“Hi, I’m The Friendliest Black Artist in America,” began William Pope.L at his Influence lecture at University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gallery 400. His is the art of contraries, employing reversals where high becomes low and the lens through which we consider race becomes obtuse. Pope.L crushes boundaries. A major retrospective of his work, Eracism, spans his 25-year career. It includes sculpture, collage, painting, video, web projects and performance art. Many performances take place in the street and his body serves as the conduit. In Pope.L’s performances he places himself, as the black male signifier, in various engaging and subversive contexts. His performances utilize, deconstruct and extend notions of race.
He comes from the school of Franz Fanon, who wrote Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. The former title, in fact, brings to mind the cover of The Friendliest Black Artist in America, which shows Pope.L with a white plastic bag with holes in it over his face. Fanon described blackness as constructed and unstable, alienation from the self. He writes about anti-colonial revolutionary thought and harmful psychological constructs as well as epidermalized cultural values. Revolutionary art of the poor, according to Fanon may be the antidote to a colonialism that brought about notions of black and white. Pope.L said in his Influence lecture that poor working class folk make significant contributions and that lack is worth having. In his book, he points out that ‘lack’ is actually embedded in the word ‘black’. The title of Pope.L’s book The Friendliest Black Artist in America parodies the good Negro which conjures up the spirit of the plaintive character Steppin’ Fetchit. But there is no mistaking that beneath Pope.L’s sometimes beguiling approach is what can only be described as a radical effort to forthrightly address the pervasive social problems of racism and poverty.
As Superman, he began The Great White Way project (commissioned for the Whitney Biennial). It was a 22-mile crawl through New York City via Broadway. He initially wore a business suit, crawling in the streets of New York City. His crawl performances embodied social struggle and highlights a radical intervention. Crawling from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx, also, metaphorically suggests the migration of African-Americans from the south to the north. He moves horizontally, through urban debris, placing his personal safety at risk. He also created a piece titled Crawling to Richard Pryor’s House. It is not insignificant that he chose Pryor as his subject, given that Pryor often joked about the underclass, their despair and disillusionment with life in America. Pryor and Pope.L provided commentary on the social condition of the poor using farce, revolutionary humor and absurdity.
As Superman’s alter ego was Clark Kent so, too, does Pope.L have an alter ego. Pope.L underwent theater training at Mabou Mines Re Cher. Chez in New York City and holds an Master of Fine Arts from the Mason Gross School at Rutgers University. He has received widespread recognition and numerous grants, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital and Franklin Furnace. He is represented by The Project Gallery in New York City and a professor at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
Pope.L’s street performances create metaphors of disenfranchisement that often make him appear homeless. For example he sat on an American flag in the street in Writing/Sleeping/Living on the Flag. In a performance at a Chase Bank ATM, he acted as a reverse panhandler. Wearing a hula style skirt of $1 bills, he beckoned passersby to take the money. He was considered, as is common with the homeless, bad for business and this performance nearly landed him in jail.
He often uses processed foods associated with lack as objects of power. Curator Stuart Horodner has commented, “Pope.L has had over the years, a shopping cart full of consumer items, including underwear, hotdogs, onions, mayonnaise, Pop Tarts, crackers, pizza, and a little bottle of Milk of Magnesia.” These processed foods represent packaged ideas. Pope.L often creates compositions with such foods that decompose over time; separating into their most base ingredients. He acts as a catalyst directing the potency of the consumables to their dispersion, pungency, sprouting, molding and breaking down.
The coloring of many of Pope.L’s food selections like mayonnaise, flour and milk symbolize “manufactured whiteness.” In fact, Pope.L, seems to have attached himself to the legacy of Robert Ryman who created a series of ‘white paintings.’ Though Ryman’s paintings are considered to be in the minimalist style, they have been sold from 2 to 2.5 million dollars. The color white is intended to expose other elements in the painting like the oil, acrylic, canvas, paper or metal. Working in Ryman’s tradition, Pope.L created a black painting titled Black to the Future. He did a series of 8 1/2 by 11 paintings on graph paper that he refers to as black family and white family. One of his paintings includes text that reads “White people are expensive.” He has commented to art dealers who have said to him, “You don’t want to be a black artist,” “well I am.”
Pope.L’s work brings to mind the work of the 16th century writer Rabelais, whose work was distinguished by his imaginative, extravagant use of language, coarseness of humor and satire as tools of social commentary. Again like Pryor’s use of power and virility or the Rabelaisian emphasis on the physical, in the Schlong Journey street performance Pope.L strapped on a white codpiece and walked around Harlem.
Pope.L has also appropriated civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King as a medium. He HeHHHHHprinted on postcards the farcical, iconoclastic and seemingly blasphemous statement, “this is a painting of Martin Luther King’s penis inside my father’s vagina” for his Distributing Martin project. Another component of this project involved enacting the injection of apples with the DNA of Martin Luther King at the MIT Media Lab, packaging the ideologies of Martin Luther King and exploiting them for public consumption.
Afua: I understand you use a series of questions when you begin a project. What kind of questions do you ask yourself?
Pope.L: What is it? Why is it? How is it?
Afua: You often use yourself in your work. How would you describe that process?
Pope.L: It’s not so much a process, as it is a technique. Part of it is practical; it has to do with usually making a choice. If I’m going to suggest a strategy to someone, I should try it first.
Afua: You titled the retrospective of 25 years of your work Eracism. Why?
Pope.L: A number of reasons. First I’m interested in the history of interaction called racism. I’m also interested in the idea of racism as a kind telepathy, something that’s not so much about bodies as about how we think about things. It’s a form of dysfunctional communication. As in cyber jargon, the idea of Eracism, suggests a platform that facilitates communication about racism. Racism is not something that simply belongs to the people who do it. It’s multi-directional, it’s more 3 dimensional. I think when a parent of a child is racist to her neighbor even the child is affected. The action of one effects many others.
Afua: Lets discuss Interventionist art. How would you describe it?
Pope.L: It’s a strategy typically, though I’m not as familiar with the term. What I am after in using intervention as a strategy is similar to when a family conducts an intervention with a family member that has a chemical problem. They’re trying to bring attention to a crisis or something important that the individual needs to pay attention to. I think that’s what an interventionist artist does. The focus, however, is society as opposed to the individual. They’re trying to focus or draw attention to something that needs to be dealt with.
Afua: Your art suggests that art should focus on civic or humanitarian concerns. In what way does art have the power to change things?
Pope.L: I think that art helps draw attention to things. Art enlists people to participate in change both within and outside themselves.
Afua: You pasted suspected al-Qaida terrorists on bologna. I assume that this is a commentary on the war. Explain that.
Pope.L: It’s not a commentary on the war. It’s a commentary on how we see the enemy. Those images came from the cover of the news organ, The New York Times. It constructs al-Qaida as ghosts, as not human. If it does anything for these folks, it objectifies their otherness and reduces them to a product, something to be consumed as the enemy.
Afua: Tell me about Distributing Martin?
Pope.L: Distributing Martin is an ongoing project that has taken primarily the form of a blog. A blog is a web log, a cyber log or a journal. Basically this project tells a story of dispersal of Martin Luther King’s body. How do I do this? Several ways. I will tell you one or two; the blog itself mentions 13, 14 or more. The first is the idea of how we remember King. Lets look at one of the postcard projects. I had printed onto 8000 postcards, “This is a painting of Martin Luther King’s penis inside my father’s vagina.” I sent this card to people I randomly selected from telephone directories and, in this way, the message was scattered throughout the 50 states, plus Guam, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The phrase itself is a turning inside out of King’s body. Asking us to look at his body in a way that we’re not used to, stretching our idea of who he was in ways which we are not used to. The website is www.distributingmartin.com.
Afua: Your projects have included laying nude in the Project Gallery in New York on a bedspring, crawling urban streets, and eating and regurgitating the Wall Street Journal. What are your boundaries, where do you draw the line?
Pope.L: It’s like asking what is meaningful to you. It also asks you what would you do to preserve your own life or maybe the lives of those you love. It’s a political question, too. So I think you can also ask, what would you do to protect what is most important to you in terms of ideas or beliefs. Like, for example, would murder ever be a choice to solve a problem? Can murder ever be a choice that an artist would make? I think there might be a case somewhere for that. Didn’t Malcolm X say, “by any means necessary? …”
Afua: In The Great White Way performance you were costumed as Superman yet you were crawling and Superman is associated with flying. How do you explain the irony there?
Pope.L: It’s a simple reversal. That which is high is now low. In the Bible that which is the beginning is the end and that which is the end is the beginning.
Afua: What’s coming up?
Pope.L: I’m working on a project currently, called The Black Factory. It’s a mobile library, a gift shop on wheels. The aim is to take blackness where it is needed most. Needless to say, it will travel the United States.
[Reprinted by permission. Thanks, Afua!]
No comments:
Post a Comment