The influential US efficiency and conceptual artist Pope.L has died aged 68 (born 1955). His dying was confirmed by one in all his galleries, Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York, who mentioned in an announcement that he had died all of a sudden on 23 December at his house in Chicago.
A raft of tributes have been paid on social media. The artist Coco Fusco says in an Instagram publish: “Nobody else however Pope.L has handled Black abjection and the absurdity of racism in such a poetic and unflinching method.” UK artist Isaac Julien says additionally on Instagram: “I don’t suppose I’ve ever seen a extra profound and highly effective critique of racism by any artist (of white masculinity) in capitalist American tradition [referring to his Superman crawl along Broadway in 2000].”
Artists Sanford Biggers posted: “Thanks to your everlasting brilliance, integrity and steerage.” Mark Godfrey, former Tate curator, wrote on social media, that “he was such an awfully unique, radical artist”.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash mentioned in an announcement that “his longstanding historical past of provocative and absurdist performances alongside together with his wide-ranging oeuvre of installations, objects, and work undermined standard notions of language, materiality, and which means. His elegant, indeterminate, and infrequently humorous, but bitingly poignant criticism of our historical past has solely just lately begun to be absolutely recognised.” He’s additionally represented by Trendy Artwork, London, and Vielmetter Los Angeles; a memorial is deliberate subsequent spring.
Final month we ran an interview with Pope. L to mark his new exhibition at South London Gallery (Hospital, till 11 February). “He was recognized for his provocative and infrequently absurdist works that take care of race, financial methods and language. The Chicago-based artist and educator labored throughout a number of disciplines, from installations and movie to portray and writing. His work is as distinctive as it’s expansive,” wrote Margaret Carrigan.
Pope.L was recognized particularly for his Crawl sequence, which noticed him transfer on arms and knees throughout giant swathes of New York Metropolis on a number of events between 1978 and 2001; the provocative interventions had a sure shock issue with the general public response elementary to the work. “To start with some folks have been perplexed. Some folks have been pissed off. Some, particularly once I was doing the road model, ignored or prevented me,” he informed us.
Carrigan wrote that Consuming the Wall Road Journal was possibly Pope.L’s most recognisable work, which has been carried out in a number of other ways since 1991, when he first sat on an American flag and began consuming pages of the Wall Road Journal, washing them down with milk and ketchup.
It was a succinct commentary on the US’s glorification of capital and consumption, one made much more poignant when he restaged it on the Museum of Trendy Artwork in 2000 whereas sitting atop a bathroom and masking himself with flour to briefly color his pores and skin white. A brand new model of this work is the centrepiece of his exhibition on the South London Gallery. For this iteration, Pope.L eliminated the stay efficiency ingredient and, as an alternative, three 4m-high picket towers, topped with bogs and in varied phases of collapse, dominate the gallery’s fundamental house.
Different key works embrace I Get Paid to Rub Mayo on My Physique (1991) which concerned the artist smearing mayonnaise throughout his torso in order to provide himself a “bogus whiteness”, difficult as soon as once more perceptions of Blackness. Sitting within the window of New York’s Franklin Furnace artwork house, Pope.L offered himself as a commodity, reflecting the dynamics of the burgeoning artwork market. He usually gave out enterprise playing cards describing himself as “the friendliest Black artist in America”.
The most important museum present of his work opened in 2015 on the Geffen Modern on the Museum of Modern Artwork, Los Angeles. The present included Trinket whereby high-powered air from a sequence of followers triggered the 51-star US flag to fray and collapse over the course of the 14-week exhibition.
Pope.L informed Artforum: “A flag factors a nation. A flag is an amulet—doo-rag image for nationwide booty. Trinkets counsel a previous time. The American flag suggests a past-time. It’s what we do when we aren’t pondering… It’s an object that rifts. It’s a division of—. It’s a dissection of—. It cleaves need right into a design that masquerades as rationality. We name this symbolic capital.”
In accordance with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Newark-born Pope.L studied at Pratt Institute, although lack of funds pressured him to drop out, and later obtained his BA from Montclair State Faculty (Montclair State College) in 1978. He additionally attended the Impartial StudyProgram on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork earlier than incomes his MFA from Rutgers College in 1981. He additionally studied on the Mabou Mines theatre on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan.
Lately his profession gained momentum, mirrored in quite a few high-profile reveals equivalent to Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration, a trio of complementary exhibitions in New York (2019) organised by the Museum of Trendy Artwork, the Whitney Museum of American Artwork and the Public Artwork Fund. MoMA mentioned that Pope L. referred to himself as “a fisherman of social absurdity”.