William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America

Pope.1 The Friendliest Black Artist in America MARK BESSIRE Black Domest ic, 1995-1995 Eating the Wall Street Journal, 2000 S oon after moving to Maine (confirmed as the whitest state in America by the latest census report), I received a holiday postcard from someone named Pope.L stamped "I am Still Black." This was followed by a non-sensical postcard image from Pope.L stamped "The Friend liest Black Artist in America." Who was this Maine artist? William Pope.L, I was to learn, has been making art for many years on the margins of the art world, quietly framing the cultural discourse on the abject, carnivalesque and grotesque by revealing how it can reconstruct the politics of the body and race. Pope.L has been expanding the boun daries of performance and installation art for twenty-five years through the manipulation of mayonnaise, digesti ng and regurgitating the Wall Street Journal and by crawling in gutters first wearing a business suit and now a Superman suit. Pope.L's voice has been resolutely heard in numerous strong and diversified bodies of work and was audible again in the 2002 Whitney Museum of Amer ican Art Biennial which commissioned a performance piece, The Great White Way (2002), for the Biennial exhibition. "Dressed in a capeless Superman suit and with an ergonomic skateboard that allows him to rest on his back while traveling forward," the Whitney press release explains that he would "trek twenty two miles, starting at the Statue of Liberty and traversi ng the entire length of Manhattan along Broadway, endi ng at the far side of the University Heights bridge in the Bronx," a few minutes from his mother's home. In providing press images for the Biennial, Pope.L, working with photographer Pope.L's explorations of the abject as well as the spectacle and carnivalesque are often discussed in relation to the work of the artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, but Pope.L's art is more securely grounded in the social, and personal biography. His ability to continue to reinvigorate art through important and diverse social and cultural issues has kept him from being classified or grouped into an art movement by critics. Member (a.k.a. "Schlong Journey") , , 996 The Great White Way: 22 miles, 5 years, 1 street (Traing Crawl) 2002. Luc Demurs and Maine College of Art student Sarah Schuster, was nearly arrested on a bridge in Lewiston, Maine as someone deemed him, a black man in the guise of an American hero, a threat during a time of national crisis. The viscerality of Pope.L's work posits a politics of collision among racial rigidities to reveal the radical fluidity behind bogus racial categories. More importantly , he casts racial problematic as the engine which drives his work, believing that our lacks are a form of knowledge and power. Lowery Sims, Director of the Studio Museum, suggests William Pope.L "may well be the poet laureate of male performance artists." Viewing "his work as a hybridization, confronting the specter of the black male as menace," Sims also admires his ability "to create from his own existence as an African American male and subject the specifics to an intellect and wit worthy of Francois Rabelais, Amos Tutola, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Malcom X." 1 In a Bomb magazine profile on Pope.L, Martha Wilson, the performance artist and founding Director of Franklin Furnace, described the artist as a "wordsmith" and "sculptor" whom she admires for his "irreverence as a visual artist" and "arsenal of materials, including peanut butter, manure, cornflakes and rat poison, [which] goes way beyond the standard palette."2 This unique palette arose from a search while in graduate school for an alternative to the social validity and commodity orientation of painting and contined throughout his studies with the Fluxus performance artist Geoffrey Hendricks in the late 1970's at the Mason Gross School, Rutgers University. In describing earlier crawls, which have informed the Biennial's The Great White Way (2002), Wilson writes in the exhibition catalog William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America published by ICA at Maine College of Art and MIT Press (2002) that...