William Pope.L at Steve Turner

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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.