William Pope.L: the Friendliest Black Artist in America - Book Review

edited by Mark H.C. Bessire MIT Press, September 2002, $24.95, ISBN 0-262-02533-7

He sat on the sidewalk, on an American flag, methodically eating the pages of The Wall Street Journal. He walked through Harlem "wearing" a long, white cardboard tube that projected like a phallus from his crotch, from which an egg rolled out and fell to the ground with a messy splat. Dressed in a skirt made of dollar bills, he "chained" himself to the door of a bank's ATM compartment with an eight-foot length of sausages. And, perhaps most famously and unsettlingly, he crawled through New York's Tompkins Square Park wearing a suit and clutching a flowerpot, while a white cameraman, whom he had hired, recorded each inch and minute of his excruciating progress.

Over the years, William Pope.L, the 47-year-old, New York-born creator of these confrontational action-art performances, has brought as much humor to his work as a certain in-your-face audacity. Today, he teaches theater and rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. As the essays in this volume that documents the career of Pope.L (that's his real name), which accompanies a retrospective exhibition of his work, make clear, race has always been the subject of his art unmistakably and unabashedly.

When a fellow black man, who witnessed Pope.L's 1991 Tompkins Square Park crawl, became angry and demanded that he stop ("You make me look like a jerk!" he said), the artist knew that his deeply symbolic, intentionally provocative work had succeeded. "Blackness is limited not by race but [by] our courage to imagine it differently." Pope.L has dared to suggest to audiences of all colors and backgrounds.

That he uses his own body as the raw material of his art only makes his message and the response it prompts more reflexive, even visceral; performance artist and curator Martha Wilson writes that Pope.L "rubs our noses" in the fact that middle-class security is not so secure after all and that he "makes us look, feel and smell troubled culture."

As Pope.L's work and this illuminating book about it show, the art of a provocateur can be as serious as it is outrageous. Ultimately, such art's nuances reflected in our mixed emotions and conflicted thoughts about it are its real substance, just as its apparent tomfoolery is the crafty camouflage of a sensitive humanist.

--Edward M. Gomez writes for Raw Vision and The New York Times.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Cox, Matthews & Associates
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group