“If I can construct works that allow people to enter themselves, thus, enter the mess—then it’s a collaboration and maybe, possibly, who knows, why not—I’ve nudged something.”
For five days, Pope.L sat on a toilet situated atop a tall makeshift tower, reading and eating a copy of the Wall Street Journal soaked in milk and ketchup. It was a response to an advertisement that claimed a subscription to the newspaper would increase one’s wealth. Pope.L pursued the ad’s capitalist promise by extending its assertion to its limits, asking, “…[then] shouldn’t ingesting [the paper] increase your wealth tenfold?”
Through absurdity, curiosity, and sometimes discomfort, Pope.L transforms mundane moments and materials, like eating and reading, into profound, often existential provocations that push on the limits of the social codes that govern us. His work questions the behaviors, practices, and ideologies we have rationalized and normalized, and he invites us to ask, “Why?”
Much of Pope.L’s work across performance, installation, writing, drawing, and painting engages with holes, ruptures, and gaps as opportunities for inquiry and possibility, not absence. In his book Hole Theory (2002), he states, “I don’t picture the hole. I inhabit it.” Pope.L’s works pull us into the dark and disruptive holes of life, never providing a solution for these voids, but rather revealing the reality and richness of living with and in them.
As an artist, Pope.L continually seeks out spaces and forms that illustrate his commitment to finding value in what he calls “have-not-ness.” He grew up in a working-class family, in which some of those closest to him struggled with addiction and housing instability. Despite these precarious conditions, their lives were rich with moments of robust creativity and imagination. This upbringing inspired in Pope.L the notion that the “dynamic of pain, loss, joy, radicality, and possibility in the experience of being Black” is a “lack worth having.”
Crawling is a recurring gesture in Pope.L’s work. He refers to it as “giving up verticality,” a way of making himself vulnerable in order to gain a deeper understanding of the world we live in. In How Much Is that Nigger in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl, Pope.L, performing as his alter ego Mr. Poots, wears a businessman’s suit while holding a potted flower as he crawls around the block of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. When asked by a passerby what he is doing, Pope.L exclaims, “Working!”
As in many of Pope.L’s public interventions, this work implicates and involves passersby. Whether they choose to engage with or ignore him, the public’s presence becomes a stand-in for “normal” behavior, revealing how social normalcy often hinges on willful ignorance or disregard for certain bodies in public spaces.
In 2001 in New York City, below the Statue of Liberty—standing tall as an emblem of freedom, possibility, and hope—Pope.L crawled in a Superman costume until a police officer demanded he stop and return to the ferry. Though he had a permit to film and perform on the island, the officer claimed that the permit did not matter—Pope.L was not permitted to drag himself across Liberty Island dressed as the strongest man in a fictional world.
This scene from The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street is emblematic of how Pope.L points toward the possibility of a world in which relationships among ourselves, our environment, and each other can be different. He embraces and embodies the uncomfortable contradictions we tend to shy away from and shows the possibility that exists in them. In his reframing of the world, contradiction brings clarity and vulnerability is a superpower. “It’s not that I have the arrogance to believe that I know what should be done,” he has said, “in fact, I’m afraid of the responsibility, but something should be done. And if I can construct works that allow people to enter themselves, thus, enter the mess—then it’s a collaboration and maybe, possibly, who knows, why not—I’ve nudged something.”
Kennedy Jones, Black Arts Council 12-Month Intern, Department of Media and Performance Art, 2024
