Plinth

In the main gallery stands a massive wooden installation, the site of one of Pope.L’s most famous performances, Eating the Wall Street Journal (1991). Decades ago, the artist sat on top of this chaotic, wooden structure covered in white flour, grime and dust. Wearing only a jockstrap and boots, he tore up pages of the Wall Street Journal, before chewing and swallowing them, occasionally dabbing scraps in ketchup and washing them down with milk. Even without such eccentric debasement, Hospital’s desolate installations seemed to me, at times, to be an empty spectacle: even if degradation and emptiness are the desired effects, some viewers will need a little more than ketchup and milk to feel full.

The viewer could easily mistake an installation on the Fire Station gallery’s first floor for an empty room where a visitor has hastily flung a bottle. Empty containers are strewn on the floor. Strange liquids drip in lab-like rooms. For an exhibition named after a site of care, Hospital persistently performs the opposite and is striking in its abjection and ambiguity. Pope.L is known for performances that test the artist’s endurance in ways that may be disturbing or darkly comic to the viewer. In the late 1970s, his Crawl series saw him wriggling on his belly through the streets of New York. No mean feat – and one that posed questions about division and inequality, requiring the artist to become literally the lowest of the low. At times, 2023’s Hospital seems, well, careless.

As a black viewer, Pope.L’s repeated exploration of blackness in negative, dehumanising terms is hard to stomach. In one of his drawings, he writes ‘Black people are shit’. Should we call him a plucky provocateur? Such a dark joke feels lazy and throwaway, while such subversions come at a high cost. While Pope.L’s early performances, such as the crawls, laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of artist agitators, today’s viewer may find herself yawning at the prospect of another edgy artist replicating violent and abject images of black bodies. Pope.L’s work brings to the surface all the anxieties, contradictions and agendas that uphold anti-black racism. Only, after these tensions are raised, what next? The viewer has to hold them. These semi-collapsed structures and dripping bottles certainly won’t.

This focus on the warped logic of anti-blackness can be boring, because it only ever speaks to itself. Pope.L resists the idea that his work is political, preferring the idea that it is ‘social’, in his own words. His artistic idiom, filled with riddles, symbols and open-ended metaphors, can seem at times anti-social. In rehashing and repeating anti-black sentiment in rambling, cryptic statements, the black artist runs the risk of reifying them. Combined with the themes of sadism and pain in Pope.L’s performances, it is tempting for the armchair psychologist to see an artist who is only creating these stunts to satisfy a never-ending penchant for self-harm. Pope.L compulsively humiliates himself and makes his body a site of abjection and horror, whether clamping objects to his penis or shoving paper down his throat. The viewer, meanwhile, is held at arm’s length.

Whose responsibility is it to turn humiliation into meaningful experiences? Of course, the impetus shouldn’t be on black artists to turn structural violence into something easily digestible. But nor should viewers be choking on the artist's newsprint. Artists often ask too much of the audience.

Perhaps Pope.L is not making art for people like me. Our present-day understanding of blackness is now so global, intersectional and deeply layered that merely observing various hateful beliefs and attitudes simply doesn’t cut it in 2023. If his work is simply to make white people uncomfortable then he succeeds. Of course, black artists can play both healers and agitators. But must black audiences be collateral?

By Funmi Lijadu