William Pope.L: the Friendliest Black Artist in America[c].

Edited by Mark H.C. Bessire

MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002. 240 pp., 125 color illustnztions, chronology. $24.95 handcover.

William Pope.L's practice is one that trades in transgression, ambivalence, humor, and ambiguity. Characterized by Mark H.C. Bessire as a negotiation of "the history of America's relationship to difference" (p. 22), it underscores the constructed nature of social hierarchies based on race in a fashion that questions their very coherency, In that spirit William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America[c], the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, not only chronicles the artist's career of more than twenty-five years but also examines his exegesis on American culture and race. Pope.L's oeuvre is vast, including painting, drawing, street performance (his best known being his crawls through New York and other cities), and installations made up of everything from mayonnaise and large-scale wall texts to sacks of fertilizer bearing the likeness of Martin Luther King, Jr. Through this body of work Pope.L points not to discrete constructions of black subjectivity but rather to the effects of racism, politicizing the racialized characterizations of African Americans, particularly males, in the social landscape.

The book includes essays by Bessire, Geoffrey Hendricks, Kristine Stiles, Martha Wilson, C. Carr, and Stuart Horodner; a dialogue between William Pope.L and Lowry Stokes Sims; and writings by the artist himself. While at times a bit redundant, the essays point to the complex nature of Pope.L's practice in different ways and from different view-points. For the most part, the authors rely heavily on the artist's own words to support their own. Bessire's essay, "The Friendliest Artist in America," stands as a thorough introduction to Pope.L, charting his trajectory and contextualizing his oeuvre within broader contemporary visual practice and the social milieu in which he works. Bessire elucidates the role of both blackness and whiteness in that oeuvre, and in this framework, race is depicted not as people but as a system of categorization. It is this system--one of "laws, representations, institutions, psychologies, and behaviors" (p. 22)--that serves as fodder for Pope.L's art.

Bessire's essay oscillates between Pope.L's work and his life experiences. Such movement assists the reader in grasping the complicated ways that race not only categorizes but also functions to render whiteness invisible. In Bessire's mind the artist's "confrontations with whiteness" (p. 25) are critical, for they position race in relative terms. That relativism--and the power such relativism engenders in terms of the very attributes we associate with white and black in the United States--is fundamental to Pope.L's boody of work. Bessire then combines such "confrontations" with an analysis of the work itself. In one important instance, he looks at the artist's relationship to the painter Robert Ryman. Pope.L first saw Ryman's monochromatic white paintings in the early 1970s, and they changed his understanding of whiteness; moreover, they changed his understanding of painting as a medium. As Bessire insightfully notes, Pope.L took Ryman's work and transposed it into his explorations of race. Suddenly those paintings, in his hands, became "dispersed, spoiled, and reconfigured in the guise of mayonnaise, flour, and milk" (p. 25). Such a transposition of medium shows how white works as not only a "raceless" category but also a formal and conceptual strategy in Pope.L's painting. In that sense, the artist turns whiteness against itself, using it formally in order to deconstruct the myths of its invisibility. However, if whiteness is both strategy and category, so too is blackness.

As Bessire shows, Pope.Us materials--mayonnaise, peanut butter, newsprint, paint, dolls, his own body--are used to unhinge and destabilize ingrained racial categories. In his performance How Much Is That Nigger in the Window (1990-91), the artist transformed his body into an object by spreading mayonnaise all over it. The intent was to become white. However, as the mayonnaise oxidized on his body, it lost its color: Pope.L., while white for a moment, became black (and very shiny). With such materials Pope.L's work resides in consumption, decay, and abjection, all of which serve as metaphors for the ways Americans understand (and literally consume) race and for the marginalization that occurs with racism. Class and capitalist exploitation are also vital to understanding his art. Much of it places race in a conversation with both: bodies are not just raced but classed and commodified. Ultimately, Bessire's essay gives an expansive view of Pope.L's practice, underscoring a shift in the ways in which blackness (and race more generally) figures into the work of an African American artist. He shows that Pope.L is not constructing a neat "black" identity; he is using blackness, and race more generally, as tools for a counternarrative on social and economic marginalization.

Bessire's essay (the catalogue's Ur-text, so to speak) gives a macro view; the others give smaller accounts, and the balance allows for a more nuanced understanding of the artist's work. Geoffrey Hendricks's essay, "From an Old Overcoat to Workboots and a Jockstrap (a 22 Year Journey of Friendship with Pope.L)," is, as the title suggests, a personal and affectionate reiniscence. Hendricks points out the importance of language in the artist's performances and gives insight into the effects these productions had on the viewer, noting that they "were all consuming and constantly had the character of works in progress" (p. 33).

In "Thunderbird Immolation: Burning Racism," Kristine Stiles situates Pope.L's practice biographically, socially, and art historically. She describes the performance Thunderbird Immolation (1978) in detail, paying much attention to its formal qualities. Stiles notes the incongruous nature of the piece: "Out of place in the center of the white international art trade, Pope.L represented himself as the quintessential crazy street person who is bad for business" (p. 37). In pointing out the artist's relationship with the art establishment, she explores how he takes advantage of the social criticality often understood as a fundamental part of performance art. Stiles also understands his performance as an articulation of anger, one that is aided by satire and humor. She ties it to "a long history of art in the street ... from Dada to the International Situationists, Happenings, Fluxus, agit-prop and guerrilla actions, Performance and so-called Public Art" (p. 40). While linking Pope.L's work to larger histories of visual production, Stiles also takes pains to point out its difference, one that for her is based on the artist's race and black diasporal experience more generally.

Pope.L's performance is certainly unlike the movements Stiles mentions; however, to define it as simply as a distinction between "black" and "white" is to undermine her own close, and quite accurate, reading of Thunderbird Immolation, one in which the very signifiers of black and white are thrown up for debate. Moreover, it does not allow for the opportunity to see how Pope.L's performance is different from other African American art practice.

Unlike Stiles's sustained reading of one performance, Martha Wilson's brief essay, "Limited Warranty," looks at a number of performances enacted between 1991 and 2000, and explores the importance of materials and how they allow Pope.L to think about race in more open-ended ways as well as to question social, cultural, racial, and economic hierarchies. Wilson also gives insight into the artist's intellectual development and its effect on his practice. Using the attacks of September 11, 2001, as her backdrop allows her to bridge what she sees as the difference between her position as a middle-class white woman and Pope.L's as a black artist whose practice resides in contingency and contradiction. In Wilson's mind, life became more provisional, more ephemeral, after the destruction of the twin towers, and it is here that she finds the means to identify with Pope.L and to find beauty in his work. She writes, "Now that all of our lives are provisional, as William's has been all along, it's uncomfortable to not know what will happen next, to not have middle-class security to believe in anymore. William's work rubs our noses in it, makes us look, feel, and smell, troubled culture" (p. 45).

Functioning as a survey of sorts, C. Carr's essay, "In tire Discomfort Zone," covers much of tire same material as previous essays; however, this author pays close attention to viewers' responses to Pope.L's work. For example, she notes the reaction of an African American spectator to Tompkins Square Crawl, suggesting that the performance "evolved quickly from racial metaphor to racial tension as the black spectator challenged the white cameraman [hired by the artist to document the piece]" (p. 48). Such a scene directly shows how people make assumptions based on race and how they are tied to perceptions of power (the crawling Pope.L is powerless; the white cameraman is in charge of the scene). It also points to the burden of representation placed on artists of color, a point further underscored by Pope.L's irreverent works such as Rebuilding the Monument (1995-99) and This Is a Painting (2001-02), which critique the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and question the iconic status the martyr has been assigned in black communities. Carr also notes how the reception of Pope.L's crawls (he has done a number of them) is dependent upon site and audience, which indirectly raises important questions about site specificity with respect to his practice. Like Wilson, she directly considers class in her examination, and like Bessire, she also focuses on the importance of the abject in Pope.L's work, exploring how abjection and consumption question the limits and the very boundaries of the body.

Stuart Horodner's piece, "Working and William," is part analysis of Pope.L's practice and part personal reminiscence of fire author's experiences as a dealer and curator who has consistently shown the artist's work, work Horodner sees as "connected to everything at once: race, politics, economics, history, and of course, other art" (p. 55). Like Stiles, he places Pope.L within a broader art historical framework, tying the artist's production to African American practice (a la Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott, Adrian Piper, and David Hammons) as well as to the work of Nancy Spero, Edward Ruscha, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Jasper Johns. However, unlike Stiles, Horodner is content to let all of these seemingly incongruous elements rest together.

Lowry Stokes Sims's interview with Pope.L was conducted by e-mail over a six-week period in late 2001. While many of her questions are fairly standard art historical fare, Pope.L's responses to them provide more insight into the ways he thinks about the black male body--what he means when he writes such things as "The black body is a lack worth having" (p. 62), and what blackness more generally means to him. The artist is at times humorous, at times irreverent, but always perceptive, and his responses call up the paradoxes inherent in constructions of blackness. For him, blackness is not, in the end, an essential quality, and while it is a strategy in his work, this dialogue shows how it is also something quite real something he and millions of others live on a daily basis. In his work, as the dialogue shows, Pope.L embodies the lack of blackness, as he tries to rewrite scripts that reduce the black body, in his words, "to flesh and function" (p. 67).

Perhaps the most provocative essay in the catalogue is Pope.L's own piece titled "Bocio," in which he asks difficult questions about desire and the construction of the artist. He takes as his cue Cair Crawford's review of his 1998 performance My Niagra #2 (Bed) at The Project in New York (see Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Spring/Summer 1999). Crawford compared the artist's work to Fon bocio objects. Pope.L notes, "Like Ms. Crawford, most of what I know about bocio derives from Ms. Blier's book /African Vodun: Art, Psychology and Power]" (p. 70), and he then goes on to comment on his relationship to bocio as well as Suzanne Blier's relationship to the same. Yet the essay is not about who has the rights to things African as much as it is about how artists of color are often exoticized by writers (and not only by white ones), In embarking on such issues, Pope.L directly questions the still popular notion--for black people as well as non-black people--that African American artists have some innate, natural, "primitive" connection to Africa, and in essence exposes such notions as constructions based on desire. He further insists that the move to exoticize black artists denies for them (and black people generally) "the kind of psychological complexity typically assigned to white mental worlds" (p. 72).

However, Pope.L is also pragmatic. He suggests that if writers and scholars equate his blackness with things African (as is the case in a couple of the essays in this very volume), then he will follow suit in order to get attention for his work. Such a move constitutes a shrewd and nakedly honest take on the relationship between artists and criticism, showing the capacity (and perhaps the willingness?) of artists of color to use those things which exoticize them as a means for economic gain and acceptance in the art world. Nevertheless, at the end of the day Pope.L calls for a more dialectical reading of his practice. He stresses, "I am as much Yves Klein as I am Toni Morrison. I am as much Jackson Pollock as I am Jacob Lawrence. I am as much Mary Kelly as I am Adrian Piper. I am as much Sigmund Freud as I am Sagbadju, a maker of bocio and an informant of Ms. Biter." But he continues, "Even so, I am not Sagbadju Nokam I, Sigmund Freud or Toni Morrison. I am the child of their ancestral dissonance with all its contrariness and overlappings. The only bo I can make is bo that does not know itself" (p. 73).

The most exciting part of this retrospective catalogue is its lavish illustrations, which, divided by medium, give a rich visual over view of Pope.L's provocative oeuvre. By looking through these sections, readers can understand its visceral nature as well as its elements of abjection, humor, irony, and satire. with such an array of illustrations, the importance of language, food, and the body be comes clear. The book itself functions as a sumptuous object, and its commendable design--like the artist's work--uses blackness as a strategy. In the top right-hand confer of the odd-numbered pages from 27 to 61, the designers included postage-stamp-sized images from Pope.Us Training Crawl (2001), and flipping the pages gives some idea of Pope.L in motion.

As provocative, irreverent, and insightful as any of the essays is the chronology at the end of the catalogue. A collaboration between Pope.L and the other contributors, this text, spanning the years 1815-2055, represents both the artist's conception of history and that of the authors.

William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in American joins the small but growing ranks of MIT Press titles that address contemporary Afro-Atlantic visual practice. Since the late 1990s the publisher, usually in collaboration with a museum, has produced volumes in cluding Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe's 1999 Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, David Bailey and Gilane Tawadros's 2003 Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art (which includes work by North African artists), and generously illustrated catalogues on Ike Ude and Kara Walker. The one quality all these titles share is a desire to reframe discussions concerning the messy intersection of race and representation in contemporary art and culture. Beyond highlighting an artist's career and reevaluating his oeuvre, a task commonly undertaken by the retrospective, William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America[c] calls for broader and more complex analyses of the collision of race, capitalist exploitation, class, gender, and representation in the practice of artists of color. In doing so, it pushes the boundaries of African American art scholarship and tests the very limits of the retrospective catalogue.

Steven Nelson is assistant professor of African and African American art history at UCLA, reviews editor of Art Journal, and a consulting editor and book review editor of African Arts. He recently completed a book-length manuscript on indigenous and Western reception of Mousgoum art and architecture.