William Pope.L

William Pope.L, who once crawled through the streets of New York with a skateboard strapped to his back, explains that eating the Wall Street Journal for a project was never supposed to be hard, he just “didn’t prepare properly” and accidentally poisoned himself. For Pope.L, exhaustion, humiliation, and discomfort are artistic material, yet under the absurdity lies a vulnerability seeping from an artist obsessed with class, race, mortality, and the fragile ways people hold onto dignity. In speaking to him, he repeatedly pushed back against the idea that art should simply be “beautiful,” arguing instead that art should involve itself in “this dialogue just called life.” Pope.L refuses to separate art from the messy realities of mundanity, in the same way he refuses to separate the body from the social structures constantly acting upon it.

TRANSCRIPT:

Tania Ketenjian:
Hello, resonance listeners. This is Sight Unseen, and my name is Tania Ketenjian, coming to you from San Francisco, California. Sight Unseen brings you the words and thoughts of artists of different mediums, talking about what they do, why they do it, and and how it affects, and in many cases reflects, on the world around them. The California College of the Arts has an amazing gallery called the Wattis Institute, and we've spoken about exhibitions there several times. In fact, the director of the Wattis is moving to London to head the direction of the Hayward Gallery. I've admired Ralph Rugoff quite a bit and have been introduced to the California College of the Arts through the work at the Wattis. The college also has a brilliant speaker series where artists from all over the world come to speak about their work and vision.

Recently, last week in fact, performance artist, sculptor, painter, and professor William Pope.L came to speak about his work, and I had the pleasure of interviewing him. One of Pope.L's most well-known works is a crawl, one that started in New York City when in 1979 he began to crawl on the streets. Sometimes he'd be dressed up in a business suit, other times in a Superman outfit with a skateboard on his back. He's been doing these crawls for many, many years. He still does them to this day. Another piece that caught my attention was one that he did also in New York. Was on Wall Street, and he was sitting on Wall Street, and he just sat there and ate the entire Wall Street Journal. Both of these works are very hard on the body. In fact, the Wall Street Journal work took him 8 years to recover from. The crawls he continues to do to this day, not always in New York City. He lives in Maine now, and he tends to be a little bit less harsh on his body. That's not what the work is meant to be. He says social conundrum drives his work, and thus everything he does, every object he makes or performance he engages in, reflects on our social structure, the structure of our class, our race, the way in which we reflect on consumerism. William Pope.L Uses his body to, quote, play out, literalize, and interrogate stereotypes. And in doing so, he explores the boundaries, the categories, the misconceptions, the assumptions that we make about a myriad of things. In this case, most poignantly, the assumptions we make about race here in America. Pope.L and I discussed the purpose of art, the power of death, the evolution of his work, and the strength of performance.


William Pope.L:
Let's see, hmm, Eating the Wall Street Journal, yeah. Well, I did it, it's like many of my works, I work in versions, and what we now call Eating the Wall Street Journal really has, I think now it has 3 versions, and I think of the work in terms of those 3 versions. At first it was a street work that I did on the street sitting on a flag. I waited about 8 years, I think, before I did the next version because I had physical problems from doing it. I didn't prepare properly, and I didn't think that was the point of the work for me to suffer because I didn't take care of myself. So I had to think about, well, how can I do this work and do this physical action and not have the distraction that I was mutilating my insides by poisoning myself? Is there a way that I could do this perhaps more, how would you say, with more discipline? So I had to, I thought about it for about 8 years and I decided, well, so I made a lot of changes. I made sculptural changes as well. But I also decided I would not eat it per se. I would chew it and spit it out. And hopefully that would be enough not to become sick. I'd later, in the third version, I had to change even that. But the second version was quite a change because by elevating the work from sitting on the ground to sitting on a pedestal, that was about 10 feet high. It gave much of the sense of power relations that I was trying to suggest in the first piece. In the third piece, I realized that just by chewing it didn't necessarily save my physical system completely. Apparently, even chewing it is a dangerous thing. Even holding it in your mouth is a problem because the chemicals are so vile. And so, uh, toxic. Putting it inside your body and holding it in your mouth is just not very good. So I decided that I had to dilute it. I would drink certain things before in order to lessen it, and I realized that probably that would be the last time, was probably 2001, and especially after I lost a tooth doing it. So That's probably the last time.


Tania Ketenjian:
And the other project that has been done over a long period of time, and the other performances, your crawling performances. Now, all of these are going to be leading— these, both these questions are going to be leading up to the whole kind of political social commentary that these projects do. But can you, can you discuss a kind of— give us an idea of what that's about as well?


William Pope.L:
Well, I started doing crawls probably in '79. And it came out of the fact that New York City at the time was suffering, like many cities in the US, fiscal crises, at least they claimed to be. And it seemed like the only thing they could think of was to do things like close important institutions and services for poor people. It seemed like it was one of the major decisions that they made. And it backfired. You have all these people on the street now with no place to go, living on cardboard boxes. Interestingly enough, for me, it was more personal than that. Some of these people I knew. My father was on the street. My brother was on the street. My aunt was on the street. And, you know, I grew up always fearing that we were going to be on the street as a family. So here we are, you know, '79, I'm an adult, and this is still bothering me. And I lived in New York City at the time. I worked in New York City. And, you know, every time I turn a corner, I just think I'm going to run into my dad or I'm going to run into my brother. And what am I going to do? You know, how am I going to lift this person up? How am I going to meet that occasion? You know, and so everybody looks like my family, I guess. And it doesn't look good.

At the same time, you know, I know that my brother, you know, is not a criminal and my father's not a criminal. I mean, these are people because of one reason or another, and it can happen to anyone, you know, if certain things go wrong in your life, you know, you don't get that check. You know, you get a little sick, you get those hospital bills, you could end up on the street. And it can happen to anybody. And that's the thing, you know, you really start thinking about it, you know, how far is anyone away from this condition, this situation? And so I said, well, how can I show that within these people lying on this piece of cardboard like crap in the middle of the street, how can I show that within them is the same point of energy like within any of us, but it's perhaps under stress right now, you know? And I said, well, what if all these folks right now started to move as one? And it won't be something, you know, like kind of cartoonistic like the Ascent of Man where they sort of rise up on their feet and get all glowy and solve all the world's problems. What if they simply just started to move along, just along the space of the ground, you know, just to show that I'm not going to stop moving until you notice me. Now you can step over me and go to your ATM. And people would do that kind of thing, right? Walk by talking on your, on your whatever, your cell phone, even though cell phones weren't that popular, whatever the case may be. I'm just going to, I'm going to just, I'm going to just get in your face with my will to be. I think I needed to do that. And I needed to prepare to meet my family in a way. I need to be prepared to meet my responsibilities. It wasn't just my personal connection to these individuals of my family, which is more of a one-to-one thing. It was really a connection to misery and to the fact that I guess, you know, you see it in yourself and you see the connection to some other and it's a larger issue than yourself.


Tania Ketenjian:
Now did you actually ever run into anyone that you knew that was on the streets when you were doing these crawls?


William Pope.L:
Yeah, I think maybe I ran into my brother at one time. No, while I was doing the crawls? No, not necessarily, no.


Tania Ketenjian:
But once you did, while just walking, you ran into your brother. And what was that like for you?


William Pope.L:
Well, what is it like when you meet anyone you recognize? You know, you're glad to see them. But, you know, when you see someone who's, you know, having a hard time, you know, then there's a mix. I think there's a mixed bag of feeling, you know. He's my brother, you know. He's my older brother. He's supposed to be the one who knows. That's a stereotype, of course, of big brothers, but, you know, it's interesting to see him struggle so much and to see someone— it can't help but pull at your heartstrings when you see that. He has a certain pride about himself, so he's not going to necessarily— suggesting to help him can be problematic because of his pride. You know, you have to be very careful. You know, I think the whole idea of charity, that word has a lot of charge to it, and there's a lot to be said for the old thing of, you know, teach a man to fish, blah, blah, blah, you know. But, you know, my brother's in that situation because of a number of reasons that I won't talk about where he would rather you simply, you know, give me the money, you know, that kind of thing. And I don't want to give him money because I know what he's going to do with it. So, you know, it's a very complex kind of connection.


Tania Ketenjian:
You know, you're listening to an interview with William Pope.L, artist, sculptor, performer, writer, and professor.


William Pope.L:
When I, uh, do these things, especially community projects, and people question their efficacy, and I think it's interesting and I think it's a good thing, you know, it makes me really ask myself, you know, um, can art change the world? And then I say to myself, you know, why do I want to change the world? You know, isn't it fine the way it is? You know, and then I go, well, maybe the world is, but maybe someone in it is not. I think it's very arrogant to think that you can change the world. I can't stop the world from spinning. You just, you know, that's, you know, that's not something I'm interested in doing. But I would be interested in perhaps ensuring the fact that maybe someone could spend less time trying to find food and then perhaps maybe spending time with their kids.


Tania Ketenjian:
But art is just a— I mean, there are other ways to do that. There are other ways to put cans on the shelf. It's just that art is a very, very particular way of doing it, and actually a unique way of doing it. I think that one thing that in reading about you, and I don't know if this is because of the press coverage on you, but it was laden with the opening of dialogue about race. You know, you're an artist, you're a Black artist, you know, that definitely plays a role in the work that you do. I personally find that the conversation of race is ridiculously limited in the United States, and yet it's opened up in the art world. You know, I'm curious to know if, you know, if that's one of the motivations, if that's one of the foundations or importance for you, or if not.


William Pope.L:
Well, my thing is that I'm an artist, just like someone else could be a journalist or someone else could be a doctor. You can decide what kind of doctor or artist you want to be. Well, I want to be an artist that connects to the world. I want to be an artist that thinks about service, you know. Yeah, you could, you know, there are other things, you know, there are ways to do other things, I guess efficiently, if you want to be efficient. But maybe I don't want to be efficient. Maybe I want to be a part of something. And of course, understanding takes time. You might, people, the critique that art has a specific role or something has another specific role or function. I sometimes find those arguments specious, you know.

People need to try to find an interdisciplinary way of thinking about how things work, that they're the connection between the service that things can do, that they can function. And I think that's why some people probably feel that even if art speaks about something like social issues, period, race or what have you, gender, that it's somehow not being art. So I don't have that attitude myself, but I could imagine that some people think that art's about beauty and that's it. It's just like it was with the Greeks. It's about beauty. And if you want to be really specific, male beauty, if you're dealing with real strict, you know, Greek belief. That's a very narrow understanding of what art can do or what art can be. So I feel that, you know, race, The discussion of race is limited, but perhaps even more, it's ossified, it's not imaginative, you know. And some of the most imaginative stuff about race thinking dovetails with other kinds of civil rights issue thinking, or lack thereof, issues to do with class or gender. I mean, they're all about the idea that people think by classifying someone in a certain way, it gives them power. You know, basically, you know, that's it. And if I can classify you with a law, then it can determine your fate, you know? And that's it. If I can make it official what you are, then I can determine what you will be, and I can determine what I can do to you, you know, what you will cost, what your value is. Very powerful. So I think that, you know, art should speak out as, or should, get involved in this dialogue just called life, I think.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, the beauty question for me has been an interesting one lately because I've been doing interviews on conceptual artists. Often the work of conceptual artists isn't very beautiful, or conventionally beautiful, I'll put it that way. Um, so I think conceptual art has erased the notion to a certain extent of the necessity of art to be beautiful.


William Pope.L:
I don't necessarily think that's true. I think that the thing that conceptual art reminds me of is certain— if you take a logic class or you do any kind of work in logic, they always talk about the beauty of a premise or the beauty of a formula. And there are formulas that are very inelegant. They will solve the problem, but they do it very inefficiently, or they're very rickety the way they do them. And then there's formulations that are incredibly, they get incredibly to the point. It's almost like, you know, like Wittgenstein will say, the first word I think in the, not the Tractatus, maybe it's the Tractatus, is everything which is the world is the case. I mean, it's elegantly said. It's very economically said, you know. I mean, you could say that what he's trying to imply or state there, you can say 5 or 6 paragraphs if you like. But he's beginning his take on things, and he wants to say, this is the way I want to lay things out. Everything, which is the world, is the case. It's like a biblical thing almost. The world is. You know, and it's interesting, you know, you could, you know, and I have a lot of respect for that. Someone who's able to conceptualize something in a way which helps us see something clearly. That's beautiful. And I think certain conceptual art's able to do that, you know. It's able to, to really bring together a certain set of concepts that render a certain state of affairs or whatever phenomena, and you go, okay, I see it now.


Tania Ketenjian:
What you're saying reminds me of a piece of conceptual art that I really love, which is Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Lovers. It's these two clocks that are very plain and not attractive necessarily, that were set at the same time, but they're never quite on time together, saying that no matter how compatible or close two people can be, love is imperfect. And there are beautiful paintings from, you know, the 16th century that also imply that love is imperfect. Is there a similar analogy in your work in the sense that something that's incredibly simply done that is just so much more profound?


William Pope.L:
I'm not an iconic artist like González-Torres. I see— I tend to make things that are much messier. This is not to say that his work is— he's really good at finding these iconic relates. But the kind of thing that I'm interested in is more, I guess, if I had to find a philosophical correlative to what I do, I would be thinking of someone perhaps like maybe Wittgenstein's notebooks, not Wittgenstein's formal books, where he's trying to find, he's trying to discover the relationships rather than simply state them. I think of someone, for example, literature, like maybe Thomas Pynchon rather than someone like Joan Didion or something like that, or, I mean, my work tends to be a little bit messier. I think there's a kind of elegance in the sense that commitment. In the crawls, I begin and I stop when I can't go any farther. That's it. It's just like everything else, you know? You're born and you go and then you can't go anymore.


Tania Ketenjian:
It sounds like the messiness that, to use your word, messiness is an engagement with process. I mean, these are very time-based works that we've just, just these two that we've talked about. They all take time and time is messy.


William Pope.L:
Yeah, it is, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And I think that for humans, at least for this human who's talking now, I think that, you know, our understanding of time and our fear of it, you know, the fear that we won't have enough or the fear that we have too much, you know, we don't know what we feel about. We're very ambivalent about it, you know. And as I get older, I see, you know, on the one hand, you know, I think Do I continue working the way I have for the last 25 years? Because it will change the amount of time I have on the planet. I'm stressing my body in certain ways that may not really help me down the road. In fact, it hasn't. So will I, am I gonna be able to commit in that way? And I think that it's an interesting place to be, you know. But I also know that I have to be more imaginative. I can't think that because I can't physically do those actions anymore that I can't contribute other ways. So maybe I won't do those physical actions anymore, but maybe I'll do something else. So I'm still very cheerful about time, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the next, you know, the next putting one foot after the other will be.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, I know someone that right now has very little time. I mean, she's a lot older than you. And it's interesting to be speaking to her knowing that she knows that she has very little time. How does that change the way she interacts with the world? How does that change the way she considers the people that she loves? Which is her art, I suppose. Loving. So, let's say your time was— since we came on this topic— let's say your time was 6 months, let's say your time was 3 weeks. What urge do you have? When your time is limited, your most profound urges come to the forefront, I would imagine.


William Pope.L:
You would imagine.


Tania Ketenjian:
Mine would. You would? Mine would.


William Pope.L:
I think one doesn't know until it happens, but that's me. I mean, I've watched a couple people die in the last 4 years, my grandmother and my mother last year, or the year before, and it's a really interesting idea to imagine your parent not being there because they simply aren't there. It's not because something, you know, romantic or dramatic happened, you know. It's not out of something you said to them or they didn't say to you. They simply just pass away. And it's very mundane, and it's very— everybody— happens to everybody, that's what they tell us. And usually a lot of times it will happen in these things called hospitals that have their own character to them. They're institutions, basically. And people who work in hospitals, they have their own lives, you know. They can't stand by your parent all day. At least I can't afford that. And even if they could, they couldn't stop them from dying. So it's a very mundane business, you know, this thing of watching someone die. Or being there with them. And you're dying at the same time, you're just dying slower. I mean, that's the other thing is you realize that, okay, they're just dying faster and I'm dying slower. And, you know, you look around the room and you see, you know, your brother and your sister, you see cousins, they're all dying.

And it's really, you know, very humbling, you know. And then what's going on? Well, who Who does the person dying recognize and who do they not recognize? And why do they recognize those people? Like, and I mean, if they have a pain, who do they call out? Whose name do they call out? And how does everybody feel? What if they call out Joe's name and not Bob's? You know, how does Bob feel? It's my mother too. Why didn't she call out my name? And it really does things to you, you know? And maybe you were glad she didn't call out your name because if she did, what would you do? Would you up the morphine? Well, that's not your job. And then, you know, why does she call out Joe's name? Is he closer to her? Well, maybe he is, and maybe that's the truth of it, and you have to accept that. And so this whole idea of profundity, I mean, it is profound, but in a way that one could never imagine until you're right there and you're dealing with it, and you realize that there's a part of it I understand, there's a part of it I may never understand, and that's really annoying. It's more than annoying, it's scary, because while this person's leaving and they don't have to deal with that anymore, as far as we know, as far as we know, you have to stand by their bedside in a way forever, and you won't ever know. And it's a— I think it's very humbling, you know, if you thought you did, you will find out you won't. You know, or you'll— and I think that's a big thing to find out, that you have that limitation. Even before you pass, there are these limitations in life that you're going to be confronted with about what you can know. And sometimes, you know, and I used to— you know, when my mother was passing, I would say things like— and I would surprise myself, like, do I want to know? And I would think that I, you know, would want to know everything. But it's really interesting to have that voice in my head say, maybe you don't want to know this.


Tania Ketenjian:
How much does your own sense of mortality propel what you do? Propel the contribution that you feel you make to the world, to the thing that's beyond you as an artist?


William Pope.L:
Well, it only affects me when I'm an artist. When I'm not an artist, my mortality doesn't affect me. Ha ha ha ha ha! I'm only dying when I'm an artist. I mean, gee. You know, I don't know. I think it's always there, you know, this— I think if it's not a fear of mortality, it's a fear of decay or it's a fear of lack of knowledge, lost in the void of whatever that might be. I mean, sometimes even when you're loving someone, I think, like when you're making love to someone, sometimes I think it's, you know, and you have that moment where you merge with them, it's a kind of death in a way. And some people, you know, that you make love with, It's a— maybe you get a little scared and you realize it's okay. And some people you get really scared with, and I don't know why that is. Maybe it's a trust thing. But like that.


Tania Ketenjian:
You're listening to an interview with William Pope.L, artist, sculptor, performer, writer, and professor.


William Pope.L:
If you look at 1920s Dada, a lot of the people who took part in it were from the upper classes. And the reason they could hang out in those cafes all day drinking absinthe and writing poems is because they were being supported by their families. What I want to attend to people who are indigent, who are from the lower classes, is because that's where I come from, you know, and I— and that because you, when you know, if you see these people depicted in art, it's because some person's feeling sorry for them, or they're not doing anything for them, they just have these nice pictures of them, these sad pictures of them, but you know, you know, when they sell that picture, do they do anything with it, you know, in terms of the money? And maybe, you know, so, you know, do they go out and hang out and, you know, and just try to like, you know, go down to the shelter, what have you, and hang out and whatever? No, they'll make the picture. Maybe they don't really want to go near those people, you know. So I don't know. I think that, that, that I thought that maybe it's a slight shift, but I think the class thing is huge.


Tania Ketenjian:
I think I read an interesting article talking about, you know, whether these people will depict what's going on with the lower classes, but will they actually do anything to help them? Kara Walker is putting together a collection of works from the Met that have to do with Black issues. One of the pieces that was in this article that they showed was a piece by Winslow Homer. A Black man is on a kind of a rickety boat in the middle of a stormy ocean with sharks surrounding the boat. That painting has an emotive effect on me, and it makes me think about the plight of the Black man or the difficulty or challenge, and it makes me think, wow, Winslow Homer was aware of it and was willing to make a painting about it. I don't know if he did anything, actually. Did he go into a shelter and give the money that he made from that painting to the shelter? Highly unlikely. But he did affect me. Does it make it less worthy, more worthy, unworthy?


William Pope.L:
Well, I think, you know, to choose one incident, you know, I mean, I think it's a very powerful painting, you know, and there's, in fact, in Maine, I mean, Winslow Homer is God, and in fact, the Portland Museum of Art, you know, one of the things that made me love that museum is their collection of watercolors by Homer. I mean, I've seen some of these things, so if I thought they were interesting in photo, they're even more interesting when you actually see them. So yeah, of course, I mean, that's a beautiful image, and it's a very poignant one. I didn't even know the guy was Black. That's— I think that was another thing. I mean, okay, let's say that me claiming that if so-and-so makes this painting and it's a Black, you know, subject matter, but they don't head down to the shelter, then there's that. No, I don't— I think that the thing I thought about that particular painting was amazing was that was not that the person was Black per se, even when I found out, it was the loneliness of the image.

That's what I thought at first, even when I found out, but it was interesting that when, I think when I was taught that at first in art school, that the teacher didn't talk about that. And I think I was surprised when I finally saw it on my own and realized it is a Black person. I'm wondering why I was never told that in class. And then I thought, well, maybe the person thought it might, be too delicate. You know, it was interesting. I said, this is really curious. Why am I not clear that this is the case? I was happy that it was Winslow Homer had used this person for this strong image, but I was curious about that. So I think it's a wonderful image, a terrifying image. I don't know. I think that, you know, when one starts talking this way about race, it gets to be kind of like loopy. I mean, people think that Americans are really crazy anyway about this race thing, Europeans do, but of course Europeans were involved in all kind of crap themselves, you know. You know, so, I mean, they have guest worker issues, they call them guest worker issues, they don't have race problems, they have guest worker issues. You know, okay, fine, you have guest worker issues and we have race problems, you know. We're hung up on our race problems and you just have maybe, how do you say, you may just have immigration issues or something, I don't know. Maybe that's the difference between— why can't it be both at the same time? Homer makes this image that's very much about a human issue, and yet at the same time, he also makes a nod to something that concerns us as Americans, race. Why can't it be a layered kind of concern? And that's why the thing really hits us. It's so layered. It's not one or the other.


Tania Ketenjian:
Those were the words of William Pope L., artist, sculptor, performer, writer, and professor amongst other things, including social critic. To learn more about his work, please Google him. There's loads of information there. That's William Pope, P-O-P-E, dot L. That's what you'd look up. This has been Sight Unseen, hailing from San Francisco, California. And as you know, my name is Tania Ketenjian. I've been your host. You're listening to Resonance 104.4 FM, the UK's first Radio Art Station. Stay tuned.