ISSUES


ABOUT

Addition/
Subtraction

Brit Barton  


Pope.L, Hole Theory (2001, 2002, 2021) Ink, ballpoint pen, tape, paper, hair, correction fluid, collage, acrylic paint, gel pen, marker, stickers in artist's book with acetate binding, (14 ✕ 10.4 cm). Courtesy the Estate of Pope.L and Gladstone © The Estate of Pope.L




The acclaimed American artist Pope.L died in his South Side Chicago apartment, suddenly and alone, just before Christmas Day at the age of sixty-eight in 2023. While it is an all-too-ordinary action for an extraordinary artist, it is a mundane tragedy to reconcile with nevertheless. In the years since his death, there is a further sense of spectacle that adds another ironic, all-too-ordinary dimension for an extraordinary artistic practice. That he was radical, philosophical, and confrontational in his lifetime makes for a poignant and mitigated institutional narrative in his afterlife.

       When he passed away, an overwhelming number of international headlines came and went, along with a sudden interest in the man and his practice, and then in his…estate. The virality of and subsequent extension to Hospital—his first and only solo exhibition in London that coincided with his death—cultivated a further mythos. Meanwhile a spate of group exhibitions and museum acquisitions in more recent years have aimed to translate Pope.L for a wider, European, and perhaps apprehensive audience.

        It wasn’t that he was unknown or without accolades in his lifetime, but he could be perceived as niche. He could be incorrectly pigeonholed by identity-based curation. Oftentimes the uninitiated didn’t know what to do with him. There are nearly fifty years of varied, not entirely coherent disciplines within his work to prove it: painting, performance, theater, sculpture, installation, sound, film, teaching, etc. 

        But it is his drawings that make the most sense in that they are based on a built language that simultaneously circumnavigates language itself. They are difficult and deeply demanding, but also insightful, methodical, coded, sarcastic, vexing, private, personal and painful, ambiguous, and most of all, ambivalent. They are notable in that individually, they neither seek your comprehension nor your cooperation, but together, maintain a gradual generosity that resists easy clarity. 

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Certainly an Act is Pope.L’s first solo exhibition since his death.  Held at The Drawing Center in New York City, it is described as a comprehensive survey of the artist’s works on paper, touting that many of the more than two hundred objects on display have never been publicly exhibited. It is an ambitious attempt to showcase the breadth of Pope.L’s practice—of which drawing was a fraught, obsessive, and critical part of his everyday process. It inherently counters an often reductive perception that he was simply a performance artist as his obituaries tended to focus on. In this respect, the premise of Certainly an Act succeeds at the outset.

        The exhibition takes up the entire institution: two main gallery spaces on the ground floor dedicated to drawings, paintings, and an installation, along with a basement full of archival odds and ends—video, sound, sculpture, and rarities encased in a vitrine. Nearly every exhibited object is labeled with the newfound refrain, as if it were a Gregorian chant: Courtesy of the Pope.L estate and Gladstone Gallery.

       Upon entry, a freestanding wall blocks the main gallery entrance and is covered from floor to ceiling with framed, letter-sized or slightly larger works known as the Skin Set Drawings. Adopting the nomenclature of sequencing and logic, Pope.L moved through his practice using words like Set—as in a mathematical problem set—instead of more art-historical terms like series or period. He also adopted terms like Proto-, version, or numerical notation to categorize and create a canon of locution. This wall full of Skin Set Drawings at The Drawing Center inundates you immediately with an absurdist syntax enveloped in declarative linear structure: X is/are Y. 



Pope.L, Blue People Cannot Conceive Of Themselves, (2008) Ballpoint pen, coffee, correction fluid, oil
stick, glitter, hair, marker, and white glue on graph paper, 27.9  ✕  21.6 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Pope.L and Gladstone © The Estate of Pope.L

Pope.L, Green People Are The Light From A Star That Will Never Reach Us, 2010. Ballpoint pen, coffee,
coffee grounds, adhesive, ink, hair, and marker on off-white paper, 29.2 ✕ 22.9 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Pope.L and Gladstone © The Estate of Pope.L


Pope.L, White People Are Prawns At Sunset, 2010. Ballpoint pen and marker on off-white paper, 29.2 ✕  22.9 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Pope.L and Gladstone © The Estate of Pope.L

Installation of Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L at The Drawing Center.  Photo by Daniel Terna. Courtesy of The Drawing Center 


       
       
        I counted fifty-six works in total on this first wall, each with its own varying level of process and exhaustion. The clear-cut, palatable, or otherwise painterly works are hung toward the center, at standard gallery height. Denser, abstract, offensive, or obscured works are hung toward the unreachable top or the physically burdensome to read bottom. Typical titles within the sentence structure examine colored collectives being described or reduced by the absurdity of their existence: Orange People Are Made of Lozenges (2012); Red People Are With Stupid (2008); White People Are The Couch And The Sofa (2001); Blue People Are Racist (2010-2012). 

       Then there are works that crowd the paper’s planar surface with multiple layers of statement and dense gestures of addition and subtraction. Untitle (2011), for instance, reads: Purple People Are The Christians With The Beer, The Tons And The Baseball Caps, as it dominates the page in black capital letters with thick strokes from a felt marker. But additional text—like a subset of intrusive thoughts—permeates the interior of the words and along the margins of the page in thin, ballpoint pen handwriting. “If there is a god, she drinks with the puter. There is a language only for liquids, another for solids, still another for gases, another for ether. Another for Energetic Energies. Another for Mother with Children. No [redacted] in inner life.” Each clause is separate, with drawn lines pointing from one to another; there are black, vortex-like holes drawn repeatedly, and correction fluid—otherwise known as Wite-Out, one of his customary materials—is used throughout. 

       To move around the wall, there are two corners that riff off the Skin Set Drawings with a little more levity. To the left, several works offer a sparser hanging, including White Drawing (1997), a large-scale Proto-Skin Set Drawing consisting of seventeen pieces of newsprint with the repetitive phrase, “White people are sad.” It is finger-painted in ketchup; a nod to Pope.L’s interest in the abject, food, and poverty. 

       To the right, four letter-sized drawings from the series Skin Sets: the space between the letters hang in an asymmetrical quadrant and are a close examination of power in silence, one of his perpetual subjects. These works are overwhelmed by the negative space between giant, formal serif lettering, but counter the whiteness with small traces of smudges, glue, or hair that tarnish the surface. The quiet restraint of this series has always been my favorite, as if the artist got tired of all the repetitive words and phrasing in his head and took a momentary pause. They remind me of the periods when he fell into meditation or silent protest, or how he remarked, admiringly, on the way his mother would artfully hang a piece of paper out of conventional order to cover a hole in the wall of their dilapidated East Village apartment. 

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There are sixty-nine text-based drawings at the entrance of the exhibition. Maybe the overwhelming hanging and halting architecture works in favor of the Skin Set Drawings; maybe they serve as an overt, unapologetic statement about the work that is a reflection of the practice itself. But, in retrospect, my thoughts turn toward a more cynical, commercial take: here is an outright display of manageably scaled and ready-to-ship works, Courtesy of the Pope.L estate and Gladstone Gallery; now with newfound provenance. As if it were a modern-day Monet: here are multiple walls of color and choices, with an array of abstraction or conceptual gravitas to consider or ignore.

       A broad criticism of the exhibition has been that it is impossible to navigate as a newcomer; it is room after room of difficult to decipher text that feels like a crammed storage show. Others have visited and been able to breeze through. After all, one of the benefits of displaying such a large quantity of repetitive things is that you can grasp one or two details and still feel satisfied enough to go about your day. Maybe in that manner, too, Certainly an Act encourages multiple visits to process not only the demands of reading a drawing but comprehending it in its entirety. 

Pope.L, WHA (2020–21) Acrylic, charcoal, oil, and epoxy on panel, 240 ✕  370cm. Collection of Jill & Peter Kraus. Photo: James Prinz © The Estate of Pope.L



        In the main gallery space, much larger-scale, private works are on display. They are primarily paintings, including Wha (2020–2021), from the renowned collection of Jill and Peter Kraus, who also underwrote the exhibition. The panel work is massive and commanding. It is one continuous run on sentence, illegible at some parts but the repeated WHATWHATWHATWHAT-ism is apparent, as are words like “STIMULUS CHECK” or “THE PEOPLE.” The last sentence reads, I think: WHAT IS A VIRUS THAT AGAIN I FORGET MY — THE AS OR US FEELING DEJECTED WHAT WOULD GEORGE FLOYD DO IF HE WAS ELECTED. 

       As an act of drawing, painting, writing, and sculpture, Wha folds in on itself and around the question of what it is and isn’t, resisting a categorical interpretation of anything other than art. The part that held me the longest wasn’t the written word but again the subtraction—only this time as a more violent act: the hammering of holes throughout the panel with drips of dried epoxy running from or out of them. These repeated holes break up the steady smoothness of the panel, acting as articulated, rounded black-hole forms with these viscous and clear drippings streaming out of them. To me, they resemble a weeping eye socket or a bleeding gun shot wound. To others, the image may reference something else I don’t care to think about. 

       Despite that, some of his work insists on those thoughts. The furthest and final gallery on the ground floor holds innumerable small framed works on things like napkins, scraps of paper, prescriptions, receipts, or hotel stationery. They are referred to as the Failure Drawings and were initiated in 2003 as musings. That same year, Pope.L had dealt a prolonged nosebleed that garnered a trip to the hospital, as well as a sudden and immense interest in his work after decades of comparative artistic obscurity. Of the thousands of Failure Drawings done since the start, there are plenty of pieces within the series that question mortality, materiality, and fragility. And then there are probably ten times as many that are literally so boyish as to induce an eye roll, so immature and so adolescent. They don’t so much as question masculinity but insist on it. The fact that they are framed in an institution may be a sign of success, but I’m deeply amused by the appeal to their ridiculous seriousness. At times, it is clear the artist took whatever was in front of him and doodled something from his visual lexicon: deserted landscapes with crevices, volcanos, or caves, maybe a word or two, and usually included a very prominent or hidden phallus. Needless to say, and to say so reluctantly: from ancient cave depictions and graffiti among the ruins of Pompeii to the meandering, restless mind of William Pope Lancaster—very little changes. Maybe drawing sometimes boils down to an immediate impulse that isn’t necessarily genius but another generic way to pass the time.

        Among the archival works in the basement, a self-published, spiral-bound notebook is inconspicuously encased in a vitrine amid the dozens of other works. Opened to the first page spread, Hole Theory: Parts Four & Five (2001, 2002, 2021) is the core of Pope.L’s thinking, informing everything he would do thereafter and offering a way to reconsider everything else in retrospect. He was a writer, editor, and consummate critic. Immediately after the first sentence in Hole Theory, and well after printing and publishing, you can see retractions and notations are worked over repeatedly, across different versions and at different times. The notebook isn’t a polished document but a working one. The idea that it’s finished is a shame. 

***



Pope.L,  page scans of Hole Theory: Part Four (likely January 2002) 
from the monograph William Pope.L : the friendliest Black Artist in America Published by MIT Press , 2002. PDF available here.




Brit Barton is an artist and writer. She is the editor of Art & Order Journal. Additional text on Pope.L can be read here.