Pope.L at The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society & Mitchell-Innes & Nash

(Neubauer, Mitchell-Innes & Nash)

Language abstracted to near illegibility would be frowned upon as a cake-and-eat-it-too cop out, the affect of meaning without having say anything at all. But Pope.L makes the illegibility unnerving, like a joke whose punchline we aren't sure we get, the language's refusal to be clear instead affect uncomfort. Aggravating an unspoken racial relation of a violet people.

“No Thing” at Eva Presenhuber

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because though Pendleton's sign shows through, the permutations act to make it safer for consumption, an aesthetic that acts like a packaging, rather than spilling it out on the floor, crawling towards you. Instead petri-dished for white-gloved examination, the pretense that no one has to get dirty.

“No Thing” at Eva Presenhuber

(link)

If laughter was the earthquake alleviating the tension of the joke, then Pope.L's don't really relief its valve. A refusal that turns humor into a weapon where misunderstanding the joke might have risks. "Swiss Are People Lonly." "White Peo abstr ation." Pointed fingers. What are the stakes of misunderstanding? The generalized artworld fear of misinterpretation someone's artwork becomes conflated with the generalized fear of Blackness, of one's foot in one's mouth, of white spaces suddenly filled with an innuendo that doesn't confine itself to safe quotational space of art, the usual polite holding patterns of white walls, and art mumbo treating its signifiers as some archaeologic thing, subject to whatever formalist schooled things that can be thrown at it - the whole Richard Prince affect - but Pope.L's are living breathing wet things, crawling towards a floor near you.

See too: Pope.L at What Pipeline, William Pope.L at Steve Turner, William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

Pope.L at What Pipeline

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If art is some alchemical process for value creation from nothing, then turning poisoned wells into monetary venture is proof; snake-oil sold as a souvenir to the ruse, the artistic swindle is absolved by irony, the buyer "in the know"enjoys the hoax of uselessness: "Flint Water ain’t for drinking, it’s for thinking!" Flint's water is unique afterall, an object of contemplation if there ever was one, lead transmuted to gold.



See too: William Pope.L at Steve Turner, William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

William Pope.L at Steve Turner

(link)

There's a joke here, somewhere, but the joke dissipates abruptly and the punchline, lost, disperses the energy of its expectation to an audience as nervous flatness. This type of joke flips the roles, the performer now audience to reaction, making the best of such jokes just complex enough to contain within the possibility of real punchline hidden and produce doubt, a heightened consciousness of where exactly this all lay, the blankness of its meaning a projectable void that you can stand on many sides of.


See too: William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide



Since our friendly American artist gave up performance, its been objects self-mocking and the context that presents them. I walked into a giant bisected penis in Chicago, the cut slathered in a dry scab of ketchup. Less the crude directness, Pope.L’s comedy in their refusal of expectations, a mastery of not-quite-speaking-it-aloud or abstracted to the point of loss, losing the punchline for the trees, waiting for the forbidden thoughts eruption in nervous dissonance, alluding endlessly to color, grey people, beige milk, speaking every other color but but the one we’re awaiting, allowing the distending of what-is-not-yet-said to inflate like a giant white elephant under the table, a goodbadandugly standoff of who is going to say it first.
Then the press release just goes and says it.