The Great White Lie

By Kennedy Randall

In The Great White Way (2001), currently on view in American artist Pope.L’s survey at Modern Art, the artist wears a capeless superman suit with a skateboard strapped to his back and inches along in a visibly arduous crawl. Using only his elbows and knees to drag his body forward, Pope.L undertakes the first segment of a 22-mile crawl (performed over nine years) from the Statue of Liberty to his mother’s house in the Bronx via Broadway. Filmed on an undoubtedly chilly December day in New York, this was one of the many crawls Pope.L performed in his lifetime.

"the first segment of a 22-mile crawl (performed over nine years)"

Pope.L’s subversive practice used humour, contradiction, and discomfort to confront, and often shock, the viewer. He sought to probe assumptions often focusing on issues social inequality and the construction of whiteness and blackness. The artist, having seen his father, aunt, and brother experience homelessness, has said he undertook his site-specific crawls to give up 'his verticality', to render visible the increasing number of unhoused individuals on the streets. This was due to New York City’s rapid gentrification, growing wealth disparity, and the community’s simultaneous refusal to address these issues. If the American Dream promises upward mobility, Pope.L's response was to get down on his hands and knees.

The film opens with mock pageantry, as Pope.L’s name appears across an American flag fluttering in the wind, followed by a close-up of the imposing Statue of Liberty. Superman, a hero who speeds through the sky, is flattened here, inching his way painfully and slowly towards the city. After a physically arduous struggle, he finally boards a ferry and looks out at the city skyline in a shot of postcard grandeur, the American dream as a view. Pope.L chooses Broadway, Manhattan’s longest street and a showcase for lavish wealth and commerce, to make his horizontality visible. To crawl here is to expose the bodily cost of capitalist gain, which so often goes unseen. The title is Broadway’s nickname, earned from the thousands of lightbulbs illuminating the theatre district, but in Pope.L’s crawl it also suggests a path to financial success reserved for those with white skin.

Born William Pope in 1955 in Newark, New Jersey, Pope.L began creating works in the 1970s that were inspired by performance and theatre, having trained with Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks at Rutgers University. Though perhaps best known for his crawls, his interventions were not limited to public spaces. Selected Works: 1978-2022 spans five decades of painting, video, sculpture, drawing and performance, much of it rarely seen in the United Kingdom.

Throughout the exhibition, examples of Pope.L’s longstanding use of whiteness as a medium in both painting and performance make explicit his efforts to decode and satirise the construction of race. Pope.L cited famed American minimalist painter Robert Ryman (whose retrospective is currently on view at the Barbican) and his white paintings as an inspiration for his own use of the medium, even calling himself 'the son' of Ryman. Within the two paintings MLK’S Dick as Seen From Pluto (2000-2001) and Title Unknown (2000), the artist builds on Ryman’s white painterly aesthetic with everyday materials such as Tipp-Ex and footprints, embedding his own provocative humour. In the first, the title appears in black lettering across the surface; in the second, an arrow points to a tiny dot. Where Ryman made white an arena for the contemplation of paint itself, Pope.L refuses to let it remain neutral. 

"the son of Ryman"

Many of his performances also utilise the whiteness of everyday materials such as mayonnaise, flour, milk, and baby powder. In Eating The Wall Street Journal, Pope.L sat naked except for a jockstrap on a hybrid throne-toilet and covered his body in flour to temporarily whiten his skin. He drank milk to help him chew and spit out the entirety of the newspaper, in response to an advertising campaign that told readers a subscription to the Wall Street Journal would make them more economically prosperous. By chewing it to a pulp, clearly the artist finds the paper’s promise of upward mobility hard to swallow.

While his performances are rich in symbolism, his paintings and sculptures use language to create political resonance. Identity What We Lose to Real For (2022), created a year prior to the artist’s untimely death in 2023, is made up of eight lines of large wood letters. What at first seems legible dissolves into nonsense, frustrating our expectation that reading will yield meaning. In his Real Kitsch series (1990), language and Pope.L’s fascination with whiteness collide. Quotations of unknown origin appear on underwear covered in smears of white paint, uncategorisable goop, and pubic hair, creating an abject object that blurs the boundaries between meaning and materiality. Words here are treated as matter, as messy and bodily as the paint, and they refuse to deliver the message we expect of them.

One of the last works in the exhibition is documentation of his performance Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a Meditation Square Pieces (1978). The artist is seen sitting cross-legged, meditating in a black suit outside a commercial gallery in SoHo, New York, with bottled fortified wine and a can of Coca-Cola encased in a ring of matches. The photographs show spectators by turns completely unbothered and utterly dumbfounded, with one man cocking his head to make sense of the scene. His bewilderment is familiar.

Pope.L was a difficult artist to pin down. In fact, his absurdism often took aim at the ultimately arbitrary nature of categories themselves. He used humour, contradiction and materiality as levers for prying open the behaviours and ideologies that society has normalised. We are left looking a little longer, less certain of what we thought we knew.