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

This stance is highly effective, especially in a work like ATM Piece (1997), for which the artist, clothed only in a skirt made of dollar bills, "chained" himself with some sausage links to the door of a Chase Manhattan bank in New York City. Gently encouraging pedestrians to strip away the money, a reversal of the typical panhandler who stands outside banks begging for change, Pope.L was nonetheless arrested. (He was eventually released, when the police could not determine what crime had been committed.) Pope.L frequently assumes the guise of a crazy street person for his performances, as in Member (a.k.a. Schlong Journey), 1996, when he walked the length of 125th Street in Harlem with a six-foot-long cone-shaped codpiece strapped to his waist. With a stuffed toy bunny riding on the tip, the cone was so long that it was held up in front by a kind of pedastal on wheels. As revealed by the videotape, people on the busy shopping street either stepped out of the way of this comical and grotesque figure or completely ignored him.

In other contexts, the work has provoked a strong response. In fact, Member is the performance by Pope.L that was singled out by rightwing politicians during the NEA refunding debate in 1996, and which possibly led to the withdrawal of NEA support from "eRacism." Other Pope.L works, particularly the "crawls," often drive bystanders crazy. The crawls, which have become Pope.L's signature works, are endurance performances in which the artist drags himself across city streets, belly to the ground, military training style. (The artist will do a public crawl, as well as a performance titled eRacism, at each of the current show's venues.) An epic crawl-in-progress titled The Great White Way, will stretch 22 miles, from the Statue of Liberty up Broadway, and take over five years to complete. (It's done intermittently, a few blocks at a time.) For The Great White Way, Pope.L dresses in a Superman costume. In a video of the piece that was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, both black and white pedestrians in post-9/11 New York City are visibly disturbed by the image of the great American superhero prostrated on the devastated streets of lower Manhattan.

In most crawls, Pope.L wears an ordinary business suit, which can be equally provocative, as is shown in video footage of Tompkins Square Crawl (1991). One neighborhood resident is appalled that Pope.L willingly denigrates himself in this fashion. At first, the agitated man, who is black, assumes that the white cameraman, whom Pope.L has hired, is the artist and accuses him of racism. Then, when he discovers that Pope.L is in control, he breaks into a "you are a disgrace to your race" tirade, finally finding a policeman to put an end to the performance.

It's not that Pope.L is the first artist, or even first African-American, to test such strategies. David Hammons, in addition to Piper, has similarly made use of "the street." However, Pope.L's work is far more sexual in theme than Hammons's or Piper's. In some ways, he is more akin to performance artist Karen Finley, using his performative maleness to invoke stereotypes that audiences prefer to forget. "This is a Painting of Martin Luther King's Penis from Inside my Father's Vagina" runs a phrase that Pope.L has put on widely distributed posters and postcards. Purposefully using a Dada-like sentence structure and public-art strategies to raise the disturbing specter of King as simultaneously sexual and emasculating, Pope.L knows that he risks accusations of"airing dirty linen in public," or as the man in Tompkins Square put it, "denigrating his race." Alternatively, in his "Black Drawings," framed text-based works of Magic Marker and Wite-Out handwritten on 8-by-l 1-inch sheets of paper, he uses equally inchoate language--"Black People Are the Christmas Tree in the Driveway," for example--to register this debate as an internalized stream-of-consciousness. In both contexts, however, it's important to note that Pope.L insistently addresses black and white audiences alike, resisting the impulse to use his podium to either ennoble the image of the black male figure or to direct guilt at everyone else. "I am white culture," he proclaims in one of his most moving performances, A Negro Sleeps Beneath the Susquehanna (1997), in which he covers his naked body in white flour, straps a full-length mirror to his back and enters the river, both reflecting the Pennsylvania landscape and disappearing into it. Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Pope. L understands that in a culture where compliance necessitates erasure of identity, all forms of visibility will be interpreted as violence.