unexpected and obtuse lenses - in this case the Pop
Tart.
The combination of simplicity and complexity in The Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action
(1998) exemplifies the many layers of meaning Pope.L constructs through accessible and ephemeral
materials. In this time-based, laboratory experiment-like installation, onions are painted black on one
side and white on the other. The onions initially develop under a growth light and over time adjust
themselves on a shelf or fall off as they sprout and then decay. The experiment studies decay, the artist
has suggested, as a means to "obliterate the line between white and black:" "decay produces or
flattens or equalizes difference [and] at the same time it can emphasize it." The polis was the Greek
decision making body on which the u.s. government is modeled. This work investigating and
exposing difference reveals the laboratory science approach of the artist and his interest in creating a
dialogue between notions of whiteness and blackness and the absurdity of their polarization in
American culture.
Pope.L also manipulates his body as a vehide of decay. In My Niagra (1998), Pope.L pushed the
boundaries of performance by transforming his body into a decaying entity and abject reality. His
body was bound and confined with layers of materials and meaning. Cair Crawford described Pope.L,
who was viciously attached ta a bedspring hanging precariously from a ceiling surrounded by
objects and containers, as "infected, wounded and incontinent, the figure imbued with suffering."JJ
Crawford compared the artist's body to a bocio figure created by Vodun religious practitioners. In
Benin for a range of needs including protection, empowerment, and the curing of illness. In her book
African Vodun, Suzanne Preston Blier suggests that through "incongruity and disorder of everyday
life, these works [bocio] challenge the status quo." By creating such a startlingly abject figure, the
artist evoked various responses of sympathy, fear and disgust, ail of which challenged the "status quo."
"What i admire about bocio," Pope.L sug gested in a recent symposium with Blier, "is the way they
interact (or as Ms. Blier says) are sutured into the daily life of their social world. Bocio are not about a
dark, primitive African past. They are a functional, working part of the social-psycho-religious world
of today's West Africa, and by diasporic extension, also places like Haiti, and parts of the U.S." ln her
essay in this book, "In the Discomfort Zone," C. Carr suggests that the "abject imagery in 50 much of
his work speaks to the subconscious damage do ne by racism and the humiliating consequences.
Fear, anxiety, shame, dyspepsia." ln Burial, Pope.L similarly transfigures his body into an abject
entity. ln the piece he is buried vertically in the earth, with only his head exposed. He was, in fact, 50
consumed by pressure from the ground in Burial (Portland) (1998) that he had to be evacuated before
he was crushed. In Burial (Sweet Desire) (1998), the artist exposed himself to 98 degree temperatures
while a bowl of vanilla ice cream was placed just out of reach of his mouth. In this case, with the
extreme temperature, the artist's body transforms into a suffering, debilitated object, not un\ike his
experiments with food decay. In video documentation of the work, ice cream and head both seem to
melt in the sweltering heat, and in this space of decay, one could only imagine vultures cirding
overhead.
Consumin g the Artist
Creating an object of his body, Pope.L also becomes a very consumable entity. Reception politics are
Inherent to Pope.L's work as he enga ges the audience to question what is expected from a black artist
and how race is consumed. This was the case when the audience watching The Egg Eating Contest
thought Pope.L was going to reveal his penis only to chuckle uncomfortably when his lap was lit up
by a light bulb. In response to Mr. Cau-Casian, the audience member who asked the artist to "reveal
his member," Joe Wood, cultural critic for the Village Voice, wrote that The Egg Eating Contest
dredged "up the sick American fascination with our things, and caus[ed] me more than a little a
confusion." Wood's insightful response to the performance reveals the complex emotions evoked in
the spectator of Pope.L's pieces:
Why, 1 wondered, di d l, like the white Others,
feel sad and g uilty, and not an gry and
wronged, as i, a Black man, shoul d? I also
found myself askin g somethi n g else: had
Pope[.L] expected me to be part of this audience ... and brother, Pope[.L] answered both
questions. By exhi biti n g hi mself whi le he was
protestin g our gaze, Pope[.L] had made me
part of his audience. He'd trapped me
because, after all, there i was doin g what we
all knew was, weil, wrong : consumi n g him.
What we were watchi n g was a revelation of
ourselves, our Consumer selves, and in a
sense, our rapist selves, quite beyond our
Black and White selves. Pope[.L], in the end,
was showin g us a mirror_ he was selli n g us
ourselves, which is to say that the piece
worked brilliantly.
While responses to Pope.L's work are often emotionally and mentally complex, the artist has
questioned the consumption of his work by white critics and scholars who have attributed African
influences to his piece My Niagra, where his body was interpreted as an abject bocio figure. In the
symposium "Issues in African Contemporary Art," at the Maine College of Art, Pope.L discussed this
comparison raising more questions than answers:
Let me say loud and clear: I bear no malice
toward Ms. Crawford or Ms. Blier when i
say: How come all these white people know
more about black folk than i do? ln fact,
how come one of them knows more about
me than i do?
When i look at my own motivations for my
interest in bocio i cannot separate the m from
the expectations of Ms. Crawford or even
those of Mark Bessire who asked me to
speak here today and who was also intrigued
by Ms. Crawford's clai m, albeit for his own reasons.
I want Mr. Bessire and Ms. Crawford to find
my work intrig ui n g so i go along with the
idea that there is, in fact, a link between my
work and that of bo artist-activators. But in
the same breath i also say to myself: Why is
it not enou gh that i am a black American
artist? Apparently 1 need to get blacker. More
authentic. 1 must become the black
American artist with dark, mysterious, atavistic roots in some pri mitive Otherness. Who
is speakin g here? Who is telli n g me this?
Of course, this is not the first ti me a white
person has been instrumental in educatin g a
black person about blackness or constructin g
for a black person the mask of blackness
most attractive for the historical occasion.
So if i find, for myself, a connection between
bocio and my own work, how do i own it?
How do 1 own it separate from the expectations of others? Well, why worry about it?
Why look a gift-horse in the mouth?
By discussing in his symposium paper, the legitimacy of a black artist to appropriate African sources
for use, Pope.L also voiced his concern about reception, specifically the critique of his work by
critics, scholars, and curators.
For Pope.L, race is not as much the issue as is American culture's relationship to otherness,
exemplified by its definitions of whiteness and blackness (and also its distinctions of difference in ail its
forms: racial, ethnie, cultural, gender, etc). The artist Adrian Piper addressed the critique of her work
in a lengthy response to the article "Blacks, Whites and Other Mythic Seings," in which she criticized
the author, Eleanor Heartney, for drastically misreading her work. For one, she complained that
Heartney treated her "differently from the 'white' artists she usually writes about" and that she viewed
her as a "race traitor." Piper also objected to Heartney's definition of race in relation to her work, as in
the following description: "the Achilles' heel of Piper's work is the unequal way she treats the
categories of black and white .... [T]oo often in her work, 'white' is treated as an undifferentiated state
of being. The cate gory of 'white' seems to be equated with privilege and is rarely allowed the
shadings she so skillfully reveals in her analysis of 'black.''
Piper and Pope.L both open a dialogue about the positioning of black artists by the art establishment,
an issue that was addressed by Piper and many others in a selection of essays, entitled "Blinded by the
White: Art and History at the Limits of Whiteness" in the Art Journal. ln the articles the writers examine
how issues of race influence the reception of artists of color by white crities, scholars, and art
historians.
While Pope.L's work is unique in the art world, he has sug gested that he admires the work of Adrian
Piper and that of other black women who work intellectually, playfully, and in your face:
When i was first introduced to [the work of]
Adrian Piper she was playi n g with readability
and le gibility in a way that no other artist was
doin g at that ti me. Especial ly a female artist.
Especially a black female artist. Pi per, in a
way, reminded me of my first encounters
with Octavia Butler (her Patternist Series) or
Toni Morrison (Sula) or Marita Bonner (Blue
Flowers) or Phile mona Will ia mson. All these
folks work intel lectually, sexually, technically
playfully, and in your face, defamil iarizin g and
resistant to obvious one-shot interpretation. I
liked this: it was bold and sneaky at the same
time. But i wondered why position your work
this way? ln a sense, it was obvious, all of
them were comi n g from what they perceived
as a marginalized place yet they were choosin g ta enter the dayli g ht with their pants
down. They wanted to show their equi pment.
Wag it in our faces behi nd a screen of
smarts. I said to myself: here is a Ryman that
knows itself.
What Pope.L re gards so highly in these artists, the fact that they choose to display issues of identity
and "wag it in our faces behind a screen of smarts," is also precisely what he does in Menber (a.k.a
"schlong journey") When he confronts notions of black phallus, makes it white and literally wa gs in
our faces.
Conclusion
Soon after moving to Main (confirmed as the least diverse state in America by the latest national
census report), i received a holiday postcard from someone named Pope.L stamped "I am still Black."
This was followed by another postcard, advertising a movie on the front and stamped 'The friendliest
Black Artist in America ©" on the verso, from Lewiston, Maine. Who was the artist living in Maine?
William Pope.L; i have come to learn, has been making art for many years on the margins of the art
world, subtly framing the cultural discourse on lack and otherness. His practice, he suggests, invites
"viewers to question consumption and the contradictions, stereotypes, and contraries of otherness," but
he also feels strongly that "we need to take respnsibility for what we consume."
ln one image from Black Domestic Project (1993-95), Pope.L photographed himself bare-chested
holding a black and white spotted cow to which he feeds a bottle labeled "Race." Providing a
humorous scene with contradictions addressing issues of consumption and racialized culture, this
staged photograph is emblematic of his practice. It' is a direct and confrontational critique of the
manipulation of consumption, race, and the neatly packaged social ideas we are faced with everyday
as consumers. It is also a spoof on the "Got Milk" campaign, which displayed a variety of celebrities
(the epitome of American desire) consuming milk: The Black Domestic Project and other works are
viewed by William Pope.L as part of a practice where he considers the world a laboratory or a
gymnasium or a practice field. It is a place where he experiments and attempts to debunk old myths
searching for new paradigms while creating new myths and confounding any notion of what is
expected From the friendliest black artist
in America. As William Pope.L so articulately suggested, "blackness is limited not by race but our
courage to imagine it differently."
This essay is dediwled to the memory of Joe Wood.
my high school classmale who also admired
the work of William Pope.L.
SELECTION DE PRESSE
Renaissance Society gets a rise out of Pope.L’s new exhibit
William Pope.L, a DoVA professor, opens his first solo Chicago exhibit to collective
engrossment.
by Alice Bucknell - Apr 30, 2013 12:15 am CDT
photo: courtesy of the renaissance society
Forlesen, the William Pope.L show at the Renaissance Society that opened last Sunday,
capitalizes on our obsessive need to categorize and to make sense of the world around us, and
it does this by consistently not making sense. Architecturally, the show is sort of an impossibly
convoluted maze, and sort of a very basic grid, and therefore neither. We enter in, we see that
peeling ketchup-smeared wall and then smell it (or is it the other way around?), and we think,
immediately, something along the lines of, “What the fuck?” The mental sirens go off, the pushpull dynamic of simultaneous repulsion and curiosity kicks in, and we watch ourselves moving
toward that spongy, fleshy surface, all the while wishing we weren’t.
Then there’s the art, which—unsurprisingly—occupies an even more ambiguous space in the
room. Some of it, like “Ellipsis,” floats right above your head. Some of it covers real windows in
the room; some covers constructed windows on constructed walls. Some of it is paired with the
parallel strips of constructed walls perpendicular to the entrance—the skin-like “Curtain” and
plastic-coated “Lense”—and the traditional heavyweight presentation of art-on-wall is probably
at first a relief to some in its relative familiarity. However, the drawings themselves, collectively
titled “skin set drawings: The space between the letters,” are not so conceptually concise.
What’s depicted is mostly obvious: letters, zoomed in, placed near enough to the edges of each
piece of paper to prevent the letter from being fully seen or distinguishable. We know it’s a
letter, but a lowercase “k” might well be an uppercase “R” from the waist down. Who’s to say,
and does it even matter?
What’s drawn or painted becomes difficult to separate from the materials used to render it. Is a
coffee spill just a coffee spill, or is it a painting of a coffee spill using spilled coffee as a
medium? Self-referentiality is a driving concept in Pope.L’s work—particularly, as he revealed
at his artist’s talk on Sunday, in terms of the space that is created when an object pulls back
from the outside world and turns inward instead. When context is abandoned, connotations
become abstract and disintegrate away from the thing in front of you, so that suddenly the thing
becomes hyper-organic. Its significance moves into the realm of time, and into how the object
engages with and lives through whatever interacts with it. It becomes soft and sticky, clinging to
whatever reaches out to it. It bites down and fills in the space it can. “What’s filling this hole?”
Pope.L asked the assembled audience, which was full of artists, students, and academics.
Whatever gets close enough to fall in, it would seem.
Here, the relationship between wall and art isn’t as clear-cut as traditionally maintained.
Forlesen is working in an alternate way. The wall becomes its own art object, an engaging force
that extends beyond itself by relating only to itself. It is simultaneously an autonomous body
and an anonymous one: Materially, it is totally opaque. It stinks, and the smell is undeniably
known, yet impossible to pin down. It looks like skin, and the peeling bits and pieces on the
floor are both familiar and unfamiliar and kind of—pitiable?
Skirt around the right side of this structure and you’ll be confronted crotch-first by an upturned
wooden sculpture of a body waist-down, legs akimbo, with audio spilling out of its groin and
red paint smeared on its behind. Take a few minutes to adjust to the “DuBois Machine” and
continue around the back of “Quarter Shape (penis),” the bunker-like structure, to enter through
a teal curtain. The smell is pungent. At the head of the structure’s interior space is “Unfallen,” a
17-minute video piece made from pornos bought from a shop in Maine. In the warm, dark,
enclosed space, the audio in its distortion and maximized volume shakes the structure with a
buzzing violence that almost hurts. You have no idea what’s going on, and these voices don’t
sound human, but somehow they are. While you’re floundering in uncomfortable uncertainty,
meaning is congealing among all the bodies in the room.
Pope.L’s work is smart in its delicate overlaying of its own conceptual subtlety with a
constructed counterpart that loudly assaults the viewer. The cloak is magnificent; it has no
stitches. While we’re busying ourselves with getting over that initial impact of rancid smell, of
groin speakerphone, and of boorish porno moans, the art lets go of its spiky armor and sweetly,
almost hilariously, unravels itself at our feet. It’s gross and oddly becoming at the same time.
We don’t know what to think, so we engage with our senses instead. We humanize these weird
objects and they absorb our own human presence—in all our perfumed, nail-biting, teetertottering glory—to become anti-monuments in their own right. Pretty soon you can’t tell one
pack of bodies from the other. And that’s the point.
Forlesen will be running at the Renaissance Society through June 23.
alice bucknell
FLASH ART n°272, may-June 2010, p115 Evan J.Garza
WHEN CURATOR DAN CAMERON inaugurated Prospect New Orleans in 2008, billed as the largest international
biennial in the United States, it was an act not merely of post–Hurricane Katrina revitalization but of civic reinvention.
Though it received virtually no funding from depleted state or city coffers, Prospect.1 generated a great deal of curiosity,
goodwill, and private patronage and brought contemporary art to the city in an unprecedented way. Due to cost overruns for
the first show and reduced corporate funding since the recession, Prospect.2 was postponed one year and was a
significantly smaller venture: It featured only twenty-seven artists, few of whom produced newly commissioned works.
Thus the powerful site-specific emphasis of the first biennial was no longer as dominant, and the kinds of engagements with
the city’s history of racial and economic inequality that made Prospect.1 so strong were barely evident. The majority of
works in Prospect.2 were displayed in institutional settings such as the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), the Louisiana
State Museum, and the Contemporary Arts Center. Contributions by relatively well-known artists from outside the city
(Sophie Calle, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ivan Navarro, Alexis Rockman, Karl Haendel, and An-My Lê) mixed with those of New
Orleans artists (Bruce Davenport Jr., Robert Duncan, and Dawn DeDeaux); yet it fell to satellite venues such as Good
Children, Antenna, Barrister’s, New Orleans Airlift, Parse, T-Lot, and more to bring substantial numbers of NOLA artists to
the attention of those who came to town for the biennial.
The strongest pieces in Prospect.2 were primarily to be found outside the main venues’ walls and took the form of
performance-based events that drew on local traditions and histories. In R. Luke DuBois’sThe Marigny Parade, 2011,
presented on the biennial’s opening morning, five groups from three junior high and high school marching bands made their
way to Washington Park in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood while playing a composition by the artist. Despite an
attempt to synchronize the performances, giddy chaos and cacophony reigned as spectators found themselves hemmed in
by the converging drummers and brass musicians. (One of the best object-based works in the show—Davenport’s intricate
hand-colored diagrams at NOMA of area marching bands and their spectators interspersed with facts and wry commentary
about the dissolution of many of these bands post-Katrina—also dealt with NOLA’s history of processional performance.)
The street was also the stage for William Pope.L’s roving project Blink, 2011. In this work, a cast of some sixty-five
volunteers, eight at a time, pulled a black-painted ice-cream truck ten miles from the Lower Ninth Ward to Mid City using a
specially designed harness. Pope.L’s van functioned as a mobile rear-projection screen: The back gate displayed
snapshots, solicited by the artist from New Orleans residents, that touched in some way on the idea of dreaming and then
waking up in the city. The luminous, flickering images emitted by the ghostly truck, conveyed through the city by human toil
alone, brought to mind rescuers and evacuees pushing boats to safety in Katrina’s aftermath.
Prospect.2’s most elaborate installation was DeDeaux’s Goddess Fortuna and Her Dunces in an Effort to Make
Sense of it All (Part One: Mysteries avere la fortuna di), 2011, based in part on John Kennedy Toole’s posthumously
published New Orleans romp A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). Set in a rarely used historic courtyard in the French Quarter,
DeDeaux’s work opened to the public at nightfall, revealing a troupe of sculpted dummies in peaked witch hats—the
dunces—illuminated by eerie lights throughout the adjacent rooms and stairways. The work’s tour de force was DeDeaux’s
casting of local sissy-bounce rapper Katey Red as its eponymous goddess character. A haunting, dirgelike sound track
accompanied a large, circular projection of slowed-down footage of Red twirling batons in an outfit that evoked eighteenth-
century French court costume: a white mask, a powdered wig, and metal hoop panniers. Periodically, the film returned to
real time and a bounce beat took over, which in fact felt massively sped-up, given the hyperactive, rolling ass shaking
performed by Red’s silver-lamé-hot-pants-wearing dancers.
New Orleans’s place in the American cultural imaginary—its status as a site where the richly creolized culture of
the Caribbean littoral lives on with singular vibrancy but is too often subsumed under the sign of exoticism, and where the
unvarnished reality of the present is too often obscured by a gothic nostalgia—was embodied by DeDeaux’s work in all its
complexity. The city’s past was granted its haunting seductiveness, but power was shown to reside in the here and now, in
the living persona of Red—a representative of one of the city’s more recent cultural innovations. Sissy bounce, as yet,
cannot be comfortably added to the list of stock signifiers that already includes beignets, gumbo, carnival masquerade,
second-line parades, jazz funerals, and, via a formal logic of opposition, poverty, violence, racial inequality, and corruption.
Indeed, the entrenched fetishization of such beloved things as gumbo and carnival masquerade is what allows poverty,
violence, and racial inequality to ossify, to acquire an aesthetic and immense quality. DeDeaux’s work suggests that the
wayward hybridities of the moment are as necessary to New Orleans’s forward movement as are its traditions, and that the
former may in fact be a necessary counterweight to the latter. Art, of course, is a principal channel through which these
amalgamations take shape and express themselves. It is for this reason that the strength of the Prospect idea resides in an
engagement with New Orleans’s spaces and communities. Hopefully, Prospect.3, which Franklin Sirmans has been tapped
to curate, will re- emphasize artists’ commissions in sites throughout the city and foster collaborations with residents, putting
the culture of New Orleans at the forefront in its time of regeneration.
Eva Díaz is an assistant professor of contemporary art at Pratt Institute in New York.
ARTFORUM - MAY 09 / REVIEW- p242
CAMBRIDGE, MA
William Pope.L
CARPENTER CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
Invited to lecture or exhibit at Le Corbusier's only building in North
In
America, artisrs devise surprising strategies to confront the modernist
architect's legacy. Rabble-rousing performance artist William
Pope.L was no exception: While inaugurating his installation and
performance Corbu Pops, 2009, with a peripatetic address, Pope.l
childishly rossed pieces of paper (presumably his notes) onto the
auditorium floar.
In seeking to unsettle the relations of power that inevitably frame
any interface between rnaster and interloping apprentice, Pope.L not
only infantilized himself but repeatedly reduced "Pops" to puerility. In
the ensuing performance, for example, Harvard students dressed in
black and donning Corbu baby masks (with chubby cheeks, a blond
tuft of hair, and signature owl-eye glasses) poked their heads through
a puppet stage while ululating, grunting, and squealing a chorus of
nonsense at times disrupted by the clearly enunciated N-word. As
the bedlam unfolded, Pope.l sat on a nearby bench and watched,
apparenrly unperturbed,
letting his privileged minions enact the
redistribution of authority.
This anarchie tack continued with a gallery's installation, where on
a floor covered in light red paper held in place with black gaffer's
offerings. The
tape stood a table loaded with a bevy of questionable
foremost attraction
were Hydrocal casts of the Carpenter Center
mounted on wooden prostheses. Resembling at once hatchets and
Popsicles, these hazardous confections spil1ed out of Bayou Cl as sic
steel cooking pots and were covered by a discharge of gooey petroleurn jelly and black paint. Vaseline oozed over sorne texts placed on
the table, which included seminal statements like Fred Koetter and
Colin Rowe's Collage City, 1978 (a denunciation of modernist urban
planning), and excerpts from the artist's contract with the Carpenter
Center. All were subjected to Pope.L's
scribbles and annotations,
including doodles of testic1es and reflections on how to "possess"
Corbu's building. Amid these allusions to sexual desire-which
also
incorporared insinuations of Freud's theories on child development
through oral, anal, and phallic psychosexua1 stages-was
a photo of
Le Corbusier clothed like a female domestic laborer (upon which
Pope.L drew an arrow pointing from the picture's caption, DRESSED
ta the
AS A CLEANING WOMAN, ON HOLIDAY AT LE PIQUEY, CA. I930,
architect's scribb1ed name).
A video on view reminded usthat Corbu wasn't the only modernist
who liked to dress up in drag. Intertitles quoting critical texts on modernism note that the Dadaists would mask themselves in various forms
of primitivism ("Negro-ness, Afriean-ness, Insane-ness, Childish-ness,
and Femaleness"). These passages are woven together with footage of
Pope.L rehearsing the performance
and segments from an interview
with Sheldon Cheek, curatorial associate at Harvard's Image of the
Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive. With the
artist as instigator, we witness a theatrical exercise in which he encourages students to turn their healthy bodies into microbe machines
through raucous coughing and discover that the Caucasian Cheek
(who had an African-American ma id in his childhood) often imagines
himself in the guise of the African and African-American
subjects he
documents. Crucial to this fracturing of hierarchies is Pope.L's dep1oyment of gratification, discomfort, and humor as tools that reveal the
"suppressed longings" coursing through the lived body, the aesthetic
language of modernism, and a scholar's affinity to his archivaI project.
Such tactics a1so brought Corbu down from his untouchable Modulor
throne ta a world of base matter.
Yet if blasphemous hilarity can short-circuit
power, it can a1so
reterr iroria
lize it. In his lecture Pope.L conceded that "we must always
be aware of who is being laughed at and who gets to laugh," but he
made sure the distinction remained unclear in the ropsy-turvy world
of Corbu Pops.
-Nuit Banai
William Pope.L
Corbu Pops, 2009
Mixed media
Installation view
"HANG MAN" (114 DESSINS ENCADRÉS) W3 - 2000. COLLE COLORÉE SUR SERVIETTE ÉPONGE, 36,4 X 34,5 CM.
COURTESY CATHERINE BASTIDE
Pour son exposition 'Mordre l'innocence à pleines dents' à la galerie Catherine Bastide, William Pope.L (USA °1955) a
réalisé des objets singuliers: des boîtes-valises accrochées au mur qui prennent modèle sur' les 'stations de change' - des
tables à langer escamotables que l'on trouve sur les aires d'autoroutes ou dans les aéroports. Il en surgit des matelas aux
formes étranges, ils sont parfois crevés et déversent leur contenu. Ces sculptures molles, sortes de membres de grandes
poupées de chiffon, inquiètent par leur référence anatomique, mais aussi par leur déploiement qui de toute évidence ne
peut pas être contenu dans les boîtes. Dans un aquarium, des poissons évoluent autour de ruines. Les photocopies de
dessins au trait sont à la fois machinaux et cauchemardesques. A ces œuvres récentes, l'artiste joint quelques autres plus
anciennes qui appuient le propos de l'exposition. Les peintures sur des serviettes de toilette ou sur des tranches de pain
empruntent à la manière enfantine (quelques traits définissent un corps, un visage), mais c'est une face angoissante de
l'enfance qui se trouve ici: un pendu, une tête difforme .. La vidéo 'Pierce' nous montre des scènes quotidiennes de la
vie d'une famille bourgeoise - les repas avec la mère, l'école, les jeux dans le jardin, le retour du père -, mais sur les
visages un masque électronique se pose: les yeux et la bouche ou le visage entier: Ils ne le portent pas, c'est le masque
qui semble les poursuivre et transformer ces bourgeois blancs américains en masques africains. L’innocence proclamée
de William Pope L. est celle des angoisses de l'enfance que tout adulte feint (ou non) d'avoir oublié. Elle renoue avec le
petit garçon qui, de peur' ou en rassemblant son courage, 'mordait et grinçait des dents', comme il l'indique ici. C'est
aussi, chez ce plasticien et performer, l'utilisation des formes - film, peinture, objet ou performance - pour interroger les
valeurs de nos sociétés. Comme il avait sillonné l'Amérique du Nord avec une grande sculpture/performance itinérante,
'The Black Factory', amassant ou distribuant sur son passage des objets faisant référence à la couleur noire, il accumule
ici les objets et les formes qui font référence à l'enfance et au changement. Des notions que nos sociétés valorisent en
leur ôtant toute substance: l'enfance devient simpIe innocence, le changement est supposé être aussi simple que celui
de la couche d'un bébé dans un restoroute; elles en deviennent faciles, polies et apolitiques alors que leur force et leur
potentiel résident dans leur non-sens angoissant.
Colette DUBOlS
H ART 08-05-2008
LOS ANGELES TIMES
March 16, 2007
AROUND THE GALLERIES
Using King to raise questions
Reviews of William Pope.L, Sam Durant, Elizabeth Peyton and Steve
DiBenedetto.
By David Pagel, Special to The Times
"The Void Show," William Pope.L's second solo exhibition in Los Angeles, is a
combustible mixture of irreverence, desperation and wit that captures the tenor of
our times. You don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Suspended upside-down from the ceiling of MC Gallery is a larger-than-life
hollow plastic statue of a saucy pirate babe, her stance and dishabille suggesting
eternal Mardi Gras. Her head has been lopped off and replaced by a plaster bust
of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., slightly smaller than life-size and coated with
gold.
Incandescent light glows from the interior of
Pope.L's recycled pirate, and thick
chocolate syrup drips from the top of the
civil rights leader's head, pooling on the floor
in an ever-expanding puddle that resembles
spilled blood. On the serving tray in the
pirate's hand, Pope.L has affixed a mirror,
allowing viewers to catch their reflections
against the backdrop of dark, glistening
syrup.
Strictly speaking, "A Vessel in a Vessel in a
Vessel and So On" is a clunky chandelier.
Or a supersize, nonstop syrup dispenser for
some misbegotten ice cream stand. Or a
ceiling-mounted vanity for someone who
has everything.
And that's the tip of the iceberg. Things get
complicated when the metaphors loaded
into Pope.L's piece spill out and draw in
viewers.
To my eye, the sculpture does not mock
King. But it does raise profound questions about his legacy, his place in history
and, most important, in public consciousness. Sexuality — and what people
make of it — also enters the picture, with the endless supply of sugary
sweetness oozing from the upended bust like an overflow of libido. And humor
plays an essential role. The piece is both utterly ridiculous and right at home in
our topsy-turvy world.
It also raises questions about art's place in life, and where politics and
entertainment fit in. Pope.L's sculpture takes its place alongside Jonathan
Borofsky's "Ballerina Clown," affixed to a Venice building facade, another piece
of wicked genius that combines comic authority and tragic pathos.
A second installation fills the rear of the gallery, turning what first appears to be a
small monochrome painting into a hole in the wall and then into utter
nothingness: pitch-black emptiness into which viewers pour their fears and
fantasies. Two small drawings round out the show, their wiry scribbles recalling
the acerbic absurdity of H.C. Westermann. Pope.L's four pieces are certainly
ridiculous. And they might be sublime. But that's for each viewer to decide.
William Pope.L
SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART
Bergamot Station G1, 2525 Michigan Avenue
September 8–December 23
The Grove, 2007, mixed media. Installation view.
To many Angelenos, “The Grove” is synonymous with a West LA retail shopping experience, one of the ubiquitous
outdoor malls that crowd much of the American landscape. William Pope.L’s new, large-scale installation of the same
name could perhaps be the environmental subconscious of such a site, the residual ghost of nature overrun by
capitalist drives. The Grove, 2007, a forestlike arrangement of potted palm trees power-sprayed with white paint and
slowly dying, is one of three parts of Pope.L’s first major West Coast museum exhibition, “Art After White People:
Time, Trees, & Celluloid.” Drawing the psychology of the local landscape into the exhibition space, The Grove is a
conduit from a public exteriority to an intimate and provocative interiority. Navigating through the trees, viewers
encounter several hatch doors with portal windows that reveal narrow hallways stacked to the ceiling with archival
boxes. Although the boxes’ labels are blacked-out, VHS tapes are strewn about and puddles of fake blood congeal
on the floor, hinting at the boxes’ contents. The use of videotape rather than celluloid (as enumerated in the
exhibition’s title) emphasizes a lingering material absence brought on by unceasing technological evolution. This
eerie passage leads to a billboard-size video projection situated among domestic furnishings—drawers, a hospital
bed, a high chair, desks, a staticky television set—piled high in the corner. Here, Pope.L’s new video APHOV, 2006–
2007, whose title is an acronym for “A Personal History of Videography,” acts on the idea of “art after white people”—
that is, an art at once superseding and based on (or perhaps simply masquerading as) a hegemonic population. The
video shows a man, wearing a Donald Rumsfeld–like mask and with black-painted hands, toying with a diorama of a
sinking ship. As his rubber eye holes begin to cry syrupy blood, we catch glimpses of what looks like the man’s secret
hideout, a cache of archival boxes dating back to the eighteenth century. As an uncomplicated (but heavily symbolic)
narrative, the video might act as a prophecy for the men in power today, which is to say they are ultimately an
endangered species. However, Pope.L’s video could cleverly double as a warning for the otherwise complacent
masses, in that “the man” can always have control (over people, over nature, over technology) so long as he has
control over history.
—Catherine Taft
Contemporary Magazine
Issue #69, 2005
PROFILE: TAPPING THE ENERGY OF PREDICAMENT
Lauri Firstenberg on the work of William Pope. L
‘The melting pot’s just a channel on the TV. Buy some cable and you’re as American as you’ll ever be.’ William Pope. L1
William Pope. L’s extensive practice of performance, writing and installation offers a litany of uncompromising, sardonic
and sadistic propositions saturated with lack, spectacle, myth, cliché and fetish. A viewer of his work is kicked out of
complacency. The body is a site for risk, experimentation, confrontation and controversy. Violence is done unto the body, a
particular body – that of the artist. Pope. L has dedicated decades of his career towards the re-signification of cultural
subjectivity and community. His task is to impart the paradoxes, fluctuations, transformations, potential and indistinctness,
what he calls ‘identity uncertainty’2, to the discourse on race in America. In Bush-mandated America, we are in extreme
need of a new cultural ambassador who can cleverly out the new polarisation of the nation and ‘…the myth of American
culture as universally democratic.’3 New essentialist platforms have consumed the American imaginary from an insidious
polemical binary of black and white to red and blue. On the heels of a recent survey exhibition entitled ‘eRacism’,
accompanied by the monograph The Friendliest Black Artist in America,Pope. L’s work will reverberate more than ever, in
light of an administration who notoriously manipulates racial identity in a country divided on war, religion, morality, civil
liberties and civil society.
His Map of the World (1999–2000) is the US abstracted, defaced and composed of mouldering foodstuffs – impaled
hotdogs and condiments form a rancid, melting map. Frankfurters are the pathetic building blocks for the log cabins of
consumerist America, while the entire map has been reversed – ‘Florida’ becomes ‘Mexico’. For Pope. L, ‘decay produces or
flattens or equalizes difference [and] at the same time it can emphasize it.’4 His actions of abjection extend to paramount
performances that include Eating The Wall Street Journal (2000), his literal consumption and regurgitation of the leading
conservative economic newspaper in America; Burial (1997), the partial internment and excavation of the artist’s own
suffocated and injured body; Roach Motel Black (1993–5), his flaneur moment of affixing a portable insect-poisoning
device to his head, navigating the city while revealing racism as endemic; Crawl (1967–), his most Bataillian gesture of
lowering his body to a horizontal axis on the street, revoking verticality, reason, order, civilisation, inhabiting the position
of the abject, the wounded, bearing the weighty implications of domestic poverty, disability, homelessness and war.
However, the performance My Niagra (1998) could be described as Pope. L’s most catastrophic success. In the darkened
basement of The Project’s New York gallery, Pope. L was bound and suspended from the ceiling, his body brutally mounted
on a metal bed frame. The frame read like a cage, his binding sado-masochistic, the experience shattering. Hanging above
the spectator as if subject to Draconian punishment or racial genocide, Pope. L’s masked visage and fastened body
resembled a display of a criminal or martyr. Surrounded by paper cut-outs of African figurative sculptures, Pope. L inserted
himself at the centre of this collaged installation. In an unbearable test of suffering and stamina for the artist and a
gruelling psychic confession for the spectator, Pope. L animated a space of pain, memory, fear and acknowledgement. His
willingness to literally play out self-degradation, humiliation and abjection is both theatrically and experientially resonant.
The artist defines his production as centered around conceptions of lack. Difference is articulated through this fractured,
wanting space. In a 2002 poem or manifesto titled Hole Theory, Pope. L advises, ‘lack is where it’s at’.5 Klein’s void is
taken on by Pope. L’s ‘Hole Theory which is guided by a lack to be with the world and in so being be right with the world’.6
He maintains, ‘ I don’t picture the hole I inhabit it ... I am the hole ... the successful negotiation of holes ... is dependent
on maintaining a healthy respect for what cannot be seen. A voodoo of nothingness ... Holes are conduits or a “means to”
or a space or an intersection – I mean holes are occasion – Opportunities which can take many forms, materials, and
durations ... When I say – Hole Theory explains nothing this is in order to create a platform from which to engage
everything ... Hole Theory was built to house nothing ... Perhaps my brand of Hole Theory could only have been imagined
by an American ... I am interested in holes because I have been wounded by absence. Marked by this trauma. I have a
choice: either be ruled by circumstance or be circumstance and tap the energy of predicament.’7
This interest in questioning the notion of lack is most notable in the artist’s wicked series of black-and-white drawings. His
corpus of absurdist aphorisms as minimalist drawings contingent upon whiteness and blackness are inane, yet potent,
opaque entities – declarations, negations, mutually generated and constitutive, inexorably bound, erratically referential.
These caustic dictums include ‘White People Are the Measurement of Things Brown’, ‘White People Are A Disaster That Has
Already Happened,’ ‘White People are Not White People’, ‘White People Are What White People Lack.’ Race is critiqued
through processes of degradation and irony. Whiteness is flattened out and forced into submission. Pope. L usurps its
conditions as primary, symbolic, hegemonic. These drawings are the blueprints for Pope. L’s entire practice. The work,
White People Are Negotiable (2004), precisely points to Pope L’s interrogation of race – its ambivalence and indeterminacy.
Race is interrogated by the artist as a construction, representation, experience and encounter. A critical drawing, a study
for Black Drawings for an exhibition at The Project, Los Angeles, in 2002 illustrates Pope. L’s structuring of race as a series
of non-hierarchical equivalencies – ‘Black People are White People on Fire’. Propositions such as ‘Black People are the End
of Things Black’, ‘Black People Are the Future’ and ‘White People Are My Father’ are born out of the same grid. These
seditious assertions are cyclical, paradoxical, generative, elusive and contingent. As Pope. L so aptly avows, ‘I am after the
mixed signal’.8
1. William Pope. L as quoted in “Working and William“ The Friendliest Black Artist
in America, exhibition catalogue, Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College
of Art and MIT Press, 2002, p. 58.
2. Pope. L in Lowery Stoke Sims, “Interview with William Pope. L,” p. 67.
3. Kristine Stiles, “Thunderbird Immolation: Burning Racism,” p. 38.
4. Pope. L as cited in Mark Bessire ‘The Friendliest Black Artist in America,” p. 28.
Pope. L’s studies in decay and difference extend to other grocery items including
Pop Tart Frieze (1998) wherein racist caricatures are served up with rotting
breakfast, perhaps an homage to Oldenburg’s 1966 entropic experiment in the
form of a moldy Jello self-portrait.
5. Ibid., p. 84.
6. Ibid., p. 86.
7. William Pope. L, ‘Hole Theory Parts Four and Five’, January 2002, as cited in The
Friendliest Black Artist in America, pp. 72-83.
8. William Pope L, quoted in Mark H.C.Bessire, The Friendliest Black Artist in
America, p. 22.
Time Out
January 15 - 22, 2004

william pope.l - Catherine Bastide

Transcription

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