The art of public disturbance: William Pope.L consistently provokes visceral responses from viewers, especially with his street performances. A traveling survey of his work titled "eRacism" arrives this month in Portland, Ore - Critical Essay

Art in America, May, 2003 by Barbara Pollack

More than a decade after artists such as Lorna Simpson, Fred Wilson and Glenn Ligon gained institutional support for inserting race into the "identity politics" discourse, William Pope.L, a contemporary of these artists by age but a provocateur more stylistically akin to a younger generation of African-American artists, is finally receiving his turn in the spotlight. In the past two years, Pope.L's works have been featured in solo shows at The Project (New York and Los Angeles) and at the 2002 Whitney Biennial. His first museum-scale retrospective, "eRacism," is traveling to venues throughout the United States, accompanied by a comprehensive monograph, William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, published by MIT Press with essays by Lowery Stokes Sims, Kristine Stiles, Martha Wilson and C. Carr, as well as two of the show's organizers, Stuart Horodner of the Portland [Ore.] Institute of Contemporary Art and Mark H.C. Bessire of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art (ICA at MECA), who also served as editor.

Prior to this recent swell of attention, Pope.L, 47, had operated very much as a self-designated outsider, staging some of his most important performances on city streets and distributing Conceptual art works, ironic messages ("I Am Still Black") on postcards, through the U.S. mail. Combining the public intervention tactics of Adrian Piper with the poetics of Amiri Baraka, Pope.L confused and challenged audiences--black and white--in ways that won him support from some but alienated others. Even when he worked within conventional art venues, either alternative spaces or most notably at the Horodner Romley Gallery in New York in the early 1990s, he used the sites to defy marketability, either by presenting his own body as an abject figure--a drunken black Santa Claus or a monstrous victim caught in a torture device--or by creating installations from such unconventional, unstable materials as mayonnaise, peanut butter and Pop-Tarts.

In an art world with room for Matthew Barney and Paul McCarthy, such strategies would not seem to automatically exclude an artist from serious consideration, but Pope.L has not followed a straight path to success. Indeed, his resume is as filled with contradictions as his personal history. His impeccable academic credentials--Pope.L is a professor of rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine--has not erased a childhood shuttled between relatives in Newark and Harlem, filling in for his nearly absent mother, a drug addict, and his entirely absent father. (He arrived at the odd spelling of his name by appending the first initial of his mother's maiden name, Lancaster, to his father's surname.) As an undergraduate at Montclair State College (which he attended after a scholarship to Pratt Institute fell through), Pope.L was encouraged to apply to the Whitney Independent Study Program, which he attended in 1978, spending the year in his studio dissecting Wittgenstein instead of making art. Three years later, he received his MFA from Rutgers University, where he studied with Fluxus artist Geoff Hendricks. Upon graduation, Pope.L pursued performance art, working for several years with Mabou Mines and creating solo works in alternative spaces, such as P.S. 122 and Franklin Furnace.

Throughout his career, Pope.L received continuous foundation support (including four fellowships to Yaddo), yet his work has often been overlooked for such landmark shows as "Black Male" at the Whitney in 1994 and other important surveys of contemporary African-American art. And while he has never been quite controversial enough to be elevated to a household name, like Andres Serrano or Karen Finley, he has had his own skirmishes in the culture wars. Most recently, in 2001, the acting-chairman of the NEA, Robert Martin, rescinded support for "eRacism," despite the fact that a panel had recommended the show receive a $20,000 grant. Luckily, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts stepped in with a grant of its own.

The reasons for this range of reactions become abundantly clear in "eRacism." For one thing, Pope.L's output seems boundless--encompassing theater, performance art, installation, sculpture, drawing, video, text and, most recently, digital projects. His targets seem equally diverse, as he offers up critiques of African-American stereotypes, consumer culture, high art and Martin Luther King, Jr., often within a single work. All of this might still be readily digestible if Pope.L resorted to straightforward political-art or Conceptual-art practices. Eschewing both, he blends poetry with Dada, politics with scatology, continually confronting viewers with difficult questions and hard-to-categorize art.

For two decades, performance art has been central to Pope.L's practice. In "eRacism" viewers can see a selection of videotaped performances dating back to 1991, presented as a two-hour film in a movie-theater setting. The videos cannot fully convey the visceral experience of seeing Pope.L perform live, but they do convey the evolution of his persona as "the friendliest black artist in America," a disguise that acknowledges that the black male body will likely always be interpreted as simultaneously threatening and ineffectual.