Pope.L: Showing Up to Withhold 9780226200231

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pope.l

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table of contents

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X X HMM X X HMM X X X 1

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introduction by

Pope.L and

karen reimer X X X X X X X

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the balloon inside the body by

nick bastis X 2 0 X 2 1 X 2 2 X 2 3 X 2 4 X 2 5 X 2 6 X 2 7 X 2 8 FOOD X 3 0 X 3 1 X 3 2 X 3 3 X 3 4 X 3 5 X 3 6 X 3 7 X 3 8 X 3 9 X 4 0 X 4 1

X X X X X

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REPRODUCING DU BOIS AND OTHER CRAZY IDEAS by

Lawrie Balfour X X X X X X X s X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

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interference in pope.l's skin set drawings by

K. Silem mohammad X X X X X X X X

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4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1

X FO X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

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8 2 LESEN 8 4 8 5 8 6 8 7 8 8 8 9 9 0 9 1 9 2 9 3 9 4 9 5 9 6 9 7 9 8 9 9 0 0 0 1 0 2 0 3 0 4 0 5 0 6

Showing Up To Withhold: Pope.L's Deadpan Aesthetic by

Lauren berlant 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

showing up to withhold

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interview between

Pope.L and

hamza walker 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 f 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

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5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 s g 2 1 1 2 2 1 a u t h o r s Born1955,Newark,NewJersey 2 1 5 2 1 6 2 1 7

table of con—tents by

Pope.L 2 2 2 2

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pope.l

to lewiston

Page, 2013 curtain over window in wall 15 × 19 inches The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

pope.l

showing up to withhold

The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in association with

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

10

The Polis, or The Garden or Human Nature in Action (Frieze version), 2007 onions, paint, glass shelves, brackets Galerie Catherine Bastide, at Frieze Art Fair, London, UK

pope.l/Reimer

INTRODUCTION

This book was created on the occasion of the solo exhibition Forlesen by William Pope.L at the Renaissance Society in 2013. On the surface, Forlesen appeared to be a cryptic exhibition. In fact, it seemed to operate at a level of cryptic-ness that demanded to be noticed. There were mysteries, obscurities, materialities, and symbolic colorations. A code seemed to be in play but it was either too personal, elliptical, or inconsistent to solve with any certainty, leaving the audience wondering:

Ⅰ. If the show was indecipherable,



or

Ⅱ. Whether the onus was on the audience because they could not decipher it, or Ⅲ. Whether it was the play between these two outcomes that was the desired effect, that is, the play between imminent code and collapsing reading of code; a stalemate held in tension by our expectations as an audience that exhibitions must resolve. Titled after a 1974 short story by the celebrated science fiction writer Gene Wolfe, Forlesen featured: Curtain, a 12-by-30-foot wall covered in joint compound mixed with ketchup; a 10-foot-high figural sculpture called Du Bois Machine from which issued the voice of a female child telling a first-person story written by Pope.L; a video installation titled Unfallen, which consisted of a stack of four monitors showing blurry, scratchy, upside-down images emitting bits of music and moans, all culled from

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introduction

low-budget, VHS pornography; and the most recent iteration of Pope.L's Skin Set Drawings, subtitled the space between the letters, which were literally drawings of the empty spaces between the typeset lines of Wolfe's Forlesen”extremely enlarged to the point that only partial letters showed at the outer edges of the paper. There was also a scattering of curtains, glasses of water, and black balloons in varying degrees of inflation. These works were set in and around an elaborate architectural configuration that articulated schematically, and only after some observation, a giant penis in cross-section. Hmm. Some of the works taken together created a certain poetic sense, for example, the Du Bois Machine had a speaker inserted near the crotch and made passing reference to Du Bois's sex life. Associatively some of the mark-making on the drawings was reminiscent of dried semen, and the balloons could arguably be said to look detumescent. So, there were definite connections between some works in the show, and while ordinarily one might question oneself if deflated balloons look detumescent, in this case you could reasonably believe that the artist was directing you to this reading: after all, you were standing next to a room-size penis hearing moans from a pornography video. But what then to make of the glasses of water? Or the curtains? And what if you hadn't yet figured out that the large, hulking, black structure emitting the moans was, in fact, a schematically rendered penis? Hmm. Hmm. Rather than being plot-driven, Wolfe's“Forlesen”is a string of bizarre yet plainly written episodes that comprise the life story, birth to death—occurring in a single workday—of an archetypal company man, adding up to a meaningful story or life depending on how the reader decodes the few hours of Emmanuel Forlesen's existence. Pope.L set out to create an installation similar in spirit, one where the relationships between constituent parts, and any ultimate significance, were continually in question. The installation was a puzzle in which meaning could be

pope.l/Reimer

sought around, between, within, and despite the artworks that made up the exhibition. This book is also a puzzle and extends over greater territory than the Forlesen exhibition, using artworks Pope.L has created over the last fifteen years as ‘talking points’from which to explore the family relations in his practice. Not family relations in a linear genealogy— this begat that, and so on—but something more along the lines of: this piece has its auntie's nose, or its father's smile, or perhaps: this piece has its intellectual grandmother's phallus. Iain Kerr, in an essay about Pope.L's Skin Set Drawings, applies Wittgenstein's concept of“family resemblance” “ : Instead of being related by a singular essence, [they are] related in distinctly tangential ways—such as one sees in a portrait of a large extended family. Thus“family resemblance”is a term that refers to the multiple, shifting and overlapping similarities of components … .”1 Pope.L's term for these cousinships, these similarities, is“hinges. He creates hinges between artworks, sometimes several between the same works, such that one might recognize them as belonging together in some ways but not in others. He thereby creates pieces as a troubled, oscillating set. Hinging is articulated between works as linear or narrative or metaphorical, formally or materially, rarely ever one hinge alone, and almost never consistently, except in the sense of a poetics. Like Wittgenstein, Pope.L is interested in loosening the overly careful bounds of what most believe can comprise a set. The world in all its uncertainty, variability, and ineffableness is a set. 'Nuff said.

1   Iain Kerr,“Working In (the) Color,”Black People Are Cropped, ed. Cle'ment Dirie' (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2012), 32.

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introduction

The starting points in the Forlesen exhibition from which family resemblance is explored are: Curtain, Du Bois Machine, the Skin Set Drawings: the space between the letters, and Unfallen. Curtain is addressed through images. Essayist Lawrie Balfour addresses the Du Bois Machine as the most recent attempt by Pope.L at“distributing Martin,”something he has been working on for the last fifteen years. This distribution, initiated by a gift of hair and nail clippings from a friend with access to Martin Luther King's archives, has involved efforts to derive King's DNA from these leftover bits of the man's body and introduce it into the bodies and minds of others by any means necessary (to borrow a phrase from a movement that ran parallel to King's) in order to make us heir, willy-nilly, to King's goodness. Balfour considers what it means to refer to, revere, and metaphorically redistribute figures such as Du Bois and King in a present in which race paradoxically matters both more and less than ever. K. Silem Mohammad's essay explores the overarching logic of Pope.L's Skin Set Drawings project, on-going since 1997, from the early absurdist, poetic assertions about people of different colors (including green, purple, blue, and so on) to the large-scale Skin Set paintings, to the most recent space between the letters drawings in the Forlesen exhibition, drawings wherein written language is reduced to inarticulate marks surrounding voids filled with dirt, hair, stains, and unnameable substances. Mohammad draws from the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson, particularly his notions of phatic and poetic speech, the sonic theory of Jacques Attali, and Sianne Ngai's idea of“stuplimity”in order to understand how the visual“noise”of Pope.L's drawings operates. Hamza Walker interviews Pope.L about his video practice, which changed gradually from documentations of his performances to being works in their own right. Their conversation redresses a dearth of critical attention to this important node of Pope.L's practice and attempts

pope.l/Reimer

to circumscribe an evolution with discussions of the earliest performancedocumentary work through A Dome Like Structure and the work of the mid-aughts—APHOV (A Personal History of Videography) and Small Cup—with a special focus on two of the most ambitious and recent works—Unfallen and Reenactor. Initially we thought we would ask Lauren Berlant to write about the video“family” ; however, her vision of the formal, conceptual, and affective relationships around and between the works within the Forlesen exhibition itself was so compelling that we asked her to just run with it. Berlant's thinking and writing over the past several years has focused on comedic forms of life and art, and she casts the installation and Pope.L's method more broadly as a type of deadpan, a form of performance that she refers to, in short, as“showing up to withhold.”While this idea entered her work long before she wrote this essay on Pope.L's show, it became the umbrella concept, a sort of“big reunion”of the extended families, and such a thoughtful characterization of Pope.L's practice in general, that we used the phrase as the title of our book as well as of her essay. The community performance Pull! occurred very soon after Forlesen and kicks off this book in order to demonstrate the breadth of Pope.L's practice and his consistent interest in duration, embodiment and sociality. Nick Bastis's essay on Pull! examines the seemingly purposeless and frequently grueling and abject physical activity in Pope.L's performances, including his street crawls, initiated in 1978, and Pull!, in which a team of people pulled an eight-ton truck—that could have been driven—across Cleveland for three days. Bastis ties Pull! to the artwork in the Forlesen exhibition through Wolfe's story of the title character's Kafkaesque job, and borrows from Hannah Arendt's distinctions between labor, work, and action to consider what such conscious unproductivity as Pull! might mean.2 The hinges between Pull! and Forlesen are, to an extent, representative of the tensions existing between Pope.L's community

2   At the conclusion of the Pull! project, the truck, which had served the Black Factory project faithfully for so many years, was donated to Cleveland's Lakeside Men's Shelter to support their catering business.

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introduction

projects, his pieces concerning gender, class, and race, and the works that deal with process or language. All this activity defines a set, but the set is clunky, anomalous, and beautiful. Part of the aforementioned tension can be explained by way of reference to what has been historically possible for Black Art in the U.S. There has always been, for artists of color, a conflict between a desire for formal play and individual expression versus a duty to legibility, audience and political efficacy. This tension-space has always been, and continues to be, a troubled arena, but it is a necessary negotiation and must be inhabited. It is a political necessity for all culture-makers, not just the blue, the green, the orange, the gay, or the ofay.3

3   A word of unspecified West African origin that refers to white people. It was commonly used in the American South but has fallen out of favor as“White Devil”has assumed prominence.

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The Polis, or The Garden or Human Nature in Action (Frieze version), 2007 onions, paint, glass shelves, brackets Galerie Catherine Bastide, at Frieze Art Fair, London, UK

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Pull!, 2013 community endurance performance SPACES, Cleveland, OH

nick bastis

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The Balloon Inside the Body

I want to know if it's meant anything,”Forlesen said. If what I suffered—if it's been worth it.” No,”the little man said.“Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.” Gene Wolfe,“ Forlesen”

Why do we labor? Why do we do anything? Existential cliche's, perhaps—but often we can more easily answer such questions when they refer to a specific situation. As the joke goes: Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. William Pope.L's Crawl pieces, as well as his more recent Pull! (2013) project, are like the joke that does not resolve itself, prompting questions about art and labor recursively through simple traversals: go from here to there, because. Pull!'s premise was straightforward: to ask paid“pullers” (or those who could afford to volunteer) to haul an eight-ton truck from one side of Cleveland to the other over the course of three days.fig. 1 The truck, once used to sell ice cream, had a back-door projection screen displaying images of working Clevelanders and those involved in the project's production process, flanked by vinyl imagery and text. The host gallery, SPACES, had organized a constant stream of pullers so that, aside from short breaks, the truck would be pulled continuously, day and night. As the SPACES website stated about Pope.L's performance,“Pull! will provide a moment for the diverse people of Cleveland to work together, eat together, pull together and talk 1 together about one of the most powerful, meaningful forces in our lives—our jobs.” Before the project's launch, Pope.L walked around Cleveland asking residents on camera if they would pull an eight-ton truck for their city. Alternating with enthusiasm and amusement was skepticism about what the project would really“do”for Cleveland. To squelch this sort of skepticism, many socially engaged, and especially participatory, artworks have forfeited the power that lies in ambiguity; Pope.L, too, could have directed the social, financial, and organizational resources behind the project to, say, build a house, but he resisted constructing a readily identifiable thing outside Pull!'s seemingly purposeless activity. As one of the pullers on the project, I saw many passersby stop their cars in the middle of the street to ask,“What are you doing?”Our usual response,“We're pulling this truck to the other side of the city—it's about work,”rarely satisfied them. 1   Pull! project statement from SPACES Gallery Web site, http://www.spacesgallery.org/project/pull (accessed May 2013).

Fig. 1

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the balLoon inside the body

This project contains a contradiction, a redundancy that resembles the answer“because”to the question“why?”Both assertions ensure that the activity, like eating and excreting, must continue regardless. Pull! presents a never-ending, never-beginning negotiation (as one might describe life itself), an everything and nothing, a something that might not do anything. It is the sort of contrary that much of Pope.L's work wades into. for everything and nothing are synonymous when energy in vacuo has the power of confusion2 So what could pulling a truck“do?”Or what might it mean to pull a truck with strangers, with friends, with artists, with non-artists? Pulling something might suggest that what is being pulled needs to be somewhere other than where it is and can't get there on its own. The thing needs us! But the truck, though a little slow and sputtery, was actually driveable. It may have failed an emissions test, but the engine still ran. In the Pull! project, it is the people who need the people, and the people who need the thing. Maybe the thing is a truck, maybe it's art, or maybe it's a job; whatever it is, without it there would be nothing to pull, to talk about, to labor over, to attend. The poet Dean Young proposes that“more than intending, the poet attends.”3 Intention creates a difference, or rift, between the thing one intends to do and the thing that receives the doing. Instead, Pope.L's works are both the fist and the face in the instant of their acquaintance. Attendance implies, simply, being there—the“there”always existing in the“now” —and more than having presence, these works are just present. A truck in Pull! or a horizontal body in a Crawl make no claims to alter the surrounding environment. Nothing certain accumulates in these projects; they show up, and because they break down at the same rate at which they build, they insist on an effort that always stops short of producing a surplus. 2   William Carlos Williams,“To Have Done Nothing,”Spring and All (Paris: Contact Publishing Company, 1923), 105. 3   Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2010), 4.

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bastis

This activity is labor, which, like caring for a child, tending a garden, or loving something or someone, needs to be constantly reproduced and defended because no monument or product accumulated from it can act as a stand-in.“It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent,” notes Hannah Arendt.4 As much as its stated intention is to talk about jobs, the potency of Pull! lies in the value it places on this kind of lack—a word Pope.L uses often—a nothing and everything with a value always in negotiation. A lack of product differentiates the activity of labor from that of“work,”which is practically and etymologically tied directly to the identifiable product it offers. While work can be considered accumulative and public, to be a laborer means to be limited—bound to a private and cyclical activity of necessity that is used up as quickly as it is produced. But what if the never-ending, never-beginning cycle of labor could be a valued choice or public activity? 5 What if the“nothing”of labor has everything to do with the meaning of life? And what if meaning itself, like life, disintegrates as regularly as it is constructed? These are questions that Pope.L might not have an interest in answering specifically, but I believe he poses them continuously in his work. If labor is a private activity bound to the necessities of life, surely defecation is part of that cycle, biologically speaking, and perhaps the most private of any laboring that we regularly perform. As a finalist to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale in 2009, Pope.L proposed turning the American Pavilion into a large plumbing and sewer system to support the function of 42 toilets. (Apparently, they can be hard to find in the Giardini).fig. 2 Bringing such a private and banal activity to a public forum is at the very least funny—and humor, having a value in and of itself, is often an entry into Pope.L's work. You laugh, thus opening yourself up to this thing that has an unexpected gravity—and now you actually might have to deal with it. Like an efficient plumbing system, like a body, like a Pull!, no extra is produced—only shit, and it's the stuff we're made of whether we like it or not. Although the promise of work and product has always contained a desire to free oneself from the necessities of life, no one's body is free from the ever-impending release that occurs after consumption.6 4   Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., 1958), 87. 5   In Arendt's formulation, this would correspond to“action”, which is what labor becomes when it becomes public and an end in itself. See The Human Condition for Arendt's full articulation of the distinctions between the categories of human activitiy she names“labor” “ , work”, and“action”. 6   Actually, to be free from the release that follows consumption would be a curse of extreme magnitude. In this regard, Pope.L cites as a notable moment in his life the the 1993 release of The Wu-Tang Clan's 36 Chambers. On that album, during a theatrical exchange of insults, Method Man makes a memorable threat when he says he'll“sew your asshole closed and keep feeding you, and feeding, and feeding you, and feeding you.”

Fig. 2

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the balLoon inside the body

Amid the vinyl imagery and text on the side of Pull!'s ice cream truck in Cleveland, under the title,“The Right to be Lazy,”were these words: We must begin to question the meaning of work and think about what it means to us personally. We must value our‘unproductive’labor—child-care, housework, gardening, conversation, reading, cultural pursuits, art making, musing, daydreaming, napping, wasting time. All of these are necessary for a civilized society.7

Fig. 3

; labor Pope.L takes up the redundancy in the term“unproductive labor” always lacks a product, and futility and contradiction are owned in these artworks. Why pull a truck when you can drive it? Why crawl when you can walk? Because we're in no rush to get there when we are bound to a labor cycle, one in which our position is relatively always the same. The“there”is the activity itself. It took Pope.L nine years to trace the 22-mile length of Broadway in Manhattan from its southern-most point to its near end in Harlem in his laborious The Great White Way, 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–Ongoing).fig. 3 Without the unproductiveness of the Crawl performances, eventually some absorptive thing would have popped out and rendered the meaning of the activity that preceded its production a slave to this new presence: the thing produced. But given their lack of a product, nothing can substitute for what occurs in the Crawl and Pull! performances, placing the negotiation of their value on the shoulders of those who witness, or perform and re-perform them. While produced separately from Pope.L's show at the Renaissance Society (exhibited a few weeks before the Cleveland Pull!), these projects' conscious unproductivity can be placed in relation to the writing that partly informed the works in the gallery. A short story by science fiction writer Gene Wolfe from which Pope.L borrows his Renaissance Society exhibition title,“Forlesen”tells the tale of the brief life of Emmanuel Forlesen, a curious man who is uncertain how he got where he is and what exactly he is supposed to be doing there. His family, his car, and his commute are overwhelmingly structured around his job, which, while seemingly busy, is a bizarre means toward an unknown end (other than the vaguely cited“profit” .) His“team”at the office makes a range of attempts to fill the day with random tasks, creativity exercises, multiple choice tests, employment manual reviews, and various other nebulous tactics by which they can accomplish … umm, something. The opacity around their employment's purpose leaves Forlesen and his colleagues in a state of confusion and anxiety, 7   Poppy Dixon, from the Why Work? website, http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/inspiration/quotes1.html. The Right to be Lazy”was originally published on the website of the Postfundamentalist Press.

bastis

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and in the end, they lack confidence in their ability to produce meaning about what it is that they do. You have a lot to do there?” Oh, God, yes.”[Forlesen] remembered the crowded desk that had been waiting for him when he had returned from the creativity meeting, the supervision of workers for whom he had been given responsibility without authority, the ours spent with Fields drawing up the plan which, just before he left, had been vetoed by Mr. Freeling. 8 I don't think there's any purpose in most of it,”he said,“but there's plenty to do.” It is tempting to set up a converse here—to say that, unlike the tasks that confuse Emmanuel Forlesen and his co-workers, a project like the Cleveland Pull! or Houston Crawl: Freedmans Town to Enron City (2003)fig. 4 provides its participants (and their respective cities) with a clear objective, along with the means by which it can be accomplished. This would not be untrue. Yet to suggest that pulling an eight-ton ice cream truck that one simply could have driven“makes sense”would deflate the chicken-crossing-the-road joke we began with. If Pull! offers any sort of alternative, it pivots around the idea that the work in the story“Forlesen”is oppressive and anxietyinducing, not because it seemingly has no point, but because nobody is able to take ownership of that pointlessness. Truly dystopian work is not work performed without a logical purpose, but work performed for a purpose of which one is not aware. For jokes and economies alike, whether you're in on them or not can make all the difference. Unlike the participants in Pope.L's projects who choose to pull or crawl, the workers in Wolfe's story are never given the opportunity to question their own activity and construct meaning around it, because it is always a means toward some unknown end. They believe that, somewhere, a supervisor's supervisor is using their activity for something, that the value of their efforts is defined elsewhere. Often produced collectively, Pope.L's projects allow meaning to develop plurally (even if entropically) through an activity of reading, pulling, crawling, or watching. Meaning itself, and the“power of confusion”that lies in everything and nothing, are built only through a specific activity—through a something. Wolfe's workers are unstable in a cloudy set of duties. But, even if its product is unclear, in Pull! Pope.L pursues an articulated goal within a structural limitation. 8   Gene Wolfe,“Forlesen,”The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction, (New York: Tor, 2009), 191. Throughout“Forlesen”Wolfe spells“hours”as“ours.”

Fig. 4

the balLoon inside the body

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For meaning to be useful it must be marked. … Sometimes it's a rock against someone's temple. Sometimes it's the act of throwing the rock. Sometimes it's the goal of throwing the rock. Sometimes it's the temple itself.9 In the case of Pull!, Pope.L sets out the clear goal of getting the truck from one place to another to make room for the experience of the unclear—to create a space in which meaning isn't determined, or refused, but made, lost, and remade. It is the swiftness and flexibility of capital that makes the ice cream truck's engine run, and it is this artwork's deliberate emphasis on experience that requires the engine to stop and the truck to be pulled. This gesture in some ways represents, not only art's unique position, but, deductively, maybe its job (if it has one at all). The messiness between art and economy enables us actually to ask questions about the way we experience labor, rather than producing a project so consistent with the“logical”conditions of capital (in this case,“ just drive the truck, it's faster” ) as to be complicit with a system that has seemingly failed cities like Cleveland in the first place. In other words, rather than work being the inconvenient requirement for an end product, Pope.L uses the end of getting the truck from one side of the city to the other as a means to simply labor. Whereas historically, people have fashioned structures of togetherness, either seductively, through religion, or forcibly, through slavery, to make the goal of moving heavy stuff from one place to another achievable, Pull! flips this relationship and uses an objective goal to strive for togetherness. This wasn't a valiant effort to raise a stone for the pyramids; it was a voluntary Sisyphean endeavor to just raise a stone. In placing the emphasis on the value of labor more than on the work product, we are dealing with what it means to be alive. Only with that recognition can we begin to place a personal value on what it means to be employed. While embedded in the social and economic realms, labor in these projects is ultimately experience, and as such, is equally embedded in the aesthetic realm. These works engage with the sociopolitical life embodied by and expressed through a city street, but as importantly, they deal with the street as a line and the body as a point moving along it through time. Robert Ryman, whom Pope.L has often claimed as his unwilling father 10→, described his own work as always being a drawing if it contained line.11→ So along with social work and public performance, 9   William Pope.L,“Some Notes on the Ocean,”Black People Are Cropped, ed. Cle'ment Dirie' (Zurich: JRP— Ringier, 2012), 10.

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maybe we can consider Pope.L's Crawls and Pull! to be drawings, marks in a disappearing ink made by bodies and silent vehicles, as points, moving slowly along the city's substrate. Given the invisibility of the mark a body or a rolling wheel makes on the street, the line a point in motion produces can be described only during this motion, not after or before it; it exists only in time. As drawings, these works are always in a cycle of making and re-making, placing material and physicality in a direct relationship with time. The unmaking and remaking of skin, energy, or the texture of asphalt cannot be taken for granted when scraping your body against the street, nor can the physicality of an object like a truck when faced with the task of dragging it. Without ignoring“real”economies, Pope.L manages to make projects that incorporate people and money while also participating rigorously, as artworks, in a conversation about line, performance, movement, and abstraction. The participatory Freedmans Town to Enron City in Houston and Pull!, which navigated the waistline of Cleveland, can be read as social works, but to the same degree they bear formal and conceptual relationships to seminal body-based performance works, like Nauman's Walking In an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68). Pope.L, however, while using the literal, also ruptures the tautologies of modernism. While Nauman's work is deliberately tautological— “If I was an artist and I was in the 12 studio,thenwhateverIwasdoinginthestudiomustbeart.” —Pope.Ltakeshisliteralist performances out of the studio, expanding them into the world of referent, experience, and sociality. The works simultaneously are present and refer to other presences. Furthermore, while grueling, these works contain a kind of humor and humility that sits awkwardly with the category of“endurance performance” . Despite crawling the length of Manhattan or pulling a truck, in both his Crawls and his recent Pull!, Pope.L has often appeared wearing a Superman costume either during or preceding the works, hyperbolizing and thus deflating his own role as a heroic artist (and perhaps even the whole notion of a super-man.) Through his costuming and invitations for the public to participate, the hero is dispersed, blurred, and unlike much endurance work that eventually valorizes the courage of the artist, Pope.L's works lead back to something more unstable, whether that be the act of labor, action, or the identities at work within. 10   Mark H. C. Bessire,“The Friendliest Black Artist in America,”William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, ed. Mark H. C. Bessire (Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002), 25. 11   Catherine de Zegher, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, ed. Cornelia Butler (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 63. 12   Quoted in Ian Wallace and Russell Keziere,“Bruce Nauman Interviewed,”Vanguard (Canada) 8, no. 1 (February 1979), 18.

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During a talk about Forlesen at the Renaissance Society, Pope.L observed that: With abstraction there's always a sense of … abstracted from what? Not that things perhaps always have to have an anchor in something else, but they tend to. I think I don't have this dream of making something that has no referent. I sort of accept the fact that everything that I would attempt to use as an artist is tainted by that which is in the world … Everything is marked by this stuff we live in, this life we live in, so how do you … it seems a waste of time to try and avoid that.13 Those pulling a truck or slowly moving along the ground on all fours are both individuated bodies and a collectivized object, just as the 40-foot-long work titled Quarter Section (Penis) (2013) in Pope.L's show at the Renaissance Society is both reduced geometry and giant phallus, hovering or alternating between figuration and abstraction. Pope.L and his performance participants become a slow-moving object and a swarm of subjects with personal histories, out in the world. Through the horizontality of his Crawls or the all-night truck-pulls through urban areas, the work begins to feel like a slowly danced ritual for the undead, a summoning of a dusty politics, or social groups still breathing, but just waiting. The performances are migrations in odd positions at odd hours. They are evacuations from the invisibly burning building. They are disco balls in the shape of familiar signs we no longer recognize. They are expanding pockets of air inside of systems, like a balloon inside a body. They are kinetics that feel somehow hopeful amid their referenced forms of alive/dead work where value is often singular and speculative. Pope.L builds a stage on which slow labor watches itself be watched. In 2002, while writing a timeline of his own life for publication in his monograph William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, Pope.L predicted that in 2012, between Wu-Tang's 1993 release of 36 Chambers and the end of the world in 2055, he would be struck by an ice cream truck, slipping into a coma indefinitely.14 Like the slow labor of these works, life, too, is a cycle, being consumed as forcefully as we attempt to regenerate it. Pope.L's Crawls and Pull! draw as close as possible to this loop, even if that means edging toward fulfilling the artist's own self-predicted death by ice cream truck (Pull! required him to walk in front of one for 72 hours). And that would be a story—edging on myth, even 13   William Pope.L in conversation with Hamza Walker, The Renaissance Society, April 28, 2013. 14   William Pope.L, Cindy M. Foley and Sarah Schuster,“Chronology”in Bessire, William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, 232.

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—which is the most powerful product of labor that remains. As much as it proposes that cities like Cleveland still have the power to work and labor, Pull! proposes that, because labor is inseparable from the necessities of life and biological processes, a city like Cleveland has a desire to live. In lieu of the story-ending coma, Pope.L donated the neardefunct truck to the Cleveland Lakeside Men's Shelter, thereby giving them the only thing one really can ask for in life: a problem along with a potential —the makings of an everything-nothing cycle that never begins and never ends. Endings can give us a sense of security, but endings, no matter how brilliantly contrived, are fictions … And so, one story begets another and so on.15

15   Jascha Hoffman,“The Africana QA: Performance Artist William Pope.L,”on The Artist's Network of Refuse & Resist, http://artists.refuseandresist.org/news3/news142.html (December 18, 2002).

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Western Geometry, 2007 spam, wood, palette knife, bracket, paint, newspaper, matte medium Schroeder Romero, New York, NY

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Western Geometry, 2007 spam, wood, palette knife, bracket, paint, newspaper, matte medium Schroeder Romero, New York, NY

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Setting the Table (version 2), 2005 images of American military dead from the US war in Iraq laminated onto 84 slices of baloney Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK

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Chocolate Fountain, 2005 wood, wall, paint, lights, pumps, timers, chocolate syrup Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK

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Chocolate Fountain, 2005 wood, wall, paint, lights, pumps, timers, chocolate syrup Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK

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Candy Mountain, 2003 endurance performance (chocolate spill, dance with audience) Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

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Candy Mountain, 2003 endurance performance (chocolate spill, dance with audience) Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

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A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and so on … , 2007 fiberglass pirate serving wench, plaster bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., wood, pump, light, chocolate syrup Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium

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A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and so on … , 2007 fiberglass pirate serving wench, plaster bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., wood, pump, light, chocolate syrup Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium

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A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and so on … , 2007 fiberglass pirate serving wench, plaster bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., wood, pump, light, chocolate syrup Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium

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A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and so on … , 2007 fiberglass pirate serving wench, plaster bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., wood, pump, light, chocolate syrup MC Kunst, Los Angeles, CA

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A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and so on … , 2007 fiberglass pirate serving wench, plaster bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., wood, pump, light, chocolate syrup MC Kunst, Los Angeles, CA

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Pope.L

REPRODUCING DU BOIS AND OTHER CRAZY IDEAS

DU BOIS machine

I. ON BEING CRAZY ‘We both are.’ ”W. E. B. Du Bois's short “Either you are crazy or I am. story,“On Being Crazy,”ends in a stalemate of sorts, as a black man and a white man confront each other across a muddy road. The story traces the black narrator's movements as he attempts to purchase a meal, to enjoy Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, to find a hotel room, to buy a ticket for a sleeper car through Texas, just to walk down the street without being accosted. In each of these endeavors, he runs into a wall of white incredulity and outrage. What he asks 1 for, after all, is“social equality.” When“On Being Crazy”appeared in the The Crisis in 1923,“social equality”worked as a trump card in the hands of white citizens; it was a way of changing the subject, diverting African American claims to political rights or economic justice or the acknowledgment of basic human dignity. More dangerously, since the late 19th century the two words conjured elaborate fantasies about miscegenation and the threat to white men's property posed by white women's vulnerability and black men's outsized appetites. As Ralph Ellison's invisible man discovers early in the 1952 novel, social equality could get you killed.2 Arriving on the scene 90 years after Du Bois's story and more than 60 years after Ellison's, William Pope.L's Du Bois Machine fig. 1 inhabits a very different world. The provocative power of“social equality”has receded; indeed, college students today are bemused to learn that two such unobjectionable words could ever have carried the force of a sexual threat. That said, Pope.L's piece recalls both the absurdity and the dead seriousness of Du Bois's story, and exposes the disjunctures and non sequiturs that shape post-civil rights era existence. Du Bois Machine is composed of a wooden sculpture of upside-down legs from which issues the voice of a female child telling in the first person an autobiographical story by Pope.L that stitches together a series of observations and contingent meetings. These form a coherent narrative even when they do not follow, logically, from each other. Like Du Bois's story, Pope.L's first-person narration relates instances 1    W. E. B. Du Bois,“On Being Crazy,”The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 68-70. 2    Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995).

Fig. 1

Sometimes a person says this: If you listen he'll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel. And then he'll say: we're flawed because we want so much more. We're ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had. It is not that a particular artwork fails or succeeds, it's that we get to play in the hinge. Almost 15 years ago today, a friend, a colleague called me up and said he'd been given access to Martin Luther King's papers and he had something for me.

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When we met, he put an envelope in my hand, laughed and said,“I found this and thought of you.”In the envelope were bits of hair, dirt and skin. That evening, I called my friend back and asked him:“What's in the envelope?”He said,“I'm not sure but “MLK's?”I said, and I think it's his.” he replied:“Yep.”I didn't quite know what to do with this treasure so I set it down in a reasonable place and forgot about it.

of misconnection and exchanges that go badly awry. Though these exchanges do not directly concern“race”—a word that is notably absent in Pope.L's script—they address the sheer difficulty of coming to terms with the legacies of Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the context of the world they helped to bring into being. This is not to say that the words tell the whole story. The visual aspect of Du Bois Machine is the sculpture: an abdomen—probably male, although the groin is smooth and sexless—mounted on a frame and holding the speaker from which the words emerge, and a slightly askew pair of legs clad in the suit and shoes of a professional (or, possibly, the pants and boots of a worker.) All of it is sculpted from a grainy, blondish wood, and all of it is upside down. Take the legs: Emblems of respectability, these legs could belong to Du Bois, who always appeared in a three-piece suit, or to King, or to any one of the militant reverends and young students striding toward freedom in the 1950s and 1960s. Their legs, we might say, are what democratic protest should look like: they indicate that anything can be changed, that forward movement is possible.“Like MLK,”Pope.L observes in the Du Bois Machine's story,“Du Bois seemed to be able to contain, as it were, an incredibly large and complex family of desires, actions, objects and images, seemingly merely within the stride of his legs.”But the sculpture's image of masculine striding does other work, too. If“within the stride of [Du Bois's] legs”has become a receptacle for things wished for, and even accomplished, the sculpture also suggests other, less purposeful and respectable kinds of motion. For the legs are not clearly moving forward. Somewhat akimbo, they may look less like Du Bois or King marching than like Ellison's unnamed protagonist, who lurches from mishap to misunderstanding in pursuit of uplift, always on the run. Either way, Pope.L's piece inserts Du Bois and King into the skewed realities of the twenty-first century. If they had lived another fifty years, if they had been able to trace the legacies of the craziness they depict so vividly into our time, they would confront the juxtaposition of Americans' embrace of a black First Family, on the one hand, and disregard for staggering racial disparities in wealth, health, employment, education, voting rights, and incarceration, on the other. That many of the causes with which these men allied themselves have triumphed is hard to dispute. That their triumph has been partial, often grudging, and accompanied by spectacular inconsistencies and setbacks is equally clear. When Pope.L explains that he is“trying to imagine a possible world while living in this world,”when Toni Morrison uses fiction to envision“a-world-where-race-doesnot-matter,”that is not“posited as ideal, millennial, a condition possible only if accompanied by the Messiah or situated in a protected preserve—a wilderness park,”they undertake the complex work of assembling the contradictory materials

Some early outcomes of receiving this material were these: A postering project A website which mutated into a blog called distributingmartin A chance meeting with a black man on a bus The postering project grew out of a failed billboard project. In which I wanted to buy billboard space at several locations and print this text: This is a painting of Martin Luther King's penis from inside my father's vagina. I decided another way to obtain the scale I desired was to miniaturize. So I had the statement printed on 8×10 peel-off stickers and in late September 2001, several days after September 11th, we postered the length of 8th Avenue in Manhattan from 125th Street in Harlem down to Canal Street.

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of the present world, and the memories that inspirit it, into a livable future.3

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The National Guard prevented us from going any further.

II. REVERING Pope.L's narrative opens casually—“Sometimes a person says this.”—but it covers a lot of ground. It voices a series of encounters: with a friend, who brings Pope.L an envelope containing“bits of hair, dirt and skin”that have been retrieved from the Martin Luther King archive, possibly once belonging to King himself; with a man whose expertise in genetics enable the two of them to devise mechanisms to distribute King's DNA by injecting it into fruit or transforming it into an aerosol spray, but whose romantic preoccupations eventually end the partnership; with a young“PhD guy,”whose initial enthusiasm for Pope.L's project and eagerness to introduce the artist to a mentor who“marched with King—somewhere”turns to outraged rejection when Pope.L proposes using the AIDS virus to spread King's goodness; with a university that hosts an art exhibition and symposium in celebration of Du Bois's 100th birthday and a professor who reveals the contradictory legacies of a man whose public greatness coexisted with private cruelties; with the artist's sister, who is hospitalized, dying, and whose visit with a beloved nephew, the artist's son, is jeopardized by the child's fever; and with the same university, as it presses ahead with and then accepts the abandonment of an interview with Pope.L about his King distribution project. If the points of contact between these incidents are not always self-evident, the vignettes offer vantages from which to regard the burdens and possibilities of inheritance. What happens, Pope.L asks, when human beings become objects of reverence? Not just any human beings, of course, but figures who were once reviled for being too outspoken, pursued by the FBI as threats to public peace, or shunned as communists. Today, their likenesses sell stamps and coffee mugs and provide the occasion for academic gatherings. Their papers are collected and enshrined, and their birthplaces become sites of pilgrimage. Animating Pope.L's project are the lifeless traces of King's physical presence. By reducing King to the material remains of his humanity, the artist elicits our judgment of our own practices of reverence. Maybe we are perplexed or appalled by Pope.L's attempt to distribute Martin, in both the physical and virtual worlds. Yet we participate, many of us gladly, in a culture that already dissects and distributes King. 3    William Pope.L,“Ritual, Archive, and Repetition: An Interview with William Pope.L by Lisa Meandri, William Pope.L: Art After White People: time, trees & celluloid … (Santa Monica: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2007), 14 [Emphasis in the original]. Toni Morrison,“Home,”The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 3 [Emphasis in the original].

One day, I met a man on the bus. He was seeing a woman in the next town over, a much larger town than the one I lived in. The man told me he had a genetics company. More of a website than a company really. When I told him I wanted to inject fruit with the DNA of Martin Luther King, he told me it wouldn't work but he'd help me anyway. At the end of our impromptu meeting, we agreed that I'd check out his website and then give him a call. Over the next several months, we worked out a prototype and injected and placed fruit in several supermarkets. We had no way to track the results so our weekly updates resulted in us talking about our personal problems. The woman the guy was seeing wanted to have a baby and the guy wasn't into it. So— We later developed an aerosol system but our ability to deliver the material was pretty crude. In addition, my relationship with the bus guy was becoming strained because I wanted to talk about the project and all he wanted to talk about was this woman in Portland and the epiphanies or anxieties arising from their relationship— The blog was called distributingmartin. It came about because I was becoming frustrated with finding a way to distribute the man himself. I'm not

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sure what that means except to say I began the blog as yet another means of dispersing the body or the shadow of the body of Martin Luther King. The blog still exists at distributingmartin.com.

We assert ourselves into that future when King's children are judged“by the content of their character,”but we elide those things that he went to Washington, D.C. in August of 1963 to remind his fellow citizens of—the living heritage of slavery, the everyday reality of anti-black violence, and the promissory note, never redeemed, issued upon emancipation. For academics, scholars of democratic theory or African American studies or 20th Century literature, Pope.L's creation recalls another kind of revering, another“Du Bois machine.”Insofar as Du Bois, like King, has been canonized, his words, especially those of his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, can be plundered for concepts and catchphrases that signal our learnedness, cultural authenticity, or political credentials. This Du Bois machine consumes his 95 years of living and writing and activism and regurgitates it as a scholastic lexicon:“double consciousness, the color line, the Talented Tenth, the Veil, Niagara, NAACP, Pan-Africanism.”It can produce these terms whenever required, for a keynote or an op-ed or a class lecture. Sometimes, the Du Bois machine frames our history as a series of epic clashes: Du Bois-versus-Booker T. Washington or Du Bois-versus-Marcus Garvey. From these formulations come others, most notably Martin-versus-Malcolm, as though the capaciousness of Du Bois's mind (or those of Washington, Garvey, King, and Malcolm X, for that matter) could be so simplified. Although our investment in Du Bois's greatness may make a fitting memorial to a man who dedicated much intellectual energy to memorializing the feats of great men, it also distances us from the continuing reverberation of the hard questions he posed. Too much revering does more than distort historical records, in other words. It prevents thought, and it may even stifle the imaginations of the living. This, I think, is the worry at the heart of Robert Gooding-Williams's challenge to political actors and scholars of“Afro-modern political thought.”Gooding-Williams urges his readers to step out of“the shadow of Du Bois”and think for ourselves about what black politics, what democracy, should be.4 Whether or not it is true, as Pope.L notes, that Du Bois cared too much about his clothes or too little for his daughter, whether one remembers him as a pragmatist, an elitist, a radical democrat, and/or a socialist, Du Bois Machine cautions against the impulse to fix him as the precondition for artistic or ethical or political projects in the present. It demonstrates how revering thwarts contemporary efforts to take inspiration from the man.

Several years later this young guy calls me up, or maybe it was an email—he was from the big city. He wanted to work with me on— something. Anything, he said. And I said: Anything? The young guy was very enthusiastic. Too enthusiastic. I told the young guy, PhD guy, about the distributingmartin project—kind of. Not really, maybe. And we danced around that, and each other for a while until a small performance piece came out of that, a piece about ghosts and holes and street intervention. So with the ghost piece successfully behind us, the young guy introduced me to his special mentor. The mentor was a reverend. He taught at the big university in the big city. He'd marched with King—somewhere. We went to the mentor's house. We met his wife. We had tea. The deal was maybe the mentor would give his blessings to the project, maybe say a prayer at the live event and I could release the material from the canister into the room and then there'd be that—but like I said, the PhD guy, the young guy, was into revering. He was very sincere so I knew sooner or later I'd fail him. The project was stalling. It needed new juice, new ideas. And it just so happened that I'd

4    Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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Pope.L

III. WHAT IF … ?

been reading about the use of the AIDS virus to motor or drive the dispersal of genetic material in the body.

Du Bois Machine confronts its audience with a series of outlandish proposals and observations. What, after all, could it possibly mean to paper Manhattan with stickers that purport to be“a painting of Martin Luther King's penis from inside my father's vagina” ? fig. 2 How would the miniatures be read? What response might they prompt? What actions could they engender? If Pope.L deliberately refrains from solving the puzzles his art produces, he presses his audience to consider the ways that we regularly dissect“the body or the shadow of the body of Martin Luther King”and other all-too-human heroes like Du Bois. He questions how we anatomize or mechanize their legacies, dividing the sacred from the profane in official memories of those parts of the past deemed worthy of celebration. The outlandishness of Pope.L's experimental proposals—is it even possible to inject fruit with the DNA of nonviolent resistance and beloved community?—does not mean that they are unprecedented. Too much is known, and not, about the history of medical experimentation, forced sterilization, and other science fiction projects carried out on the bodies of poor and nonwhite citizens to dismiss Pope.L's revolutionary genetics out of hand. And“distributing Martin”via a website and blog should seem no more bizarre than the political and commercial use of King's name to underwrite agendas that defy the record of his work and words, or products that are out of reach for the people with and for whom he struggled. Du Bois Machine not only demands new consideration of the outlandishness of a world its audience may take for granted; it disorients us and challenges us to imagine how things might be otherwise. Pope.L's speaking sculpture discloses alternative, even utopian, possibilities for a time that seems out of kilter or upside-down. What if the artist, or any one of us, could distribute Martin? If the spread of his DNA were enough to reproduce his commitments to a decent standard of living for everyone, to the idea of community unbounded by color or class, and against militarism and violence of all kinds, why wouldn't we make use of any available technology? Distributing Martin, from this vantage, seems seriously sane. From this vantage, furthermore, the idea of a Du Bois machine gains new traction as a possible instrument of democracy. Not democracy as we know it, but as a way of life premised on the abolition of exploitation, especially of people of color, on the discrediting of imperial projects carried out in the name of freedom or human rights, on the end of the damnation of women and the systemic devaluation of“the crankiest, humblest and poorest and blackest peoples.”5 5    W. E. B. Du Bois,“Of the Ruling of Men,”Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Mineola, NY: Dover Press, 1999), 88.

This upset the young man. We were talking on the phone. He said:“Yes, sure, we can do what you're asking and I can get you access to the labs but if we do this, if we do this would you really open the canister in a room full of people?” And I said:“Sure, if it will make them as good as MLK, sure. And then he replied:“Well, you're an idiot. A traitor and a fucking idiot. So that put the kibosh on the project for a while. A pretty harsh ending. I'd still bring up the project in artist talks but the audiences never latched on. I continued working on the website. It had become this labyrinth of several websites. The topmost layer was a diary with fantastic dates that did not, in some cases, match the entries. I tried to make the site visually attractive but it ended up looking more like my grandmother's apartment with trap doors and hallways that went nowhere. Recently I've introduced the white pages … My most recent opportunity to get the project off the ground crashed and burned just several months ago. I'd moved to a very large city in the Midwest next to a very large lake.

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I received an email invitation to participate in an art exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of W. E. B. Du Bois, the renowned black scholar and activist who, legend has it, shepherded in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

By posing serious questions about what it means to inherit the bodies and lives of King and Du Bois and to come to terms with the unexpected consequences of their victories as well as the daunting prospect of their unfinished work, Pope.L directs his audience forward. In between the openness of his first word— sometimes”—and the“decision”that closes Du Bois Machine's narrative and appears to suspend the projects inspired by the King materials, Pope.L explores the contingencies that give birth to and foreclose his work as an artist. The abruptness of the ending mirrors gestures of closure through which Du Bois's and King's memories are preserved for our reverence or eclipsed in the insistence that it is time to move on or get over the past. Pope.L also alerts his audience to the ongoing circulation of King and Du Bois in a moment in which demands for social equality have lost their capacity to kill, but listening to the wrong music or walking through the wrong neighborhood is no less deadly for young African Americans. If they lived still, King and Du Bois would encounter a world so changed as to be unrecognizable in many respects. But they would also find themselves in a new kind of funhouse, one where arguments for extending a decent standard of living are translated as“dependency,”where affirmative action and school desegregation are decried as“racism,”where corporations are people. Du Bois Machine, like Pope.L's Skin Set Drawings, discloses how an aphoristic imagination enables a confrontation with the taken-for-granted and the unthinkable. It counters what James Baldwin calls“our passion for categorization, life neatly fitted into pegs.” “Those categories which were meant to define and control the world for us,”Baldwin writes,“have boomeranged us into 6 chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions.” Du Bois Machine reassembles inherited categories and definitions so that we might see them differently. We hear them differently, too. One of the most striking elements of Pope.L's piece is the assured voice of the narrator, Eden Strong. She links the artist's thoughts and stories with a matter-of-factness that belies the youthfulness of her voice and suggests that what he proposes is, in fact, conceivable. Maybe there is hope there: in the emergence of a generation that pierces the accretions of dishonest histories and political philosophies and is prepared to tangle with the mixed bag of astonishing achievement and shortcoming that these great men—and the many more invisible women and men, girls and boys—have bequeathed to us. If Du Bois Machine instigates a fuller reappraisal of the human beings behind the myths we revere, it equally presses us to consider how much we have to gain by reviving their dreams of more democratic future worlds. Would that be so crazy?

My host was a large university who had just bought the former homestead of the Du Bois family and they were very happy. In the fall of last year, I attended a symposium at the university. Upon arrival, I discovered that my hosts revered Du Bois. Like MLK, Du Bois seemed to be able to contain, as it were, an incredibly large and complex family of desires, actions, objects and images seemingly merely within the stride of his legs. The second day of the symposium I learned that like MLK, Du Bois had a large appetite outside his marriage. That he was driven, almost hypergraphic. That he loved clothes and getting his picture taken. That he'd pencil in the crease of his trousers so they'd show better on camera. Later, after a hard day in the symposia rooms, I walked to dinner with one of the university's professors who told me a story involving Du Bois forcing his daughter into marriage with a famous gay poet. When I asked the professor why Du Bois did this, he said: Well—I think he was an asshole.

6    James Baldwin,“Everybody's Protest Novel,”Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 19.

Pope.L

After the symposia, I returned home to the city near the lake and, for the most part, forgot about the project. A month or so later, my sister became mysteriously ill and I could not reach her by phone. When I did finally contact her she was in the hospital and very, very ill. It was her heart and she was dying. Thanksgiving was approaching, I'd been planning to visit her, bringing along her favorite thing in the world, her nephew, my 4-year old son. On the way to the airport to visit my sister, my son became ill. A slight fever. I hoped. In addition, over the past several days, I'd been receiving emails from the university concerning doing an interview with me about my project. In fact, they were flying in the interviewers to do just this. The primary interviewer and I got off on the wrong foot. For her everything was easy: to arrange the date, to choose a place for the interview, etc. etc. For me everything seemed too much. Eventually I told my hosts I might have to bow out of the project. When I returned from visiting my sister, they had emailed telling me they had accepted my decision. Fig. 2

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Installation view of Skin Set Drawings, 2010-2013 Colored Waiting Room Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, NY

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0→086, 38-39, ci/gry‖087, 07-08, )., D‖087, 10-11, N/LY‖087, 20-21, e/S&M‖087, 37-38, e, o/as‖088, 36-37, I/dow‖089, 10-11, o/s, h, A‖089, 10-11, o/s, h, B‖089, 12-13, e/o, E‖090, 09-10, lif/th‖090, 09-10, t/o, A‖090, 09-10, t/o, B‖090, 16-17, d, 0/sup‖090, 26-27, C/n, A‖090, 26-27, C/n, B‖091, 08-09, w/la‖091, 13-14, h, h/ha‖091, 13-14, n, a/y, s‖091, 20-21, s/g, A‖091, 20-21, s/g, B‖091, 23-24, hre/th‖091, 24-25, e/e‖091, 27-28, o, F/hed‖091, 30-31, t, w/ir‖091, 34-35, y/ac‖091, 3536, h, b/Hi, A‖091, 35-36, h, b/Hi, B‖091, 40-41, n, i/t, t‖092, 01-02, d, l/n‖092, 9-10, ey/g‖092, 10-11, he/b, A‖092, 10-11, he/b, B‖092, 10-11, n,t/ke‖092, 12-13, h, t/f, t‖092, 18-19, s,/e‖092, 19-20, pty/d, t, A‖092, 19-20, pty/d, t, B‖093, 9-10, or,/be‖093, 14-15, tsi/g, o‖093, 15-16, d./oa‖093, 22-23, (/H‖093, 22-23, ), h/at, i093, 22-23, e/g‖093, 22-23, st/n, i‖093, 22-23, ze/th‖093, 26-27, ", H/c‖093, 31-32, at, t/wore‖094, 31-32, im/al‖094, 39-40, ce/gh‖094, 39-40, e, y/e‖094, 39-40, mi/sp‖095, 12-13, lf/r, o‖096, 04-05, Na/"E‖097, 04-05, r, w/n', b‖1→102, 32-33, t‖102, 32-33, We/?"‖8→888 0X8 080 XOX‖,→,Bla,ck Pe,ople, Are, Not, Black, Th, Ey, Are, Not,, People, Bl,ack Peop,le Are A Set, Of Te,xts, That, Marched In Selma, Alabama, No, No, Let's, Start Again, Only This Time, This Time, This, Time, Let's S,tart With: Or'ange, People, Are, Not, Orange..,‖B→Black Peoe Are When People Were Made Of Ethics‖Black Peopl Are Th Weather‖Black People Are A 'V' Of Light‖Black People Are A Cave Inside An Earthworm‖Black People Are A Drain On Our Autonomy‖Black People Are A Freathe of Bresh Air‖Black People Are A Line In The Hand‖Black People Are A Memory‖Black People Are A Moment‖Black People Are A Musical About Hard Candy, Pork Rinds, Pussy And Money‖Black People Are A Partially Burnd Fuel‖Black People Are A Positive Cancer‖Black People Are A Single Flower‖Black People Are A Sunny Day, Red Clouds And Ammonia Trees‖Black People Are An Idea‖Black People Are Beside The Point‖Black People Are Better Off‖Black People Are Bloody Kansas In A World without Hope Or Rubbers‖Black People Are Children‖Black People Are Crispy‖Black People Are Cropped‖Black People Are Cross-over‖Black People Are Dope‖Black People Are Falling Stars Against A Blue Sky‖Black People Are Feta‖Black People Are Fisson‖Black People Are Five Miles Down Right At The Inebriation Left At Repatriation And You AreThere‖Black People Are For Rent‖Black People Are For Shit‖Black People Are Glass‖Black People Are Grape‖Black People Are Great‖Black People Are Great‖Black People Are Grumpy‖Black People Are Guilty‖Black People Are In The Building‖Black People Are Magic Marker In The Elevator‖Black People Are Matisse's Armchair‖Black People Are Men‖Black People Are Misspelled‖Black People Are Mom‖Black People Are My Deft Side‖Black People Are My Dustiny‖Black People Are Needy‖Black People Are Nice To Animals‖Black People Are Nice To Their Anger‖Black People Are Noah Hitchhiking To The Concert‖Black People Are Okra Felons‖Black People Are Peachy‖Black People Are Playing Possum‖Black People Are Playing Possum‖Black People Are Positive‖Black People Are Pride‖Black People Are Pure Tone‖Black People Are Safe‖Black People Are Shit‖Black People Are Shit‖Black People Are Slick‖Black People Are Sodom & Disney Land‖Black People Are Something I Can't Sell‖Black People Are Super-market‖Black People Are Talented Fudge Packers‖Black People Are Taut‖Black People Are That Movie You Wanted To See But Yopu Got There Too Ate And The Tickets Were Sold Out‖Black People Are That Transient Hotel In That Neighborhood You Always Wanted To Visit Now You Can‖Black People Are The (W)hole In God's Anus‖Black People Are The Bag, The Glue, Wet Dream And Broken Teeth On The Rail Road Track‖Black People Are The Bex Of The Polaroid‖Black People Are The Bitterness Of Davis, The Solitude Of Prince And The Flatulence Of Elvis‖Black People Are The Boat On The Horizon‖Black People Are The Broken Cock And Its Liquid‖Black People Are The Cave Inside An Earthworm‖Black People Are The Christmas Tree In The Driveway‖Black People Are The Clouds Above The Potomac‖Black People Are The Cong Kind Of Patience‖Black People Are The Crust In Baby's Eye‖Black People Are The Cupola‖Black People Are The Diamond Chittlin'‖Black People Are The Dream And What Comes After‖Black People Are The End Of Things Black‖Black People Are The Future‖Black People Are The Future‖Black People Are The Garden Hose And Running Children‖Black People Are The Glory Of A Shared Piece Of

pope.l

Candy‖Black People Are The God's And What The God's Have Forgotten‖Black People Are The Harrow, The Arrow And The Corot‖Black People Are The Hole In God's Anus‖Black People Are The Holl(er)ow That Keeps On Giving‖Black People Are The Last White Colonists‖Black People Are The Light At The End Of The Chummel‖Black People Are The Lit-miss‖Black People Are The Long Wet Grass At Midnight‖Black People Are The Moat, The Keep And The Faggot‖Black People Are The Nape Of Dracula‖Black People Are The Pot And The Kettle‖Black People Are The Rabbit In The Fabric‖Black People Are The Rage‖Black People Are The Rage‖Black People Are The Rain Against The Windshield‖Black People Are The Reflections In The Chrome In The Toaster On The Counter‖Black People Are The Rhinoceri On The Tight Rope‖Black People Are The Road At The Beginning Of The Movie‖Black People Are The Root Of All Evil‖Black People Are The Salt Bath After The Beating You Thought Would Never End‖Black People Are The Scar Of Coffee‖Black People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand‖Black People Are The Silent Weapon In Our Race Against Tomorrow‖Black People Are The Smell Of Freshly Baked Bread‖Black People Are The Song Of The Rain-drops On The Window In The Wrong-Ciousness‖Black People Are The Song Of The Tractor‖Black People Are The Sound, The Wing And The Shadow‖Black People Are The Sputter In The Water‖Black People Are The Sun And What Comes After‖Black People Are The Thong Of Moses‖Black People Are The Tie That Binds‖Black People Are The Told‖Black People Are The Trees In The Park‖Black People Are The Way We Live‖Black People Are The Wet Grass At Morning‖Black People Are The White Habit‖Black People Are The Window And The Breaking Of The Window‖Black People Are The View From The Hotel Room Of Karl Rove And My Mother‖Black People Are This Book On Fire‖Black People Are Told‖Black People Are Transparent‖Black People Are Trying‖Black People Are Turdy‖Blacx People Are Twowit Black People Are Sa-Sa-Salambo Black People Are Myst XXXXX People Are The Fiery Dragon Above The Police Station Blxck People Are What You Think When You Think Of 'X' Black People Are Hasp Black People Watch De Grass Grow XXXX XXXXX XX XX XXX XXX XXXXX: 22 Bxaxx Peoxlx Axe Zwick Bblackk Ppeoplee Aaareee Sssshittt Black People Are My Foot Black People Axe De-Morrow Black People Are IX Black People Are The 'C' In Weep Black People Are Cleophus Not Odysseus Black People Are Lake Constance Black Pxopele Are Shit Black Xpeoplps Are The Seems Black People Are Beaf Black Poupee Xrx Liszt Black People Are Gif Black People Are What Is This Black People Arxxee The Bardo Black People Are Whale Black People Are The Knit Of The Gist Of The Xylon Gif‖Black People Are Typical‖Black People R V‖Black People Are Vynil‖Black People Are Waking Watermelon‖Black People Are What Black People Lack‖Black People Are What's Wrong With Everything‖Black People Are What's Wrong With Montana‖Black People Are White People on Fire‖Black People Art Us‖Black People Is A Dime Rolling Into the Gutter Sinking Into Memory Reemerging Into Forgetfulness‖Black People Is The Lipstick On The Escalator‖Black People Shit In The Mouth Of History‖Black People: When I Walk Into The Sea‖Black People Wick‖Black Poeople Are To Scale‖Black Poeple Are The Hatred Of The Cicadas‖Black Poeple Are The Lsot Red Colony‖Black To The Future‖Blue Peopl Are Fabricated‖Blue People Are 100% Vawter‖Blue People Are A Carton Of Newport‖Blue People Are A Drop Of Halter‖Blue People Are A Drop Of Halter‖Blue People Are A Lake In An Ocean‖Blue People Are A Trick of Rain‖Blue People Are An Underwater Airport‖Blue People Are Cold‖Blue People Are Coousins Whooeaatt Eat Eaat Eat Eat Watcch Big Colorvision Aall Dayyall Night All Llllllllllllllll Lll Every Time Follow Yy Oou Around Tthe Hhouse Talking About The Future Of Plastics‖Blue People Are Fungent‖Blue People Are Gaunt, Broken, And Stand A Long Fence Staring At Everything And Nothing‖(Blue People Are (If God Created Them And Created Everything Even Non-Everything So) Blue People Are The Tears Of God When It Is Sleeping‖Blue People Are Inconsolable‖Blue People Are Large Fat And Old And Live In Caves In East Orange, N.J.‖Blue People Are My New God Replacing Chartreuse People, My Old God‖Blue People Are My New God Replacing Chartreuse People My Old God From Last Year‖Blue People Are Not A People They Are A Substance‖Blue People Are Old People‖Blue People

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Are Pices Of Wood‖Blue People Are Racist‖Blue People Are Rain‖Blue People Are Saran-Dinavian‖Blue People Are Smoke‖Blue People Are Smoke Curling From A Clay Pipe‖Blue People Are That Heaven In That Movie‖Blue People Are The Beautiful Sliver‖Blue People Are The Blood Inside The Blood Inside The Blood Of A Puppy‖Blue People Are The Color Of Oour Crimes‖Blue People Are The Future‖Blue People Are The Light Of Debt‖Blue People Are The Niggers Of The Atmosphere‖Blue People Are The Red Man On His Pony In Front Of The Hospital‖Blue People Are The Scent Of Her Pajamas‖Blue People Are The Wine Of Dogs‖Blue People Are What We Do With Homosexuals, French People And Roma‖Blue People Cannot Conceive Of Themselves‖Blue People Have No Hand Feets No Afro To Make The Head Grow‖Blue People Is What History Is Like When You Love Inside A White Person‖Blue People Is What You See When You Got A Bad Cold And Can Only Talk About Globalism‖Blue People Live In Your Ass‖Blue People Ssshit In The Mouth Of History‖Blue People Take The Cat To Work‖Blue Peoplee Are In The Glass‖Blue Poeple Are An Exprssion‖Blue Poeple Are An Exprssion‖Blue Ppeople Are That Cloud That Pourssss From The Windows Of Carss That Pull Up Next To You At Thate Stop Light And Blind You With Possibility‖Blues People Are The Bits Of Thread, Dirt Rust And Blood On The Floor Sweat Shops‖Brow People Are Are Broken Incandescenttt‖Brown People Are Aaa Lounge Act At The Bakery‖Brown People Are A Gas At Room Temperature‖Brown People Are A Gift‖Brown People Are A Liquid‖Brown People Are A Liquid‖Brown People Are A Mall In Australia‖Brown People Are A Theory About Green People‖Brown People Are Animals In A Story‖Brown People Are Derivative‖Brown People Are From‖Brown People Are Hung‖Brown People Are Im-patient‖Brown People Are Lemon‖Brown People Are, Moses At The Pool Hall, Purple Leisure Suit, Two-Toned Shoes, Bicardi Rum And Kryptonite‖Brown People Are No Where To Be Seen‖Brown People Are Our Belief In Gravity‖Brown People Are Pinnchio With a Green Card‖Brown People Are Precipitation‖Brown People Are Roaches‖Brown PeopleAreSelf-Detonating‖BrownPeopleAreShit‖BrownPeopleAreTasty‖BrownPeopleAreTheAint'sOfTheUnderpass‖Brown People Are The Black Sun‖Brown People Are The Dirt Of The Salt‖Brown People Are The Gimp Daffodil‖Brown People Are The Green Ray‖Brown People Are The Phone That Glistens‖Brown People Are The Sea In Leisure‖Brown People Are The Spill In The Harbor‖Brown People Are The Taco In The Harbor‖Brown People Are The Water They Are Looking For On Jupiter‖Brown People Are The Whispers And Beaks Across The Backside Of The Prime Minister When He Is In Session‖Brown People Are The World After Shit‖Brown People Are To The King What The Sky Is To The Armadillo‖Brown People Are Vexas‖Brown People Are Winged Breaded And Eted‖Brown People Are Writing‖Brown People Live On The Haed Of A Pin‖Brown People Shrink Shit‖Brown People Wash They Ash On The Television‖Brown Poeple Are Illegal Immigrants‖Brown Ppeople Are Pooooontang Ccclan Wingg Ffeigngg‖C→Cliff‖D→Destiny's Child Is Caramel‖DRTA AWXX CZRR AXRP/ XCXD XAEX ODDD MDXT‖E→Everthing Goes Better With White People‖F→Fence‖G→‖Green People Are, This …‖Green People Are A Good Way To Look At Anismism‖Green People Are A Member That Protrudes From Flatulent Ideas‖Green People Are A Recent Invention‖Green People Are An Ecology Of The Dozens‖Green People Are America Eat Its Ass-ness‖Green People Are Artificial‖Green People Are Club Med Of Hate‖Green People Are Death Eating A Soda Cracker‖Green People Are Decidous‖Green People Are Dust It Is Waiting‖Green People Are El Salvador, Montana‖Green People Are Famished‖Green People Are Features‖Green People Are Flavoring‖Green People Are Flower Fleck Gilgamesh This Bereft Yet Another Quest A Guess Of Flesh Who Gets The Breath?‖Green People Are Foliage Without A Kernel‖Green People Are Hope Without Reason‖Green People Are Immigrant Laxation‖Green People Are Inferior‖Green People Are Jesus When He Was Choking‖Green People Are Kafka Construction, Queens, New York, New York‖Green People Are Kelp Cunt‖Green People Are Leave-it-to-beaver With His Cleaver And His Shadow‖Green People Are Mice Beneath The Floorboards‖Green People Are My Brother Frank‖Green People Are My Unca Junior In The Hell Of His Own Choosing‖Green People Are Not Irish‖Green People Are On Rice‖Green People

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Are Pea Fuckers‖Green People Are Pea Fuckers‖Green People Are Pierced‖Green People Are Powder‖Green People Are Pumice‖Green People Are Red People With No Money, No Country, No Winfrey, And No Belfry‖Green People Are Red People With Toyotas‖Green People Are Shitty‖Green People Are Teal‖Green People Are Teal‖Green People Are That Bar Above The Treeline At Half Past Midnight In August‖Green People Are That Definitive Humanity With Their Asses Pressed Against Transparent Surfaces Everywhere‖Green People Are The Best Mulch‖Green People Are The Bush Family Planet On The Tilta-whirl After Toooo Many Universes‖Green People Are The Depp Of Everyone‖Green People Are The Firey-Truth-HeadedDragon‖Green People Are The Forest Canopy Burning‖Green People Are The Glory Of The Shallot‖Green People Are The Hope Of The Hand With The Knife At Your Throat In The Alley Inside Your Bathroom‖Green People Are The Light From A Star That Will Never Reach Us‖Green People Are The Light From A Star That Will Never Reach Us‖Green People Are The Neatness Of Military Installations‖Green People Are The Nervous System Of Lincoln Bronte And Copernicus‖Green People Are The Ones Who Keep On Laughing Long After The Joke Is Over‖Green People Are The Reflection Which Is Form‖Green People Are The Sky Above The City‖Green People Are The Soft Palate‖Green People Are The Wreck-fist Of Champions‖Green People Are Toothy And Good Dancers‖Green People Are Wars Weems Lancaster Lopez Pruznick Montalto Weems Barnes And Lancaster Thomas‖Green People Are White People Who Can't Escape Their Blackness‖Green People Cellophane‖Green People Don't Care What Color They Are As Long As They Get It For Free‖Green People Eat Homosexuals‖Green People Hark‖Green People Shed Their Skin‖Green Poeple Are Juwana, Tuwana, And Rwanda‖H→HXM OXO XXX XHX‖HXM OXO XXXX XHX‖I→IXXIXXI XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX IXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX‖J→Jackie Gleason Is Ether‖M→MHX XXX NOO 88O HMX‖N→Negro Idea #14‖Negro Idea #28‖Negro Idea #56‖Negro Idea #82‖Negro Idea #241‖Negro Idea #267‖Negro Idea #501‖Negro Idea #678‖Negro Idea #1591‖Negro Idea #7017‖O→OOOO OOOO OO O OOOO OOOO X‖OOOOO OOOOO OOOOO OOOOO‖OOOOOO OOOOOO OOOOOO OOOOOO OOO‖Orange People Are A Book With Write Pages Writ On Them!!!!!‖Orange People Are A Drink Of Annihilation‖Orange People Are A Leaf In A Mall In Australia‖Orange People Are A Powder‖Orange People Are A Sentence Penned By A Crea-ture In A Con-tainer Under A Lake On A Strannet Several Light Years From East Orange, N.J.‖Orange People Are Andy Wharhol's Negro Breath‖Orange People Are Asleep On Fire‖Orange People Are Bat Skin‖Orange People Are Famous‖Orange People Are God When She Is Shitting‖Orange People Are Gods Who Like To Tan A Lot‖Orange People Are Learnt‖Orange People Are Made Of Lozenges‖Orange People Are My Balls In Summer‖Orange People Are My Balls In Summer‖Orange People Are My Father With His Brown Bottle Curled Up At The Bottom Of The Stairs Like An Orphan Larger Than Life‖Orange People Are My Mother When She Was In The Hospital Dying By Lying Under The Blue Lying About Her Illness‖Orange People Are Rotting Rays From Ruins Refore The Last Enjoy The Griot Convey The Shrapnel Deploy‖Orange People Are That Stupid Rich On The Irrelivsion‖Orange People Are The Bodies Falling Piece By Piece To The Carpet‖Orange People Are The Cracked Pavements In The Backyards Of Hollywood‖Orange People Are The Cupola‖Orange People Are The Grain Of The Sun‖Orange People Are The Grid On The Ceiling‖Orange People Are The Pollywood House Burning On A Hill Of Donkeys And Refrigators‖Orange People Are The Surface Of The Son‖Orange People Drink The Light From The Upholstery‖Orange People Love Their Own Smell‖Orange People Stick Their Finger Into Tomorrw‖Orange People Suck And Get Something Out Of It‖Orange People The Way Things Used To Be When They Were In Power‖Orange Poeple Are The First Word In The Bible‖OXO OHO OMXX H XXXX VO‖OXOX XXOXXX OOOXOOOO OOOXOOO OOXOO OOOO‖P→"Page 456 [Book 3, spine 44, (errata)] White People Are God At The Grocery Store With Our Whinnys Andher Pennies He Said: "" I Never Atone Alone!!"""‖Page 480 [Book 3, spine 44, (errata)] White People Are What I Stink Of When I At The American Flag Flying High Above My Hemmorhoid On A Collision Course With Mirth‖Page 573 [Book

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3, spine 44, (errata)] Green People Are A Member That Protrudes From Flatulent Ideas‖Page 922 [Book 3, spine 44, (errata)] Pages 923 through 3401 in the errata are made of paper and contain the same content as page 922; pages 3404 through 8771 vary as to substrate (for example, pages 7231 through 8500 are composed on several types of water vapor). The content of pages 3404 through 7230 and 8501 through 8771 are equally various.‖Pink People Are The Wrong Sale‖Pink People Eat Cotton Candy I Eat Cotton‖Porple People Are The Salt In The Wound, Green Around The Edges Hardened Crust‖Ppurple People Aare Aa Very Long River‖Purple People Are A Gray-Green Thin Bright‖Purple People Are A Type Of Candy For Blue People Who Live In White Neighborhoods In Canada‖Purple People Are Chained To The Steering Wheel‖Purple People Are Discarded‖Purple People Are Fraught‖Purple People Are Guilding A Bitter D-ubious Not Just Bigger Pathetic Lining The Nose Of Royalt-yyyys With Carbonated Cowboy Hats Narled Wren-to-wregui-nas Set Out Into The Very Wa-ter Mosesfartedisraelites O-n A Cracker With Palestiniaaan An Buttoks Betwixt F‖Purple People Are I'Il Fuck You Whole Family And Cut They Shit Off‖Purple People Are Middle Age Is Snow‖Purple People Are Moses In His Tasket‖Purple People Are Natural‖Purple People Are Pernicus- (?), Famous For Being Themselves In Love With The Lower Blood Types‖Purple People Are Reason Bicarbonate‖Pur E People Are Stained‖Purple People Are The Arm That Is Breaking‖Purple People Are The Capote‖Purple People Are The Cartoon Network After The Bra-Strap Across The Testicles‖Purple People Are The Christians With The Beer, The Lions And The Baseball Caps‖Purple People Are The Color Of Blood After Several Days On The Radiator‖Purple People Are The Color Of Plinarchy‖Purple People Are The End Of Orange People‖Purple People Are The Explosions In The Harketplace‖Purple People Are The Fog Barking In The Backyard Of The Family That Has Maybes‖Purple People Are The Footprints Around That Hole In The Ground‖Purple People Are The Foot-Prints Around The Hole In The Ground‖Purple People Are The Heel When It Is Lifting‖Purple People Are The Hollows In Our Bodies‖Purple People Are The Labors Of Tyson‖Purple People Are The Larvest‖Purple People Are The Joyce Of A People‖Purple People Are The Joyce Of A People Who…‖Purple People Are The Perfect Conee Or The King Not His Body‖Purple People Are The Pile Of Bodies On The Television‖Purple People Are The Prostheses‖Purple People Are The Rhyme In The Sky Out Exactly Against The Red Against The Blue Against The Black Against The Glass Against The Sun‖Purple People Are The Ripples On The Plastic Wrappers In The Ocean‖Purple People Are: I, I Fuck You Whole Family and Cut They Shit Off‖Purple People Are Two Kinds Of White‖Purple People Are Used‖Purple People Are Very Persuasive‖Purple People Are What Holds Our Look Together‖Purple People Are Your Middle Finger Twixt The Spunk Of The Two Twins, One From Desmoine, The Other Bei-Jing, Both Releas--Ing The Great Salt Tear‖Purple People Be So Black Even The Sun Is Jealous‖Purple People Bust A Nut In The Gravy And We Learn Something‖Purple People Do Not Believe‖Purple People Lox‖R→Red People Are‖Red People Are‖Red People Are A Liquid In A Beaver In A Lab In Manchester England‖Red People Are A Moon Of South Dakota‖Red People Are A Novel Set In The Head Of A Watermoccasin‖Red People Are A Photograph‖Red People Are A Road In The Middle Oof Progress‖Red People Are A Thought Experiment‖Red People Are A Thought Nothing Moored‖Red People Are A Token Made Of Kerosene Aluminum Foil And Jelly‖Red People Are A Vent In The Body‖Red People Are A Voice In The Childerness‖Red People Are Ass Cots‖Red People Are Belicious‖Red People Are Black People Who Think They Are Native Native American‖Red People Are Black People With A Heritage‖Red People Are Blue Bloods With Repensive Hates‖Red People Are Boner Cosmic‖Red People Are Bonnets‖Red People Are Briefcase Of Sand‖Red People Are Cock‖Red People Are Cognate‖Red People Are Croutons‖Red People Are Custer's Al Qeada Sweater‖Red People Are Dawn‖Red People Are Dawn (Tony Orlando And…)‖Red People Are Dusk Bunnies‖Red People Are Filthy, Wealthy‖Red People Are Fred‖Red People Are Free/ Green People Are Cheese‖Red People Are From Mars Green People Are From New Jersey‖Red People Are Mauve‖Red People Are Impotent And Why‖Red People Are Jews Who Keep Forgetting Their

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Hats‖Red People Are La Nature‖Red People Are Licker‖Red People Are Martians Who Took A Wrong Turn At Albuquerque‖Red People Are Mascots‖Red People Are My Mother When She Sick And Visiting Me In The Hospital‖Red People Are Prickly‖Red People Are Puce‖Red People Are Round Spotty-colored‖Red People Are Samples‖Red People Are Something That You Dance To‖Red People Are Tan‖Red People Are Tents‖Red People Are The Above Cloud The Military Installation‖Red People Are The Buffalo In Heat High Above Anartica‖Red People Are The Color Of Baloney‖Red People Are The Garage Door When It Is Open‖Red People Are The Last Bar-b-que Potato Chip In The Bag Crumpled Up On the Floor Of A 1992 Toyota Pick-up With No Radio XXX‖Red People Are The Little Dot On The Prarie‖Red People Are The Mascara‖Red People Are The Moon, The Fort And The K-mart‖Red People Are The Niggerss Of The Canyon‖Red People Are The Opposite Of Green People‖Red People Are The Tip For Which The Iceberg Has Been Waiting‖Red People Are The Voice Of Liver‖Red People Are The Wind, The Horse And The Movie Channel‖Red People Are Tobacco, Wampum, A Shovel, Blankets And A Chevy Pickup‖Red People Are Trail Mix‖Red People Are White People With Paws and Blankets‖Red People Are With Stupid‖Red People Fuck The Oysters Of Authors‖Red People Have No Reservations‖Red People Line The Halls To The Smaller Offices‖Red People Ream Of Talapia‖S→Skin Set Painting: Four Seasons‖Skin Set Painting: The Commons Divides Moses and Moses Divides S…‖Skin Set Painting: The Winter Of Black People‖U→Untitle (Black Peoe Are When People Were Made Of Ethics)‖Untitle (Black People Are Shit)‖Untitle (Brown People Are A Liquid)‖Untitle (Brown Ppeople Are Pooooontang Ccclan Wingg Ffeigngg)‖Untitle (Green People Are The Soft Palate)‖Untitle (Orange People Are My Mother When She Was In The Hospital Dying By Lying Under The Blue Lying About Her Illness)‖Untitle (Orange People Are That Stupid Rich On The Irrelivsion)‖Untitle (Orange People Are The Cracked Pavements In The Backyards Of Hollywood)‖Untitle (Purple People Are The Christians With The Beer, The Lions And The Baseball Caps)‖Untitle (Purple People Are Your Middle Finger Twixt The Spunk Of The Two Twins, One From Desmoine, The Other Bei-Jing, Both Releas--Ing The Great Salt Tear)‖Untitle (Sign)‖Untitle (White People Are An Invention Machine That Creates An Anti-Clotting Agent In Several Known Colors Pink, Beige, The Fa-Mous Skin Tone Olive, Fair As Well As Certain In Purple And Greys And Thin-Indi-Gos, Producing With This Interaction A Not Breaking Down Or Or Subversion-Of But A Waning-In Or Pro-Gliding-Into (See J.R. Timmons, Pg. 486-548)‖Untitle (Yellow People Are Red People Are White People Are Black People Are Green People Under-The Same Gas-Stained Tarpaulin)‖Untitle (Yellow People Are The Great Red Schlong)‖UXO O XUO OOO OO O OOOO‖W→White Peo E Are A Text In A Puddle‖White Peopl Are Hung‖White People Are‖White People Are A Desalination Plant In Puerto Rico‖White People Are A Desalination Plant In Puerto Rico‖White People Are A Disaster‖White People Are A Disaster That Has Already Happened‖White People Are A Glass Darky‖White People Are A Kind Of Masturbation‖White People Are A Peace Of Foam‖White People Are Air‖White People Are All The Fort Laramie Treaties‖White People Are An Adjective‖White People Are An Adjective‖White People Are An Invention Machine That Creates An Anti-Clotting Agent In Several Known Colors Pink, Beige, The Fa-Mous Skin Tone Olive,‖Fair As Well As Certain In Purple And Greys And Thin-Indi-Gos, Producing With This Interaction A Not Breaking Down Or Or Subversion-Of But A‖Waning-In Or Pro-Gliding-Into (See J.R. Timmons, Pg. 486-548)‖White People Are Angles On Fire‖White People Are Art‖White People Are Ass‖White People Are Back‖White People Are Been‖White People Are Below Freezing‖White People Are Black People Are Good‖White People Are Black People By Neuroses‖White People Are Cain's Idea‖White People Are Cold‖White People Are Crack‖White People Are Creative‖White People Are Death In Sunshine‖White People Are Dirty‖White People Are Donkey‖White People Are Dublin Ireland 1988‖White People Are Encouraged‖White People Are Expensive‖White People Are Fad‖White People Are Fair‖White People Are Fat‖White People Are Foamy And Bitter‖White People Are Folded‖White People Are Folded‖White People Are Gabriel And His Boner‖White People Are

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Gas‖White People Are Gay‖White People Are. Get Used To It.‖White People Are Glass‖White People Are God At The Grocery Store With Our Whinnys Andher Pennies He Said: " I Never Atone Alone!!"‖White People Are God When Shweit Is Over‖White People Are God's Anus‖White People Are God's Way Of Saying I'm Sorry‖White People Are Gold‖White People Are Good To Eat‖White People Are Good To Eat‖White People Are Hoi Vuc, Vietnam 1965‖White People Are Hysterical‖White People Are I Can See The Whole Room And There's Nobody In It‖White People Are Jape‖White People Are Lard‖White People Are Lark‖White People Are Larks‖White People Are Love‖White People Are Meat‖White People Are Mind‖White People Are Monkey‖White People Are Mum‖White People Are My Family‖White People Are My Father‖White People Are My Son‖White People Are My Tears‖White People Are Naked‖White People Are Negotiable‖White People Are Negotiable‖White People Are Negotiable‖White People Are Negro Idea #2205‖White People Are Next To Cleanliness‖White People Are Nice To Animals‖White People Are Nice To Their Ideology‖White People Are Not Jewish They Are Caucasian‖White People Are Not White People‖White People Are Paint‖White People Are Palesman Who Live In Cleveland‖White People Are Parts‖White People Are Poor‖White People Are Prawns At Sunset‖White People Are Pun‖White People Are Randy‖White People Are Rind‖White People Are Sad‖White People Are Sad‖White People Are Sad‖White People Are Salty‖White People Are Signs‖White People Are Stones Up Turned‖White People Are The 'Y' In Winona‖White People Are The "Y" In Winona‖White People Are The Ache And Its Hole‖White People Are The Ashtray Overflowing‖White People Are The Beef On Fire‖White People Are The Blink, The Wink And The Chink‖White People Are The Blood And The Horizon‖White People Are The Book In The Fire Grate‖White People Are The Breaking Of Everyday Things‖White People Are The Broken Light In The Refrigerator‖White People Are The Bunny Beneath The Bureau‖White People Are The Camel And Its Needle‖White People Are The Cheese In The Burrito‖White People Are The Cliff And What Comes After‖White People Are The Clouds, The Sea And The Wreckage‖White People Are The Coins Beneath The Cushions‖White People Are The Couch And The Sofa‖White People Are The Crook Of My Arm‖White People Are The Cupola‖White People Are The Dent In My Left Testicle‖White People Are The Diamond And The Ferret‖White People Are The Empty Cupboard‖White People Are The Field And The Cattle‖White People Are The Final Solution‖White People Are The Fish Phallus‖White People Are The Flavor Of The Mout‖White People Are The Fumes Of The Speeding El Dorado‖White People Are The Future‖White People Are The Future‖White People Are The Future‖White People Are The Future‖White People Are The Genome Washing Its Feet At The Magic Fountain‖White People Are The Gnomes Washing Their Feet In The Magic Fountain After The Massacre At The Projects‖White People Are The Gods And What The Gods Have Forgotten‖White People Are The Hot Dog Vendor At The Ruins‖White People Are The Interior‖White People Are The Jape And It's Rattle‖White People Are The Leaves On The Pond Near The Creamatorium‖White People Are The Lights Of The City‖White People Are The Measurement Of Things Brown‖White People Are The Neg-Ative In The Sen-Tence: "The Son Is Not Made Of Candy, Martin, It is Made Of Politics‖White People Are The Planet After The Planet After The Planet After Pluto‖White People Are The Pimp Of The Iceberg‖White People Are The Pound Of My Flesh At Orgasm‖White People Are The Pretty Lights Of Bars‖White People Are The Right Rat Poison‖White People Are The Glass Donkey‖White People Are The Sex Of The Polaroid‖White People Are The Silence They Cannot Understand‖White People Are The Sky, The Rope And The Bonfire‖White People Are The Smoke From The Ruins‖White People Are The Snake And The Apple‖White People Are The Spoon And The Needle‖White People Are The Sun And What Comes After‖White People Are The Thighs Of Rats‖White People Are The Victims Of History‖White People Are The Violence You Cannot Understand‖White People Are The Wet Street‖White People Are The Whale‖White People Are Toast‖White People Are Tool‖White People Are Ultra-Violet‖White People Are Unclear‖White People Are Us‖White People Are What I Stink Of When I At The American Flag Flying High Above My Hemmorhoid On A

pope.l

Collision Course With Mirth‖White People Are What White People Lack‖White People Are Yellow‖White People Are Yellow‖White People Are Yellow‖White People Are Yellow‖White People Are Zeit Mice‖White People Belong To Everyone‖White People Cardboard Boxes Beneath The Freeway‖White People Cornhole All The Cardinal Numbers‖White People Smell Like Time‖White Poeple Are Hung‖White Poeple Are Jews In The Crown Of Eastman Kodak‖X­­→X‖X00Xii8 XCM 8008X 8XiVi‖X08 888 XNX XX IH MXXI‖XDO OXM DXO/XXX XXXX MLX OOO‖XOOX XX XX XHX XXO O8OOO8 XXXXXX‖XOOX XX XXXHX XXO O8OOO‖XOX MXM RROW/RRX DRM 0MX‖XOXO OXOO XXOXX HHHXH OOXHX XHV‖XRXMX OOROX XDDNE 1955/XMXRX XOROO ENDDX 5591‖XX X X‖XXIXX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XRXXN XXXXXXX: 1,7,186,4,101‖XXV VHNX XOMXX XHX XXXX OO‖XXX HMV XOJ LNX MMM‖XXX XAX XXX XXX XXX IOB‖XXX XXX XXX X X M‖XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX‖XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX‖XXX0XXX8 XXXXX 000X000 8X88XX‖XXX0XXXX8 XXXXX 0000X000 8X88XX‖XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX‖XXXX XXXXX XXXXI XXXXX XXXXXXX XVXX‖XXXXXX XXX OXXV HOV XXXOO XXX‖XXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXX‖XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX‖Y→Yellow People Ape Robot Pollen‖Yellow People Are 5 Trillion Teeth‖Yellow People Are A Contry‖Yellow People Are A Jew Dream In A Blackhead Against A Red Thigh‖Yellow People Are A Jew Dream In A Blackhead Against A Red Wish Sky‖Yellow People Are A Ring Around AAA Planet Of Flesh‖Yellow People Are A Rock On A Cliff In Rapture‖Yellow People Are A Ski Slope In Caat Box‖Yellow People Are A Tea Of Sanity‖Yellow People Are Accidental‖Yellow People Are Anger Cultcha, Fuck-yaa, Mulch-chaa‖Yellow People Are At‖Yellow People Are Bananas Without Morals‖Yellow People Are Black Lice‖Yellow People Are Black People With Tragic Genitalia‖Yellow People Are Boring‖Yellow People Are British And British People Are Yellow‖Yellow People Are Brown People At A Bus Stop 105°In Alabama, Great Britian, In Ghana‖Yellow People Are Cool‖Yellow People Are Corporate Lossom‖Yellow People Are Cotton Candy Titty‖Yellow People Are Curleww During Wartime‖Yellow People Are Dumpy‖Yellow People Are Film‖Yellow People Are Flecks Of Faint‖Yellow People Are Food‖Yellow People Are Glutty And Nationalistic‖Yellow People Are Gooey‖Yellow People Are Grocery Bots‖Yellow People Are Gummy‖Yellow People Are Heir To The Foam‖Yellow People Are Hung‖Yellow People Are Hydrogenated‖Yellow People Are Keratin‖Yellow People Are Lists‖Yellow People Are Made Of Foam‖Yellow People Are Odorless‖Yellow People Are Plexi‖Yellow People Are Pretty‖Yellow People Are Rawls‖Yellow People Are Red People Are White People Are Black People Are Green People Under-The Same Gas-Stained Tarpaulin‖Yellow People Are Runny‖Yellow People Are Spun‖Yellow People Are Sterile‖Yellow People Are Sun Come‖Yellow People Are Tart‖Yellow People Are The Bee Of Anality‖Yellow People Are The Bee's Knees‖Yellow People Are The Bits Of Lipstick Between The Teeth Of The Wregina‖Yellow People Are The Black Cone In The Desert‖Yellow People Are The Black Cone In The Desert‖Yellow People Are The Bone See The Whale Midst The Red On The Deck 'Neath The Sun‖Yellow People Are The Bones St The Wreck Of The Deck In The Sun‖Yellow People Are The Cellphones In The Irrigation Ditch‖Yellow People Are The Dog's Seed‖Yellow People Are The Favorites Of Monster‖Yellow People Are The Foreskin Of History‖Yellow People Are The Great Red Schlong‖Yellow People Are The Monster From The Sky That Eats Democracy‖Yellow People Are The MSG Friggin'‖Yellow People Are The MSG Friggin'‖Yellow People Are The Neighborhood Behind The Chemical Plant‖Yellow People Are The New Improved Christianity In The Green Plastic Unbreakable Bottle‖Yellow People Are The Ochre Mountain‖Yellow People Are The Perfect Ocean‖Yellow People Are The Sad Leaves‖Yellow People Are The Wiast Of The East‖Yellow People Are Tinny‖Yellow People Are TThe Bits Of Lipstick Betweeen The Teeth of The Wregina‖Yellow People Are Wayne‖Yellow People Are What's Wrong With Asia‖Yellow People Are White People With Manners‖Yellow People Eat The Word …‖Yellow People Infinite Love Dick Syrup‖Yellow People Reek Seek‖Yellow People Slant Dick Memory‖Yellow People Split That White Pussy In To‖Yellow Poeple Are Boo-Hooo Whores On Burning S Hores Of Pee‖Yellow Poeple Are The Dot On The Map In The Glove Compartment

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skin set

Skin Set Drawings: the space between the letters, 2013 12 × 9 inches each The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Skin Set Painting: The Winter of Black People, 2011–2013 water-based oil, acrylic, on paper 61 × 120 inches Skin Set Painting: The Commons Divides Moses and Moses Divides S … , 2011–2013 water-based oil, acrylic, on paper 63 ¾ × 117 ½ inches Conceptacle, 2013 acrylic on vinyl Condoleezza Rice mask Colored Waiting Room Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, NY

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Desert, 2005 corn flakes Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK

k. silem mohammad

Interference in Pope.L's Skin Set Drawings

Black People Are Guilty. White People Are Love. Brown Poeple [sic] Are Illegal Immigrants. Black People Are A Musical About Hard Candy, Pork Rinds, Pussy and Money. Yellow People Are Sterile. Orange People Are My Balls In Summer. White People Are A Desalination Plant In Puerto Rico. Blue People Cannot Conceive Of Themselves. These are a few of the self-descriptive titles of William Pope.L's Skin Set Drawings—self-descriptive in that each has as its primary component the words of its title sentence. As statements, these titles represent provocative claims that are sometimes all too familiar, sometimes counterintuitive, sometimes patently false, and sometimes bafflingly non-linear. The works' meaning and force are overwhelmingly dependent on this language that oscillates between sign and referent. The arbitrariness of some of the media (e.g., correction fluid, coffee, hair, mayonnaise) suggests that in these drawings the artist is challenging the usual material considerations and further, that the material form consists more in language than anything else. Thus, the allegorical value of the physical substances is preempted by the broader allegorical gesture performed by the titles (which also are the visual focus). In what follows, I will draw on concepts that have informed my take on conceptual writing and other avant-garde poetic practices to discuss the ways Pope.L deploys various forms of arbitrariness strategically to enable such allegorical swervings. In particular, I'm interested in“interference,”or“noise,”effects that are difficult to separate from the primary significance of the work. In the Skin Set Drawings, arbitrariness in part inheres in the free play of linguistic selection: Statements with a readily apparent general thrust (i.e., sweeping claims about race) veer off into unfocused or irrelevant areas, while still managing to maintain the sense that the works are interrogating attitudes about racial identity. A few more recent works add another layer of arbitrariness by zooming in on the spaces between letters rather than foregrounding the entire utterance. In addition, the text in these recent works isn't of Pope.L's own composition, as in the earlier pieces, but consists of excerpts from science fiction author Gene Wolfe's 1974 short story“Forlesen,”which also supplies the title for Pope.L's 2013 Renaissance Society installation and which begins, tellingly, with the title character waking and momentarily not remembering“what human 1 beings were supposed to look like.” 1   Gene Wolfe,“Forlesen,”Gene Wolfe's Book of Days (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1981), 85.

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interference in pope.l's skin set drawings

Fig. 1

This work has an evident conceptualist aspect. It replicates a previously published text, but at such a radically magnified level that the text's referential dimension is occluded, replaced by Pope.L's oblique, close-up perspective, which privileges negative space as much as, or more than, the areas representing black ink. Complicating this perspective, however, is Pope.L's painterly interference in both the magnified typographic details and the blank areas surrounding them. Watery smears and tints embellish the edges of letters, emphasizing their ornamental quality. Intentional coffee stains simulate accidental coffee stains. Subtle pen strokes mimic tiny pieces of lint on the surface of the page, and in some cases the original lint itself seems to remain as part of the media. This meticulous aesthetic embellishment arguably becomes the chief focal point, raising the question: What is the rationale for using Wolfe's (or anyone else's) text as a source when viewers are able to see only minute portions of it? Its specificity is preserved only in the exhibition title. This tension between appropriation and masking of appropriation suggests a critique of—or at least a reflection on—conceptualism as such. It's important to note that oscillation between legibility and illegibility plays heavily in the earlier Skin Set Drawings as well. In some of them, the title phrase is as clear and direct as a Ruscha painting or a“Keep Calm” poster, and in others it is barely recognizable, if at all, as language. In nearly all of them, however, a motivated imbalance exists between the hyper-restrained clarity of conceptualism and the messy“handmadeness”of expressive painting. Orange People Are the Grain of the Sun fig. 1, for example, at first appears to be simple pen and ink. The title phrase is mostly clear and readable despite being set against a background of short, bold, black pen-strokes and what look like crude drawings of bullet holes in glass. The“A”and the“I”in the word“GRAIN”are distractingly blacked in, in a way that suggests absent-minded doodling. A bullet hole is situated directly above the“I,”as though to dot it. The impact ripples surrounding the hole extend downward to envelop the“I”as well, giving the letter an almost anthropomorphic shape. These ripples are distinctive for being gray, rather than black like all the others. A faint pink hue is visible along the staff of the“I,” perhaps indicating a bolder color covered over by correction fluid (explaining the gray ripples as well?). The calculated sloppiness evoked by this focal point insists on corporeal fleshiness, whether of the artist (the creating“I”) or of the human subject in general. Various elements obscure this fleshiness, but in doing so, they make it all the more conspicuous. Similarly, the messiness of the rough, black strokes that cover the entire piece causes viewers' attention to fluctuate between the urgent visibility of the title phrase and the unstable application of its media by a human agent. One almost could perceive these strokes as representing

mohammad

beard stubble or some other index of the body's ungainliness. This is a recurring effect in Pope.L's work: slippage between symbolic value and symptomatic excess, allegorical representation and accidental residue. Brown People Are A Theory About Green People fig. 2 is built, like many other pieces in the Skin Set series, on a foundation of assertive block capitals. It is one of the pieces, however, in which Pope.L has embellished the title phrase to the point of near-illegibility. The embellishment consists of an obsessive, but seemingly unmotivated, filling-in of the space defined by the stems, strokes, bowls, and counters of the typographical shapes. Ordinarily vacant, the space is inhabited by dense layers of pigment and texture—as though to suggest the conversion of absence into presence, or openness into closure. The effect on signification is one of occlusion or blockage: One must carefully attend to the shapes of the buried letters to make out the total utterance. To discuss the tension between communicative directness and aestheticized materiality in pieces like this, I would like to turn to some concepts from linguistic and poetic theory. Roman Jakobson famously isolates six factors at play in acts of linguistic communication.2 The context of a given utterance is the meaning an addresser communicates to an addressee by means of a message (i.e., series of sounds or visual symbols representing language) constructed from a given code (i.e., language) and transmitted via some contact (i.e., set of conditions allowing linguistic exchange). To each of these factors, Jakobson assigns a function, which obtains when that factor is dominant.3 Utterances in which the context is dominant perform the referential function. The phrase“Brown People Are A Theory About Green People,”interpreted via this function, presents a claim about the world that we might affirm or deny, comprehend or fail to understand, recognize as sense or reject as nonsense. We also might consider the emotive function, focused on the addresser: the tonal or affective delivery of the utterance might tell us something about the state of mind of the person uttering it that we cannot determine from the external context alone. The referential statement,“this is a church,”has different emotive registers depending on whether someone whispers it reverently or shouts it angrily. In the case of Pope.L's drawings, the large block capitals of the title phrases might suggest urgency, commitment, shrillness, or any number of emotive qualities. The conative function, which is oriented toward the addressee, has to do with the utterance's ability to make something happen by virtue of its being received. Imperatives do this most obviously (e.g.,“bring me a pencil” ), but any 2  Roman Jakobson,“Linguistics and Poetics,”Language in Literature, eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1990), 66. 3   Ibid., 66-70.

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Fig. 2

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interference in pope.l's skin set drawings

statement employs the conative function when it solicits or elicits some particular response (e.g., sympathy, a change of mind, direct action). The metalingual function is performed by code explications, as in dictionary definitions or explanations to new language users (e.g.,“a pencil is a writing instrument”). An utterance exercises the phatic function when its purpose is to test, or to reinforce, the contact between addresser and addressee (e.g.,“is this thing on?”or“you know?”). Linguistic fillers like“um,” “er,”or deliberative stuttering are purely phatic utterances: They have no reference other than to the fact that one is talking, or trying to talk. In the 4 poetic function, or“focus on the message for its own sake,” devices such as rhyme, alliteration, repetition, or other such patterning draw our attention to the material features of a given utterance (or its graphic representation). It is significant that in Jakobson's formulation, the message is the physical dimension of the utterance, not its referent or“meaning.”Nevertheless, because he frames it explicitly as a message rather than simply as a sound-cluster or constellation of inky symbols (though that is what he means by it), and though he never acknowledges this nuance, he doesn't fully divorce it from its status as a meaning-bearing object. A fuller examination of this topic might contextualize Jakobson's understanding of the message, as well as the poetic function generally, in light of Yuri Tyianov's account of“oscillating signs,”or“principal”and“secondary”signs, which occupy the space of what appears as a single sign, and which“mutually crowd each other.”5 At other times, Tynianov notes,“Oscillating signs may quite displace the principal 6 sign of meaning.” The poetic function by itself is ultimately inadequate as an account of poetic language, though it is useful as a way of categorizing specific strategies of wordplay and sonic arrangement—especially if interrogating the slippage discussed earlier, in which one can understand the“message”simultaneously as a vessel for the transmission of information and as a discrete entity with its own immanent significances. Jakobson's six functions taken together, however, provide a wide range of perspectives from which to consider linguistic acts situated as art. The phatic function is one of the least examined of these perspectives. Jakobson doesn't explore its aesthetic applications, but its emphasis on improvisatory articulation has clear relevance to poesis. Any gesture that foregrounds the physicality of the medium in a way that suspends mimesis or external reference may be said to partake of phatic means. 4  Ibid., 69. 5   Yuri Tynianov, The Problem of Verse Language, ed. and trans. Michael Sosa and Brent Harvey (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1981), 69-70. 6   Ibid., 70.

mohammad

In the Forlesen drawings, Pope.L stages a phatic fantasia at a miniature level. By scaling the works consistently as ultra close-up views of the spaces between lines in Wolfe's text, Pope.L both acknowledges Wolfe's content and bypasses it. He retains just enough of the typographical forms to remind the viewer of the source, but not enough to identify any of its thematic particulars. In 091, 08-09, w/la fig. 3, all we see are the bottom points of a“w,”the tip of an ascender (probably of an“l”), and the inner edge of an“a”. The focus is the white space, which is insisted upon as material surface: Thin pencil lines echo small parts of the letters' shapes, as though we were viewing them through slightly refracting lenses. In addition, areas that appear to be treated with correction fluid are smudged with grit, and seemingly accidental lines and pockmarks appear in random places. Further, the edges of Wolfe's letters themselves are rendered as rough sketches whose edges are bisected by hasty guidelines and blurred into crosshatches. It is as though the printed text were still under construction and required preliminary pencil work. A process that is, in reality, automatized (i.e., the typesetting of a printed book) is imagined here as artisanal. Jacques Attali posits“noise”as the fundamental material that music forms and channels, and describes its function as follows:

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A noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of emission. A resonance is a set of simultaneous, pure sounds of determined frequency and differing intensity. Noise, then, does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the system within which it is inscribed: emitter, transmitter, receiver. Information theory uses the concept of noise (or rather, metonymy) in a more general way: noise is the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for that receiver.7 In this definition, with its emphasis on the relation between addresser, message, and addressee, it is easy to see an application for the role noise plays in Jakobson's phatic function if we understand the difference between emitter and transmitter to be one between a message's initial generation and its subsequent delivery via a given channel. It is in this transmission channel that noise assumes its status as such. If you ask me a question, and I respond with a stalling“well … , the conspicuous pitch and tonal variations I use to prolong the word are phatic, in that they manipulate the message's material form, which falls outside the code's confines. These pitch and tonal variations are improvised, contingent, and 7   Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 26-27.

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interruptive. They do carry meaning, of course, but, as Attali notes, this does not negate their status as noise. Or, conversely, it might be more to the point to say that their status as noise does not (entirely) negate their status as components of a meaningful utterance. Nathaniel Mackey applies Attali's concept of noise to poetry, connecting it to what he terms“discrepant” practices: Recalling the derivation of the word discrepant from a root meaning“to rattle, creak,”I relate discrepant engagement to the name the Dogon of West Africa give their weaving block, the base on which the loom they weave upon sits. They call it the“creaking of the word.”It is the noise upon which the word is based, the discrepant foundation of all coherence and articulation, of the purchase upon the world fabrication affords. Discrepant engagement, rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its anti-foundational acknowledgment of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings“base,”voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend.8 A similar emphasis on such“exclusions”and the“positings of identity”they enable figures in Pope.L's own notes on“marking” :“To mark anything is to create a difference; maybe a world, maybe a wound, certainly an act, let's call it a notion. 9 And, as an addendum:“Any notion is an ocean.” For meaning to be useful it must be marked. [A] mark divides the world into this and that. To say blackness is anything at all is to mark it off from the world as this thing rather than that. This is an attempt at stemming the tide of the notion which is, by definition, prone to liquescence, leakage, vapor, oxidation, and doubt.10

8  Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19. 9   William Pope.L,“Some Notes on the Ocean,”Black People Are Cropped, ed. Cle'ment Dirie' (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2012), 9. 10  Ibid., 10.

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Continuing the trope of“notion”as“ocean,”Pope.L offers a clue about the recurrent use of stains and blotches in his Skin Set Drawings. It is as though some enormously wet and uncontrollable force were behind, above, or around them, threatening at any moment to break through and obliterate all difference. One can never mark off a notion without creating a new portal of release for the ocean that attends this notion. Pope.L's absurd and implicitly infinite plethora of claims about black, white, purple, blue, orange, brown, and other colors of people represent acts of marking that cannot be contained, once initiated. Hence, viewers see, not only the seemingly random plenitude of the claims themselves, but the scratches, smears, errors, and stretch marks that surround them at all times. Sometimes these marks envelop and obscure the claims. One mark effaces another until we see only marks upon marks, leaving no further space upon which to inscribe difference. Craig Dworkin comments, in reference to Attali's theory:“There is a strong temptation to recuperate the resisting and unsettling potential of‘noise’ as a ‘message’ which can be absorbed into the very code it challenges, so that it can then be safely consumed by traditional hermeneutic strategies as simply another 11 part of the message's ‘meaning.’” This is a problem attendant on such readings as the ones I have been attempting of Pope.L's Skin Set works. By interpreting the phatic visual noise of these pieces as allegorical of systems of cultural and racial difference and of the ways in which artworks might confront and destabilize such differences, we threaten to domesticate noise's power to confront or destabilize at all. That is, we risk causing it not to be noise anymore, but a motivated part of a coherent message. Of course, this is a problem in formulating any theory of resistant art—especially when the art itself is as theoretically informed and conceptually complex as Pope.L's. Part of the work's paradoxical strategy seems to be to keep itself unsure of what it is doing on certain key levels. (More from Pope.L's notes on meaning and marking:“I'm not sure. // Most times it's … 12 I'm not sure.” ) The work leaves itself open to misunderstanding and counterpurposive results on such a wide scale that one of the most striking things about it is its defiance of our critical intelligence, its ability to send our attention in so many directions simultaneously, sometimes without apparent justification, so that we must maintain an attitude of at least partial frustration toward it. One component of this strategy, as with much absurdist art, involves gestures of frivolity: gestures that seem to encourage us not to exercise our rational critical faculties in response to the work in a way that causes us to understand, or privilege, 11  Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 49. 12  Pope.L, Black People Are Cropped, 10.

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one of its semantic layers over another, but to remain (and here again we might recall Tynianov's oscillating sign) in a state of suspension between engagement and disengagement—a state that Sianne Ngai, in discussing the confrontationally repetitive writing of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Goldsmith, and others, describes as“stuplimity”—a“concatenation of boredom and astonishment.13 Stuplimity,”Ngai writes,“reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality, as does Kant's mathematical sublime, yet not through an encounter with the infinite but with finite bits and scraps of material in repetition”14 Ngai, via Deleuze, associates such stuplime finitude specifically with words, with their proliferative, but ultimately circumscribed, sets of extensions: What stuplimity relies on is an anti-auratic, anti-cynical tedium that at times deliberately risks seeming obtuse, as opposed to making claims for spiritual transcendence or ironic distance … . [T]his boredom resides in relentless attention to the finite and small, the bits and scraps floating in [what Ben Watson refers to as] the“common muck”of language.15 Particularly in the case of the Forlesen drawings, Pope.L's visual work performs just such acts of attention to linguistic finitude, whether in the form of full sentences (or pseudo-sentences) whose references are as suspect as their lexical parts are liable to error and irregularity, or in microscopically enhancing individual letters and punctuation marks, which in turn shed even smaller and less distinct material particles that occasionally replicate their larger shapes. Both kinds of Skin Set objects require viewers to perform the act of reading and both complicate that act, either by calling into question the possibility of assimilating an ostensibly legible message into a recognizable relation within the code or by resituating the legible as blatantly illegible—or sometimes, both.

097, 04–05, r, w/n', b acrylic, ballpoint, correction fluid, ink 12 × 9 inches

13  Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2005), 271. 14  Ibid., 271. 15  Ibid., 278.

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Curtain, 2013 wall faced with ketchup and joint compound, oriented strand board, paint, window and curtain The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Wall, 2013 red curtain, open window 29 × 32 inches The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Page, 2013 curtain on window in wall 15 x 19 inches The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

Parable, 2013 fable reproduced by Lucas Zwirner in his essay on On Kawara's project Code, in On Kawara: Date Paintings in New York and 136 Other Cities, 2012 14 × 10.5 inches framed each The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Sun, 2013 Photo of the artist's son from behind 7 × 5.5 inches framed The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Ellipsis, 2013 Black balloons filled with helium The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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091, 34–35, y/ac, 2013 ballpoint, correction fluid, hair, matte medium 093, 31–32, at, t/wore, 2013 ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, hair, matte medium, pencil 12 × 9 inches each The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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091, 27–28, o, F/hed, 2013 ballpoint, collage, correction fluid, hair, ink, matte medium, pencil 086, 38–39, ci/gry, 2013 ballpoint, coffee, pencil, rubbing 12 × 9 inches each The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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091, 35–36, h, b/Hi, B, 2013 ballpoint 092, 19–20, pty/d, t, A, 2013 ballpoint, correction fluid, hair, matte medium 12 × 9 inches each The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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091, 23–24, hre/th, 2013 ballpoint, correction fluid, colored pencil, hair, marker, matte medium 094, 39–40, mi/sp, 2013 ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, ink, rubbing 12 × 9 inches each The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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091, 24–25, e/e, 2013 ballpoint, correction fluid, ink 093, 22–23, e/g, 2013 ballpoint, correction fluid, tearing 12 × 9 inches each The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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092, 10–11, n, t/ke, 2013 ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, pencil 087, 20–21, e/S&M, 2013 ballpoint, correction fluid 12 × 9 inches each The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Ellipsis, 2013 black balloons filled with helium The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Well, 2013 glass of water on shelf, three in exhibition  The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Hinge, 2013 metal hinge, screws, wall The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Quarter Shape (penis), 2013 wood, masonite, paint, screws, window, curtain, reproduction, video The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Foyer, 2013 reproduction of a page from Anders Nilsen's graphic novel Big Questions 14 × 10.5 inches framed The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Quarter Shape (penis), 2013 wood, masonite, paint, screws, window, curtain, reproduction, video The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

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Quarter Shape (penis), 2013 wood, masonite, paint, screws, window, curtain, reproduction, video The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL

lauren Berlant

Showing Up To Withhold: Pope.L's Deadpan Aesthetic

William Pope.L's exhibition Forlesen offers and withholds the pleasure of the phallus and a life structured by race, sex, politics, fictions, and thought. It does this by presenting intelligible forms—cocks, porns, fathers, forefathers, sons, balloons, legs, planes—along with less intelligible things—excerpts from stories, drawings where only the vestiges of writing appear (by way of ballpoint, correction fluid, coffee, pencil, ink, acrylic, hair, water), noise … and ellipses. Through its many remediations, the work confuses our closeness and distance from what shapes and unmakes us. It disturbs the refuge of the known object, the consistent tone, and their serious avant-garde alters. Each of the following sections plays around with what's opened up by the light and heavy, friendly and aggressive, profound and notional proposition made by Forlesen's deadpan aesthetic. Introduction: Genre after the FAll Much has been said about melodrama as a nineteenth-century mode in which the bourgeoisie mourned its lost fantasy of universality by masking its general complaint about status loss as an exemplary personal injury that demands sympathy and appropriate justice.1 The strategy of sympathetic demand is now, of course, available to any population that perceives itself to be organized by a structural harm that is felt in the gut. Melodramas are, though, not only dramas of injustice; they are also performances of the terrible fact that symbolic reparative action will always fall embitteringly short. No matter how direct and immediate the action seems, the melodramatic distortion of scale, moving across the structural and the personal, marks the outrage that some harm must remain unanswered. Even worse, the reparative effort must fail because the melodramatic mode cannot make history not have happened. 1   Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1976; New Haven: Yale UP, 1995); Christine Gledhill, ed. Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film (London, British Film Institute, 1987); Lauren Berlant,“The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,”Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, eds. Thomas Kearns and Austin Sarat (University of Michigan Press, 1998): 49-84; Carolyn Williams,“Moving Pictures: George Eliot and Melodrama, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York and London: Routledge, 2004): 105-144; Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2008).

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Thus the melodramatic mode does not simply decree the futility of engaging structurally persistent suffering and sadness. It enacts the need for some justice in the absence of all of it, which is why it is not easy entirely to disrespect the episodic relief that occurs when artworks and humans show up emotionally to confirm the damage of a situation that they do not, cannot, or will not afterwards erase, displace, or efface. The promise that public justice will somehow find a medium for reciprocity is kept alive in this manner. But the fantasy of reciprocal justice in kind is just that—a fantasy—and unkind. How shared is the imaginary of injustice that melodrama offers? How much loss of emotional and material assurance would an audience or a public bear on behalf of alleviating a problem that it has recognized? The style of exchange in which we would recognize the enactment of justice is always a matter of debate, and not just about whether the sentimental wound is sufficiently robust to anchor a politics.2 For affect is unreliable, which means that there's no trusting a sense of justice. Events are always modifying, and it is hard to tell how fully a structure is actualized in any experience, given that situations often feel more transformative than they actually are: often a wish and a prophecy will appear as an“affective 3 fact.” Additionally, people change their minds as things roll out and evolve; and accident and struggle can transform the very genre of a situation or a relation. Plus, we (individuals and peoples) are often at odds with our own selves, seeing ourselves as at once sovereign and vulnerable, as the cause of effects and the effect of causes both personal and impersonal. Then too, there is the overwhelming and ridiculous spectacle of tiny individuals assuming heroic formation trying to change a scene of power.4 The field of political symbolization is one distortion after another, an incoherent tableau of overcoherent projections. The predictability with which the encounter with power will be unruly is why, in these frantic scenes of justice-hunting amid affective chaos, the melodrama of suffering can edge into the comic: witness the irrepressible giggle at tragic spectacle, the straight performance of the bald-faced lie, and the body puffed up and ready to pounce in the moment before an outburst. Witness as well the oscillations between detail and context where small gestures set off huge effects or the stentorian performance of a massive will is met by a flat voice, a wink, or a 2  The question of whether political damage figured as scar or wound that demands reparation can authorize a politics courageous enough not to fetishize that damage but to see it as a platform to be moved from in genres of transformative claim is associated mainly with Wendy Brown,“Wounded Attachments,”in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), 52-76. 3   See Brian Massumi,“The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: the Political Ontology of Threat,”in The Affect Studies Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham NC: Duke UP, 2010), 52-70. 4   Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003 (Cambridge MA: MIT UP, 2004).

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wry silence.5 Catalog even one day's awkwardness and the unpredictability of its resonance in a devastated mood or some shoulder-shrugging humor that might be acrid or genuinely lifting. Seriousness induces the grotesque without blotting out the enormity of things. Comedy, too, keeps us close to the unbearable while providing a little wiggle room: not by legislating heroic emotional performance but by adding pleasure to the experience of ordinary and political non-sovereignty. In this way, melodrama and the comic can afford techniques to reduce life to a monotone that equates the good and true with a beautifully simplified consistency. In response to what's overwhelming, we can through them manage the distortions, convolutions, and contradictions within the dings of ordinary relation: we can organize some of them into background noise while others into radiant tones of profound clarity. At the same time, each aesthetic intensifies the absurdity, the dramatic lack of fit, induced separately and together, by pervasive structural inequality and personal complexity. Together, ironically, and as Kanye West enjambs it so beautifully, the mutually interruptive proximity of the 6 melodramatic to the comic mode can build a“still/to slow down the time.” Forlesen, the installation by William Pope.L that provides the resources for this inquiry, is such a still. A still is a machine for distilling liquefied mixtures by boiling, collecting vapor, refining. Forlesen is an active space of suspension that assembles the overpresence of sculpture, the relation among things too diverse to be taken in as a set, and the affective noise that pervades the gallery space. There are also scattered glasses of water actively vaporizing, as though quenching the thirst of the world, the room, and its habitants. Black helium balloons floating here and there and way up in the air also leak slowly, to remind us of fun and loss: pretty much what's to come. Taking place in and around a giant peeling cock, Forlesen's affective mode is thus neither melodramatic nor comic, exactly; it moves through pain and slapstick, but is also after the fall, as it were. Even Unfallen, the installation's pornographic video loop, turns toward unlearning the dramatic impasse of tragicomic reeling we call“sex.”Note that“turning toward unlearning”is different than“turning away from.”But sex is just one of the origins of life put on display here as a curiosity that has lost its assurance about what other genre an encounter might take. Forlesen rescales what“a life”is, given the accretive rhetoric of worldbuilding and begetting among fathers, forefathers, sons, and the reproductive 5  Lorrie Moore,“Subject to Search,”Harper's Magazine (January 2014), 72.“If you're suicidal,”he said slowly,“and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as“wry”.” 6   The line about the still was originally a Bon Iver lyric, from“Woods,”on Blood Bank EP: it reappears on Kanye West,“Lost In The World”from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It was written by Edwin J. Bocage, Alfred Scramuzza, Kanye Omari West, Manu Dibango, Justin Vernon, Jeff Bhasker, James Brown, and Gil-Scott Heron.

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inheritances from the archives of political philosophy, art and porn—all of which solidify in the oppressively-fixed value we call“identity.”The installation takes up and steps back from the burlesque spectacle of the aspiration to identity through sexuality, knowledge, or art. It articulates the pleasure of political recognition along with the discomfort of insecure intimacy, generating attachment and politics as play and muddle while all along there is a quiet beat within the aesthetic noise that remains optimistic—or yet undefeated. If the compulsion to repair or deliver justice motivates much melodrama and comedy, in Pope.L's hands it asserts and hacks at its own repetitions on behalf of re-engineering their use as props for life. So, Forlesen extends a melodramatic perception of what is broken in life into a comedic zone; but it is not one that merely inverts melodrama's heaviness into an acidic or fluffy lightness. The relation of the comic to the melodramatic is not one of substitution, but an evocative proximity. The aesthetic space of this encounter is not funny, but deadpan, offering and yet withholding metacommentary and solutions in order to still and distill the mutual embeddedness of the political and the personal sensorium. In a tragic relation, there is the comfort of a finitude that can be mourned; in a melodramatic one, the disbelief that after great pain one is still forced to show up for life; and in the comic, the shock of sudden insecurity followed by an even more unpredicted resilience.7 Forlesen breathes deeply in the face of all of these, in a recessive action that opens up the noise and bodies we carry around to deadpan's quizzical reading. David Robbins suggests that“We use the term ‘deadpan’to describe those products that display the emotional neutrality of data yet retain an existential 8 charge of theater.” So deadpan emerges under the sign of maybe (you may be in on the joke of life, or not; or the artwork's strategy of inclusion, or not; you may be an insightful reader, or not; or welcomed in the world, or not). Maybe is a big keyword in this artwork: maybe Pope.L tells his collaborator about his plan to distribute Martin Luther King's DNA, maybe Forlesen's life was worth it.9 Converting the calcified fact to a proposition may be polemical, skeptical, curious or a non-event. If, in the melodramatic and comedic modes, tone, atmosphere and gesture add 7  Simon Critchley,“Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,”Constellations 6, 1 (1999): 108-122. 8   David Robbins, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy (Copenhagen: Pork Salad Press, 2011), 256. 9   From Du Bois Machine:“Several years later this young guy calls me up, or maybe it was an email—he was from the big city. He wanted to work with me on—something. Anything, he said. And I said: Anything? The young guy was very enthusiastic. Too enthusiastic. I told the young guy, PhD guy, about the distributingmartin project— kind of. Not really, maybe. And we danced around that … ” [Italics mine]. Gene Wolfe's“Forlesen”(the title of the story is also the name of the main character) ends with“Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.”[Italics mine] (New York: Macmillan. Kindle Edition), 201.

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up to something emotionally mimicking the press of an incident or the world (as though we know a truth when we feel it), in the zone of deadpan's recessive action, we must be uncertain: we really don't know who we are to others, or who they are, let alone who we are to ourselves, and therefore we are apprehensive, or we should be, if we are paying attention. We do not know whether we are included or excluded from the warmth of the joke's absurd intimacy, and we can't be sure that the performance of withholding is a joke or an aggression or both.10 Facing deadpan's performance of withholding, we may pretend to be in the know, but it is a fake self-assurance. The machinery of presumption is a laugh. It is not easy to make work that recedes when one has been trained to perform clarity, significance, and profundity by claiming to repair something that's broken within the space of encounter: as though problems can be resolved through expertise, explanation, or merely reenactment or restatement. Even avant-gardes give keys to their members. A deadpan aesthetic tortures, plays, and induces all kinds of wondering (from awe to the wondering that questions), generating a rough curiosity in the field of aggression, anxiety, and delight. This brings it closer to farce than to tragedy, if we understand farce not at the acidic extreme of despair in response to an infelicitous repetition but in the more contingent space of disbelief at the absurd material stuffed into ordinary existence.11 Confidence loss does not mean its entire disappearance, though: it entails expansion, multiplication, trial, gesture, and all kinds of wonder. In atmospheres of recessive action the event of the encounter is opaque. No doubt it is always a little opaque, insofar as we have to be attuned to the possibility that our will will not control relationality as such. But additionally, in our collective life, not everyone is in the same place, and the connections are not universal. Here the in-between things—like families, history, inheritance, and desire, inherited tradition and sought-for conversation—convert to materials that demand rerouting. But Forlesen is not cocksure about what to do with the opportunity it creates after the normative anchors are loosened: it does not anchor its disturbances in a pre-felt future. It performs a consciousness in transition from within the 10    On jokes as intimacy events, see Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v. 8 ed. James Strachey, ed. and trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud); Andrew Stott, Comedy (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 11  Lisa Trahair writes,“Although today the word farce refers to a dramatic work whose only object is to arouse laughter, ‘a proceeding that is ludicrously futile or insincere; a hollow pretence or mockery,’ as well as‘to season or spice a composition or speech,’it is worth recalling that the Old French substantive farce originally meant force-meat or stuff with force-meat, herbs, etc., ‘to stuff or force (something) into something else,’ ‘to paint the face’ and‘to cram the stomach with food and to fill out something lean or shrunken’ .”See Lisa Trahair, The Comedy of Philosophy: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Slapstick (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 50.

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phallic form's machinery, withholding the comfort of a higher knowledge or formal structure and instead offering what's awkward, whimsical, and violently jarring about being in a racialized, patriarchal, familial, sexual, American, aesthetic, project-based life that's at the hinge of what's particular and general. A life where one does things and finds out later whether and how the local disruptions can be made to resonate transformatively to shake up what's structural. A life where one gives in to and interrupts the force of repetitions.“It is not that a particular artwork 12 fails or succeeds,”Pope.L writes:“it's that we get to play in the hinge.” Different vectors meet in a hinge; some are simple folds or joints and some have teeth. To allow everything one knows to have both its softness and its edge, its smoothness and roughness, its solidity and atmosphere, is to play and risk getting caught in the hinge. Showing Up (to Withhold) Too Close: At the entrance to the room that houses Forlesen, we see a reddish flaking wall a few yards back that, when we do a double-take, turns out to be a cock. The head of the cock is to the left and the shaft ends a few yards to the right: on each side there's room beyond the ends, a room crossed by light. The cock shaft, in turn, will turn out to be trisected lengthwise into two other corridors.13 Each lengthwise segment is a small gallery that houses drawings and posted text. On the far side of the gallery, the cock is not cross-sectioned flat, as it is in the front, but thick, a dwelling of its own, inside of which resides Unfallen, in its porn-broadcasting cavern. But coming in the gallery door, all we can see is the cockface wall flaking off, in long strips and splinters, what turns out to be dried ketchup and drywall compound. The name of this piece is Curtain. The curtain. It appears at first as an oxblood substance slathered on light wood that turns out to be particle board. Later in the exhibition, the oxblood turned into a kind of khaki color.14 We are still at the door. We hear, there, conflicting voices and noises echoing through the room, whether or not there are other live humans in the room. As we enter and move to the right (a gallery habit even though the cock's head points to the left) there is a statue made from metal and wood of a man standing 12  William Pope.L, Du Bois Machine speech in Forlesen. 13   Like a sliced roll, or, if the cock were turned on its face, like a club sandwich. 14   Khaki is less cocky than oxblood. But the chemical process of oxidation, as of constant racialization, is part of what Forlesen wants to reflect on and induce. Unintended puns also loosen up the object and make it inhabitable and mobile.

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on what would be his head, but there is no head, only the wood into which the body tumbles, slapstick-style. The statue's wooden legs flail awkwardly in the air. The wood is also a light wood, although not as light as the particle board. There is much light in the room around the statue during the hours that the gallery is open, and when it's not cloudy, giving the falling man a sacred aura, which is interrupted by the slapstick component, but not entirely. The statue's name is Du Bois Machine. It is of a castrated W.E.B. Du Bois, we discover.15 Where his cock should be, given the body's otherwise realism, there is a round metallic speaker cover, as big as the side of a face. Out of Du Bois's groin a doublevoiced story is broadcast.16 A young girl's voice speaks a story about the AfricanAmerican male political icons, Du Bois and Martin Luther King. The story is also in Pope.L's voice, by which I mean, his autobiographical one. It appears to be about the relation between the political fathers' appetite for extramarital sex— which disturbs Pope.L without negating their inspiring iconicity and worthiness for patriarchal idealization as“Fathers”of radical anti-racist action and philosophies of politicized life. The little girl, speaking as“I,”tells of the artist's encounter with Du Bois and King not as humans in life but as text, memory, publiclyheld treasures, and archived resources for yet unformed collective experience: a zone between reputation and gossip also emerges from the god-like quality of the Du Bois Machine. Pope.L's story is about his desire to distribute King not as King did—through language and sex and showing up as political inspiration and radical inconvenience—but through scholarship and art projects and the DNA extracted from what may have been an actual hair of King's that his friend found in King's archive. Pope.L is also interested that Du Bois was a kind of brilliant dandy, a phallic fashionista who needed his pants to be creased perfectly, along with being a great thinker. Du Bois is fashioned as also a visual artist of sorts, penciling in a pants crease where there wasn't one, to emphasize the phallus and the labor of his precision. This narrative trajectory is twined with another story, not as mediated by mass fantasy. It is about Pope.L's many sexual, paternal, professional, and aesthetic speculations, practices, and conversations. He is being an artist and a parent, a“friend 15  The cocklessness of the Du Bois Machine makes us doubt whether the cock that we have just encountered is what was excised from Du Bois in the sculpture: but maybe castrated is the wrong word, or not the only one, since his cock is simply not there and as a statue, never was. 16   As Du Bois is the originator of the term“double-consciousness,”which is the subjective structure of black subjectivity in a white supremacist world—a racialized subjectivity always viewing itself from within its experience and as an object in the white imaginary—this double-voicedness seems a citation and a performance. But it also transforms what it means to say“subjectivity”as though it is equivalent to“voice.”Here they are clearly not synonyms but dissonyms, concepts in tension, in the proximity of a mutual transformation that also expresses alterity and its interruption, the distinctions that are disjointed yet intimate, locked in a verbal and aural hinge.

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and colleague”open to chance encounters; he is a subject of the family, a racialized political history, aesthetic practice, and their potential reconfiguring. At some point in it, Pope.L moves to a big city on a lake, where he is to be near his son. He spends time on the phone with his sister. Familying seems to displace art imaginaries: a lot of fathering, forefathering, and kinship shapes the world of this story. We have a hard time hearing the narrative the girl tells, though, because it is complicated and long, because the room echoes, because we have to put our heads close to the cockless space where the speaker cover is, because the little girl's voice is little, and also because there are droning, deep sex noises coming from what is at the time only apprehensible as somewhere and everywhere. As we listen we gaze at the cock's shaft, and we see its three lengthwise sections. Two internal corridors are reading galleries lined with drawings and printed matter all the same approximate page size, one a wine red curtain. As we move through the narrow galleries, the condensation and stretch and decontextualization of the words and images also make not just reading, but attention, very difficult. It is easier to look and to skim than to read. When we leave the center galleries there is one more task. On the north side of the cock there is a final space for movement, a quarter-penis hangar that one has to enter, through a curtain, to see a video stack of bad-resolution, heterosexual porn images of only genitals going through the motions of intercourse. The sex moaning echoes, the voices are processed, they move from the sound of ordinary breath and the monstrous“OH”of orgasm to electronic pulses and the beat of waves. Graphics saying“The End”in curlicued, feminine, cursive writing appear upside down and sometimes backward throughout the loop. Some of them look like melodramatic movie markers that have a nineteen-forties look to them.17 In all of these spaces, we are both too close to and too far from the object we see—pressed toward the text, inundated with sound, always belated and incomplete. Emerging from the galleries, or looking up for relief, we might notice some things scattered around the high-ceilinged gallery. These are the black helium balloons that turn out to be an artwork called Ellipsis. At first the balloons are full and more up in the air than they are toward the end of the exhibition, when most are shriveled and perhaps farcically, post-coitally limp. One also sees the glasses of water here and there. As one walks out, one notices, in front of the cock, a picture, Sun, whom we assume is the son of the story the little girl tells, the artist's son. He is photographed from behind, a silhouette, almost, facing the sun but also a wall on which hangs a picture that he perhaps drew. On the way out 17    One closing credit sequence turns out to be extracted from The Wizard of Oz (1939).

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we also see a framed page of a story that turns out to be from Gene Wolfe's story“Forlesen,”hung on the wall beside the gallery doorway. The posted page is the story's close. The story proper ends: “I want to know if it's meant anything,”Forlesen said. “If what I suffered—if it's been worth it.” “No,”the little man said.“Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe.” Looking to the other side of the doorway through which the viewer passed initially, one realizes that“Forlesen's”first page might have been missed on the way in, the eye having been distracted by the cock, the peeling, the circus of scale-shifting, and the bright sun shining. Too Far: “Showing up to withhold”is my tagline definition for the performative event that is deadpan. Pope.L is an artist whose very name shows up to withhold. All names are abbreviations; all pronouns are little crypts into which the biographical subject is stuffed.18 Or maybe we could call the pronoun and the name for which it substitutes installations, i.e. spaces one walks around in search of aesthetic and affective events that deliver the pleasure and experience of self-encounter,“pleasure”meaning not what feels good but the state that one wants to extend and repeat. Pope.L advertises himself, also, as“The Friendliest Black Artist in America,”e.g. as a potential pleasure-source for others, which is to say that he's invented a tagline or crypt for himself, a handle at once too cold and too hot to handle, a line that gives the brand name and contraction of the name of the father“Pope.L”some oomph and atmosphere beyond the gimmick of surprise. It brings him closer to familiarity but, at the same time, as the familiar is a ghost, it supplements the complexity of biography and history on the surface of the flesh made by being in relation. The phenomenologists call“flesh”a sensual abstraction; it is what gets made when affect infuses an encounter.19→ The flesh is not wholly determined by the freighted zone made by sociality, history, 18    Elissa Marder, in The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, associates the crypt with the impossibility of capturing the experience of birth (the relation to the mother) and the moment of death. The cryptic relation to the other, the mother, the woman is central to Pope.L's immaculate installation. For Pope.L though, it is the name of the father that's explicitly cryptic. Questions of the relation of sex to sexual difference, to pleasure, and to reproduction are posed without being articulated in a speech in anyone's voice.

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and law. It is a live, peeling and stretching, decaying, littering, and loved thing. Flesh history covers, flesh history flakes. It reveals surfaces on surfaces, and does not bury, but redistributes—sometimes on the skin.20 In Pope.L's work, the weight of history, racial, class, and familial structure, and symbolization is not fate but an incitement to perform the labor of aggressive remediation, which is also the labor of physical, social, and aesthetic movement toward re-enfleshment. How does he, how do we, make movement possible without denying the weight of the freight? When black people manifesting in the white-privileged U.S are not cast as Tragic, they're often Dignified or Comic objects-in-monotone, as James Baldwin wrote.21 For women too, the appearance of the body is never a non-event, but erotic in its overpresence, and an incitement to a managerial judgment in the direction of simplicity. What barely appears are opportunities 22 to be notional, friendly, or casual, allowed a flippant“whatever.” What's rare is 23 the fun of experimenting in public“to obtain the scale I desired.” The tossing together of melodrama, comedy, and withdrawal in this installation opens the pores of the oversaturated object, dilutes its fullness. “Friendly”is not a synonym for“funny,”therefore; this artist of the political makes openings for the flippant, the awkward, the out of scale, the mote in the eye, a different perspective, a hiccup, and/or a gag that stays with you, but, like the comic itself, it's not even usually about generating laughter. More like a marriage between affection and sarcasm, as the cock's shredded skin reminds us that sarcasm means literally to strip off the flesh.“Friendly”is like wit: a thing 19  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Paperback, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964) and The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1964; Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968); and Gail Weiss, Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). The flesh of Forlesen may go further than the phenomenological tradition goes, though, because flesh begins in relation rather than emerging from two entities not in contact outside of each other. 20   The skin/flesh toggle points to clashing intensities around the body in this installation and generally. The making of social flesh involves an appeal within the encounter to remain in the situation of creation and exchange, whether antagonistic or not. The peeling away of the skin induces its own impact on the flesh. When it's on the surface, that's called desquamation—or pityriasis, and only sometimes is it the effect of a decision (cosmetic, ritual, and/or self-harm); when it's the lining of a uterus shedding, it's called deciduate, and it's ordinary until it hits a certain level of intensity; when it's a penis manifesting its relation to tradition and decision, it's a foreskin. 21   James Baldwin,“Everybody's Protest Novel,”The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martian's Press, 1985), pp. 27-33. 22  “Notional”is Pope.L's concept of what blackness or any identity might become if it weren't a site of power's utility. Instead of power's imprint on the body for purposes of population control, and perhaps (in Forlesen) instead of repro-patriarchy, we'd have a world curious enough to wonder about the Wittgensteinian“family resemblances”that keep emerging, fading, converging, and splitting beyond the interests of biopower and financialized sexualization. See Black People Are Cropped, ed. Cle'ment Dirie' (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2012). 23   William Pope.L, Du Bois Machine speech in Forlesen.

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of amusement and a mode of swift intelligence one uses and lives by. A labyrinth (such as what's cut into the giant shaft) makes you live by your wits and be generous toward your strategic and tactical failures, if there's time and space for it. The sound loop plays with the noise in your head as the walls peel and post fragments that you stumble toward, attend to, and lope away from, looking around. It is by wit that you—bearer of white racism whether or not you're white, erotophobia even if you desire sex, and misogyny even if you're a woman—can stomach the impact of an encounter with friendly alterity, ferocious affection, the weight of the world reprocessed by machines that won't stop. It can be miserable to bear the noise of the world; to Pope.L, the comic always hovers in proximity. The downside of always being a figural event is that it blocks one's confidence in the ordinary as flow: a blockage that is expressed in the structure of slapstick and its alter in deadpan, each of which wrench scale but open the wrenching to many affects. Pope.L's gambit in Forlesen is to stay close to the comedic in this technical sense: as Gillian Rose puts it in a different context,“to utter the gravelly laugh roused by the whimsical poetry of the incongruous in one 24 who has damaged lungs.” It involves, as well, the shouldering of contradiction through the double gesture of extension (friendly) and contraction (.L). The given name that is a withheld one is also a dare to peel off the phallus in an“against”the 25 name-of-the-father that is both a resistance and a“with.” Ketchup, a condiment, is supposed to add value to the thing it never fully covers, but it also hides or alters the initial flavor. Here in Pope.L's Forlesen, we don't consume it all at once out of appetite, but keep refinding it as it sets, evaporates, changes, and changes, therefore, what it covers and supplements. Is the cock itself changed by the condiment? As the peeling and recoloration is a process, one has to keep paying attention, commit fully to distorting the sensorium intentionally on behalf of assessing the family resemblance among all of the surfaces. Michel Foucault recasts“genealogy”from the fantasy of direct descent from forefathers to an image of the subject as the scene of the impacts of the world.26 Through scenes that make indistinguishable presence and withholding, Forlesen moves us from an antinomy of intimacy and distance and into the ambitious spaces of curiosity, thirst, lust, and life.

24   Gillian Rose, Love's Work (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995): 143. 25   On the relation of the‘against’ and the‘with,’ see Lee Edelman's excursis in Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014), 69. 26   Michel Foucault,“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,”in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 138-164.

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(Showing Up) To Withhold Too Close: The phrase“Sometimes a person says this”is the hinge of this section. “Sometimes a person says this”opens the speech the little girl gives from within the Du Bois Machine's fallen body.“A person”could be anyone, which does not mean that he has no qualities. The phrase,“Sometimes a person says this”could open out into anything, which does not mean that it has no meaning. A caption, as Walter Benjamin writes, is the beginning of an object's history as an object for others; a caption, as Lynn Hejinian writes, can be wild, the loosening, destruction, and maybe the constitution of a new object.27 You never know, you can only do, and attend to the clusters of effects and affects. Pope.L's speech as performed by the little girl initiates the long middle of Forlesen, while also captioning the cock, the installation's first image and structuring architecture. The opening phrase is also an object in itself, captioned by the rest of the speech. As we proceed down the hallways past the Skin Set Drawings, noise begins to trump signification, receptiveness trumps aggressive reading, while diacritical marks and moans drown out narratives and speeches. The girl's speech is thus a transformative event in the arc of intention and attention. It has substance as a phrase but during the transition the hinge changes. One thing the phrase changes is personhood. So close to the inaugurating peeling cock sculpture,“Sometimes a person says this”has to refer to what a person is in relation to how said person organizes genitality, racial-epidermal schemas, and aesthetic abstraction.28 Surely“a person”is burdened by taking on so much meaning, but a person can also move in the world, relocating its symbolization—surreally, like a float in a parade, or recessively, like a deadpan reenactment, both specialties of Pope.L's art.29 27  Walter Benjamin,“Little History of Photography.”Selected Writings. Vol. 2. eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Trans. Edmund Jephott and Kingsley Shorter (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 507-530, and Lynn Hejinian,“Wild Captioning,”Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences Vol, 20, No. 1 (Fall/Winter 2011): 292. 28   Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, Intro. Anthony Appiah (1952; Boston: Grove Press, 2008), 92. 29   Pope.L's career is full of such streaming formations. His body is one such float-tableau, from his Superman crawl across the streets of New York and Houston to its performance as money tree or human ATM in the New York performance, ATM Piece; but he also makes floats for others, as in the collaboration with shelter members in Pull!, involving the moving of an ice cream truck across Cleveland in 2014. As Eve Sedgwick pointed out, by way of Freud, the tableau form allows one to encounter the weight of symbolization and also the lability of bodily and attentive movement through its field. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,“A Poem is Being Written,”Representations 17 (1987):110–43 and Sigmund Freud,“A Child is Being Beaten”in The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud SE: XVII, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (1919; Hogarth Press, 1974), 179-204.

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But to begin captioning the cock with what“a person says”in this installation also probes what a person is in general and not just as a moving target, figuring the relation between the generality of gender and of race and the generality of the personhood concept as such. We are all so many different kinds of example. Forlesen interrupts the weight of symbolization by making a person, in this artwork, not just someone in a kinship relation but someone who makes and circulates things in relation to things other people have made, including what people make from their very bodies. Children are reproduced, sound is reproduced, DNA is distributed, detritus falls, biographical stories about individual persons circulate, and fictions are captured in drawings made at a scale so large that we can see but not read between the lines the desperation motivating the desire to say something, a completely affective thing that escapes the discipline of the sentence, a thing that is a back-formation from a relation yet to be determined. That's what's exhilarating about taking up life in the hinge. In Du Bois Machine, persons are things among things, piled on each other, yet discernible thanks to the difference between the medium of the sculpture and the medium of the voice that at once refers to its little girl self and the story of encounter that is Pope.L's story. Personhood emerges on contact, and contact makes relations. So, additionally, to raise the question of what“a person says”is to ask: how can one respond to impacts of the world without being reduced to a member of a set, a type of person, a reification or thing whose phrases and works do not matter to their presence in the world? What does it mean to be produced as a kind of thing-in-movement? How not to just inflate or deflate, melodramatize or fall comically into the block or blockage? Usually, when white men have it, deadpan is a hoard of power. Usually, when people of color and women use it, it's a refusal to please and reinforce the need for power to see and hear evidence of compliance to what is expected. To ask the question of what“a person”sometimes says is to ask how not to wear oneself, or ourselves, out, rattling between the singular and the general, the personal and the structural domains of being, as though it is possible to separate them. If Pope.L's project has to do with slicing, peeling, and prying apart the phallus with all its vulnerability and privilege, the aim is not to scrap but unlearn. So too using, wearing, or washing clothes softens and destroys them a little. At the same time that one is all kinds of a generic person, that person is also someone, a singular being with a biography. The question of who“someone”is, is embedded in Du Bois Machine; but, as deadpan,“someone”is embedded in the installation's almost entire negation of the face (the Sun has a head, but no face). What we have instead are bodies and traces that emit sense without being absorbed by anything like story or direct speech or the other's eyes and mouth.

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There is no comic mimesis, no tragic outcome for personhood. All conversations are reported or recorded, all bodies are distorted. Pope.L offers unfree indirect discourse on the way to shaking something off. There used to be a joke—or claim—that decapitation was castration, and perhaps that's at play here, too, in a strategy of literalization that breaks the symbolic by playing with it, cat to mouse.30 It's ironic to track how a caption (like the cock, the headless man) captions from the inside, not from the exterior vein of expertise.31 Without a head“a person”is appetites, styles, gestures, organization— but not cognition, in its explicit performance or demand for recognition. We move from the kinship grid to the assemblage. Without a head, but nonetheless speaking,“a person”who sometimes says this stretches through space as a mass of singularities and another mass of generalities, always subdividing across and within the law and randomness.32 So headlessness might also be political, a kind of claim. Headlessness includes but is not identical to facelessness.33 Without the face one cannot be registered with the state and normativity (from the mug shot to the passport; from the national portrait gallery to the National Symbolic). At the same time, the aesthetic consistency among persons purchased by the loss of face might also involve a throw of the dice toward recreating what Jonathan Flatley calls a“revolutionary mood,”the mood of attunement at the foundation of solidarity that grows from a common situation and project: what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the mood of the“undercommon,”where the unpredicted and unwelcomed cogs in the wheel of social reproduction set out on their own to develop idioms at once so collective and personal they could not be replicated without the citation of an inner voice that might have come from someone else, a person who says things sometimes.34→ One might subtitle the picture of the son:“I have your 30  He ＇lene Cixous,“Decapitation or Castration?”Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 41-55. 31   See Jonathan Culler on the frame as permeable boundary from Kant through Derrida, in On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Deconstruction (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1982), 134 et passim. 32   Georges Tessyot writes,“In Diffe ＇rence et re ＇pe ＇tition (1968), Gilles Deleuze relies on Emmanuel Laroche's study of the various meanings of the Indo-European radical Nem, and introduces a distinction between a sedentary Nomos (the law, in Greek, originally meaning to apportion according to rules) and a nomadic nomos (to spread in an aleatory manner on a limitless space). Deleuze will develop the concept of the nomadic as a distribution without properties, with no enclosures or measurements. In the nomadic view there is not so much a dividing up of that which is distributed, but rather the division among those who distribute themselves in an open space. In subsequent texts, Deleuze will reinforce the opposition between Nomos (a legal subdivision of things) and the nomadic (an aleatory distribution).”Georges Teyssot,“A Topology of Thresholds,”Home Cultures 2, 1 (2005): 106. [Italics mine] 33   On the reduction of the head to the face in the racialized imaginaries of biopolitical modernity, see Tom Gunning,“In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film, Modernism/Modernity 4.1”(1997): 1-29, and Alan Sekula,“The Body and the Archive,”The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1989). 342-388.

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back.”Rolling out personhoods in conjuncture, peers in the symbolic, descendants in history, mutually defining forces in the aesthetic,“A person could say a thing like this”topples the colon marking“before”and“after”and it becomes an ellipsis, and maybe a caption for a sociality to come. The event that is Du Bois Machine gathers all of this nomadic production under the sign of work. Forlesen is very much a piece about men who work, and whose work mattered for collective imaginaries far beyond their bodies. They were also sexually“a piece of work”while holding up the world so that some movement could happen in it. In Forlesen work thus refers to labor and cultural production as well as the work of intimacy and the psychoanalytic sense of autonomous processing (as in“dream work” ). Desire fuels productivity and threatens the very infrastructures that sustain the reproduction of life, and in the arts of reimagining the world personal relations get sacrificed or complicate the attempt to get a new thought or capacity for encounter out there. So it is not surprising that, after Pope.L's speech moves through meetings with Martin Luther King's and W.E.B. Du Bois's gossipy archivists and amatory remediators, it tells a highly personal story about mortality and fragility that displaces entirely the drama of the artwork's pressure to become material and make impacts. The story ends with Pope.L's attempt to reach his mortally ill sister and to care for his son, who gets sick on the way to go see her. The artwork ends there without assessing what all of Pope.L's gestures added up to in relation to redistributing the burden of gendered, racialized, and sexual history. But the tableaux of care are only apparently a distraction. This is clarified, I believe, by how sex functions in the artwork, in its anecdotal and pornographic forms. It appears neither as love, nor as the scene of recognition that beings can provide for each other within the misrecognitions inevitable in love. The event of penetrative sex represents technically beinghinged-together as such. Unfallen is a hinge. On the one hand, it gives us sex as an archaic machinery like its video technology, its flesh faded in grotesque color, and its ghosts of moaning distorted, rough, and aversive. Throughout the installation Pope.L seems to prefer DNA distribution through syringes and posters and websites and essays to the copula of sexual difference. The relative absence of women in an installation so much about the labor of reproduction by other means is a stunning non-event of Forlesen. But the porn loop Unfallen shows something else—a knot of bodies having sex whose performance of movement exemplifies 34   Jonathan Flatley,“How a Revolutionary Counter-Mood is Made,”New Literary History 43, 2 (Summer 2012): 503-525, and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe, New York, and Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013).

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relation in general: a relation at once in the middle of a thing and potentially the beginning of many things. Rather than imagining life after the fall pastorally, as a return to an Edenic experience held as potential in fantasy, Unfallen unlearns the impasse of melodramatic reeling during sex by sitting with the fact of it, penetrating the eye and ear with what's simple about pleasure: that it can be ugly, but still good. The icons and the artist thus work for something through the body but also beyond it, to social and political relations that will never be realized in a single idiom or figure. This would suggest both that the cock is deadpan, overpresent yet keeping its own counsel, and also that it is a deictic, pointing to the convergence and difference among all kinds of work.35 The“yes, and”of work affirms what it means to show up for life. All work, all becoming-form of relation, is an opening and a defense, a copula and a failure to meet. It is also a point of exposure, like sex.36 This is how the circumcision signaled in the structure that houses Forlesen refracts in the circumspection signaled by the autobiographical piece. Cir-cum denotes indirection, among other things punningly resonant. The condiment, a barrier and a seduction, shifts to commentary, a barrier and a seduction. Like the condiment, the commentary is not entirely outside of its object, but occupies it, emerges from the pores of the body—that's one way to read the speaker cover, as bared flesh. It is, in this sense, an exegue, a commentary that invaginates, transforming the external matter into insides and back again, like the pornographic loop.37 I use“invaginate”not only to describe the processes of in and out that mark how Forlesen moves but also to invoke the first artwork of Pope.L's that the girl tells about:“I wanted to buy billboard space at several locations and print this text: This is a painting of Martin Luther King's penis from inside my father's vagina.” A person says things like this, sometimes. Is the surrealism of the phrase just a slap in the face or a breakneck figurative leap? Is it solidarity with women, or the opposite (men have all the genitals), or a light doubletake, for fun? Or figuratively: it may suggest that any“person”has a vagina once he/ 35  Pun intended. I have elsewhere talked about the deadpan of genital shot-reverse shot in“Tit Variations,”a piece about Claire Pentecost's Three Women with the Same Pair of Breasts. See“the Game (6)”at Supervalent Thought: http://supervalentthought.com/2013/06/18/the-game-6/. 36   During my second encounter with Forlesen, a woman standing near Du Bois Machine looked around and said,“I came here to go to my diet doctor and then I pigged out after the weigh-in. I'm wandering the gallery now to work it off.”It was as though she was talking to the sculpture itself, identifying with the problem of wild appetite. 37   On exergues see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Sprivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), pp. 3-26 and“Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,”trans., Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics, 25, 2 (Summer, 1995): 12; On invagination, see Jacques Derrida,“The Law of Genre,”trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry, 7, 1, (Autumn, 1980): 55-81.

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she's been penetrated by the force of another, even another's phrase: which means that everyone has a vagina. It suggests that if you think from within another's thoughts, if you take up a position from within their view, you occupy their vagina, the intelligence of their receptivity expressed in their perspective. Pope.L wants to use the distributingmartin project to“make [anyone] as good as MLK”by inserting King's DNA, his spirit and voice, through all of the public's permeable pores and boundaries. The listener who moves uncomfortably close to the groin without understanding it, is learning the intimacy of awkwardness and the awkwardness of intimacy with any body, let alone an iconic one such as Du Bois's, or King's or a guy's on a bus, a host's at a conference, a son's. In this view, we are all penetrated by King; by double consciousness; by ambition; by each other. In this sense, and in this piece, whomever Pope.L meets becomes a collaborator. He shows up repeatedly for collaboration in art, knowledge, and black (fore)fatherhood, as in the distributingmartin project's aim to make any spectator a potential incubator. Such collaboration is fundamentally comic, like marriage: a scene of being-with emerging from a relationship continually taking and losing form. A scene of where intention quickly becomes other than it was.



I continued working on the website. It had become this labyrinth of several websites. The topmost layer was a diary with fantastic dates that did not, in some cases, match the entries. I tried to make the site visually attractive but it ended up looking more like my grandmother's apartment with trap doors and hallways that went nowhere. Recently I've introduced the white pages … My most recent opportunity to get the project off the ground crashed and burned …

Forlesen is another incident in the long career of the distributingmartin project. This time it is folded into a discourse about trying to show up for rather than to achieve something, while receding from the ambition for public sanction as well as from the fantasy of the sexual relation.38 Over time Forlesen archives all of the gestures that were not, or badly, taken up, and these narrative metagestures become as much a force for shaping next steps as the ones successfully taken. The opening of Du Bois Machine's story thus suggests something else about converting the moment into an episode, something about the importance of accident in the shape of a life not fully determined by structures of inheritance 38  This is exemplified by the“man on the bus”with whom Pope.L meets and collaborates to distribute MLK's DNA into fruit. The relationship founders“because I wanted to talk about the project and all he wanted to talk about was this woman in Portland and the epiphanies or anxieties arising from their relationship—”Du Bois Machine.

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showing up to withhold: pope.l's deadpan aesthetic

and ambition: it's about how one never knows which encounters will change what one thinks is possible, what one can do. The show makes the body an archive, and memory, too. It has also a library of sorts from which it induces encounter: a short story, a catalog, the generic oeuvres of MLK and Du Bois, and Anders Nilsen's gorgeous, recessive Big Questions. But this opening paragraph, with its“public display of introspection,” points to another kind of archive altogether, an encrypted or closeted one that might have accidentally invaginated Pope.L's mind, one never knows39: however it got there, it opens out into a whole other world of crypts and secrets: Here is the first paragraph from Pope.L's machine-speech. Sometimes a person says this: If you listen he'll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel. And then he'll say: we're flawed because we want so much more. We're ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had. It is not that a particular artwork fails or succeeds; it's that we get to play in the hinge. Don Draper of Mad Men is the original“person”who uttered the speech about the angel and his fall.40 Here is his speech in full. When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him. He has a million reasons for being anywhere. Just ask him. If you listen, he'll tell you how he got there: how he forgot where he was going and then he woke up. If you listen he'll tell you about the time he thought he was an angel or dreamt of being perfect. And then he'll smile with wisdom, content that he'd realized the world isn't perfect. We're flawed because we want so much more. We're ruined because we get these things and wish for what we had. In the scene where he says these phrases, Draper is writing in his journal, sitting in a brown room where the light is dull. What he writes is reenacted in voiceover, and laid out across flashbacks of ordinary miserable family life, and the everyday of work. He's talking about men, but the flashback includes women's lives of quiet desperation, too. 39   Zach Galifianakis, episode #7 of By The Way, In Conversation with Jeff Garlin (April 4, 2013). Accessed at http://www.earwolf.com/episode/zach-galifianakis/ 1/3/2014. 40   Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 8,“The Summer Man”(2010).

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Like many heroes of male melodrama, Draper is trying to learn how to reflect on himself, by which he means on the sadness that accompanies his loops of failure and desire, of ordinariness, grandiosity, and hoarded authority. He doesn't have the confidence to be melodramatic; nor the courage to go for the joke and risk losing everything, as happens to another man in the episode. Draper tries, though, to generalize from his situation, to go from being Draper to“a person”among persons. That dramatic structure organizes the series as well. To become subject, he tries to be an artist, a theorist, a lover, self-critical, to speak as an authority about the“we”he might also belong to, anything to find a genre that will honor his need for self-idealization; anything that will change the sad habits of efficient attunement—of sexuality and creativity—that he has used as a defense against living honestly and as means for taking the risk of a transformative sensation. Draper has just lost his wife to Henry Francis, an authoritarian man who wields proudly a previous generation's style of being manly and right. The man mows his lawn with the intensity of someone intent on mowing down the world. He has grey hair but the body is hairless, to show that it has nothing to hide. Draper has a lot to hide, and the more he shows the more there is to hide. He is a man behind the phallus,“the curtain.”Unlike the wizard in Oz, though, Draper's dissociated affect finds no consolation in the success of the image. If you listen you will hear the noise of the reeling that comes from Draper's inability to extract himself from the loop of grandiosity and regret. Mouthing these words through the little girl, Pope.L nonetheless edits and interrupts Draper's loop, the loop of the person who sometimes says things that justify the life made from the tedious conventional mistakes by sounding profound about them. Sometimes the artwork, if you listen, if you can bear to receive it, will allow the pratfalls and grotesque pleasures of the intimacy that is also a watchful encounter to be received for what they are, a medium. Forlisten. The first phrase of Du Bois Machine is trying to tell us that. Too Far: A thought experiment, then, is here propped on a collection of not just part-objects but ripped, flaking, distorted, and abandoned things poised to induce a new realism not just about identity but about attachment to the normative imaginary

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showing up to withhold: pope.l's deadpan aesthetic

that also props Pope.L, and some version of“us,”up. As the cock shreds and is cut into sections, language disperses into a speculative leap of multiple distortions in the page drawings, the sound of a collective autobiography echoing, and phatic sex noises. Racialized skin reappears as conceptual-aesthetic flesh, sex becomes visible as a decaying video image, a sculpture decays male iconicity and sovereign authorship in their patriarchal glory, and the logos of the word dissolves into a between-the-lines that is radically quiet amid the noise. But then it all leads to that picture of the artist's son from behind his head, in the light, pointing away from where we stand, in the same direction that the cock faces. On the one hand, what a sentimental bore this might be, if the result of this experiment were just another instance of patriarchal self-pity about the desire to have an impact everywhere, to make something good, to be good, against the disruptions that happen from the pressures of sexual and professional ambition. But the attitude it takes toward professional ambition is to just keep showing up, trying this thing and that: the gesture is always in the middle, holding up the world for effects to happen.41 Otherwise we are in it together but we are not the same. We are in it together as bodies of desire and knowledge, and of appetites that cannot be controlled in advance by what we know. We are in it together as producers—but mainly remediators, distributors, reenactors—of history. Pope.L's film Reenactor (about Civil War reenactors) states this explicitly, defining life as the torture of being aesthetically and existentially in an endless middle. In the endless loop or sequence one must respond to the pressure to occupy, transform, destroy, and live on in a landscape whose monuments to racism and misogyny and problematic paternity are as alive now as they were when slaves were fucked and fucked over in the shacks that are now tourist sites. Race, sexual difference, domesticity, capitalism, violence: everything including what we've forgotten and repressed accompanies us, and we are living archives, which is one of the stories of Forlesen.42 Unlearning genres of encounter so that one might transform the potentials for the encounters within which one is already acting and reacting: this attachment to maintaining attachment while reconfiguring what it can do and be, summarizes what I've been suggesting about showing up to withhold, about the friendly aggressivity of Pope.L's deadpan. 41   Giorgio Agamben,“Notes on Gesture,”Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 49-60. 42    See William Pope.L, Reenactor (2012). This film engages in the endless middle as well, taunting the audience for its desire to wrap things up as genre, as teleology, as separations between the past and the present. An intertitle proclaims,“It's something in the middle of something else we mistake for a wall.”

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Take the frame of the show. Forlesen, the name of the show, is not at first a word with meaning, but a phoneme that titles a story, Gene Wolfe's short story, the first and last pages of which mark the margin of the project as we enter and leave. The titular protagonist wakes up one day knowing his name but neither understanding how he got old, nor what the rules of life are currently, nor who that wife is and what he should do with her, nor who his children are and what he should do with them. Plus, he has a new job and has to be receptive to the fact that he is always belated to the rules, always flailing and failing. In other words, he is ordinary. But unlike people who can take this ordinary for granted, he must read a manual to get through the day the story covers and follow the directions of a live GPS, of men on the phone whom he never meets, and of administrative assistants. He has a sense that he has had a life, but he takes nothing for granted about how to continue to live it. By the end of the story's day, he is fitted for his casket and waiting to die. There has been no time to mistake his appetites and inclinations for sovereignty. The world is deadpan, and he does not know how to make it reorganize itself around him. He becomes progressively flat. This is neither a comic nor tragic story, because there are neither claims for justice, nor rapid oscillations of knowledge and nonknowledge, aggression and pleasure. Deadpan whiteness, once a god, now is merely a machine, and fades not to black, but to maybe. Forelesen's is a patriarch's name that Forlesen inherited whether or not he liked it, like the rest of his inheritance. He is confused, finding himself within a patrlineage and a marriage but not remembering motive or detail. He didn't ask to be born, or reborn. Who does? 43 For him, and for the reader, the mere name Forlesen’is an aperture moving from simply sound to an assessment of where it is in relation to desire, power, action, and love. The installation moves in the other direction, from the cock's self-evidence to a quiet, yet diffuse, noise. Pope.L's art-patronym offers no assurance of power's or love's success in achieving its reproductive aims: it provides an architecture for inhabiting genealogy differently, and also breaking up its inevitability and solidity. The German vorlessen, or“to read,”is also in the air, like the water that was there before the atmosphere's dryness claimed it, leaving evaporation rings on the glasses of water around the room. The name that shows up to withhold is an imperative toward curiosity within capture, an erotics that has not yet lost its optimism, a labor of staying-inrelation beyond the promises of all of love's known genres. 43  David Benatar. Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford UP, Press, 2006).

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INTerview

Hamza Walker: When did video become a part of your arsenal? How did it relate to performance and theater? William Pope.L: I worked with film a little in undergrad and grad. I didn't like cutting so I used entire reels uncut. I liked the directness of the port-a-pak reel-to-reel video system, but did not know quite what to do with it … so, my arsenal … ?

re: grant submissions but the question very soon became a bit brittle. Film and video cannot but be … a wound, an ash and a cinder. HW: Yeah. WP: After a while I decided: screw purity. I'm going to make docs that are works in themselves. HW: So you had documented a number of performance/theater pieces, but you weren't thinking of that documentation as a work in its own right.

HW: Mm hmm. WP: Later, when I was in theater, I used video to document shit primarily for grants. HW: Mm hmm. WP: At the time, in the theaterperformance world, grant panels were very suspicious of edits. If there were edits in your documentation, or too many edits, a panel suspected you were hiding something or, god forbid, making video art! The question in their minds was: are you constructing a fiction to make your work better? The answer was a resounding: Y!-E!-S! Of course you were, that's why people spent an entire week's pay on live three-camera shoots—to make themselves look better. I understood the concern with edits

edit are cousins, not twins? And people would nudge me, people who knew more about video than I, and tell me what I was doing was neither documentary nor video nor film. It was amateur.

WP: Well, not at the very very first, no. But it didn't take long for the thought to creep in. The problem was how to do it. The performance-theater stuff was more linear and proscenium. The solo street performance stuff I was doing was more improvisational with more changes of angle and depth of field. For me, it was easier and more interesting to edit the street stuff. All the while I was asking myself questions like: why should one image follow another? What if the actual event and the resulting

HW: Right. It's interesting to think about the evolution of the technology over the course of your career. Back in the 1980s you were still thinking of editing as chopping up film. It's relatively cumbersome. WP: True. But in many ways editing is the same now as then. Whether analog or digital, it always comes down to: I have this material and I have to figure out what to do with it. Today digital editing allows folks to chop shit up much more than film or VHS, perhaps giving the editor a fuller, more expansive fantasy of control of the medium. Ha! But I still don't edit my own stuff. I find it more interesting to collaborate with someone else. HW: Unfallen, in its use of appropriated footage, is such an old-school piece of video art, very ‘80s, especially in its use of multiple monitors. In terms of form and genre, it is distinct from anything performance-based. WP: I don't think I'd made anything exactly like that before Unfallen, except for grad school. Hmmm. But as I said, I'd already been thinking cinematically. I'd been thinking about

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film form and moving-image culture long before. And I was making single channel works 10 or 12 years before Unfallen, some in which I performed, some not. For example, a film called A Dome Like Structure. I didn't perform in that. Perhaps Unfallen looks more like“video” , but my overall concern was image relationality, as in montage, and creating the appropriate install for a particular type of moving image. But even Unfallen deals with bodies, the bodies just do not include mine. HW: I guess I'm thinking of the live dimension, a theater dimension. WP: Theater? Not sure. Story, yes, or narrative, sure. Theater? I can say I'm really interested in ‘live-ness’ as per the book by Phillip Auslander, and the work of the Builders, the experimental theater troupe led by Marianne Weems, also the Wooster Group, people like that who are interested in how‘live’interacts with story and screen and the question:“ Today what can ‘live’mean as a motor for production?”Live-ness as a way of actively engaging viewers concerning their place as living, breathing fleshy entities in a world full of screens. In Unfallen, using old found porn footage I was attempting to incite in people the idea that the performers, the bodies they saw on the monitors, were evanescent, fragile, perhaps even deceased. Ghosts, like themselves …

HW: Out of curiosity, where would A Negro Sleeps Beneath the Susquehanna fall chronologically?

Some of the edits were in camera and done during the shooting, some later. The echo was produced live.

WP: Probably 1998, around there. There were many drafts and versions, ending with the most recent Son version, which I showed at the Renaissance Society in 2010. It was through working with this sort of performance material, basically treating it as found footage, that I was able to figure out how I could be true to the spirit of performance and create a cinematic event at the same time. It was challenging. Susquehanna involved multiple modes of address and staging ideas applied to one narrative line, for example, the idea of looking as creating, shifting locations for audience and performer, and a cousining of time-based or process-based performance, storytelling and the idea of a baptism. It was fun.

HW: You had reverb …

HW: That was the first video of yours that I saw. Although the performance did have a small live audience, it seemed to have been done for the camera. You seemed to be really playing with effects and echo and delay and other things in a couple of the cuts to turn it into something other than the performance, to really speak of it being mediated through video. WP: It wasn't done for the camera. I didn't know where the camera would be or how it was to be videotaped.

WP: On the mic, live. HW: Ahhh. WP: The speakers were almost 100 yards from the mic into which I was breathing. The audience did not know where I was. I led them to my location with the sound of my breathing. The sound echoed in the forest … HW: So, going back to the Unfallen, when and how did the idea for it coalesce? You had been collecting VHS tapes for a long time. WP: I had the idea three or four or more! years before I made the actual work. These things always seem to take a long time. I collected the tapes and played with them as objects. Unspooling them. Building totems of the cassettes, lighting them on fire. Then I began to play them. The ones that could be played and not gunk up playback. I thought they were more than a little odd, not so much titillating, but relics, little plastic tombstones with magnetic tape inside, weird anthropomorphic, fleshy, disturbing, awkward, dirty in a dead-thing way. And the dates the porn had been recorded was very revealing

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because many of the films were fairly old, in some cases 15 to 20 years or so. The performers, on the tapes, who were by no means young at the time of the recording, were by now most likely sick from disease, elderly, or deceased. Later I also bought four super-discount, big-ass tube TVs that played DVDs. I built wooden frames around these and stacked and rotated them like building blocks. Turning some upside-down or sideways, allowed the powder in the TV , causing tubes to shift and‘rainbow’ color effects. Then I edited some of the porn footage and combined that with rotating the cubes and the color effects. Eventually, I realized I could create similar but much more stable color effects digitally, and that led to the final form the project has today. From that point, it was two or three years before the piece was completed. At least, the version that was shown at the Renaissance Society. HW: So, was it all porn that you were buying? Was that specific? WP: No, I bought some other stuff like Bowfinger with Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin and Enemy Mine with Lou Gosett and Randy Quaid, which I used in a film called The Collective. HW: All bargain bin? WP: Yes. Much of it beat up. Usually not in very good condition.

HW: Right, and you got it at a truck stop? WP: Yeah, and several other places. At video stores going out of business. Also, Lewiston, Maine, where I was living, had tons of these“frontier”convenience stores—the kind of store that had a hundred thousand things in it, used and new, in boxes and barrels throughout the store. And in one corner there was usually a bin of VHS tapes that seemed to never empty. Most of the tapes I got from those bins. HW: Right. But the porn was the core of the piece, I guess. Now obviously, there is the body in porn. Did you think of the body in porn as a substitute for your own body in performances? I don't think of you as a child of a certain kind of critique of media, so if I think about you as appropriating porn, I think it would be because it's got bodies, rather than because you want to make a critique of pornography or media imagery. WP: The word“critique”is a funny word. Re-thinking what art critique actually is or does or creates is very important for me right now. It's too easy to use the word critique as if it's a tool rather than a fashion. Re: my use of porn, I did think about who has license to use this material. What kind of viewing it incites. What kinds of situations or spaces that its typically

consumed in. I thought about what I was asking of viewers when I required them to publicly share it together. That you run the risk of splitting your audience, dividing people concerning their sense of decency or propriety by requiring them to look at sexrelated material together in fairly close quarters. HW: You purposely abstracted the images. The rough draft was far more explicit than the final piece. WP: Well, to me, it's like in Bataille's Story of the Eye there are these great passages where I have no idea what's going on sexually or even narrativewise, for example, the travel sequences; how the characters move from one place to another can be very disorienting. The more explicit sex stuff goes by pretty hard and fast, and I could follow that, but there's sections in the story where, for example, a young girl sits on a bowl of milk and its striking and funny, not literal, sex-wise. It's a great image, very clear and fuzzy at the same time. A very slow image because Bataille seems to be using more words than necessary to describe a simple event. To me its more effective than seeing the sexual act directly.

HW: Is Unfallen an analysis of porn to some degree?

pope.l/walker

WP: Perhaps. Maybe in its indulgence. Its acceptance. For example, I'm interested in clunky story telling, of which porn has plenty. That's why the story set-ups were interesting. However, with the fucking, you go from this thing that's very square in the frame to something very gushy, very gushy and close-up, like literally fucking an abstraction. I was interested in two basic actions in the porn: the behavior, or as we artists say, fucking, and the scenario in which the behavior was acted out—a woman in her kitchen calls a plumber, he visits, they have sex; a man sits in his apartment reading, calls up his lady-friend, she arrives, they have sex. The most dramatic thing in a porn vid can be when a character knocks on a door or enters a room. As behavior, in some ways, the knocking and entering is more interesting than the sex itself. An architectural penetration. Then there's the type of room a character calls home. Is it a set? A borrowed house? A hotel room? Does the host offer the guest a drink, a cigarette, a bath? Or do they sit on the sofa and rub each other's … materials? All good stuff. HW: We live with exhibitions for six weeks. Whenever the Ren has a video installation or an installation with a strong video component, what I tend to remember most is the sound, since I hear it in my office throughout the day. For Unfallen, what I remember most is

the slamming door and the“squeaks. Could you talk about the sound? WP: My use of sound in Unfallen was influenced by my experiences creating music for performance or musical theater years before. At that time, I was thinking about using different flows or rhythm possibilities parallel in one work, having a track or image in one rhythm, and a counter-track or -image in another, and intercutting or layering them so they rubbed against each other, creating some contrapuntal noise or narrative puzzle. The so-called“mickey mouse”interruptions or“squeaks”in the filmareauralandvisualslicesinthefilmspace and emphasized the repetition, a trope with which we are familiar in most porn. So even interruption was patterned. And sometimes I focused on pattern, sometimes on body. Sometimes both until the difference was erased. The body reasserted itself most clearly via sound—moans and cries. Sometimes liqueous, gushiness in the extreme closeups. Maybe what really disgusts people about porn is it reveals so clearly how wonderfully dumb, on the ground and repetitious our sex ways really are. And how closed off it can be to an“outside” . Watching sex without sound is like watching a signal pattern. Is there any“inside”to two people hired to have sex? Are they zombie-husks only meant to serve us? And do only our bodies, the consumer's bodies, matter? What is this relationship? I wanted the porn to re-

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make our bodies, so I“fretted”the porn, cinematically opened up its walledoff aspect—so I rarely used medium shots, instead almost all the shots are extreme close-ups, or inverted, even romantic moments and party-going. I wanted the film space to be familiar yet disassociated—too intimate, too unreliable, too fluid, too gushy. HW: The sound was something of a binding agent for me,“Fluid and gushy,”as you said. The interruptions, in introducing pattern, made Unfallen quite formal. It was not until the introduction of intertitles announcing“The End”that I asked myself if there was a beginning and whether the piece had a narrative structure. What was your thinking in introducing them? WP: The usual stuff—wonder, fear, death, redemption. One of the“The Ends”is taken from the Wizard of Oz and another from a Bollywood film. I think Unfallen is about a kind of loss. We don't say“The End”at the end of films any more, do we? HW: In the case of Unfallen, I got to“The End”only to ask where was the beginning. ( L l A aU uG gH h T t E e R r) WP: It's all biblical shit. In the beginning was another beginning.

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HW: Unfallen strikes me as nostalgic. Were you aiming for that?

that once“edited”in or out, changed how we understood the narrative.

WP: I'm not trying to be funny, but I think the film is mostly about time and death. Trying to box that in with monitors, maybe that's nostalgic. The work is partly about TV, a certain kind of TV, maybe that's nostalgic, which I find very interesting. The 4:3 screen size, which has a concentration that wide-screen does not. Also, many artists today have inherited widescreen without realizing it's as much a convention as 4:3 was. Screens are just another way of saying proscenium.

HW: But this is what's funny about talking to you about video. On the one hand, you started with documenting performance. On the other hand, you're wholly film-savvy, so you've got all these references to draw from, whether it's performance, or film, or video art; but it's only now that those things are being brought to bear in the making of video for you.

HW: Right. 4:3 was transparent because there really wasn't any other option, but now if somebody shot something in 4:3 you'd notice because 16:9 is the new convention. Conventions are transparent and only become opaque when something else comes along. WP: Fassbinder did a lot of television and trained in the theater. Even his feature films have that 4:3 blocky feel. He embraced the limitations of the frame and gave it a cinematic affectivity by playing with the edge. He over-emphasized the rigidity of the screen edge by lining up doorways with performers and the frame itself or using mirrors to fracture or disorient point of view. He used pans and zooms to contract or expand film-space to reveal or conceal something outside the frame,

WP: Well, I guess, for me, its more the case that thinking cinematically has been going on quite awhile, long before I made my first films, but its only recently that I'm making a greater effort to take the work public. It takes me a long time to get comfortable. And I think it's always important to have a work or works on-going for which there are no expectations, no history, at least in other minds. This kind of work is not necessarily secret, but an activity I can do in relative silence. HW: It seems there was a kind of freedom that you were exercising with respect to making meaning from the components of Forlesen, and I couldn't get a handle on where that may have been coming from. But if you think about it, it seems similar to making something like a film, where there's also freedom, although it's bound in time and editing. Did film-making af-

fect how you were thinking about Forlesen as an exhibition? The show is like a series of episodes, situations, where some kind of logic plays itself out; and they create what amounts to a surreal situation. The way that they accumulate, the way that you layer them, you create a very strange thought-space arrived at through uncanny juxtapositions. Did that occur to you at all? Was Forlesen as an installation conceived in cinematic terms? And if so, what was the role of Unfallen within Forlesen? Was it just one out of a series of different things, or was it a point where things may have crystallized? Was its role to taint the other components with a psychosexual dimension? Not that the sculpture and the story couldn't have done that.

WP: I'm not sure. Duration was a strong hinge in Forlesen—it operated in all the works in that exhibition— so perhaps you are on to something. Either way you pose a deep question, as my sister would say. Re: Unfallen's role in the exhibition, maybe its role was to function as the thing you get to

pope.l/walker

at the end of something, in this case an exhibition. And so the thing you get to and have to deal with is different, yet, puzzle-wise, very connected to the fleshiness of the beginning. For example, Curtain, the flaking wall of ketchup and joint compound near the entrance to the exhibition. Both it and Unfallen had to do with decay, verticality, and time. So it may sound cool to say:“Yeah, my exhibition was structured like a film,”but I sense not. The organization of Forlesen was a blind, a puzzle built around a set of hinges, many weak and creaky. Connections between elements required a lot of symbol, metaphor, and structural work from the viewer. Some of the work was feeling-work, not visual or idea work. I think this was confusing to some folks. Feeling in my work is usually, even when unpleasant, fairly clear, yet combined with varying conceptual hinges in Forlesen … well, things got more difficult. Unfallen had a very structural place in the exhibition in that it was the last thing most people encountered. I did not want audience to sit when experiencing it. Or at least not comfortably. I wanted people to have to stand and deal with the stack of monitors as if it was an alter or an altar, something that might do something to you. Unfallen's function was to answer fully and bodily, but inadequately, this sentence:“What is this thing Forlesen, the exhibition?”Unfallen is a creature in a dark cave like an oracle that can only

offer puzzles and non sequitors. It's four films in boxes stacked on top of each other like a hydra or a medusa. Installing Unfallen at the“end”of Forlesen demonstrated my interest in exploring what is the end of an exhibition. How do people know what or where the conclusion of an exhibition is, and how can I enter that question. How can I intervene into that? One way: insert an object of duration at the“end”of what seems a path (a la Hansel and Gretel) in order to carry on the journey, but now inside a room inside a room filled with boxes filled with lights and sights. HW: Unfallen's development seems to have overlapped with Reenactor, which, in addition to being wholly distinct from Unfallen, is your most epic video work to date. What is Reenactor's backstory? WP: The whole idea began six years ago when I was invited by Washington and Lee University to do a project. Have you heard of them? HW: No. WP: Well, it was the first and last job that General Lee accepted after the Civil War. He became the first President of Washington and Lee University. Speaking of jobs, Washington and Lee eventually fired me … HW: Mm hmm.

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WP: Their invite was barely an invite, probably half an invite. Apparently I did something wrong. I wanted to bring back the“southern spirit.”Ahhh, the spirit. Ooohhhh. Scary. I wanted to invest in the notion of a visible Confederacy. Literally. I wanted to do a kind of community-based project in which the town's people would dress up in Confederate Uniforms for one day. I'd develop activities for them. I wanted to create a swarm with this look. I wasn't sure what the activities would be. I described what I could. I told them I wanted the swarming to be a haunting parallel with the town's daily life. So, if you chop meat for a living, you chop meat in your Confederate uniform. If you drive your kids to school, you drive them to school in their confederate uniforms. Whatever. The Washington and Lee gallery director was very excited. She said she'd take my ideas to the University community, and develop discussions, etc. And I immediately sensed trouble. I said to myself:“ There's going to be trouble.”And there was. She never told me exactly why she stopped taking my calls except that I'd misstepped in an email and wrote Washington and Lee University was in West Virginia instead of Virginia. She felt my mistake implied a lack of respect. She felt I was trying to trick them. I thought I was very straightforward. Maybe too straightforward.

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HW: But you shot it in Tennessee ultimately?

HW: Mm hmm. You have the credits occurring deep, deep in the film …

WP: Nashville, actually. Another year went by after Washington and Lee dropped out, and I was invited to do a project at Tennessee State University … a very different kind of place. A State university with 90 percent black students. And I thought: this is where I really want to do this.

( L l A aU uG gH h T t E e R r)

HW: Mm hmm. WP: TSU had discussion groups, too, but they came back with a“yes” , and were very excited about taking on one of the more visible and onerous costumes of our historical past and dressing themselves in signs and emblems that even today upset or energize some folks. Reenactor is screened continuously 24 hours a day for at minimum of three days, sometimes 5 to 7 days. Initially the plan was to make a 24-hour film, but I wanted more tension and con-trol in each moment of the edit, its internal time, so I decided a horizontal approach to screening would give me the desired duration-texture to its external-time. During Reenactor sleeping is encouraged. Talking, cell phones, drinking, eating is fine. We even serve coffee. HW: So it's three and a half hours. WP: Three and a half now. Four hours very soon. I'm still working on it.

HW: An hour in and it says,“Directed by William Pope.L.” ( L l A aU uG gH h T t E e R r) WP: That's something I've always liked in Fassbinder, his use of credits to defamiliarize time, texture, even the ownership of a film. HW: There are a couple of passages featuring you doing a voice-over where you read your own writing. Beautiful. The relationship between text and image makes this piece quite cinematic in its nod toward narrative. The montages. The relationship between sound image. The grainy close ups. The dissolves. It seems like a new language. What about its relationship to Unfallen? WP: Reenactor and Unfallen were produced around the same time. I didn't realize it until I had to go back recently to look at some of the Unfallen footage for its latest edit for the Renaissance Society. But the working approach was very different. For example, Reenactor was about location shooting and documentary whereas Unfallen was about the studio, found material and sculpture. To shoot Reenactor, we had to travel twice to Nashville, and make

a couple of smaller trips to Pennsylvania to shoot reenactments. A lot of the Civil War took place in that State. Another difference between Reenactor and Unfallen was image-layering and cropping, and how these effects extend or retard the sense of passing time. In Reenactor I wanted the flow to wax and wane, in Unfallen I wanted more of a trudge and then a release. HW: There is a funny play with the title. I see“reenactor;”I say“reenactor;”but I think“reactor.”There was something of a delay before I put“reenactor”together with“Civil War reenactor.” WP: The viewer haunting.

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HW: It's telling that these two pieces developed together—one, a piece of video art proper, and the other, a translation of a performance. It seems you have maintained integrity to two distinct approaches. WP: As I said previously, my earlier performance-documentaries like A Negro Sleeps Beneath the Susquehanna, and then later with more narrative works like APHOV (A Personal History of Videography), were a platform for me from which I could develop a sensitivity to editing as well as duration and body in the same work. These things did not have to deny each other. The rub between the two could be productive

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and held together in one attitude. The work didn't have to be talky or overexplained. In a way, too much talk makes the body disappear. HW: That seems impossible in your work. Those crawl-a-thons have made your bod the stuff of legend. WP: The solo crawl performances feel long and grueling not only because they are, but also because I am constantly feeling my body. Maybe this is a fundamental difference between being young and being old: when you are older you feel your body so much more, so much so it becomes unbearable.

work. I sense a similar confusion when I insist that edited videos of performance can be artworks in their own right. Chris Burden was very clear about this, and he was great at the essential cut, but he was careful not to edit too much, at least in his canonical videos. His video works come across more as objects or TV objects. I am not as interested in that.

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winning videos are spliced into the film to make it even more available. I mean, audiences make artworks porous by consuming them. So why not work with audiences functionally as a structuring schema? If you can accept that part of their functionality will be the inability to totally circumscribe their affect … . HW: Mm hmm.

HW: So that brings up the issue of shooting. The key factor seems to be shooting with or without that kind of consciousness. WP: Yes.

HW: What about A Dome Like Structure? In terms of making the transition from the performances to what could be called video works in and of them-selves, A Dome Like Structure is the first one that doesn't use actors or bodies.

HW: Going into something, realizing …

WP: Actually there are people in Dome. They aren't the object or motivators of action. Some of the people were performers who I directed; some were not. The dome of ice melting on the hill, becoming the hill in a way, was the object, the central visual idea. My body did not appear in the film. My attitude about this—the decision to not use my body to anchor my film work—has perhaps been a little confusing to some folk who know my solo performance

WP: Mm.

WP: Mm hmm. HW: … that you are shooting and this is material that will then be re-translated into some kind of facsimile …

HW: … of the event … WP: Facsimile? Hmmm. That sounds like a copy. I think Reenactor is more a doppelganger in the Edgar Allan Poe sense. I wanted to put Reenactor out into the world for people to haunt. I am entertaining the idea now of sponsoring a 30-second video contest at each venue where the film is shown and all the

WP: … for example in artists' talks, Q&A is the best part, hearing the comeback. Audiences have always been important to me, not always cordially, in learning what it is I have made, because I can never know fully what I have created. There is that blindness. And of course, I think I may know and I may have a fantasy about knowing but, truth be told, what one makes is always beyond oneself … HW: Mm hmm. WP: Audiences look at things like a camera, a very layered and sometimes contradictory camera. But we artists believe we are the photographer! Aha! We think we've taken one picture whereas the audience says:“Yes, perhaps but you've also captured this and this—and that!” HW: Mm hmm. WP: The audience seems very elastic

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with this thing. HW: Right, right, and so the question seems to be, to what extent the camera served as a substitute for the audience. WP: Ok … . HW: When you started to think about the audience seeing things in a very elastic fashion, did that help shift your thinking about the role and status of video documentation? WP: I think it helped free me from having to feel I had any responsibility to ‘60s video practice, where the camera doesn't move and editing is so surveilled. Where editing can't serve to tell a story or create a feeling or rhythm or atmosphere. HW: So the camera can never be just a recording tool. WP: For me, the poetics happens first. What are the tensions in the hinges between the things, people, places, materials, and rhythms that I want to bring together? I try to set that up in the physical world. It could be costuming and an actual city, as in Reenactor, or farm animals and a set I build in an old textile mill, as in Small Cup, or used VHS porn cassettes and a stack of monitors, as in Unfallen. I commit to a poetics, and then record as if I am shooting a documentary,

knowing that later in the editing room something else will transpire. Something that may have little to do with the truth of the documentation. My job is to reveal the poetics of the set of relations I have contrived, regardless of what was actually shot. You tell the truth of the poetics as if it's real time. And then treat video time as if it's more true than real time. HW: So when you made A Dome Like Structure, you chose a very loaded symbol, and it seems to be some of kind of allegorical maneuver to make that symbol out of ice, but it's not a durational thing where you want to show it melting. It's only a five and a half minute video. So, what was the impetus for A Dome Like Structure, first of all? WP: Well, I think more than a quarter of the film shows either the dome or its melting, so there's that, but I did not want to make a strict document of a process. I was balancing competing interests, for example, my interests in duration, performance, narrative, tone and atmosphere. Probably more tone and atmosphere. HW: Sounds as if A Dome Like Structure was a learning experience. WP: Yes, I agree. All the films teach me something. For example, in Dome it was how to think about recording and showing place using aural cues

equal to visual. And thinking about the frame. How do I use the frame to articulate tone? Do I have to use the entire frame? What if it's not serving me? How can I get rid of the frame or stretch it? It's questions like that that led me to inverting the frame, cropping to the pixels, and shaping at the material level of the medium. All while telling this wispy story that never quite comes into focus. HW: Okay, so this is all … it's a pretty heady … in terms of a learning curve with respect to the video medium, because it seems you can break those pieces down into the kinds of shots. I mean, there's the tracking shot that's a close-up of the ground, and the use of sound, and the montage sequence. So that's all there—and I like the use of ice as an actor—but why did you choose the Capitol? WP: I chose the American Capitol, or cupola, because it's an object encrusted with a very dense layer of myth and desire. I'd planned to shoot three Capitol films. One in ice—that's Dome. One in butter—a Maine county fair reference. This one was never made. And the third one became Small Cup, in which the Capitol is made out of birdseed. HW: But the Capitol is an obvious symbol, especially in terms of the idea of it melting or decaying or breaking

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down. So, did you think of that kind of subject matter almost as a ready-made content? WP: Obvious? Yes, I am interested in vernacular subject matter or modes, stuff common to many: is that what you mean by“obvious” ? Or do you mean in the sense that the Capitol represents our fear of our own government? And our wish to harm it because it wishes to harm us? The idea of the Capitol against the sky, always against something? … HW: It looks like there are two other structures, on either end of the frame, in the distance … WP: In many small towns in New England, the church is the tallest structure; a steeple or cupola similar to the Capitol. Banks, police stations, city halls, textile mills, and nowadays bigbox stores mimic the cupola's affective architecture, this structure of dark against the light, against the sky. HW: In Dome, there's a fire in the distance at one point, and then there are church bells that also go off at another point. And so it felt like there was a use of sound in terms of a portrait of a place. It sounds like you were interested in capturing that. WP: I like it that sound can articulate a feel and a depth without the baggage

of an image. HW: A Dome Like Structure opens with the thunder-clap, which repeats throughout. Sound might be a nice segue-way into Small Cup, even though APHOV (A Personal History of Video) comes in between those two.

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time—even with a super-thin storyline like in Dome—and how that story form interacts with location, sound, image and editing. Small Cup was important because I was on location inside and around a very large building, a textile mill, and was able to explore that specific locale like a character …

WP: Right. HW: But it seems like the two bookends should be A Dome Like Structure and Small Cup … . WP: I'm not sure about that. I think the films hinge in different ways. APHOV was the child of one and the parent of the other. APHOV used the actor as a pivot like I used the animals in Small Cup and the ice sculpture in Dome. In APHOV, the actor moved slowly and specifically but his blood was the real motivator of action, taking us from the front of the set to his little apartment in back. The blood from his eyes spilled off the table, flowed onto the floor, and filled the room. In Small Cup and Dome, instead of blood, camera movement connects spaces. I am super-specific, or try to be, about how action or performance fills the film frame—meaning the action of an object or a performer or the camera, even the weather. I am equally obsessed about image-sequencing, which for me is almost always about world-building and storytelling, how story sculpts

HW: Right. WP: … whereas Reenactor was basically a large chunk of the city of Nashville. HW: Nashville was an important agent, but an unwieldy agent, it sounds like. WP: I suppose so, but fairly gracious, I think. Cities are organisms so they're always changing. They're also social and legal entities whose immaterial layers can impact how you shoot sensitive subject matter. Basically different films provide different lessons, challenges. To work on character as object, place and myth, I did APHOV. To work on group, national identity and time as mask or costume, I did Reenactor. The lessons

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in APHOV are still percolating. They're about story, character, scenography and time. APHOV is part one of a trilogy. Three films have been shot. Two have been edited. Almost! HW: The Condolezza Rice one? WP: That one has an edited version, but I'm not happy with it. Condolezza Rice Day is related to the trilogy, but not a part of it. It was shot and shown in Trento, Italy. HW: Yeah. So when you said something about the way that you learn, the way that it's a kind of cumulative process, with APHOV poised between Dome and Cup, is that the same kind of situation as when A Dome Like Structure and Small Cup are perhaps bookends and relate to one another? APHOV has its own set of concerns in terms of character development, and it seems like a completely other entity. WP: It does? Character development? Hmm. HW: Yeah, it doesn't seem at all related to A Dome Like Structure. I mean, outside of the use of Rumsfeld in this really funny, poignant way. So could you talk about APHOV and how it distinguished itself from A Dome Like Structure? What was your thinking going into that one?

WP: Well, I've already talked a little about the differences and similarities between the films. I'd say another significant hinge between all three films is Craig Saddlemire. He shot and edited, together with me, all three films. For the 20 or so films I've made in the last 15 years, separate from performance docs and shoots in Europe, the team has been very specific: Craig. Lydia Grey. James Pruznick. Justin Moriarty. Micheal Reidy. Another strong hinge between the three films is my tendency to use a location or a set as a site to be explored such that the exploration becomes the storyline and/or interacts or runs parallel with the storyline. In Dome, the site is a location. In APHOV, the site is a set. In Small Cup, its both. HW: Right, and again with the issue of a ready-made—I called the use of the capitol a ready-made, and it seems analogous to the use of somebody like Rumsfeld, given that you made APHOV in 2005. The Bush years, the war … WP: My interest in Rumsfeld was that he'd lost his job and so had to“find”himself. HW: Rumsfeld, in the film, is crying blood, but those things seem pretty straight-forward. Blood on his hands, etc. But is that really what the piece is about? I'm asking what the piece is about insofar as Rumsfeld seems like a

ready-made. WP: Rumsfeld was a father. A father of our country, He was a shepherd of his own ludicidity, which was also a kind of drunkenness. He's very much in his head. A very large head, a bread face, as the Spanish say. A block for a head. His emotions are blocky, too. Very controlled. A labyrinth of right-angles for his defenses. I thought it important for someone so impenetrable to have holes in his face. Especially where his sight, his glasses, his vision resides. HW: Right, and he made the one gesture. The video opens with his hands? And … is it safe to say that his hands were in blackface? ( L l A aU uG gH h T t E e R r) WP: Maybe not safe, no. HW: There's a moment where it seems that the wrong CD has been placed in a boom box. Before you put in the seashore soundtrack that accompanies the shot of the battleship, what comes out of the boombox sounds like DJ Screw. WP: The track was Jay-Z's 99 Problems. Garbled. Slowed down. Played backward. HW: Wow! Ok! And there are just momentary images of a photograph of

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a woman who has graduated tacked to a wall, and another man. These are photo album kind of portraits and the setting is a storage area, a collection of sorts. And then there are just the brief momentary passages in which the camera examines these photos. There's a deeper subtext to the piece. Are these photos why you call it A Personal History of Video? WP: The photos are an attempt to give a hint about a life or lives behind or obscured by a scene or ritual. This“reveal”strategy is repeated in the use of high angle shots that move from the front of the set with the actor playing Rumsfeld to the back of the set where the performer lives, where perhaps he or she takes off the mask and lies down on the army cot. So, yes, you see a set of photos tacked to the back of the set wall. The photos are worn. Some from different time periods, for example, one is from the Civil War. You see a bed, cans of food beneath the bed, a can opener, then a stream of a flowing red liquid, possibly the same material flowing from the eyes, and then stacks and stacks of storage boxes with dates on them. The dates recede back in time. HW: I didn't notice the dates. So, who are the figures in the family? WP: Some of the figures could be the performer. Perhaps at different times,

different periods. We don't know. It's not nailed down. It could be a blood thing. Maybe the performer is just one of a long line of caretakers of this ritual we've been witnessing. Maybe he or she has been the one and only caretaker … You have to puzzle it out. The intertitles in the beginning of the film suggest there's something inside of something inside of something and so on … HW: The apparatus for flushing … WP: Perhaps. Maybe that's what intertiltles are for—they flush out the story. And the blood flushes out the mask … HW: So why did you decide to call it A Personal History of Video? WP: I wanted to explore the history of the moving image as personal, masked, and opaque, yet political, witnessed, and connected to a common. I was interested in late 19th/early 20th century film; how stories were told then as compared to now. Early silent film had a directness, a crudeness, a deliberate use of pathos and sense of time that helped me to better understand contemporary film and art video and my place in it. HW: So when you say“19th century you mean literally the mechanical nature of the apparatus … ?

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WP: No, not just that … HW: It's funny that you said we could talk about A Dome Like Structure and APHOV in terms of differences or we could talk about the similarities. I never fail to be amazed at how many different strands you are capable of entertaining, which to me seem like they ultimately result in two very different pieces even though they're made back-to-back. For A Dome Like Structure, you say,“I'm dealing with the steep learning curve about video.”And then for APHOV, older cinema is an interest. Your strands of thought don't lend themselves to a kind of evolutionary arc where one video follows another, even though you mentioned a kind of cumulative aspect to how you learned things. WP: It's not cumulative in a pure sense. I knew when I made Dome it was going to be a“first version”experience. Sometimes you have to make the work you need to make and other people endure it. Within one's practice the function of this work is architectural. It's a work to build on. HW: Right. Reenactor is epic in that the location is historically charged, and then there is the issue of race and the use of performance and actors. How did you muster the confidence? WP: I gathered the members of the

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crews that helped me make the performance docs and the smaller films in order to make Reenactor. Some of the crew had worked with me over 20 years, none less than five. So it was time.

with a 1960s durational aspect, but in terms of Reenactor's duration, are you regressing? I thought you killed the father. WP: I am the daddy! HW: You killed the father only to become the father. ( L l A aU uG gH h T t E e R r)

HW: Oh, okay. WP: Except for the puppeteer, the crew that built the set and shot the puppet sequences for Reenactor was the same crew that worked on APHOV. Two of those people I'd known for maybe 35 years cumulatively. So at the time, I'd built a certain working environment around myself in order to get at certain projects. But bottom line, I could not have made Reenactor without the generosity, graciousness, and bravery of the students of TSU, its gallery director Jodi Gresham, and the individuals and businesses of the city of Nashville that supported the film. We list all their names at the end of this book! HW: Right. It's funny, you know, you started off with A Dome Like Structure trying to announce a break

WP: When you banish the father, you banish yourself. My father is myself. I can intellectually set aside fathers but, at the same time, this story, that is fathers, this feeling, this fact, is a part of me, especially the fatherness begat by women. Anywho, this totality of fatherness is responsible, to a certain extent, for how I am in the world today. For me, late 19th/early 20th century silent film's camera use of variety theater's proscenium begat the ‘60's use of stationary camera. Of course, there were different reasons why this occurred in each of these periods. For the ‘60s, maybe it was the social sciences, observation, and evidence. For the late 19th/early 20th, maybe it was theater, story, and psychology. I think I am a child of these two ways of getting at the moving image. I like ‘60s camera ‘cause, as they used to say in those days, its dumb and boring. I like late 19th/early 20th‘cause it's parasitic on theater and the book. It's silent. It's as image-focused as today's

image-obsessed environment. In silent film, the action enters from the wings in a very shallow space. The title card is an image, a page, and an edit. It's a carrier of emotion as well as idea. Cuts between images are relatively suppressed. Image and text as image dominate environmental sound and dialogue. Static camera is an empty technique; what matters is how it is used to fill film-time. HW: Reenactor was where you figured this out? WP: Between that, APHOV, and teaching. At the time, I was teaching the rhetoric of melodrama and film. I'd been at it for probably 15 years. Films by Oscar Micheaux. Birth of a Nation. Salt of the Earth. Daughters of the Dust. Born in East L.A.—I was teaching all these films. At the time, I didn'tknow they were teaching me. I was also looking at artists like Robert Whitman, early Richard Foreman, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Jurgen Syberberg, who were all influenced, to my mind, by silent film. And it started to click for me that these seemingly disparate interests were cousins. And it could be a very rich conceptual matrix from which to think about a film in general, and specifically a film concerning the Civil War. I could use static camera as a haunting camera. I'm missing the word now … what's the word I'm looking for? Not floating …

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HW: Oh, the steady cam. WP: Yes, steadicam, yes. The steadicam can transform the still frame into a roving, ghostly, subjective point of view. Curiously, it can also mimic first and third person. I thought this shiftiness of perspective very appropriate for creating a work that used bits of historical fact to embrace haunting. HW: So, what made you then pick up where you left off with A Dome Like Structure when you did a Small Cup? If I'm going to entertain these two works as bookends. WP: I wanted to get back to the trilogy of cupolas. The form … the form of the cupola is very queer. It protrudes and it contains. In our time, cupolas are typically associated with the father. I wanted to continue to explore this object as a symbol, a form, and as a character—a thing somewhere between a marionette and a creature. HW: Right, so you wanted to do a version of Animal Farm … WP: More like a palimpsest …

just a matter of accepting them for what they were and providing a context in which they felt comfortable and filming that. It's like shooting a documentary. So that took care of itself. Besides that, the other major challenges were developing a work vocabulary with the crew, building a place to shoot, and getting the shots. It's important for me to develop a site, a location, a set, a locale. I do this through research, conversation, visits, and actual engagement with the thing itself. A site can be a physical place, a concept, or an editing scheme. Either way, its always a home from which I start and a labyrinth within which I journey. In Reenactor, the city of Nashville is both the home and the labyrinth. HW: It's the portrait of a town, very clearly a portrait of a place, and in the end, the place was like an actor. So, in Small Cup, you build a cupola out of birdseed, and then let the animals kind of go at it. Again, the meaning seems like something of a given—the decay of this democratic structure, Animal Farm, in a sense. Could you talk about some of the interruptions or other concerns that are in that umbrella of meaning, which I see as a given of sorts?

HW: So you build a cupola … WP: A small cup, as per the Latin. In Small Cup, I thought working with animals would be the biggest challenge, but in fact they were the easiest. It was

WP: I not sure about … I don't see anything as given or self-explanatory, if that is how you meant it. I'm not sure. I mean, from making APHOV came an interest in the poetics of

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creating a world that evolves in its own way according to its own clunky rules, and mustering a cinematic approach that bolsters that poetics. The mill as a location required me to think about labor, the history of the textile industry in New England, the large scale of these buildings demonstrated in the tall ceilings, huge timbers and multiple floors. What would be interesting is to speak about the spirit, the haunting of the mill, maybe via the sound of its cavernous space or the chickens eating their young or … HW: Yes. There's a chicken eating an egg. WP: A creature consuming its own kind. Very human. Very social. Very capitalist. There's a whole incest implosion at the core of Small Cup. And I wanted to create a sculptural material dynamic, an arena, to poetically support that sort of behavior. The erosion of a cupola seemed apt. There's also a point where the backdrop proscenium lifts, as if in a play, and we see this action from backstage, as it were … HW: Oh right, exactly, the back … WP: Yes, the back. As if there was a puppeteer manipulating the goings on. And we tried to film the arena from as many angles as possible, as if the animals had planned their desecration of the monument. Shifty animals, shifty points of view.

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HW: Right. There's the establishing shot, the river outside, and the … WP: Outside the building, late in the film, almost at the end. The interior movement through the mill is another shift—it is one very long tracking shot we cut into smaller moments and intercut with the collapse of the cupola. HW: The amplified pecking noises, the sound of destruction, turned it into an industrial soundtrack. WP: Well, the buildings in New England have this really strong history of … how would you say? … harboring darkness. I mean, maybe you think of Stephen King but before King you have The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane, Washington Irving. It's all mythic New England territory, American Gothic—the idea of a building possessing a dark nature that lives right in the wood of its own being, in some way embedded there by blood shed by an inhuman force. The mill owners participated in their brand of the dark arts, transforming the sweat and blood of worker's bodies into labor, behavior, trauma and resentment … But I didn't want to go at it that directly, even though I do talk about buildings as costumes … HW: Yes, in the beginning there's the text about meat buildings—Is that your writing? It seemed very blunt, very

harsh—about the way we wear our architecture or our buildings as meat … rather bleak. WP: Yes, its my text. Bleak? Hmmm. People are funny. We're ok with having opinions, feelings, and thoughts, but not behavior. We think having ideas makes us special, whereas having behavior makes us animals. There's a funny lightness we attribute to animal behavior which is its own sub-genre of“ooh, isn't that entertaining, these animals are on a journey to find themselves”kind of shit. I wanted Small Cup to have, at times, an easy-going, dark, clunky, fable-like quality. On the other hand, animal behavior can appear heartless and craven even though we know, in our rational mind, they are only behaving. In David Cronenberg's remake of the 1950's film The Fly, the central character, a scientist, has an accident in the lab, which merges him with a common house fly. One day, his girlfriend visits him and he explains to her that there can never be such a thing as an insect politics because insects are inherently brutal, but he, because of his unique hybrid condition, will be the first insect politician, and he begins to weep …

working with onions or ketchup or video or chickens. And it's mighty hard to think about duration without thinking about ending. We need endings, but they don't exist, so we manufacture them. When I end a crawl, for example, I'm still crawling inside, even after I've physically stopped. It's like a sevensecond song by the Dead Kennedys. An ending is not the last word or action: the silence is. Or the expectations built up in the passage of the work through the ether. I'm jumping a bit here, but that's where the end of an artwork is—it's in a story about the end, even though stories functionally are about reproduction, not ending. I was raised on story, the same way most of us were, but then we get older and wiser and sophisticated and ashamed of being held by an event. And then we die and the story exceeds us anyway. When we are children, we need“The End. There's something about being given that limit, that fantasy, that allows adults to go beyond conclusions, or at least pretend we do. But it's always there—the need to conclude, the need for teleology. People say the middle of a story is where the action is, but I think the end is more interesting.

HW: There is always a funny link in your work between allegory and duration. WP: In one way or another, I'm always thinking about duration, whether I'm

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A Negro Sleeps Beneath the Susquehanna (son version), 1998 Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA

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acknowledgments

The Renaissance Society is privileged to present this book on the work of William Pope.L. Widely acclaimed for his provocative performances, installations, photographs, drawings, and paintings, the work of this prolific interdisciplinary artist has permanently shifted art world discourse around language, class, and race, as well as around each medium he has opted to use. His series of street crawls, initiated in 1978 in the Bowery and continuing for decades, established a vocabulary for his work (visible, aggressive, abject, often humorous, always discomfiting) and a reputation for fearless action and incisive critique.

Forlesen, the exhibition commissioned by the Renaissance Society and the occasion for this publication, elaborated themes well-established in Pope.L's oeuvre. The project takes its name from science fiction author Gene Wolfe's surreal short story telling of one man's dehumanizing, Kafkaesque journey through a corporate dystopia. Pope.L's installation was itself physically and conceptually labyrinthine, composed of walls covered in ketchup and built of a variety of materials, rudimentary drawings of partial words, a schematic shrine housing scratchy, upside down images abstracted from technologically dated pornography, and a sculpture telling an autobiographical story by Pope.L. The exhibition and this book would not have been possible without the generosity, expertise, and collaboration of many individuals and institutions. We want to extend our sincerest gratitude to the Harper Court Arts Council and the UChicago Arts Council for their generous financial support. We are proud that the book is co-published with the University of Chicago Press, and are grateful to Susan Bielstein, Anthony Burton, Carrie Adams, Kathleen Raven, and Rose Rittenhouse of the Press for their work on the project. We extend our deep appreciation to essayists Lawrie Balfour, Nick Bastis, Lauren Berlant, and K. Silem Mohammad for their tremendous contributions to the scholarship on Pope.L's work. Also thanks to Hamza Walker for his in-depth interview of the artist about his video work. This book is designed by David Giordano, who has worked closely with Pope.L on several previous publications. Theirs is an impressive collaboration between artist and designer, and the book evidences not only David's talent but also his understanding of and commitment to Pope.L's work. Also thanks to Tom Van Eynde, who took the beautiful photographs documenting the exhibition that are reproduced in these pages.

The successful realization of the exhibition and this book is a testament to the dedication of The Renaissance Society staff. Thanks in particular to Publications Director Karen Reimer for her fine work co-editing this book with Pope.L. She brought the project to fruition with her usual attention to detail and commitment to making the Society's publications both substantial and beautiful. Thanks are also extended to the rest of the team: Robert Bain, Preparator; Lori Bartman, Development Director;LiseHaberman,OfficeManager/Bookkeeper; Zachary Kaplan, Development Associate; Mia Ruyter, Marketing Director; Yuri Stone, Marketing Associate; and Hamza Walker, Associate Curator and Education Director. Equally deserving of thanks are the artist's assistants—Lydia Grey, Nick Bastis, Lauren Beck, Rachel Ellison, Nick Raffel, Shane Ward, and Peggy Firestone—and the installation crew—David More', Christian Neill, Andy Ortmann and Hilary Strack. We also appreciate the assistance and goodwill of the artist's galleries, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. And, as always, our heartfelt appreciation and gratitude for their continuing support and trust go to the Board of Directors of The Renaissance Society. Of course, our deepest thanks is reserved for Pope.L. His expansive brilliance, intellectual acuity, and truly unique vision made collaborating with him an honor and a pleasure.

Susanne Ghez Curator of Forlesen Director of the Renaissance Society, 1974–2013 Solveig OvstebØ Director of the Renaissance Society, 2013–

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forlesen catalog

Curtain wall faced with ketchup and joint compound, oriented strand board, paint, window and curtain Page curtain on window in wall 15 × 19 inches Skin Set Drawings: the space between the letters 51 drawings, 12 × 9 inches each

091, 08–09, w/la ballpoint, collage, correction fluid, matte medium, pencil

092, 19–20, pty/d, t, A ballpoint, correction fluid, hair, matte medium

091, 13–14, h, h/ha ballpoint, correction fluid, hair, ink, matte medium

092, 19–20, pty/d, t, B ballpoint, correction fluid, marker, matte medium

091, 13–14, n, a/y, s ballpoint, correction fluid, hair, ink, matte medium, marker, pencil

093, 9–10, or,/be ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, pencil, tearing

091, 20–21, s/g, A ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, ink, pencil

093, 14–15, tsi/g, o acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, marker, rubbing

091, 20–21, s/g, B ballpoint, correction fluid, ink

093, 15–16, d./oa ballpoint, correction fluid, ink, marker

086, 38–39, ci/gry ballpoint, coffee, pencil, rubbing

091, 23–24, hre/th ballpoint, correction fluid, colored pencil, hair, marker, matte medium

093, 22–23, (/H acrylic, ballpoint, pencil

087, 20–21, e/S&M ballpoint, correction fluid

091, 24–25, e/e ballpoint, correction fluid, ink

087, 37–38, e, o/as acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, hair, marker

091, 27–28, o, F/hed ballpoint, collage, correction fluid, hair, ink, matte medium, pencil

085, 08–09, he/tte ballpoint, correction fluid, pencil 086, 06–07, m/a ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, ink, pencil

088, 36–37, I/dow acrylic, ballpoint, correction fluid, rubbing 089, 10–11, o/s, h, A acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, pencil 089, 10–11, o/s, h, B acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, ink 089, 12–13, e/o, E acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, ink 090, 09–10, lif/th ballpoint, correction fluid, ink 090, 09–10, t/o, A acrylic, ballpoint, correction fluid, ink, matte medium 090, 09-­‐10, t/o, B acrylic, ballpoint 090, 16-­‐17, d, 0/sup ballpoint, hair, matte medium, marker 090, 26–27, C/n, A ballpoint, correction fluid, pencil, rubbing

091, 30–31, t, w/ir ballpoint, correction fluid, hair, matte medium 091, 34–35, y/ac ballpoint, correction fluid, hair, matte medium 091, 35–36, h, b/Hi, A acrylic, ballpoint, marker, rubbing

093, 22–23, ), h/at, I, acrylic, ballpoint, correction fluid, rubbing 093, 22–23, e/g ballpoint, correction fluid, tearing 093, 22–23, st/n, I ballpoint, collage, ink, tearing 093, 22–23, ze/th acrylic, ballpoint, correction fluid, ink, marker 093, 31–32, at, t/wore ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, hair, matte medium, pencil

091, 35–36, h, b/Hi, B ballpoint

094, 31–32, im/al acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, hair, matte medium

092, 01–02, d, l/n ballpoint, correction fluid, pencil, tearing

094, 39–40, ce/gh acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, pencil

092, 9–10, ey/g ballpoint, correction fluid

094, 39–40, e, y/e acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, collage, correction fluid, ink

092, 10–11, he/b, A acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, marker, pencil

094, 39–40, mi/sp ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, ink, rubbing

092, 10–11, he/b, B ballpoint, correction fluid, marker, pencil

095, 12–13, lf/r, o ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, hair, marker, pencil, rubbing, tape

092, 10–11, n,t/ke ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, pencil

pope.l

096, 04–05, Na/” E acrylic, ballpoint, coffee, correction fluid, tearing

Well glass of water on shelf, three in exhibition 

097, 04–05, r, w/n', b acrylic, ballpoint, correction fluid, ink

Ellipsis black balloons filled with helium

102, 32–33, t acrylic, ballpoint, correction fluid

Teleology photocopy of the first and last pages of the story“Forlesen”by Gene Wolfe 14 × 10.5 inches framed each

102, 32–33, We/?” acrylic, ballpoint, correction fluid, ink, pencil Parable fable reproduced by Lucas Zwirner in his essay on On Kawara's project Code, in On Kawara: Date Paintings in New York and 136 Other Cities, 2012 14 × 10.5 inches framed each Lense wall faced with two kinds of plastic Hinge metal hinge, screws, wall Page curtain over window in wall 15 × 19 inches Quarter Shape (penis) wood, masonite, paint, screws, window, curtain, reproduction, video Foyer reproduction of a page from Anders Nilsen's graphic novel Big Questions 14 × 10.5 inches framed Unfallen 4 channel video, 4 stacked monitors, sequencer 16:56 minutes Sun photo of the artist's son from behind 7 × 5.5 inches framed Wall red curtain, open window 29 × 32 inches Du Bois Machine wood, bondo, amp, speaker, mp3 player, text spoken by Eden Strong

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authors

Lawrie Balfour is Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. She is the author of Democracy's Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford University Press) and The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Cornell University Press). Her articles on race and democratic theory have appeared in Political Theory, American Political Science Review, Hypatia, The Du Bois Review, The Review of Politics, and edited collections. Nick Bastis is an artist who was formerly a student and assistant of Pope.L's, and who worked closely with him on both Pull! and Forlesen. He was a teaching fellow at the University of Chicago in 2014. Upcoming projects will be shown in Brussels, Vilnius, Los Angeles and Chicago. Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her national sentimentality trilogy—The Anatomy of National Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Duke University Press, Durham, 1997), and The Female Complaint (Duke University Press, Durham, 2008)—morphed into a quartet with Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, Durham, 2011). Her most recent monograph is Desire/Love (punctum, Brooklyn, NY, 2012). A co-editor of Critical Inquiry, she is also editor of Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2000); Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York University Press, 2001); and Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, New York, 2004). Her forthcoming books with Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Duke 2014) and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds (2014), as well as her work-in-progress, Matter of Flatness, are centrally about comedic forms of life and art.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of several books of poetry, including Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), Breathalyzer (Aerial/Edge, 2008), The Front (Roof Books, 2009), and Monsters (forthcoming). He is a pioneer Flarf poet, active in the conceptual writing movement. In his current project, The Sonnagrams, Mohammad anagrammatizes Shakespeare's sonnets into all-new English sonnets in iambic pentameter. He is also editor of the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln and faculty editor of West Wind Review. He teaches English and Writing at Southern Oregon University. Since 1994, Hamza Walker has served as Director of Education/Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Recent exhibitions he has curated include Suicide Narcissus, 2013, and Teen Paranormal Romance, 2014. He was the recipient of the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for curatorial achievement, a 2006 Emily Hall Tremaine Award for the exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't, and the 2010 Ordway Prize. He has written for numerous artists' monographs in addition to publications such as Artforum and Parkett.

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Born 1955, Newark, New Jersey

Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN Three Projects. Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium

Education 1983-1987  Mabou Mines Re.Cher.Chez Theater Intensive New York, NY

2011 Child. Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK 2010  color isn't matter. Samson Projects, Boston, MA landscape + object + animal. Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, NY The Process Show. 37-A Gallery, Portland, ME

1979-1981  M.F.A. Mason Gross School Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ

2009 Corbu Pops. Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA William Pope.L. Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK Yard (to harrow). Hauser + Wirth, New York, NY

1977-1978 Whitney Museum Independent Study Program New York, NY 1975-1978  B.A. Montclair State College Montclair, NJ

2008 Animal Nationalism. Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO Biting Through Innocence. Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium October Projects. MitchellInnes and Nash, New York, NY

1973-1975  Pratt Institute Brooklyn, NY

2007 Art After White People: time, trees & celluloid … . Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA Drawing, Dreaming, Drowning. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL The Void Show. MC Kunst, Los Angeles, CA William Pope.L: snow, spraypaint, hair, sperm & baloney. Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK William Pope.L: The Black Factory and Other Good Works. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco, CA

Employment 2010–Present  University of Chicago Chicago, IL Fall 2009  Northwestern University Evanston, IL

2006 Condoleezza Rice Day. Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy Trophy Room. Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria Under All, Above Most. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH

Fall 1991  Williams College Williamstown, MA

2005 Props & Propositions. Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH some things you can do with blackness … . Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK

1990–2010  Bates College Lewiston, ME Selected Solo Exhibitions 2014 Claim. Littman Gallery, University, Portland, OR

Portland

State

2013 Colored Waiting Room. Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, NY Forlesen. The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL A Long White Cloud. Te Tuhi, Auckland, New Zealand 2012 Reenactor. Williams Gallery, Lafayette College, Easton, PA; Hodgepodge Building on Strawberry Alley,

2004  eRacism. Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Artists Space, New York, NY eRacism: electronica. Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, St. Louis, MO Five Ways to Say the Same Sadness. University Art Museum, University at Albany, NY reFunkt. The Project, New York, NY 2003  eRacism. Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX Foddah. Drew University, Madison, NJ Some: Of Place and Desire. ArtHouse, Austin, TX

Selected Group Exhibitions 2014 Poor Working Conditions. Martos Gallery, New York, NY Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Ruffneck Constructivists. Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 30 Americans. The Rubell Family Collection, Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, TN Warm Side of Zero. Overduin & Co, Los Angeles, CA 2013 African American Art Since 1950: Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center. Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH; The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC Against the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Art, Craft and Design. Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY Blues for Smoke. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH Burying the Lede. Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY Cliff and Better. Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL The Eleventh Hour. DiverseWorks, Houston, TX Galerie Catherine Bastide booth at Frieze Art Fair NYC, New York, NY Hello Goodbye Thank You, Again, and Again, and Again. Castillo/Corrales, Paris, France Kaboom! Comics in Art. Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, Germany Pull! Reading Room. SPACES, Cleveland, OH Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY 30 Americans. The Rubell Family Collection, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI 2012 African American Art Since 1950: Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center. University of Maryland, College Park, MD Blues for Smoke. The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA Fax. University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Honolulu, HI; DeVos Art Museum, Marquette, MI; Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, CA Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, TX superHUMAN. Central Utah Art Center, Ephraim, UT; Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ 30 Americans. The Rubell Family Collection, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA Wall Text. Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL

pope.l

2011 After Images. Musee Juif de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium Another Kind of Vapor. White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO The Bearden Project. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY D'un Autre Monde. Le Printemps de Septembre–a' Toulouse, contemporary art festival, Toulouse, France Fax. Apex Gallery, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD; Saint Paul Street Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; South London Gallery, London, UK; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN Go ¨teborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), Ro ¨da Sten Art Centre, Go ¨teborg, Sweden History of Disappearance: Live Art from New York 1975–Present. PhotoIreland Festival, Dublin, Ireland Inti. On Stellar Rays, New York, NY The Painting Show. Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK Prospect.2 New Orleans. New Orleans, LA 30 Americans. The Rubell Family Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC 2010 At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg. Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Fax. Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, MB, Canada; Barnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, BC, Canada; Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, China; Dowd Gallery, State University of New York, Cortland, NY; Museu de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico; New Galerie, Paris, France History of Disappearance: Live Art from New York 1975–Present. Arhus Kunstbygning, Arhus, Denmark The Last Newspaper. New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY Resurrectine. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY Slightly Unbalanced. Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, Richmond, VA 2010 deCordova Biennial. deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Lincoln, MA 2009 Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry. Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, NY Carnival Within. Uferhallen, Berlin, Germany Collected: Propositions on the Permanent Collection. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY Fax. The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD Pour. Installation at the Botanical Gardens, Art Projects at Art Basil Miami Beach, Mitchell-Innes and Nash in collaboration with Galerie Catherine Bastide, Miami Beach, FL Slightly Unbalanced. Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV; Rodman Hall Arts Center, St. Catharines, ON, Canada; Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, Lafayette,

LA; Museum London, London, ON, Canada Summer Exhibition. Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, NY 30 Seconds Off an Inch. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY Trouble at the Front (Troubles aux Frontieres). Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris, France 2008 Black Is Black Aint. The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL Brainwave: Common Sense. Exit Art, New York, NY Criminal: Art and Criminal Justice in America. International Center for the Arts, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA Disinhibition: Black Art and Blue Humor. Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL History of Disappearance: Live Art from New York 1975–Present. Sydney Underground Film Festival, Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney, Australia Informal Architectures. Plug In at ICA, Winnipeg, MB, Canada Kenny Schachter ROVE booth at Volta Art Fair NYC, New York, NY Mergers and Acquisitions. Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA Paul Thek: In the Context of Today's Contemporary Art. Sammlung Falkenburg, Hamburg, Germany People Weekly: What You Wish For. James Gallery, City University of New York, New York, NY Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flanerie. Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York (SUNY), Purchase, NY Port City: On Mobility and Exchange. A Foundation, Liverpool, UK Retail Value. Dorsky Gallery, Long Island City, NY Slightly Unbalanced. Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL 30 Americans. The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL 2007 Conceptual Paper. Arndt & Partner, Zurich, Switzerland Get Lost. New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY History of Disappearance: Live Art from New York 1975–Present. Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda, Santiago, Chile Informal Architectures. Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Banff, AB, Canada Keeping Up With the Joneses. Schroeder Romero, New York, NY New York—States of Mind. House of World Culture, Berlin, Germany; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY Paul Thek: In the Context of Today's Contemporary Art. ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany Plug. Sister Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Port City: On Mobility and Exchange. Arnolfini, Bristol, UK Silicone Valley. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art. Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, FL 2006 A Noir, E Blanc, I Rouge, U Vert, O Bleu: Farben. Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg, Germany Civil Restitutions. Thomas

215

Dane Gallery. London, England Dreaming of a More Better Future. Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH History of Disappearance: Live Art from New York 1975–Present. Galleria Neon>fdv, Milan, Italy; MuseumMAN at the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK Humor Me. H & R Block Artspace, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO Newark Between Us. 744 Gallery with the Newark Arts Council, Newark, NJ Relics and Remnants. Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, New York, NY 7e Biennale de l’ Art Africaine Contemporaire (Dak'Art). Dakar, Senegal Shed Piece. MC Kunst booth at Frieze Art Fair. London, England Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art. Winnipeg Art Gallery, MB, Canada; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL Skowhegan at 60. Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME South Bronx Contemporary: Longwood 25th Anniversary. Longwood Art Gallery, Bronx, NY Stories. Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM 2005 Decarie. Liane & Danny Taran Gallery, Saidye Bronfman Center for the Arts, Montreal, QC, Canada Defense: Body and Nobody in Self-Protection. Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, CA Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970. Museum of Contemporary Arts Houston, Houston, TX Hero. Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM History of Disappearance: Live Art from New York 1975–Present. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK Landmark. Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR Looking at Words: The Formal Use of Text in Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper. Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY RAPSIDA: Rwandans and Americans in Partnership Contre le SIDA. Gallery 138, New York, NY Reverse Engineers. Carnegie Art Center, North Towanda, NY Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art. Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI 2004 The Big Nothing. Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA Brown v. Board of Education 1954–2004. Gallery 138, New York, NY Harlem Postcards: Spring 2004. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere. MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA Moving Collection: BodyCon. Fukui Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan Only Skin Deep. International Center for Photography, New York, NY Republican Like Me. Parlour Projects, Brooklyn, NY Reverse Engineers. Herndon Gallery, Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH Romantic Detachment. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long

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Born 1955, Newark, New Jersey

Island City, NY Watch What We Say. Schroeder Romero, Brooklyn, NY 2003 Ameri©an Dre@m. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, NY diSTILLation. Fylkingen, Stockholm, Sweden In Heat. Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY Motion Studies. Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY Moving Collection: Body-Con. Wanakio Festival, Naha, Okinawa, Japan White. Bill Maynes Gallery, New York, NY Selected Performances and Films 2014 Mercier and Camier. Portland State University, Portland, OR 2013 Burying the Blues. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Cage Unrequited. Performa-13: Three Duets, Seven Variations, at Soto Velez, New York, NY Pull! SPACES, Cleveland, OH 2012 Costume Made of Nothing. Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Houston, TX Firing Squad. Grizedale Arts, Frieze Art Fair, London, UK A Personal History of Curation. Case Study: William Pope.L Interprets Flux-kit, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY 2011 Blink, Prospect.2 New Orleans, New Orleans, LA Go ¨teborg Crawl. Ro ¨da Sten Art Centre, Go ¨teborg, Sweden History of Disappearance: Live Art from New York 1975–Present. Laznia Center, Gdansk, Poland Paste. Flux This!, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, NY 2010 Cusp. Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, NY Cusp (Kafka version). Foire Internationale d’ Art Contemporain (fiac), Paris, France Eating the Wall Street Journal (new millennium version). New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY 2009 Corbu Pop Singers. Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA ET. Haverford College. Haverford, PA 2007 Holiday/Dovolena'. Prague Quadrennial, Prague, Czech Republic In the Cabin! House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany Under the Milk. Watermill Center, Watermill, NY 2006 Before You Can Walk: Crawl Santa Fe. Santa Fe Art Institute, Center for Contemporary Arts, Institute for American Indian Arts, Santa Fe Public

Schools Adelante Program, and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe 2006. Santa Fe, NM The Black Factory. Multiple venues, USA In the Cabin! Mobius at Midway Theater, Boston, MA Poor Piece. Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM Singing the House. Collaboration with The Manhattan Group of MIT, Boston, MA 2005 Anglo-Vision. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK The Black Factory. Multiple venues, USA Bringing the Decarie to the Mountain. Montreal, QC, Canada White Room #4: Wittgenstein and My Brother Frank. Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK The Yeti and the Case for Contemporary Photography. Kenny Schachter ROVE booth at the Cologne Art Fair, Cologne, Germany 2004 The Black Factory. Multiple venues, USA Cleveland Free Clinic Crawl. Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH Negarkuisse, Part 1. House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany Negarkuisse, Part 2. House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany White Room #2: Moby Dick. Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, New York, NY White Room #3: Music Appreciation. P.S.1, Queens, NY 2003 Anglo-Vision. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI Candy Mountain. Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and the Regional Arts & Cultural Council (RACC), Portland, OR Coon. Cinema Texas, University of Texas at Austin and ArtHouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX Freedmans Town to Enron City. DiverseWorks, Houston, TX The Great White Way: 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (seg. 5). New York, NY

2004 Guggenheim Fellowship 2003 Rockefeller Foundation 2002 Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art 2001 The Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Capital Foundation Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship 2000 Franklin Furnace/Jerome Foundation Tanne Foundation Fellowship 1999  Maine Arts Commission Fellowship Grant 1995  National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Art Fellowship 1994  Maine Arts Commission Fellowship Grant National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Collaborative New England Regional Initiative Project 1993  Art Matters; National Endowment for the Arts, Solo Performance Fellowship

Selected Grants and Awards Selected Interviews, Talks, and Panels 2012 Joyce Foundation Award 2007 Nancy Graves Foundation Tiffany Foundation Award 2006  Bellagio United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship 2005 Grizedale Foundation Residency Fellowship LEF Foundation

2014 Hinge Artist Talk. University of Southern California, Roski School of Art and Design with The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA Limner Performance. Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY PSU MFA Studio Lecture Series. Portland State University, Portland, OR The Diversity Talk. Panel with Zachary Cahill, Wolfie E. Rawk, Lise Yun Lee, and Romi Crawford. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL 2013 Hinge Artist Talk. Columbia University, New York, NY Interview with Hamza Walker. Kent Hall, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL Episode 405: William Pope.L. Bad at Sports, Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL William Pope.L: Before and After PULL! Cultural

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Conversation Series, High Concept Laboratories, Chicago, IL Skowhegan Conversations #5: Pope.L & Zachary Fabri. The Drawing Center, New York, NY 2012 Skin Set Artist Talk. Conversations with Artists Series: Art as Experiment, Center for the Study of Modern Art, The Phillips Collections, Washington, DC Three Projects Artist Talk. Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN Three Projects Artist Talk. Grossman Visiting Artist, Williams Center, Lafayette College, Easton, PA Mike Kelley Moving Forward. Panel with Rachel Harrison and Joe Scanlan, MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, NY Three Projects Artist Talk. Linderman Library Humanities Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA William Pope.L Black Art In A Forest Of Night. Frances and Armand Hammer Auditorium, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 2011 Awards Speech for Geoffrey Hendricks. VaVa Voom! Visual AIDS Vanguard Awards, New York, NY Advice Column. Maine College of Art (MECA), Portland, ME Think Tank. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY 2010 Expanded, Exploded, Collapsed? Panel with Johanna Burton and Josiah McElheny moderated by Fionn Meade, Vera List Center for Art and Politics and SculptureCenter at The New School, New York, NY Visiting Artist Talk. Department of Art, Yale University, New Haven, CT William Pope.L Artist Talk. Poag Auditorium, Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN 2009 Performance Object/Object Video. Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Artist Talk. Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA Residency Presentation. Acadia Summer Arts Program (Kippy Kamp), Mount Desert Island, ME 2008 Artist Lecture. Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL Artist Talk. Grand Arts and Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO Atmosphere, Goo and Drawing. Plug In at ICA, Winnipeg, MB, Canada Artist Talk. Montclair Art Museum and Montclair University, Montclair, NJ Artist Talk. Visiting Artist Lecture Series, Columbia University, New York, NY Panel Discussion. Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL Recent Projects. Hunter College, New York, NY Some Recent Things I Made That Do Not Go Together—a lecture by William Pope.L. Grand Valley State University (GVSU) and the Urban

Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA), Grand Rapids, MI 2007 Art as Intervention. Roundtable discussion moderated by Mark Bessire, Art of Concern Symposium 2007, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH Artist Talk. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Artist Talk. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco, CA An Evening with William Pope.L. Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMOA), Santa Monica, CA Influence Lecture, version 11. Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; University of Michigan School of Art and Design, Ann Arbor, MI Visiting Artist Talk. Vermont College, Montpelier, VT 2006 Artist Talk. Center for Contemporary Art Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM Black Factory Round Table Discussion. Gallery 400, Chicago, IL Black Factory Talk, version 3. Foreman Gallery, Bishop's University, Lennoxville, QC, Canada Black Factory Talk, version 4. Nova Art Fair, Chicago, IL Graduation Talk. Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA Influence Lecture, version 11. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA; California College of Art (CCA), San Francisco, CA; Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM; Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, ON, Canada Lecture Seminar. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH Politics of Visual Culture, Black Factory Talk. College Art Association, Annual Conference, Boston, MA 2005 Influence Lecture, version 11. Montana State University, Bozeman, MT; American University, Washington, DC; University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 2004 Artist Talk. Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Barbara Lee Artist Lecture Series, Skowhegan, ME eRacism Panel Discussion. With Barbara Pollack, Andre Lepecki, Midori Yoshimoto, Paul Robeson Cultural Center, Piscataway, NJ Influence Lecture, version 3. Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; University of Colorado, Boulder, CO; Carnegie Mellon School of the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL; University of California, Davis, CA; Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD; University of Illinois, Gallery 400, Chicago, IL; University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI; Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; Columbia University, New York, NY; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY; Artists Space, New York, NY Madison Project: Challenging the Public Art Paradigm. Panel at University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

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Project Lecture: The Black Factory. Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME The Third Body. Panel at House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany 2003 Artist Talk. Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR Conversation with Christian Rattemeyer and Lowery Sims. Artist Space, New York, NY Conversation with Lowery Sims. DiverseWorks, Houston, TX Influence Lecture, version 2. University Art Museum, State University of New York, Albany, NY; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Drew University, Madison, NJ; University of Texas, Austin, TX; New York Studio School, New York, NY Sandwich Lecture 8 (Klingon Talk). Live Culture: Performance and the Contemporary, Tate Modern, London, UK Selected Bibliography Cotter, Holland.“Art in Review: William Pope.L, Yard to harrow).”The New York Times, October 1, 2009. Dirie', Cle'ment, ed. William Pope.L: Black People Are Cropped. Zurich: JRP—Ringier, 2012. English, Darby, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2007. Foley, Sabine and Gerald Matt, eds. William Pope.L: Trophy Room, Wein: Kunsthalle Wien Project Space, 2006. (cat.) Foumberg, Jason.“Is Chicago Ready for William Pope.L?”HYPERLINK“http://ChicagoMag.com/” ChicagoMag.com, May 3, 2013. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: performing art, supporting publics. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Jones, Amelia.“Forum: Performance, Live or Dead.” Art Journal, Vol. 70, 3, Fall 2011. —. Kaboom!: Comics in Art. Weserberg: Weserberg Museum of Art, 2013. (cat.) Lepecki, Andre. Exhausting Dance: Performance and  the Politics of Movement. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Oliver, Valerie Cassel, ed., Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2013. (cat.) —. Voice of Images, Venice: Palazzo Grassi. 2012. (cat.) Wiseman, Gary.“William Pope.L: The Claim Interview.”HYPERLINK“http://www.portlandart.net/ www.portlandart.net, 2013

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image credits

p. 1 Photographer: Thierry Bal Courtesy of Thomas Dane, London, UK

pp.

pp.

pp.

p.

Editor: Lydia Grey Production Assistant: Jonathan Leiter

8, 47, 70, 81–107, 114 Photographer: Tom Van Eynde Courtesy of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

55, 71 Photographer: Chris Burke Courtesy of Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, NY 72 Photographer: Andy Keate Courtesy of Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK

177–191 Unfallen, 2009–2013 Video (4 channel installation), 16:56 min

Venue: Forlesen, The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2013)

pp. 136, 140 pp.

10, 17 Photographer: Mark Perennes Courtesy of Galerie Catherine Bastide, at Frieze Art Fair, London, UK p.

18–19 18 19 Photographers: Pope.L , Lydia Grey Courtesy of SPACES, Cleveland, OH p.

22 Photographer: Lydia Grey Courtesy of the artist p.

23 Photographer: Lydia Grey Courtesy of DiverseWorks, Houston, TX pp.

29–31 Photographer: Lydia Grey Courtesy of Schroeder Romero, New York, NY pp.

32–37 36 Photographers: Andy Keate, Simon Parris Courtesy of Kenny Schachter ROVE, London, UK pp.

38–40, 109 Photographer: Jo ¨rg Jakoby Courtesy of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR pp.

41–44 Photographer: Isabelle Arthuis Courtesy of Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium pp.

45–46 Photographer: Joshua White Courtesy of MC Kunst, Los Angeles, CA p.

53 Photographer: Lydia Grey Courtesy of the artist

Photographer: Lynn Cazabon Courtesy of the artist pp. 145, 148, 151

Camera: Francois Morelli Courtesy of the artist pp.

153–159 A Dome Like Structure, 2003–Ongoing Video, 5:39 minutes Editor: Craig Saddlemire Camera: Craig Saddlemire Performer: Ryan Conrad pp.

161–167 APHOV (A Personal History of Videography), 2005–Ongoing Video (projection/installation), 15:38 min Editor: Craig Saddlemire Camera: Craig Saddlemire Performer: Chris Schiff Venue: Art After White People: time, trees & celluloid … , Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA, 2007 pp.

169–175 Small Cup, 2006–2010 Video (projection), 12:51 min Editor: Craig Saddlemire Cameras: Craig Saddlemire, Emory Kessler Animal Wrangler: Mr. Gabe Couture Venues: Animal Nationalism, Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO, 2008; The 2010 Cordova Biennial, Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, 2010

pp. 193–207 Reenactor, 2010–Ongoing Video (projection/installation), 197'35"

Editor: Craig Saddlemire Cameras: Craig Saddlemire, Lydia Grey, Spenser Fritz Performers: Maya Moore, J.J. Jones, Mario Stuart, Derrick Westbrook, Beth Gilmore, Grace Gilmore, Christopher Leaming, Rocky, Mandy and Stella Horton Production Coordinators: Jodi Hayes-Gresham, Erika Wollam Nichols, Amanda Dillingham Shooting locations: Belmont Mansion, Bicentennial Mall State Park, Camp Edwards, City of Nashville, Downtown Presbyterian Church of Nashville, Gaylord Opryland Resort, Hermitage Hotel, Lord Sterling Park, Meat-n-3 Restaurant, Mount Olivet Cemetery, Opry Mills Shopping Center, Scarritt Bennett Center, Shelby Bottoms Nature Park and Greenway, Tennessee State University, Viridian Condominium Tower Venues: Williams Center Gallery, Lafayette College, Easton, PA (2012); Hodgepodge Building on Strawberry Alley, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN (2012) All images of artworks are copyright of the artist.

colophon

Published on the occasion of the exhibition:

William Pope.L: Forlesen April 28–June 23, 2013

The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago 5811 South Ellis Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

William Pope.L was born in 1955 in Newark, NJ. His performances, videos, installations, sculpture, drawings, and paintings are internationally exhibited. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago. Special Thanks a little boy and his mom Editors William Pope.L Karen Reimer Design David Giordano

w w w. r e n a i s s a n c e s o c i e t y. o r g The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

©

2014 by The Renaissance Society and the University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in Lithuania by BALTO print. 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20006-4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20023-1 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226200231.001.0001 This book and the exhibition were produced with generous support from the Harper Court Arts Council and the UChicago Arts Council.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pope.L, William, 1955– Pope.L : showing up to withhold. pages cm ISBN978-0-226-20006-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN978-0-226-20023-1 (e-book) 1. Pope.L, William, 1955– I. University of Chicago. Renaissance Society. II. Title. NX512.P668A4 2014 700.92—dc23 2014014659 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).