| Dear Laura Bush: The Children Of America Are Crawling |
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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. However for
those who were aware of the issue, the performance was a moving,
if complex, experience. 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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