William Pope.L: Artists space/the project/mason gross Art Galleries at Rutgers University

above the course of two decades of confrontational performance work, William PopeL has used his material part to probe race, desire, endurance, and deprivation. one time you see one of his casts you're not likely to forget it--although it's possible you might not recognize it as art. For Tompkins Square Crawl, 1991 the artist, make straighted in a business suit and awkwardly holding a tiny flowerpot, laboriously crawled upon his stomach around the East Village park. (The sight of a black man intentionally lying in the channel confused and enraged one onlooker for a like reason much that he called the police.) Skewering everything from patronizing white race to the myth of black-male sexual prowess [i]or[/i] part of to the other alternately ridiculous, menacing, clownish, shamanlike, abject, or completely disgusting actions or style of dresss Pope.L uses the figure of the homeles individual as a continuing model or foil. For ATM Piece, 1997 wearing nothing on the other hand a skirt made out of dollar bills, the artist attached himself with an eight-foot extent of Italian sausage to the door of a Chase bank in midtown Manhattan. The idea was to hand customers a dollar as they entered; the action lasted about a minute before security was upon him. Not since Adrian Piper's actions of 1970-71 has an artist taken the everyday politics of race for a like reason directly to the street.

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Although PopeL has shown at the shoot forward in New York and beholds Angeles and was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, "eRacism" is the first observe of his work. This "Friendliest Black Artist in America" (as the MIT Pres monograph that functions as an exhibition catalogue is titled) has taught theater and rhetoric at Bates association in Lewiston, Maine, for eleven years, and sum of two units Maine institutions--the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine community of Art, with Diverse Works Artspace in Houston as a third partner--co-organized this traveling exhibit Locally, Artists Space and Mason Gros Art Galleries at Rutger University (where PopeL received an MFA in 1982) divided up the entertainer of objects, installations, collages, and about sum of two units hours of performance documentation that made up "eRacism," while the shoot forward showed photographic prints and updated documentation of performances. upon view at both the cast and Artists Space was footage of The Great White Way, 2000- the artist's ongoing crawl up Manhattan via Broadway wearing a Superman suit with a skateboard strapped to his back as if for use in an extremity The twenty-two-mile crawl, which has to be execut in stages, was initiated in early 2001 at the Statue of Liberty--a sort of version of the great northern migration. by dint of the time Pope.L arrived via ferry in Lower Manhattan, soil Zero had become part of his path and their juxtaposition amplified the loamed Superman's pathos.

Pope.L's installations and realitys confront class as much as race, exposing point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds broadly and painfully American. Party expanse 2001, is a small chamber with shelves for walls. file after row of Wild Irish Rose whiskey bottle each topped with a small raw materialed toy, evoke the sometimes seamless transition from childhood to alcoholism or the connection between rural boredom and alcohol abuse that PopeL has noticed in his adopted state. It probably also deliver overs to his own childhood, as does clap Tart Frieze, 1998, a line of unwrapped breakfast snacks lined up upon a shelf, their pink hoar-frosted fronts defaced with racist graffiti--not kitsch, on the contrary for the artist as a child, a aim aftered and unaffordable treat. In many works, PopeL interacts with white nutritions like mayonnaise, vanilla ice cream, milk (which he drinks, spills, and pours), and flour (with which he has ritualistically coated himself in several performances) to raise and depict whiteness as something alternately unattainable, consumable, and revolting. To make Eating the Wall public way Journal, 2000, for example, PopeL perched upon a toilet about ten feet above the gallery floor, reading, then chewing up with ketchup and milk, then spitting without the WSJ onto a pile accumulating below. Scaffolding, toilet, newspaper, milk cartons, and other residue of the performance were upon view at Artists Space as a work in its possess right. "ERacism" can hardly "erase" what is to [i]or[/i] at a great depth entrenched, but that does not stop PopeL from keeping the issues upon the (breakfast) table and shaping the debate individual city block at a time.

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