On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

In the Discomfort Zone

• • • In the Discomfort Zone Iwas looking for a man in a hula skirt. And that wasn't even the good part. He'd made the skirt from dollar bills and planned to chain himself to the door of a Chase 24-Hour Banking Center across the street from Grand Central Station. It was high noon, and soon enough a young cop would be asking the question of the hour: "Is this some kind of protest?" Artist William Pope.L had conceived of ATM Piece as "an attempt to bring fresh discomfort to an age-old problem," the relationship between haves and have-nots. He planned to position himself as street people often do, opening the door for those entering to use a cash machine . But instead of panhandling, he would tear the dollar bills from his skirt and give them away. Pope.L figured the skirt was good for about 80 bucks, so he'd have a friend nearby with bail money. "In the street, you can't control your collaborators," Pope.L says, and often his collaborators are cops. Pope.L. is an African-American artist, and his street activities place him at heightened risk. Racism denies people their eccentricities. The so-called Other is always a symbol, never an individual free to become anything. But Pope.L's work challenges what everyone-of every color-expects of him as a black man. For example, he made a sculpture a couple of years ago called Rebuilding the Monument-manure bags bearing portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This piece came out of the ongoing discussion in the black community about King's legacy and Pope.L's wish to question this patriarchal figure. "Can we accept the idea that the richest soil has been tainted-or maybe enriched-by the negative? We don't want to deal with that when we talk about Martin Luther King. His relationship to women, for example." In the Discomfort Zone 313 In daring to do work that does not exactly celebrate blackness, Pope.L brings the horror of racism tO,the surface all the more powerfully . I thought about this while watching an earlier performance on tape. In Crawl Tompkins, Pope.L wiggled down 7th Street (along Tompkins Square) on his belly, holding a potted flower, dressed in a good black suit, determined to make it across town. A videographer walked alongside him, documenting the work. Pope.L got about two-thirds of a block before picking up an outraged collaborator. A black man from the neighborhood ran up to ask Pope.L if he was alright, then confront the cameraman, who was unseen but obviously white. Why was he representing black people like this? Lying in the street!? Holding a flowerpot!? Pope.L had to intervene, explaining that he'd hired the cameraman, and "It's an art project." He didn't want to say more till he'd finished-that Crawl was about the tradition of struggle for African Americans, about homelessness and the ways we train our eyes not to see those bodies on the street. He's done many Crawls. It's one of his signature pieces, and he offered to sit down later with the anguished spectator to explain. "No!" the man cried. "You're going to explain it to me now!" The irony is that the angry man got what the piece was about. And he hated it. In tears one minute, threatening to break the camera the next, he cried, "1 wear a suit just like that to work!" And just before rushing off to find a policeman, he got to the heart of what really distressed him: "You make me look like a jerk!" White artist Chris Burden once crawled through broken glass, but he had the privilege of being identified as either artist or lunatic, not the representative of all white people. Stopped dead after a block, Crawl Tompkins had quickly exposed racial dynamics and the experience proved to be unusually rich in discomfort for everyone. There was the issue of black self-image that so upset the spectator. There was white guilt, as the hapless white cameraman kept muttering, "I'm sorry." And there was the fact that everyone assumed at first that the cameraman was in charge. Because he held the camera? Because he was white? This particular Crawl was part of a larger enterprise Pope.L undertook during the summer of 1991. He called it How Much Is That Nigger...