‘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
Lauri Firstenberg is curating Amir Zaki: Spring Through Winter and Isaac
Julien: True North at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles
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.