#William Pope.L

[dislocatedwishbone]

Hole Theory

William Pope.L // @selkielore // Anne Carson // Jenny Holzer // Thomasin Frances ( @saintbronte ) // Jenny Holzer & Louise Bourgeois // Anne Carson // Marco Poloni // Midtown // Yohji Yamamoto

#here's that web i promised u guys <3 #my webs #hole theory #ouroboros #anne carson #lit #words #William Pope.L #thomasin frances #midtown #gabe saporta #jenny holzer #louise bourgeois #yohji yamamoto #art #dark academia #im so sorry that my old b*ndom brain made it into my hole theory post but. so long as we keep our bodies numb is a hole theory song im sorry

[notchainedtotrauma]

William Pope. L, September 19, 2020 (e)

Acrylic, ink, ballpoint, and charcoal on paper

William Pope. L, September 20, 2020 (b),

Acrylic, ink, ballpoint, and charcoal on paper

William Pope. L, On the Eve of the Election,

Acrylic, painter's tape, ballpoint or pencil, charcoal, post-it

#William Pope.L #visual art: when Black artists create #color theory #light and such #texture: a feeling #the Black fugitive as the shape of mystery

[jacobwren]

William Pope.L, A Vessel in a Vessel in a Vessel and So On, 2007. Pirate lady statue; Martin Luther King, Jr. plaster bust; wood; pump; light; chocolate; 3 x 3 x 10 feet. Unique.

#william pope.l #pope.l.

[moniameluzzi]

#William Pope.L

[genderoutlaws]

what's hole theory? the tag just has a punch of (really cool) multimedia posts, and when i googled it i got a bunch of stuff about physics? unless we've undergone some grand cultural uprooting when i turned my back, i can't say i particularly associate gay people with quantum mechanics

i think yr a bit confused in that it’s not like an inherently gay thing just bc i shared it to this blog lol, i shared the piece bc it happened to be by a trans artist. but yeah anyways i believe the tumblr obsession started with this post (? correct me if im wrong) from 2021 which mirrors the dirac hole theory in part but within a more philosophical realm — Hole Theory is also the name of a 2002 text by William Pope.L detailing a modality that largely defined his practice, that suggests that lack is also a source of value. i’m not sure if the tumblr strain of hole theory is at all inspired by this but it should be incorporated into it tbh.

William Pope.L’s piece ends on this note “…this theory could only come from someone who lacks something as a political condition. Hole Theory engages lack across economic and cultural and political boundaries. LACK IS WHERE IT’S AT.”

(i also really enjoyed this piece on the hauntology of holes by Kim Beil that mentions Pope.L’s work)

edit: Anne Carson had a theory of holes as well !

#asks #anonymous #hole theory #anyways yall should look into pope.l rlly amazing artist #hes done some really affective performance art

[nskdossier]

Pope.L

“For Pope.L, crawling on the street is a way to direct our attention to a world out of view, specifically, to the world of anyone who has lost “verticality”—a term that he uses to describe the function of being wealthy enough, or healthy enough, to remain upright and in motion.”

William Pope.L is an American artist, known for his performance work but is not limited to that medium. Speaking of his performance art, he is best known for his crawl, where the artist gets on the ground and crawls around, he plays with costuming and various settings around New York. Exhibited at the MoMa during 1978-2001 a video of the artist is seen during his crawling. The act of the crawl is meant to disturb and take up space with a humorous approach. During one of these crawls a bystander became furious with Pope.L and decided to bring police to intervene because the suit the artist donned on this crawl was the same one the bystander wears for work, which threatened the man and made him “look like a jerk”. 

“To not move at the same rhythm of the city is a form of resistance. For some people, that’s a smack in the face. What do you mean, you’re not working? The mythology of the city is about this energy, this forward movement, but the pace I was moving was not an acceptable pace.”

This performance piece really speaks on the unwritten rule of avoiding gaze with those who have experienced homelessness or who don't appear as the typical new yorker. When somebody is crawling on the streets in NYC in a superman costume you are meant to look at that absurdity instead of viewing other humans as absurd and other.

Pope.L also creates collages made up with public domain images during the nineteenth century and “re-photographs” them. He Inserts himself as the figure-head for the modern black man into these images, which really highlights the absurdity let alone cruelty of that era. When looking at these collages you cannot avoid race and you can't avoid the mistreatment black people have and will continue to face Pope.L will make sure of it.

[lanuitlennuie]

je découvre l’existence de William Pope.L (né en 1955) en même temps que sa mort (23 décembre 2023). Ici en juillet 1991, dans une de ses traversées new-yorkaises rampant proche de Tompkins Square Park.

[unmithridate]

william pope.l

[spaceintruderdetector]

What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming altogether, making nothings rather than somethings? What would be the ethical value of making nothing, of stalling becoming; and how might such nothings even be made?Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art borrows its understanding of apparatuses from quantum mechanics and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and its understanding of nothing from apophatic (negative) theology. It then proposes a new way of understanding art, applying this understanding to artworks by Arakawa and Gins, Robert Fludd, David Crawford, Joshua Citarella, William Pope.L, and Haim Steinbach. Philosophy, physics, theology, and media theory are traversed and involved in order to understand art differently so that it might be made to matter more.

Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art : Curt Cloninger : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

#alfred north whitehead #art theory #art #philosophy #cultural theory

[tynatunis]

Dans l'appartement new-yorkais du designer Brian McCarthy et de Daniel Sager, le salon est orné d'une œuvre évocatrice de l'influent artiste allemand Albert Oehlen photo 1. "Nous avons tous les deux eu une réaction immédiate, à couper le souffle, lorsque nous avons vu cette œuvre", explique Brian McCarthy. Une peinture texte irrévérencieuse de Mel Bochner apporte une note ludique au-dessus d'une cheminée du XVIIIe siècle, photo 2 Une œuvre d'art monumentale de William Pope.L préside la salle à manger. Le tableau de la fenêtre est l'œuvre de Walter Price. Photo 3 The gallerylike central hallway features a Patrice Dangel plaster and bronze light fixture above an Alma Allen sculpture and a painting by Jonathan Lyndon Chase. View 5 In the entry hall of the New York apartment of Brian McCarthy and Daniel Sager, a colorful Günther Förg painting (right) is joined by a Patrice Dangel plaster-and-bronze chandelier, a canvas by Doron Langberg, and a sculpture by Alma Allen. View 6 Located on 57th Street, in a 1922 building across from Carnegie Hall, the two-bedroom apartment has gone through three significant renovations since McCarthy moved in 23 years ago. That’s not counting the constant art and furnishings updates, or “evolutions,” as the designer likes to describe them. “It’s fun because I’m constantly collecting, and so there’s always something coming and going.” PHOTO : FRANCESCO LAGNESE. STYLISÉ PAR CAROLYN ENGLEFIELD Repost @galeriemagazine https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl-aZ5Ctnfv/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[longlistshort]

Willie Cole, “American Domestic”, 2016, Digital Print

(Tom Laidman, “Broadway”, 1993 and “Bois Ma Petite”, 1999, Lithograph on paper)

Currently on view at Akron Museum of Art is RETOLD: African American Art and Folklore, a collection of art from the Wesley and Missy Cochran collection, organized into themes exploring aspects of African American history and culture. The show features many well known and lesser known artists including Amiri Baraka, Beverly Buchanan, Willie Cole, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Pope.L., Tom Laidman, Jacob Lawrence, Alison Saar and more.

From the museum about the exhibition-

African folklore has been around as long as humankind, and the African diaspora in America has added new dimensions to its rich history. African American folk stories teach about culture, the mysteries of life, and the survival of a race of people bought and sold who continue to thrive in an unjust society.

“RETOLD: African American Art and Folklore” focuses on four themes: Remembering, Religion, Racialization, and Resistance. These themes provide a comprehensive retelling of the works featured in the exhibition. In many of the pieces, the artist’s muse connects closely with stories that have been told generation after generation. Folklore texts are featured throughout the space as a means to retell a richer, deeper story of African American culture.

There are more than forty artists represented in this exhibition, all holding one similar truth: their story of joy and struggle in the African American experience.

In addition to the artwork, there is also an educational video produced by Josh Toussaint-Strauss of The Guardian that explores the misconceptions about Haitian Voudou that is worth a watch.

How ‘voodoo’ became a metaphor for evil

#Akron Art Museum #Willie Cole #Tom Laidman #African American History #Akron Art Shows #Alison Saar #Amiri Baraka #Art #Art Shows #Beverly Buchanan #Collage #Drawing #Film and Video #Jacob Lawrence #Josh Toussaint-Strauss #Mixed Media #Mixed Media Art #Ohio Art Shows #Painting #Photography #Pope L. #Printmaking #Prints #Sculpture #Trenton Doyle Hancock #Vodou #Voodoo #William Pope.L #Youtube

[freshdotdaily]

RIP, Pope L

Artist Pope.L, famous for his crawling performances, dies aged 68. (1955-2023)

The American artist Pope.L, famous for performances in which he crawled through the gutters of busy American streets, has died aged 68, his gallery confirmed.

William Pope.L, often known as Pope.L, was a contemporary American artist, educator, and interventionist. Born on June 29, 1955, in Newark, New Jersey, Pope.L is known for his multidisciplinary approach, incorporating performance art, painting, drawing, installation, and video into his practice.

Pope.L gained recognition for his provocative and politically charged performances that engage with issues of race, class, and social justice. One of his notable works is the ongoing "Crawl" series, where he crawls long distances through various public spaces, often wearing a Superman costume or a business suit.

When Pope.L was 11, his grandmother introduced him to a portrait painter whose house she was employed to clean, and who encouraged him to draw.

Pope.L first studied at the prestigious Pratt University before a lack of funds forced him to drop out; after taking factory jobs he ended up at Montclair State University.

His art often challenged societal norms and conventions, encouraging viewers to question their assumptions about race, identity, and power. Pope.L's work has been exhibited internationally, and he has received numerous awards for his contributions to contemporary art.

Referring to himself as “a fisherman of social absurdity,” Pope.L has employed a variety of strategies to explore complicity, power, race, class, gender, and embodiment.

In Fall of 2022, Supreme put together a special collaborative collection with Pope.L. Comprised of a T-shirt and two skateboards, the garments feature imagery from some of the artist’s evocative works. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, artworks showcased include The Great White Way: 22 Miles, 5 Years, 1 Street (2001-09, Performance), A.T.M. Piece (1997, Digital c-print, 10 by 15 in.), and Tan Police (2018-19, Acrylic, Oil, Charcoal, Coffee, Ballpoint Ink, Graphite, Foam Letter, Push Pins on Paper, 44 by 30 in./111.8 by 76.2 cm).

Rest well, black man.

#Youtube

[notchainedtotrauma]

The epigraph of this poem is the following: for those at the other end of the whip in the pageantry of race play. Indeed, this poem is my personal attempt to grapple with the jouissance that some Black people derive from race play, and to pry open my terror and defiance.

William Pope.L, Real Kitsch #5

David Hammons, Untitled

Steffani Jemison, Same Time

The works of art above best visually describe the poem. Here are some excerpts:

For a labyrinth of scars, bristled voices. Rinsing a tongue hysteric: negative only to itself.

Muscles crinkle against low pitched meat; an avocado pit between spotty hips.

and

Those are bodies you cannot find burning with absence, the dampness of the crease.

Plangent throats are made to work; the friction between frothy paint and puckered liver. 

and

Young Black women in petite breath and a rusted gun. Down the leg, cinnamon bark.

They buckle against the splintered glass, a snow fleck of smoke. Someone wants it bad.

#my brain is writing

[altrbody]

The Hole (Notes): William Pope.L's Hole Theory

by Thom Donovan

In William Pope.L’s book, Hole Theory, the artist writes:

What I mean by having Something is the fantasy That having is possessing [and]* That possessing is knowing

Therefore this sort of theorizing/[deodorizing] Could only come from someone Who believes in having things As a political condition

Conversely, this theory Could only come from someone Who lacks something As a political condition

Hole Theory engages lack Across economic and cultural And political boundaries [Lack is where it’s AT]

1. Between having

and not having things as a fantasy of possession, Pope.L cleaves lack as a cultural, political, and economic condition (of possibility). Theory (seeing, knowing) becomes founded on lack; theorization risks “deodorization”–desensitization and senselessness.

2. For Pope.L,

how could one work otherwise as an African-American artist working out of the multiculturalism of the 80s? Via abjection (for instance, uses of waste materials, perishables, excrement in some cases) and ironic performance (crawling Manhattan sidewalks in a Superman costume, ‘wearing’ a 5 ft. long PVC pipe from his groin while strolling around Harlem) Pope.L attacks any easy affirmation of (African-American) identity.

3. One could

say that he “deconstructs“ it; perhaps it is better to say that he is drawing on negative characterization in ways that draw-out both white-centric mis/understandings and fears of Blackness, as well as Black fears of being understood (for fear of re/possession?).

4. Pope.L also

draws upon the association of African-American Blackness with homelessness, drug addiction, and insanity (the fate of many of the artist’s family members).

5. Perhaps, a

la Fred Moten’s brilliant book In the Break, it could be said of Pope.L that he is drawing upon a radical Black aesthetic of “combativeness,” where to antagonize (or in Adrian Piper’s term “cataylze”) engages lack, negativity, and antimony as the starting point for theorization.

6. Central to

the production of Blackness (as Moten also points out), is that which is irreducible to African-American history alone, though particularized by African diasporic cultures (is Blackness not then the condition of all struggle, insurrection, contestation in lieu of domination, persecution, genocide? The singular case substituting for the universal?).

7. That aesthetic

expression makes visible contradiction—being opposed, being against—lacking belonging, lacking home or a being ‘at home’ from which overcoming or transcendence might be accomplished.

8.

Hole Theory affirms what Tyrone Williams in his poem “I Am Not Proud to be Black” calls “sublime despair,” and what Theodor Adorno idealizes as a “methexis of the tenebrous” (the catastrophe of thought/theorization that potentializes art for the utopian—abandoned futures, futures not imagined or unimaginable).

9. When Adorno

writes in his table of contents to Aesthetic Theory the heading “Black as Ideal,” I want to take Black both as hue and in terms of a social condition which embraces shadiness to produce the catastrophe of thinking which art should affirm in order for it to overturn the order of the current world/to affirm other worlds.

10. The idealization

of Black affirms one’s participation in the shady, the opaque, absurd, incomprehensible. Through it this world flickers with an other/other ones.

11. Cross-outs of

language under erasure—holding in suspension both language’s necessity and inadequacy—become more like venetian blinds, or the aperture of a camera rapidly opening and closing, albeit soundlessly (senseless in the best possible sense).

*The above quotation

is taken from a facsimile of Pope.L’s book, Hole Theory, reproduced in William Pope. L: the Friendliest Black Artist in America (MIT Press, 2002). Brackets indicate language that has been hand-written into and at times over the type-set text.

#thom donovan #hole theory #popeL #art #poetry

[franhitzke]

William Pope.L (b. 1955 United States)

When researching exclusion and minorities, I have come across the work of artist William Pope.L, whose monumental 'Times Square Crawl' in 1978 has been written about from so many different perspectives, but I found an article that really interested me.

Image source: https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/301/3903

Joanna Fiduccia of Shift Journal wrote about Pope.L's performance work from the context that it can also be considered Land Art. With the exclusion of World Artists' from its midst, Land Art is predominantly a white mans' realm, taking shape as installations formed from the earth and natural surrounds of the site.

A constant constraint within the Art World is how works are determined based on their "belonging" to the institute. If exclusivity preludes desire or iconography, then they can't just let "any" art or artist in; and if they did, how would the category, the exhibition or the museum maintain its status?

This exclusion can also be seen through the lens of oppression, bolstered boundaries to ensure that no minority can ever achieve a sense of belonging. Pope.L is an African American man, an overlooked race, marginalised because of their colour, his actions in this work are exaggerated, exposed, ringent; making him doubly visible, a gamble for a hopeful outcome.

References

Fiduccia, J. (2015). Lacks Worth Having: William Pope.L and Land Art. Shift Journal. http://shiftjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2_Fiduccia.pdf

Pope.L, W. (1978). Times Square Crawl. https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/301/3903

[thechowk]

Crawling Through New York City with the Artist Pope.L | The New Yorker

Meanwhile, the performance artist William Pope.L has spent thirty years devising ways to disrupt our inattentive ways of seeing. He just wants us to look down, for once.

Meanwhile, the performance artist William Pope.L has spent thirty years devising ways to disrupt our inattentive ways of seeing. He just wants us to look down, for once. Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash See more of his work here.

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#Art #New York #Performance #Performance Art