An Appreciation: William Pope.L

Yesterday I heard of the sad news of William Pope.L’s passing just as I happened to be landing in Chicago, the city where he was based for most of his professional life and where I first became aware of his work in 1994, when I saw images related to his piece  Black Domestic a.k.a. Cow Commercial.  In a related photo (from his series “Eracist”) Pope.L appears holding a glass of milk with a broad smile and a cow coming out of his crotch, an image that left an indelible mark in my memory.  I always admired his ability to address issues of race with a careful and unparalleled calibration of confrontation, wit, sometimes humor, and the absurd.

William Pope.L, Trinket, 2008, mixed media, approx. 4 × 11 m

I always kept an eye out to see what he was doing next. Sometime in the late 2000s when I was developing a project for Grand Arts in Kansas City, I learned of the project that Pope.L had just realized with them, which involved installing a massive, 16-feet tall, 45-feet long American flag and affixed to a pole rising from floor to ceiling, violently waving due to a powerful turbine behind it so that the force of the wind would eventually destroy it. I remember Grand Art’s Executive Director Stacy Switzer telling me about how the intrepid Grand Arts team scrambled to find a wind turbine strong enough to make the flag wave in this vigorous way, contacting companies in the airplane manufacturing industry.  The work, titled Trinket, is in the collection of LA MoCA. It is a powerful statement on the period right before the election of Barack Obama, a time that marks the global recession, and in a way an eerie premonition of the coming apart of the political balance in the U.S. that would unfold over the following decade.

Shortly after that, around 2010, Gretchen Wagner, who was curatorial assistant in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA and was doing research on Fluxus (due to a major gift of works received at the museum and a subsequent exhibition planned for that purpose) came to us at the Education Department with the idea to do a Fluxus- inspired workshop-type activity with Pope.L. Wagner thought that he would be a great candidate for this because the artist himself had studied under Fluxus artists and acknowledged their influence in his work, and further due to the fact (this has not been emphasized enough) that he was also a great educator and mentor.   We then contacted Pope.L with this idea, and after a brief conversation he and his studio manager came back to us with a detailed and thoughtful questionnaire about the program’s goals, audiences and more, the likes of which I had never seen. Mainly it provided a window to Pope.L’s thorough thinking process and, I believe, of how intentional and carefully considered everything he did always was. He proposed an evening titled “Flux This”  which had as its goals to offer a more contemporary take, primarily by emerging Black artists, on Fluxus. Regarding this, Pope.L wrote: “I am interested in going into a certain dark, a certain anger which is gentle, not loving, never knowable, neither here nor there. Flux this! Fluxus forever.”

The event, which was more of a performance evening, brought artists like Clifford Owens and Xaviera Simmons, both of which stripped naked for their respective radical performative actions (Cliff asked for volunteers in the audience to rub loads of Vaseline onto the back of his body; because there were no takers at first one of our education staff members, a young white woman, summoned the courage to do it, grabbing a whole chunk of vaseline and went for it with amazing determination). Performers with gorilla outfits jumped around the theater seats at the beginning of the program.  Of that event, Pope L. told the press afterwards, regarding his relationship with Fluxus:

“There was a wandering aspect to it, it would never sit still, but that's what attracted me to it. So in one way, you can never fucking rely on it," Mr. Pope.L said. "The child always wants to exceed the parents, I suppose. But one thing you learn when you get older is that exceeding is not as easy, and it's more lonely. And it's also more arrogant. In exceeding, you always are attached, so why not face up to it and celebrate it?"

Yet, when he appeared to introduce the event to the sold-out audience, and true to form, Pope.L did something unexpected: he started intentionally mumbling nonsense, all the time while gesturing to the audience as if he were giving a serious, formal introduction to the evening. I had never seen anything like it before, and it was brilliant: a very Fluxus-style send-off to the stiff, stolid, and self-important aspirations of academia in its solemn historicization of art movements.

We will sorely miss this extraordinary artist.