On a recent
Saturday in October, in Portland Maine, Laura Bush showed up for
a glamorous red ribbon cutting ceremony at the Portland Museum of
Art. Meanwhile across town, some thirty art students from the Maine
College for the Arts were busy crawling 1/3 of a mile from a cemetery
to a neglected historic landmark - an 1828 church building associated
with the Underground Railroad - in a canny art stunt designed by
famous performance artist William Pope.L.
Bush was
in town with her husband to lend support to the local Republican
Senator in a re-election bid. The art students were in town to dramatize
the continuing inequities of race and power in America.
One might
wonder if the wife of the President was aware that while the city
of Portland had rolled out the red carpet for her to walk across,
the children of America were crawling on hot brick and cracked pavement?
The synchronicity
of the two events was coincidental, but not all that surprising
to the uncanny career of William Pope.L who has, since 1978, enacted
more than forty performances of what he calls his "Crawl"
pieces, physically and psychologically demanding events that require
the artist to crawl on his hands and knees along public sidewalks
until the point of exhaustion.
His acts
of prostration metaphorically challenge the notion that living on
the street is a passive act of surrender and draw on traditions
in art history of radical public interventions that convey a desire
for social change.
Best known
perhaps is the artist's Manhattan crawl. Wearing a capeless Superman
suit, Pope.L is engaged in a marathon twenty-two-mile trek that
began at the Statue of Liberty and before it ends will traverse
the length of Manhattan via Broadway, and concludes in the Bronx.
Conducted in segments, it will take the artist approximately five
years to complete.
The Village
Voice calls Pope.L's crawl, "Great White Way "A perfect
metaphor for post-9-11 New York."
In Portland
this October, Pope.L was a little less in the limelight, but with
the appearance of Bush simultaneously, there was unusual press attention
to his effort to bring attention to his assertion that an old and
run down 1828 Abyssinian Church, said by scholars to be the site
of a stop in the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad, should receive
the same kind of restoration attention that more "mainstream"
historic sites have received in other parts of that northern city.
The Casco Bay Weekly put it succinctly "His Portland crawl
will connect the Eastern Cemetery on Congress Street with the not-quite-restored
Abyssinian Church on Newbury Street," wrote the paper. "The
racial significance of this neglect is self-evident, glaring when
compared to Portland's other structures of similar historical significance,"
such as the Longfellow House or a massive lighthouse-like structure
just a few blocks away on Congress Street, known as the Portland
Observatory.
In fact when we searched the town that Sunday morning for directions
to the church, no one - not police, not firefighters, not even the
deli owners across the street from the starting point of the crawl
- knew the location of the Abyssinian Church, or the fact that there
was to be an event that day to highlight it. And during the day's
crawl, while students scuffed their elbows and knees and their friends
cheered them on, other bystanders made disparaging comments about
"those kids protesting Iraq again."
However for
those who were aware of the issue, the performance was a moving,
if complex, experience.
Why? Like other examples of Pope.L's performance work, the Crawl
combines shock, audience engagement, social commentary and a healthy
dose of disarming humor and self-effacement to ameliorate the message.
In a concurrent show at the local college of art's museum - also
on Congress Street - was the artist's exhibition entitled eRacism.
This is a show which gained notoriety because of the NEA's denial
of funding after initial approval, though the Andy Warhol Foundation
and Rockefeller Foundation subsequently offered up funding. eRacism
is the first comprehensive look at the artist's critical performance,
installation, and object-focused art, using unconventional materials
such as peanut butter, mayonnaise, and Pop-tarts to provoke a closer
examination of the "stuff" of everyday life and raise
questions about art as a commodity.
eRacism can
be seen Jan. 10-Feb 22, 2003 at Diverseworks Artspace, Houston,
TX; and May 7-July 28, 2003, Portland Institute for Contemporary
art, Portland Oregon. It returns to the Metropolitan NY area in
two shows - a joint exhibition Jan 17-Feb 29, 2004 Artists Space
NY; Jan 5-Feb 6, 2004 at Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries,
Rutgers, SUNJ.
What's at
the show? Among other things, 4,400 hot dogs, 190 bottles of Wild
Irish Rose wine, 180 pounds of onions, 80 pounds of flour and 50
pounds of peanut butter. "Looks like the makings of a hell
of a party," said one pointedly bucolic local art critic in
Maine, "but, unfortunately, the cheap hooch and processed meat
products were destined not for bacchanalia but culture. Pope.L doesn't
have much to say and wastes a lot of food saying it. "
The Pop Tarts
are painted with characters that are supposed to evoke racist cartoons
of blacks from the 1940s. The mayonnaise jars are broken and stacked
in crates in a manner, the accompanying text revealed, "reminiscent
of reliquary idols." The hot dogs are nailed to a wall to create
what appeared to be a backwards map of the United States, intended
to convey "American self-centeredness." Peanut Butter
is used to depict the KKK giving birth to America. A plastic talking
dog's head is buried in flour piled in the middle of the floor,
drowning in "a white food product." The wine bottles have
a stuffed toy balanced on top, a message about alcoholism and childhood.
The onions are painted half black and half white with a note that
"the absurdity of the project mimics the absurdity of polarization
in American culture."
And there
is a section called "Black Drawings" and "White Drawings,"
containing 54 framed statements such as "Black People Are Bloody
Kansas In A World Without Hope Or Rubbers" and "Black
People Are Matisse's Armchair" - prominently displayed in the
window. At various times, visitors may be seen carefully copying
some of the haiku-like epithets, including some smaller scrawled
messages written in tiny hand within the frames.
Some critics
say that in eRacism and other works William Pope.L has expanded
the boundaries of performance, installation, and object focused
art citing racial conundrum as the engine which drives his work
and addressing blackness, consumerism and culturally embedded racism
with dark humor and biting critique. eRacism illustrates how Pope.L
has framed a cultural discourse on the carnivalesque and grotesque
by revealing how they can reconstruct the politics of the body and
race.
William Pope
L. is a visual, performance-theater artist and educator who makes
culture out of contradiction. He attended the Mason Gross School
at Rutgers University for his graduate work and studied with Ruth
Meleczech and Lee Breuer of Mabou Mines at Re. Cher. Chez-Studio,
in New York City. Pope L. has received many awards, residencies,
and grants- including three National Endowment Fellowships and most
recently a Fund for Artists Grant to tour his solo performance work,
eRacism, in Canada and a Maine Arts Commission Grant for his Broadway
Crawl Project (1999). He is a professor of Theater and Rhetoric
at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. In the mid 1990's when the
Arts Endowment was still directly funding individual artists, he
received one of the last NEA individual artists fellowships. He
was recently selected to participate in the prestigious Whitney
Biennial in New York in 2002.
Perhaps the
one performance which got him into the most hot water was the day
Pope.L walked around New York City wearing a huge (extendable to
14 feet) white cardboard penis, as a commentary on the pervasive
supremacy of white phalluses. It is widely speculated that this
performance was the one that caused the NEA to back out of supporting
the eRacism retrospective.
But the performance
is consistent with the tone and style of the artist. There are other
works, some of which have been particularly well documented. One
time William Pope.L created a machine to grind text and images from
contemporary African American culture into "pulp." Another
early work required the artist to stand on street corners or sit
in performance spaces doused in mayonnaise. In another, "ATM
Piece," he stood before a Chase Manhattan branch dressed only
in a skirt made of $1 bills, which passersby were free to grab.
In 1998,
"My Niagra," his first installation in Harlem's the Project
transformed the artist's body into a disturbing spectacle: splayed
out on a rack, naked except for an orange ski cap and heavy yellow
boots.
In a performance
in Pittsburgh visitors had to navigate through "In Continent,"
a site-specific piece in which the artist has covered the floors
at three different locations within the galleries - at the street
entrance, in the second-floor gallery and in a third "undisclosed
location" - with large amounts of pipe tobacco in which he
had inscribed the name of a location - Pittsburgh, Afghanistan and
a third "mystery continent."
Another time
Pope.l buried himself up to the neck in sand, putting food just
out of reach of his mouth.
Eating the
Wall Street Journal is a particularly well known work. Previous
versions of this work were done in 1992 and, most recently, at the
Mobius Artists Space in Boston, January 2000. Both versions were
street performances. "The Mobius performance consisted of me
sitting on a 'throne' of Wall Street Journals on the sidewalks in
various locations within the Boston financial district," he
notes. "While there I attempted to ingest a stack of newspaper
on which I was sitting while drinking milk (to coat my stomach and
to dilute the poisons of the paper). At spontaneous intervals during
the performance I made phone calls to the senior vice presidents
of the district office of the Wall Street Journal in Boston. I invited
each vice president to lunch with me at the particular location
of the performance. I did this work once a day for five days calling
one senior vice president a day."
William Pope.L
says he generally engages contemporary issues such as race, class,
and consumerism through irony and ambiguous levels of humor, fingerpointing,
gaining the involvement and trust of audience and then challenging
them. His performances focus public attention on people, places,
and problems that are ignored by society. He decries censorship,
commodification of the American experience, stereotyping of black
artists, and more.
"In
America, blackness is treated as very obdurate, one-dimensional,
but I was influenced by thinkers like Frantz Fanon-a sense of black
identity as something constructed and unstable," explains Pope.L.
"In painting or sculpture, blackness is a picture-it is subject
matter-but I knew if you disseminate it through different mediums,
it could be looked at as more of an idea, like the way white artists
are allowed to have ideas. "The fact is I am black and I am
influenced by historically European-based art. I am interested in
formal issues and I am interested in social issues."
One idea
that continually intrigues Pope.L is the use of physical vulnerability
to unmask the public face worn by African American men-from the
machismo of Puff Daddy to the respectability of Martin Luther King.
"The preachers in my church were the first men I saw who made
use of this," he says. "Ordinarily, they were dressed
dapper-handkerchief in their pocket, shine on their shoes. But when
it comes to Sunday, they're on their knees, crying and making a
mess of themselves. And everyone knows that the way you rate the
sermon is how much of a mess they made of themselves."
And in his
now-famous Crawl performances, Pope.L reaches into an area of emblem
best thought of as "Leveling:" By getting low to the ground
- and in examples like the Portland Crawl, where he successfully
gets audience to do the same - Pope.L makes use of the ground or
street level for the purpose of questioning our views of the world
in which we live. "The work is about leveling in order to raise
questions," Pope.L says. "A lot of the pieces that I do
are horizontal. In status-driven societies, it's all about how low
someone else is (in comparison to yourself) that determines who
you are, your identity. The leveling is about trying to get everybody
on the same playing field."
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