William Pope L.

William Pope L. is an artist who works in more than one discipline and with a variety of materials. He is best known for his series of more than 40 'crawls' started in the 70s: performance-based pieces in which he inched along on busy city streets in order to draw attention to the plight of those members of society who are least empowered. The photograph above is one of Pope L. doing a crawl through the Bowery dressed in a suit.From a Bomb Magazine Interview with Martha Wilson:

'I did that street work over a period of several weeks, and when I first began I believed in the image, that the conjunction of a black man and his suit, crawling down the Bowery could produce not just
contradiction, but a feeling that would somehow transcend itself. My take on homelessness in New York was that we’d gotten too used to seeing these people on the streets. I hadn’t gotten used to it, but it seemed as if people were devising strategies in order not to see the homeless. We’d gotten used to people begging, and I was wondering, how can I renew this conflict? I don’t want to get used to seeing this. I wanted people to have this reminder.'



Another performance, called The Great White Way, featured Pope L. crawling for the 22 miles that make up Broadway in NYC. It took five years to complete. I'm not sure where rests and vacations and other work fit into this timeline. The artist wore a Superman outfit and had a skateboard strapped to his back. This is from his C.V. on the Foundation for Contemporary Arts site, Pope L. states:

'My work is not glamorous yet it is ambitious in its feeling. It seeks a visceral, bodily, material "explanation" for human desire writ large in human action....Like the African shaman who chews his pepper seeds and spits seven times into the air, I believe art re-ritualizes the everyday to reveal something fresh about our lives. This revelation is a vitality and it is a power to change the world.'

In regards to changing the world - or his ability to do so - he seems to question it as well -the arrogance of thinking one could or whether one would know really how to control the world. From the Bomb interview again with Martha Wilson:

"MW Is the purpose of your work to change the world in some tiny way?

WPL That seems arrogant to me, somehow.

MW Well, no, the opposite would be self-indulgence, which would be much worse than the arrogance of trying to change the world in some small way.

WPL Hmmm… You think you know what that change should be…

MW Ah. That would be arrogance. To believe that you have any control, whatsoever, that anybody would listen, that anybody will actually do anything differently, that the media, the social structures… would change."

I admire him for confronting these issues - the world being changeable by his art or not. I think it is more than self indulgence. I mean maybe he has to do it for himself - so what! Most artists have to make art for themselves. That is how they deal with the world - how they communicate. I wonder if there has to be a hope to make his work though...if there is a certain amount of hope he has to have to continue.

Probably because I am one, I do find his speaking of white liberals to be uncomfortable. It is funny because this same uncomfortableness that I felt in reading his quote is exactly the uncomfortableness he is speaking of that leads white liberals and blacks to be unable to effectively talk about race. Again from Bomb:
"WPL In this country, there’s a history of black people being constructed as valueless or threatening or nothing. If you hold up a mirror to certain white liberals, and you say. “Hey you know, you’re right! You’ve got a point. Black people are pieces of shit,” they’d get nervous. Me, I’ve always rejected whites when they spoke about blacks, as if what they had to say had no credibility. But then I thought, What if I reversed it? What if I explored what whites think about black folks as a kind of truth. Especially liberal whites. There’s a whole nest of vipers and ambivalence there… It’s sad. I don’t speak about blackness with most of my white friends. We very rarely talk about race, and if we do it gets very uncomfortable…

MW Even though you collaborate with Jim Calder, who is white, you don’t actually spend much time discussing race as a subject?

WPL We have discussed it. White people don’t seem to think about being white or ‘raced’. They don’t have to think about it. That’s just my take, from what I’ve observed. When you get into a discussion with someone white about race, either one or two things happen: It either peters out and there’s nothing to say: or there’s everything to say and you say nothing. It seems there isn’t a common ground where you can take a position and maybe have some back and forth, yeah, and maybe it gets a little fractious. So what!? But at the same time, perhaps you get to share your concept of the world in terms of race. Basically I don’t think that conversation happens very much. At least not productively."

I think the uncomfortableness is guilt. I think white liberals do have a guilt thing that conservatives don't have. Guilt can easily lead to uncomfortableness on the subject of race. I do agree with him that white people don't think about being white as a 'race.' That is where the idea of the Other comes in.



With Pope L.'s work, I am interested in his use of alternative 'charged' materials such as mayonnaise and peanut butter. (I can't find a direct reference to the Mayo jars image above; I don't know what piece that is from. The second photo is the cover of his book, "William Pope L. The Friendliest Black Artist in America".) Pope L. says that mayonnaise is a kind of makeup and he points out that as it dries and is out of jar, the more transparent it becomes. That is interesting. In the Bomb article (obviously the best interview /writing with him I could find online since I'm using it so much) he says that mayo is 'bogus whiteness.' I find it particularly interesting that his material choices come from his childhood. They were cheap foods from his childhood. Being a food product which will deteriorate over time - they change in texture and in the way they look. And then there is the smell. Visceral. In the Bomb article, he speaks further on race associated with these materials:
"Mayonnaise gave me a quirky material means to deal with issues black people claim they don’t value very much, e.g. whiteness. Black folks’ political and historical circumstances are at odds with whiteness, whether we want them to be or not. There are societal limitations to how much one can reconstruct one’s conditions. We are born into whiteness. On the surface, it seems wholly to construct us, and the degree to which we may counter-construct sometimes seems very limited. But, I believe we can be very imaginative with limitations. And I am lucky that today I can hold that point of view… Mayonnaise was a very useful and fresh way for me to get out of this dead-end: whiteness constructs blackness. Mayo and peanut butter allow me to think about race in a more playful, strange, and open-ended way. For example, the idea that there’s a pure good blackness or a pure bad whiteness is untenable for me. I use contradiction to critique and simultaneously celebrate."



Another favorite part of Pope L.'s work is his views on contradiction. I don't know enough about his work - and have never seen it in person - to see the contradiction in his work aside from pairing a black man in a suit in his Bowery crawl piece. But that awesome Bomb magazine interview has some good tidbits on this subject I'd like to include anyway:

"In my family, there was this tendency for things to fall apart. The conflict was in the desire to keep things together. The driving force in my work is recognizing those two tendencies and seeing them as ways to make things happen, i.e. how to produce a world or object with these types of tensions.....The reason for the contradiction is that I’m suspicious of things that make sense. Maybe I’m afraid of it. False security. Whereas contradiction does make sense to me. When I was able to accept that something could be true, and not true. I felt at home. This feeling felt threatening yet familiar. For example, one of the hardest paradigms is that your family can hurt you and love you at the same time. How can that be possible? I believe if you do not accept that this can be the case, then you have to reject your family. Now, one doesn’t have to be with one’s family. But I have decided to be with them, to live my life with them. It was important for me to come to grips with the fact that I could love them and at the same time, not like them very much. This may sound simplistic, and overly autobiographical, but being able to accept that contradiction at this level has been a guiding principle for me; it’s not an answer, it’s a positioning that’s always unstable.”

Regarding the two images above:
The image on the left, Aquarium, is a fish tank filled with red water and inks. Plaster models of Le Corbusier's Carpenter building are dunked in the tank and marked by the experience to create a set of 'Monoprints." This piece was in a show at Samson in Boston. The second image is one in which I can't find any information on but I like it so much that I kept it here. It seems to have the same elements as Aquarium in that it is about white and color in a color context but is made from a conceptual place of critiquing issues of race in our society.