William Pope.L: the Friendliest Black Artist in America[c]

Edited by Mark H.C. Bessire

MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002. 240 pp., 125 color illustnztions, chronology. $24.95 handcover.

William Pope.L's practice is one that trades in transgression, ambivalence, humor, and ambiguity. Characterized by Mark H.C. Bessire as a negotiation of "the history of America's relationship to difference" (p. 22), it underscores the constructed nature of social hierarchies based on race in a fashion that questions their very coherency, In that spirit William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America[c], the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, not only chronicles the artist's career of more than twenty-five years but also examines his exegesis on American culture and race. Pope.L's oeuvre is vast, including painting, drawing, street performance (his best known being his crawls through New York and other cities), and installations made up of everything from mayonnaise and large-scale wall texts to sacks of fertilizer bearing the likeness of Martin Luther King, Jr. Through this body of work Pope.L points not to discrete constructions of black subjectivity but rather to the effects of racism, politicizing the racialized characterizations of African Americans, particularly males, in the social landscape.

The book includes essays by Bessire, Geoffrey Hendricks, Kristine Stiles, Martha Wilson, C. Carr, and Stuart Horodner; a dialogue between William Pope.L and Lowry Stokes Sims; and writings by the artist himself. While at times a bit redundant, the essays point to the complex nature of Pope.L's practice in different ways and from different view-points. For the most part, the authors rely heavily on the artist's own words to support their own. Bessire's essay, "The Friendliest Artist in America," stands as a thorough introduction to Pope.L, charting his trajectory and contextualizing his oeuvre within broader contemporary visual practice and the social milieu in which he works. Bessire elucidates the role of both blackness and whiteness in that oeuvre, and in this framework, race is depicted not as people but as a system of categorization. It is this system--one of "laws, representations, institutions, psychologies, and behaviors" (p. 22)--that serves as fodder for Pope.L's art.

Bessire's essay oscillates between Pope.L's work and his life experiences. Such movement assists the reader in grasping the complicated ways that race not only categorizes but also functions to render whiteness invisible. In Bessire's mind the artist's "confrontations with whiteness" (p. 25) are critical, for they position race in relative terms. That relativism--and the power such relativism engenders in terms of the very attributes we associate with white and black in the United States--is fundamental to Pope.L's boody of work. Bessire then combines such "confrontations" with an analysis of the work itself. In one important instance, he looks at the artist's relationship to the painter Robert Ryman. Pope.L first saw Ryman's monochromatic white paintings in the early 1970s, and they changed his understanding of whiteness; moreover, they changed his understanding of painting as a medium. As Bessire insightfully notes, Pope.L took Ryman's work and transposed it into his explorations of race. Suddenly those paintings, in his hands, became "dispersed, spoiled, and reconfigured in the guise of mayonnaise, flour, and milk" (p. 25). Such a transposition of medium shows how white works as not only a "raceless" category but also a formal and conceptual strategy in Pope.L's painting. In that sense, the artist turns whiteness against itself, using it formally in order to deconstruct the myths of its invisibility. However, if whiteness is both strategy and category, so too is blackness.

As Bessire shows, Pope.Us materials--mayonnaise, peanut butter, newsprint, paint, dolls, his own body--are used to unhinge and destabilize ingrained racial categories. In his performance How Much Is That Nigger in the Window (1990-91), the artist transformed his body into an object by spreading mayonnaise all over it. The intent was to become white. However, as the mayonnaise oxidized on his body, it lost its color: Pope.L., while white for a moment, became black (and very shiny). With such materials Pope.L's work resides in consumption, decay, and abjection, all of which serve as metaphors for the ways Americans understand (and literally consume) race and for the marginalization that occurs with racism. Class and capitalist exploitation are also vital to understanding his art. Much of it places race in a conversation with both: bodies are not just raced but classed and commodified. Ultimately, Bessire's essay gives an expansive view of Pope.L's practice, underscoring a shift in the ways in which blackness (and race more generally) figures into the work of an African American artist. He shows that Pope.L is not constructing a neat "black" identity; he is using blackness, and race more generally, as tools for a counternarrative on social and economic marginalization.