The main seat of the spatial consciousness
in western culture today still lies
in the plastic arts.
- David Harvey
in western culture today still lies
in the plastic arts.
- David Harvey
What are the clues to understanding
architectural spaces that are shaped
through hardcore experiences of being "raced?"
-Kara Walker
The map has to do with the performance.
-Deleuze and Guattari
No longer seated in front of the spectacle,
they are instead surrounded by the performance,
dragged into the circle of action,
which gives them back their collective energy.
-Jacques Rancière
William Pope.L is an American black artist who vitalizes bottom-up notions of the right to the city. He embraces what he calls an "aesthetic of have-not-ness" to reflect on the urban poor’s experience with uncertainty and chaos. He literally gives up his verticality to engage the lower depths. His crawls throughout New York City respond tactically to various social contradictions, including homelessness, American Manicheanism, common sense racism, and American imperialism. He first started doing guerilla street theatre in the late-1970s with the performance piece Thunderbird Immolation (1978). In this street performance, Pope.L sits and meditates from across the street of a fashionable gallery in the then-developing SoHo district, dressed in a suit and bow tie. To invoke normalized racial anxieties, he scatters around him cigarettes and liquor bottles associated to homeless blacks. These objects formed a ring, as if they were spiritual charms. Spectators dragged into the performance witness Pope.L disengage from the material world, zen-like, to mentally elevate above and beyond all the enclosing high and lowbrow commodities surrounding him. Security guards from the Mary Boone Gallery no sooner ask him to leave, but by that time Pope.L implicated onlookers and the built environment into the drama of urban dispossession through the manipulation of cultural symbols.
In 1978, likewise, Pope.L took to the streets in Midtown Manhattan to perform Times Square Crawl, a direct urban intervention intended to reveal the naturalized invisibility of homelessness throughout the city. Here Pope.L sluggishly crawled thorough a Times Square intersection, intentionally clogging traffic and creating commotion. That way the symbolic commercial district was forced to reckon for that moment with homelessness. People had to see what had always been underneath their noses; their sense of time had to be altered by it. That’s how Pope.L’s performances rhizomatically goes to work against all fixed meanings in American society: he ruptures and connects the city into his critical oeuvre, which is for the most part full of conflict and contradiction.
In 1978, likewise, Pope.L took to the streets in Midtown Manhattan to perform Times Square Crawl, a direct urban intervention intended to reveal the naturalized invisibility of homelessness throughout the city. Here Pope.L sluggishly crawled thorough a Times Square intersection, intentionally clogging traffic and creating commotion. That way the symbolic commercial district was forced to reckon for that moment with homelessness. People had to see what had always been underneath their noses; their sense of time had to be altered by it. That’s how Pope.L’s performances rhizomatically goes to work against all fixed meanings in American society: he ruptures and connects the city into his critical oeuvre, which is for the most part full of conflict and contradiction.
In 1991, upon the City of New York’s determination to remove the homeless from Tompkins Square Park, a violent confrontation between the police and the homeless ensued. Pope.L soon afterwards performed a crawl near the site of conflict. He wore a business suit, and crawled under a scorching sun, clutching a flowerpot in his hand. The performance caught the attention of a black man who initially thought Pope.L was in trouble. The man first offered to help him but then quickly realized the whole scene was choreographed. He confronted Pope.L’s videographer, who was white, asking him why he was recording a black man on the ground suffering. Things quickly got hostile. The onlooker realized Pope.L was making a statement with the film, and he didn’t like that that statement mocked black upward mobility. The third space Pope.L designed into the cityscape troubled his sense of identity. He told Pope.L that he himself worked hard to wear a suit, and that he wasn’t going to stand and let him make fun of his struggle. Pope.L, on the other hand, was acting out Malcolm X’s adage about black men in suits: that no matter if a black man wears a suit, he’s still a nigger. Considering the top-down removal of the homeless in Thompkins Square Park, what Pope.L was commenting on was the fraught nature of verticality, especially for blacks.
Another rhizomatic entry point to consider in Pope.L’s street performances is the philosophical cartography and decalcomania his body impresses on the materiality of the city. Brute sweat, and perhaps even blood, work as discursive inscriptions on the pavement, advocating for spatial justice in the city. Further, still, is the early iteration of Eating the Wall Street Journal, where Pope.L layered decalcomania straight from the gut. For this performance, he sat on an American flag in front of an administrative building and ate the Wall Street Journal, blending the newspaper’s toxins with the organisms in his entrails. Again on this occasion he wore a business suit, only here he was questioning another middle-class signifier: the newspaper of the American elite and the American dream in general. It's all a sham, Pope.L seems to make out. Middle-class possessions can't promise middle-class status. Commercial culture is fraudulent. Nothing measures up. American ideals are racialized and upside-down.
And that's what he also communicates in his other tactical street performances.
After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, in the course of nine years, Pope.L dressed up as Superman and crawled from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx. Pictures show him writhing on the floor with the New York City skyline as a backdrop, suggesting the tenuous nature of empire. Or, when dressed as a white bunny in Harlem, he pushes an enormous-white-tube-on-wheels. It stood for a giant white penis in the middle of a black neighborhood and it worked to bizarrely re-signify the myth of the black phallic.
Overall, in the guerilla street theatre of William Pope.L, everyday two-dimensional representations are turned on their heads, and the public is invited to heighten, in Lefebvrian fashion, their third space perceptions, conceptions, and lived experiences.
And that's what he also communicates in his other tactical street performances.
After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, in the course of nine years, Pope.L dressed up as Superman and crawled from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx. Pictures show him writhing on the floor with the New York City skyline as a backdrop, suggesting the tenuous nature of empire. Or, when dressed as a white bunny in Harlem, he pushes an enormous-white-tube-on-wheels. It stood for a giant white penis in the middle of a black neighborhood and it worked to bizarrely re-signify the myth of the black phallic.
Overall, in the guerilla street theatre of William Pope.L, everyday two-dimensional representations are turned on their heads, and the public is invited to heighten, in Lefebvrian fashion, their third space perceptions, conceptions, and lived experiences.
Trans-textual References
- Kurt Iveson, "Cities within the City: Do-It-Yourself Urbanism and the Right to the City."
- Henri Lefebvre, La Droit à la ville.
- Maria Daskalaki and Oli Mould, "Beyond Urban Subcultures: Urban Subversions as Rhizomatic Social Formations."
- Oli Mould, "Tactical Urbanism: The New Vernacular of the Creative City"
- David Harvey, "The Right to the City."
- David Harvey, Social Justice and the City.
- Kara Walker, Ruffneck Constructivists (curatorial statement). Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.
- Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
- Jacques Rancière, "The Emancipated Spectator."
- Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture.
- Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness.