William Pope.L: ‘art can change political circumstances’

Best known for his absurdist performances and creative interventions in public spaces, William Pope.L has a history of dealing with politics and issues of race in his art. Recipient of the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award for his provocative installation in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and featured in documenta 14 with a “Whispering Campaign” that’s taking place in both Athens and Kassel, the artist has a newly opened solo show at Mitchell-Innes Nash that revisits his early works. Conceptual Fine Arts recently spoke with Pope. L about these primary pieces, which helped set the stage for his lifelong interest in a relationship between words and images, as well as his quirky use of everyday materials.

What are the core issues of your work?

I’d probably have to say language, duration and representation.

How do your early works on paper inform your later practice?

With the early works I’m trying to figure out where I going. I’m trying to work through my immediate interests as a young artist—language, the relationship between language and image, and how language can be an image.

Your work is very expressive, yet you came of age during a time when minimalism was the predominate style in the galleries. Were you being rebellious or just finding your own way?

I think I was finding my own way. I was actually very interested in the conceptual and intellectual ideas around minimalism, but I didn’t know how they could serve a content-based practice—that was the problem. I wouldn’t say that I resisted minimalism, but it took me a while to figure out how it made sense in terms of my interests.

There’s a sense of immediacy in the materiality, including your choice in using of newspapers, ballpoint pen, and peanut butter in the work. What motivated this DIY aesthetic?

A lot of my habits come from being interested in writing and, as writers are told, you write about what you know. I used ballpoint or correction fluid, and as a child growing up in a working-class family certain foods were present in my life. I was very drawn to a certain kind of direct conduit to feeling through substance. The idea of sitting at a desk—not sitting at an easel—and having an art enterprise that can occur as a writer making visual things was interesting to me.

Was your use of text and images from the newspapers political?

It’s hard to read a newspaper and not get a sense of the social, and of course once that starts to percolate the political is not far behind. When I was in school I wondered how these very rarified forms of contemporary art could speak to the messiness of what interested me. For example, you had this man who made these flags and people were talking about his work yet there were no real references to his political beliefs. How is that possible? What does it mean? How do you crack a nut like that? How is it even possible that he could be famous, yet no one even talks about his sense of being an American? But they may ask me are you black first or are you American first. And I’m not even making any flags; I’m just being black.

What are your thoughts on politics and art?

Well, that’s a big one. I think that one of the current beliefs in the art world is that art can do nothing to change political circumstances. I don’t necessarily believe that. If that was true some of the voluntary things that people do, such as offering their services to homeless shelters wouldn’t really matter, but they do. A homeless shelter or food bank could tell you that. If the volunteers don’t show up it’s much harder on the workers there. If that level of participation matters then I think arts participation does matter. It has to do with what artists decide to spend their time doing—where they decide to point their energies. I don’t believe that art is completely out of the conversation or nullified in any way from participation.

One of the works in the show is titled I believe in a Black art and another one, Malcontent, has a portrait of Malcolm X front and center. What are your views on issues of race?

That’s even a bigger one. In the US country race matters a lot. It’s the way that we order the world. It’s about ordering it in a way that we can tell who is in and who is out, who is suspect and who is not. Race is very important to Americans. We wouldn’t be who we are if we were not so twisted up about it.

The work Fundamental asks the question If dog is man’s best friend who is dog’s best friend? Are you addressing the downtrodden, the oppressed?

I’m looking at the psychology of being a victim and how victims put their masters on pedestals and cannot disentangle themselves from their master’s love. The victim never thinks who is my master’s best friend. The victim—or the dog—always thinks, well I am, but what duty does the master have to me in being my best friend? That’s a much deeper question.

Is your use of language inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat and his Samo tags and pronouncements that were visible on the streets of SoHo when you were a young artist?

My interest in language predates Basquiat’s work. I think when I first saw his work I had two reactions: one was this is really great, especially when I found out he was black, and the other one was that he was not going far enough. His primitivist stance made it seem that language did not have to be taken seriously as language.

What does language add to imagery in your work?

In a sense, language is another image. At least in English, none of our words are the thing itself—unlike Chinese, where it’s a pictographic situation. I get level of abstraction from language. It has the ability to move beyond the image quite quickly. People read language much faster than they do images, where things have to be taken apart. The use of words allows me to create one entire image composed of things that are quickly recognized and things that are not.

There’s also a certain sense of degradation in your use of materials, from the use of torn up newspaper and magazine ads to a kitty litter bag in I Can Write, where a boxer is birthing a nation. Where does this sensibility originate with you?

Most of the things that you have in your life that have any meaning are not necessarily the new ones. The things that you use over and over again—the things that obtain the patina of your life—are usually things that have a certain sense of time etched into their surfaces. I guess it’s the same reason why I might use a food that I was familiar with from my childhood. But I wouldn’t use the word degradation—and I’m not being judgmental. I just think that things do wear away and that’s the truth. In some way maybe there’s a part of me that’s either romantic or hopeful by asking if we can resuscitate this passing away of time by making it into something that you might want to keep.

Masculinity is both questioned in that piece, I Can Write, as it is in Penis melting over the world. What’s the issue that you were confronting in these works?

It’s about this sense of power that the little people—us—sometimes feel that we have. It’s like the mouse that holds up its paw and thinks that it’s bigger than the moon. I’m mocking this situation through a display of energies and superimposing them over something like a kitty litter substrate. Again, it’s like laughing at our humanity in terms of the passing away of time.

In Malcontent and Model you use peanut butter to frame the work? What was the significance of that material at the time?

I’m always looking at how things rub up against one another and how they inform each other to create meaning. And then I think is there a more novel or more interesting way to bring out the meaning of things? Now certain things you just don’t put together because they seem opposed or oxymoronic, but sometimes when you do that you get these meanings that you never would otherwise. I knew that when I used peanut butter to frame those images that it would eventually change the images because oil would seep through over time—and that interested me.

Your installation Claim in the Whitney Biennial employs 2,755 slices of baloney that are nailed to a pink wall with a photo of a person on it. The number and image supposedly represents the Jewish population of New York. What’s the issue of identity that you are dealing with here?

I’m not talking about identity, but maybe there’s a nod to it. I’m talking about the way we categorize things. Race is a way to temporalize reality so that you can order it and demographics is another way. If I count the number of people then I know “who” they are. I thought that was an interesting idea, but how is it possible? How do I know if it’s accurate? How do you I even know if I’m counting the right people? There’s something implied in that first principle, if you will, that’s not being talked about. So I decided why don’t I make a system that has these very obvious flaws in it, but that points toward practices that have been set in motion many times before for many different populations.

In the early works there’s a piece with a photo of an angry women with the word “JAP” written on her blouse. Between this early piece and the later installation you seem to have a continuous concern with Jews, why are they a recurring topic for you?

I was referring to the nickname for Jasper Johns in that piece; I wasn’t referring to Jews. The picture of the woman was taken from an article about a Civil Rights march, where she was yelling at black people. I wasn’t necessarily pointing at Jewishness, even though I will say that the relationship between Jews and blacks in our country is entirely complex. It’s a very touchy situation, which is why people don’t talk about it. I think a lot of black people feel that we owe a great debt to Jewish people. On the other hand, black people have had to live in homes where the landlords were Jewish and there was a tension—the typical one—around a class consciousness of the person who can never own anything and the person who owns. It’s a complex relationship that still needs to be worked out between these two groups.

Throughout your work there is a questioning of truth, which is a topic that’s on everyone’s mind these days. Have the times finally caught up with your interest in this subject?

That’s a pretty funny thing to say, but no, it hasn’t. I’ll tell you a thought that pops into my mind, although I’m not sure of the relevance. For most of my life I was taught to lie. My family was always doing something wrong, because most of the time we were on welfare. My mother would say, ‘when the welfare people come over you have to act good.’ We had to act like we were a solid family. There was always this tension about having money or not having it and getting it from the state. There was always a tension between the truth and the lies of the state and your own lies. I’ve always been a boy scout about it, if you will. It’s important to me as a grown up not to do what I was raised to do. It’s nothing against my mom. I understand now that she did it as a survival tactic, but at the same time it was a lying game. It was pernicious and it was everywhere in your being and in what you did.

So you decided to be your own man?

You have to grow up sometime, but to some folks apparently you don’t.

June 28, 2017