Sub-Rural, #64 Pope.L

 

Pope.L’s lengthy and productive career, regrettably cut short in 2023, is catalogued as conceptualist, activist, poet, performer, conjurer, and quasi-ethnographer. The artist was a radical progeny of Fluxus with keen rebukes of institutions, cultural or municipal, who frequented the space between the margins of DIY practice and materialist raconteur.. He was an artist who walked in the shadow of Mikhail Bakhtin and Virginia Wolf, and waded recklessly in the “new waves” of  French film and American punk rock. He dispensed installations with a restorative measure of neo-Dada, and shaded them with insurgent neo-vernacularism. Before Corbett vs Dempsey’s current salute to some of the last years of his work Chicagoans had to search elsewhere  for greater evidence of his practice and influences despite his 13 year s at the University of Chicago. With formerly unseen work in “No Thing Skin Sets” one anticipated that the artists’ first solo exhibition in Chicago would offer clues to where the artist was driving in his last days. The show does provide intermittent streams of his enigmatic research.

Pope.L has been lauded in the last decade for subjects of race, language, and culture at large where his flexibility with multiple mediums became increasingly popular with coastal dealers and curators. His impact on the public and other artists led him to enjoy career defining shows at the Whitney, MoMA and Documenta.

His work was exceptional for all the right reasons. Significant artists of his generation have multiple returns to stages of their work. CvsD includes a number of gaps and cross references from early and mid-career work that submit humor, formal restraint, and conceptual reexamination. But Pope.L’s short life provides a limited view of what should have been at the very least another decade of erudite production and experimentation. The exhibition is a chamber of intricate problems to be solved, a treasure hunt of object love, word play, and systems reorder..

Pope.L was an assiduous student of art history and philosophy. He was not careerist or marvelous but genuinely absorbed with culture beyond the axis of the academic and popular. His best work blended ordinary and difficult with sacred and profane by being strategic and disinterested. He practiced cultural inquiry extending from Flint, Michigan to Athens, Greece and back. Such geographic and cultural sweep made his attention difficult to localize, even triangulate. He honed a virtual parallax vision, attending to more than one degree of perspectival angle inserted linguistically or formally into collective desire.

He was the best example of what’s required to achieve in contemporary art, not only being multi-disciplinary and multi-logical, but stealthy and radically fun, even in a world filled with impediments like environmental racism, labor inequities, and other examples of repression embedded in  society. He leaned into satire and caricatured a demonstratively unjust nation armed with paradox, corruption, and abuse. Pope.L uncovered duplicity thriving on the intersection of the artworld and real world. He disparaged the profusion of all hierarchical structures and the prosperity embedded in normal/white experience with irony and uncomfortable reflections on the predicaments of those with “have not ness.”

The exhibition title, “No Thing Skin Sets” is derived in part from a series of early works on paper titled “Skin Sets.” Pope.L constructed hundreds of text-based drawings loaded with puerile affronts with to race, nationality, or conduct. The pieces illuminate how art and language can propagate even if disengaged from logic, how it still has cultural authority even without validation. In a work like “Black People are Partially Burned Fuel” a barbed description or an ethnic dismissal is to be parsed, but to what end? Reading handmade broadside banners plant an unrefuted seed in one’s consciousness not unlike Jenny Holzer’s inflammatory truisms which incriminated the public at large. Removed from a “Time Square” context and infiltrating the intimate artworld space with phobic innuendo was one way to cue the sometime skewed etiquette of traditional conceptualism. With “Skin Sets” hanging art alone is an act of faint irreverence. Pope.L was no stranger to tongue in cheek militancy.

The artist’s early New York City crawls, his “Skin Sets” series, and “I Machine” all forecast the alternately physical and analytical disposition of “No Things.” Each of the artist’s actions parody and literalize abstraction then quietly deconstruct subject and status. “Skin Sets’’ embody and then blur false equivalencies and “I Machine’s” performative sculpture surrenders secular materials in Pope.L’s absence.

Among Pope.L’s circuitous career filled with stigmas of subservience there is a method of reflective subtlety and performance collaboration that’s curiously ceremonial. There’s also an investigation of affordable mediatized objects that thankfully recall more than our current event nausea and brings us home to Fluxus. Rare interviews reveal a demeanor that convert winding interrogations into street corner conversation that tell as much about the interlocutor than the artist. Pope.L maneuvers around questions, sometimes appearing uncomfortable and/or self-deprecating, then suddenly, bored with a Warhol glint that recodes the file document. Toying with art protocol spoofs others detained at the border of hipness and world-weariness.

Pope.L’s collaborative performances summon W.E.B. DuBois as well as Andre Breton and license public discourse under the supervision of Pope.L logic – a method more concerned with resisting critique and surveying the immediate environment. An uncanny idealism incorporates event narratives as beautiful, labored, and as wistful as recitations. Both shamanistic and secular, his was a redemptive way to unravel an artworld that cannot distinguish itself as a sovereign body of new knowledge rather than a affiliate of popular entertainment or sinking vessel of antiquity.

Photos by Robert Chase Heishman for Bob