Pope.L, provocative performance artist, dies at 68

Pope.L, an uncompromising conceptual and performance artist who explored themes of race, class and what he called “have-not-ness” and who was best known for crawling down Broadway in a Superman costume, died Saturday in his arms at home in Chicago. He was 68.

The death was confirmed by his gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash. No reason was given.

In 2001, when he began “The Great White Way: 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street, Broadway, New York,” as the show was eventually titled, Pope.L was already well known in the art world for a career that included every medium, from writing to photography, from painting to sculpture, and from performance to pure theatre.

His enduring themes were the intersecting difficulties and differences he experienced as a black American and son of the working class. But the impact of his work came not so much from the literal meaning of its superficial content, which could be difficult to decipher, but rather from its sheer intensity, and from his willingness to say and do things that others would not doing. Especially during performances, he used his own physical presence to shock viewers back into their own bodies.

His first “crawl,” as he called it, took place in Times Square in 1978, when he crawled down 42nd Street on his stomach in a pinstripe suit with a yellow square sewn to the back. Becoming horizontal in a brutally vertical city was a simple gesture that punctured most of the collective delusions that made that city run, simultaneously satirizing and dismissing the attitude of an upstanding citizen. It dramatized, with a powerful mix of satire and resistance, the experience of subjugation specific to black Americans. And the incongruity of a man in business attire sprawled on the sidewalk drew attention to the homeless and disenfranchised people that the average upstanding citizen usually ignored.

The same year, in SoHo, he executed “Thunderbird Immolation aka Meditation Square Piece” in front of the building where the influential dealers Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend had their galleries. Sitting cross-legged on another square yellow cloth, surrounded by a circle of loose matches, Pope.L was reminiscent of the Buddhist monks who famously set themselves on fire in Vietnam by pouring alcohol and Coca-Cola over his head , using a fortified wine that was heavily marketed. poor black neighborhoods. Provocative, ambitious and more than a little funny, it was emblematic of his practice. (If anyone came out of the building to complain, he politely packed up and left.)

“These days, people often want art to have a clear and even redemptive political message, but Pope.L gave us neither,” Scott Rothkopf, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said in an interview. “He had a brilliant ability to distill difficult, even horrifying truths about American society into strange and challenging work. It can be cruel, or funny, or both, but it’s never easy.”

In a 2019 video interview for the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired a number of his early performance works prior to “member,” his retrospective that year, Pope.L talked about creating a new crawl in Tompkins Square Park in 1991. “I had been writing a lot,” he said. “I mean, that’s all I did. I was kind of written out and I had to find a more direct way to make things happen culturally.

What he encountered, the critic C. Carr wrote in an essay included in the Book from 2002 “William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America,” was another black man, a local resident, who rushed over to ask if he was okay; to blame the white cameraman hired to document the performance; and finally to cry out in tears, “I wear a suit like that to work!”

For “The Great White Way,” which he began in 2001 and continued through 2009, Pope.L crawled the entire length of Broadway, from New York Harbor to the Bronx, in segments as short as just a few blocks , depending on what his elbows and legs were. knees could tolerate. He wore a Superman costume, without the cape; garden gloves; and a skateboard strapped to his back.

Among a wide range of other performances that curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, writing in the catalog for “member,” called “existential spectacles of absurd dread,” Pope mentioned pieces from The Wall Street Journal while sitting on a toilet; covered himself with flour, mayonnaise, milk and other white substances; rallied volunteers to hand-pull an eight-ton truck through Cleveland; and he copyrighted another biting jab as a nickname for himself: “the kindest black artist in America.” He was also a longtime instructor at Bates College in Maine and has taught in the visual arts department at the University of Chicago for the past twelve years.

The 2019 MoMA show, which presented documentation and materials related to 13 early performances, was one of three simultaneous shows. There was also one new installation at the Whitney and “Conquest,” sponsored by the Public Art Fund, a group of 140 volunteers who crawled from Greenwich Village to Union Square.

“From the very beginning,” Pope.L Interview magazine in 2013 “the crawling project was conceived as a group performance. Unfortunately for me, I was the only volunteer at the time.”

Earlier this year, Pope.L built an impossible-to-enter white room in the middle of Manhattan’s 52 Walker Gallery, as part of “Impossible failures”, an exhibition that also featured work by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. A current show, “Hopital”, through February 11 at the South London Gallery in London, focuses on a group of collapsing white towers. A toilet atop the middle tower looks back on Pope.L’s act of eating pieces of The Wall Street Journal.

“Over the course of two hours at an opening,” said his gallery owner Lucy Mitchell-Innes, “he came up with what he wanted to do, and then that was kind of turned into this incredible new piece. It did what he always does: make it relevant for today. It became a metaphor for collapsing social structures: the collapsing economy, the collapsing international politics, the collapse of the rich world and the poor world. You thought about all those things when you looked at it.

Pope.L was born William Pope on June 28, 1955 in Newark to Lucille Lancaster and William Pope. He spent part of what he remembered as an unstable childhood in nearby Keyport, and part of it in the East Village with his grandmother Desmonda Lancaster, an artist who showed quilt pieces at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the 1960s.

He is survived by his partner, Mami Takahashi; a younger brother, Eugene Pope; and a son, Desmond Tarkowski-Pope.L.

According to Ms Mitchell-Innes, ‘Pope.L’, a portmanteau of the artist’s original surname and that of his mother, was coined by his students at Bates College in the mid-1980s. He adopted it and used ‘William Pope.L’ for almost three decades before dropping ‘William’.

Pope.L attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and received a bachelor’s degree from Montclair State College (now Montclair State University) in New Jersey in 1978. He also studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, and the Mabou Mines Theater on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan, which playwright Lee Breuer described as “a no man’s land between experimental theater and performing arts’.

Jessica Stockholder, a fellow professor at the University of Chicago, described Pope.L as a very committed and effective teacher.

“He was very open to all different kinds of people,” she said by phone, “and was very empathetic and concerned about people’s well-being.”

Ebony Haynes, curator of “Impossible Failures,” agreed.

“He has a way of listening to everyone,” she said. “He gave you the floor – without even knowing you, he knew that you, and everyone else, at the very least, deserve to be heard.”