Pope.L’s Pleasing Refusal to Be Interpreted
We’re familiar with the idea that art is a sublimated form of madness, but the artist William Pope.L liked to hint it was the other way around. His major works include “ATM Piece” (1997), in which he attached himself to the door of a Chase bank with a chain of sausage links while wearing only Timberland boots and a skirt made of dollar bills, and “Eating the Wall Street Journal” (2000), which involved him sitting on a raised toilet, eating the newspaper for multiple hours a day, for multiple days, with a garnish of ketchup and milk. Commentary on his work often describes it as a critique of race or capitalism but gingerly avoids the more superficial observation that these behaviors have a resemblance to certain presentations of psychosis. Seeing Pope.L in the late seventies in his “Crawl” series, wearing a wool pin-striped suit, commuting on his hands and knees through the streets of Manhattan, most pedestrians likely didn’t think, This is art, or This is social criticism, or This is an argument against bipedalism. They probably thought he’d lost his mind.
But was the performance deranged or were the circumstances? With city blocks burned to the ground, a shrinkage of affordable housing, and a spike in homelessness, the New York of the late seventies was a city in distress. Pope.L saw many of his closest relations—including his aunt, his brother, and his father—reduced to living on the street. “When you have that many people in your family suffering from this thing, maybe you think it will happen to you. Like a disease,” he said. In 1978, the year Pope.L started his “Crawl” performances, Ed Koch was sworn in as mayor, heralding an era of fiscal austerity. The slashing of public programs coincided with a rise in public performance art—Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “Touch Sanitation” (1979-80), Christy Rupp’s “Rat Patrol” (1979), Jenny Holzer’s “Inflammatory Essays” (1979-82)—but Pope.L struck a nerve. In a photograph from one of his crawls, in Times Square, a police officer reaches down and tries to get him to stand up. The officer, whose silver-and-gold watch flashes in the light, doesn’t seem intent on helping Pope.L. He looks eager to protect other people from the sight of him.
A new exhibition at the Drawing Center, “Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L,” shows how the artist extended his practice of principled unreason—or what his grandmother once described lovingly as his tendency for “foolishness” and “devilment”—into objects of two and three dimensions. There are many ways for an artist to double as a social critic; Pope.L’s preferred mode was absurd jokes with elusive punch lines. Across more than fifty years of art-making, before his death, in 2023, he worked in familiar forms—drawing, painting, sculpture, video—but also made ample use of peanut butter, mayonnaise, hot dogs, ice cream, Spam, and Pop-Tarts. He studied with the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks at Rutgers, and because of that lineage he’s often placed in the traditions of conceptual and performance art. But, if you look at the actual data on offer at the Drawing Center, you’ll see that Pope.L’s graphic work has a deep filiation with the art brut of Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet, who in nineteen-forties France collected graffiti, the work of children, and the art of psychiatric patients, wanted an art that was crude and “raw,” untarnished by culture. The less skilled or tutored the style appeared, the better.
In Pope.L’s “Harriet Tubman Spins the Universe” (1998-2017), he puts the abolitionist on a plank of Sheetrock in the middle of a swirl of peanut butter. The piece feels like an update of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” if it were spun in a gyroscope and sprayed with acrylic paint. Tubman is all but indecipherable, roughly limned with white paint and covered by red, black, and yellow smudges and drips. The personal filaments of meaning for Pope.L here include the peanut butter itself—a cheap, calorie-dense food that was a staple of his upbringing—and the organizing force of Black women in his life, particularly his grandmother, Desma Lancaster. She is said to have shown quilts at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the nineteen-sixties, and was the first person to open Pope.L’s mind to art.
Successful artists are often excellent brand managers. They have coherent “periods” of activity, when one material or idea predominates, and provide neatly packaged interpretive frameworks for the reception (and collection) of their art. Part of what makes Pope.L so great, in my book, is that he couldn’t care less about crafting an image or a brand. His work thrives on the incoherence of his own restless curiosity.
You’ll see this across Pope.L’s corpus, but also within a given series, such as the “Skin Set” drawings, which he started in the nineties. Each drawing issues a sort of proclamation—sometimes using a combo of ballpoint pens, Wite-Out, Magic Markers, and coffee stains—that seems authored by a child or a wigged-out racist: “WHITE PEOPLE ARE PRAWNS AT SUNSET”; “RED PEOPLE FUCK THE OYSTERS OF AUTHORS”; “BLACK PEOPLE ARE WHAT BLACK PEOPLE LACK”; “BLUE PEOPLE CANNOT CONCEIVE OF THEMSELVES.” “Nonsense” can mean language in which diction and syntax don’t conform to familiar patterns, but it’s also a term we use dismissively to establish that we know what sense is, to put ourselves high and dry on a plot of reason. “Oh, so you know what white people really are, if they’re not prawns?” the drawings taunt. “What are they?” Each one functions like a coarse grain of sand, eroding the certainties and stereotypes that harden racial discourse.
The most spectacular piece in the show is a multimedia environment called “Relational Painting a.k.a. If Black Is Beautiful . . .” (2003-22). There is a black tarpaulin on the wall that’s been assaulted with paint and more than a dozen lamps suspended above it, blasting the painting with light as if to interrogate it about the circumstances of its creation. Static plays through guitar amps on the ground, books are splayed open, images are tacked up on the wall, and bottles of fluid—water, Powerade, vague painterly liquids labelled “clear” or “gloss”—are scattered around. It’s a work that looks as though it’s vomited out its entire process. But unlike the preserved wreckage of, say, Francis Bacon’s studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery, in Dublin, the scene here doesn’t read as a re-creation of any real artistic procedure. There are no brushes, for instance, though there are traces of brushwork. The title is an allusion to Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics” (1998)—his famous idea being that art is a socially generative “state of encounter”—but the piece doesn’t allow for any utopian socializing, either. What’s spilled out into the gallery is Pope.L’s sendup of what we expect from artists, a carefully managed depiction of the fantasy of creative mania.
I noticed that a few visitors missed the staircase down to the basement gallery of the Drawing Center, which has not only Pope.L’s “Pop Tart Frieze” (1998)—substituting marble or plaster with mass-produced pastry—but also a video work that’s a kind of manifesto in disguise: “Egg Eating Contest (Basement version)” (1990). Wearing a tattered black tunic and combat boots, Pope.L struts across a stage like a rooster and delivers a monologue as his alter ego Mr. Poots, talking like a child prophet who’s cracked under the pressure of history. The “problem”—he clicks his tongue—“with the white man is he’s not very nice. At nap time, he takes all the blankie. And at snack time he takes all the treats. And at recess he chases all the Black people and knocks them down. . . . And when the Black people get upset he says, ‘Shut up! Shut up! I am your salvation!’ ” The artist adopts a schizoid persona, with multiple voices flowing out of him, and swerves between lucid social criticism—about the history of slavery or of higher education—and total gibberish. Like Pope.L, who called himself “the friendliest Black artist in America,” Mr. Poots can seem harmless or scatterbrained, but he has a strict agenda that loops between tragedy and farce. Next to Mr. Poots is a colossal drawing of a penis. In the middle of the performance, he marches over and pulls it down, only to reveal another drawing of a penis underneath. This one is wearing a bow tie. ♦