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

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.

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.

Social inequality is addressed more directly in Eating the Wall Street Journal, a work that the artist has reconfigured many times as a performance and as an installation. In 2000, he performed the work at New York's Sculpture Center, sitting on a toilet 10 feet in the air, naked and covered in talcum powder, atop a rickety tower made of two-by-fours. During this performance, Pope.L chewed pages of the stock market's favorite newspaper, slugged gulps of milk and spit out the resulting gray sludge on the audience below. This practice, which the artist links to voodoo shaman rituals, puts him in the position of expressing both the contempt of the "haves" for the "have-nots," as well the disgust that "have-nots" often feel in return. For "eRacism," the toilet-topped tower, sans the performer, is presented as an `installation with surveillance cameras tracking and monitors reporting viewers' reactions. In a post-Enron gesture, the tower itself is now covered in pages of the Wall Street Journal strewn with headlines announcing "Booms" and "New Highs" that are already over. While the multi-media component cannot possibly match the impact of Pope.L's performance, the work still conveys a reversal of hierarchy, with scraps of the newspaper's all-important stock reports now appearing as a poor man's toilet paper.

Consumption--both the primal act of digesting food and more sophisticated interactions with consumer culture--is a theme throughout Pope.L's work. For this exhibition, he has made two new works (to be recreated at each location) that use food as metaphor and material. The Beginning of the World (2002) is a mural depicting the vagina of a black woman--drawn in charcoal in the style of a pornographic cartoon rather than the realism of Courbet's Origin of the World, to which which it obviously alludes--giving birth to a miniature map of the United States. The rich brown skin of the figure's disembodied legs and genitals are "painted" in a thick impasto of peanut butter. In case anyone fails to recognize the material, empty jars of Jif are scattered on the floor beneath the mural. Across the room, Map of the World (2002), a free-standing billboard-style plywood wall, has a big hole in the middle shaped like the U.S. This empty space was originally filled with hundreds of hot dogs which, due to mold and humidity, exploded during the course of the exhibition at the ICA at MECA. Subsequent venues have solved this problem, but the lingering stench and the palpable absence in the center of the work only enhance Pope. L's points about the hollowness of consumer culture. Twice incorporating references to Jasper Johns's iconic Map, Pope.L creates an additional link, to Pop art. But if he offers hotdogs and peanut butter as examples of American kitsch, it also seems no accident that these products are staples of those who must survive on food stamps.

In the last five years, Pope.L has concentrated on installation, often appropriating the strategies of recent high-art transgressors such as Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley and especially McCarthy. Pope. L knows full well that the abject takes on a very different meaning when it collides with our stereotypes of the black underclass. Party Room (2002) was installed in Maine as a freestanding structure made from aluminum beams and wooden shelves, which viewers could walk around or enter. The shelves hold 119 bottles of Wild Irish Rose 750, with a different stuffed animal impaled on the long necks of each red-and-white whiskey bottle. From outside, the cutesy faces of Barney and Elmo stare down from the shelves, but once inside the claustrophobic room, their asses are "in your face." Much more effective than its presentation at The Project in 2001, when it was installed against a wall, Party Room reeks of alcoholism, drug addiction, single moms and welfare checks. Yet, the purpose of this work and the other works in "eRacism" is less to draw attention to an apparent "social problem" than to make us aware of the prejudices too often erased, or "eRaced," in fine-art contexts.

An early encounter with the work of Robert Ryman provoked Pope. L to think about why such paintings are never interpreted as "white." Likewise, Pope.L's work can lead viewers to think about why works by African-American artists are so often pigeonholed by skin-color--not necessarily in specious or derogatory ways (we have come too far for that!) but in a manner that insidiously infiltrates their meaning. Standing inside Party Room, I began to wonder why I had never thought of Mike Kelley as "white," or for that matter, Matthew Barney. Indeed, Pope.L had succeeded in trapping me--literally and figuratively-within a nightmare where race and class are inescapable, where even art, with its promises of universality and upward mobility, has met its limits.

"eRacism" debuted at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland [July 26-0ct. 17, 2002], before traveling to DiverseWorks Artspace, Houston [Jan. 10-Feb. 22]; the Portland [Ore] Institute for Contemporary Art [May 7-July 29]; in a split installation, Artists Space in New York and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. [Jan. 5-Feb. 6, 2004]; and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis [Apr. 23-June 27, 2004]. William Pope. L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America is published by MIT Press.

Author: Barbara Pollack is an artist who frequently writes on contemporary art.

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