The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 14: Pope.L
What if we felt able to be more reckless? What if we weren’t afraid to make more mess? What if we all challenged our comfort? This time, Charlotte Burns talks to one of her personal heroes, the artist Pope.L. Probably best known for his public performance art or his crawls through city streets, Pope.L uses his body—literally —to ask questions about race and inequality. He’s risked his own safety and physicality for his work, and he isn’t finished yet. When Charlotte asks how messy he’d like to get, he replies: “Oh man, you know, like removing every wall in a space and just having no differentiated areas. That would be one way. The other one would probably be use of outside and inside. Don't make that a differentiation. Right. And then have them agree that we'll do the show in winter. That would be fun!”
Photo credit: Peyton Fulford
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I'm your host, Charlotte Burns, and this is a series all about the future.
[Audio of guests]
My guest today is Pope L., the artist whose practice spans, well, almost everything, from performance to writings; from sculpture to wall works; to work in wood; work in ink to painterly works full of color to collage; assemblage; from works replete and full in every sense to a series literally called The Void (2007).
Pope L. once described another artist as a rumor, and that's how Pope L. appeared to me. I don't know how I first knew of his work—perhaps the now legendary crawl series, maybe the picture of him posing in a Superman outfit—but the more you know about his work, the harder it becomes to capture, given the expansive nature of his practice which seems to hold and refer to all of life and all of death and everything in between.
Pope L., thank you so much for joining me today.
Pope.L:Yeah, I like that bit about referring to all of death. That's a good one.
Charlotte Burns:
It feels like it does. The physicality of the work, the decay of the work, and we're gonna get into that. I've been thinking a lot about your work and about myths and about rumors and realizing that often I come up against this sense that I'm sort of ignorant in the face of it because I find much of it hard to grasp, which is my own sense of limitation. Often the moment I figure something out, a new possibility of understanding or a different layer appears in your work, but wriggling almost out of reach.
So I wanted to ask you about the audience perspective. How much an artist should reveal do you think? I also wanna ask about the artist's perspective, how much you know about the work when you imagine or create it, and how that shifts over time. So I've been thinking how useful or otherwise is ignorance in thinking about your work from your perspective and everyone else's?
Pope.L:
Well, ignorance is useful in that humans typically are coming from that place, whether it's intentional or not. I think we fool ourselves when we think or expect even that there's a fullness to our knowledge. I mean, there are always holes, ruptures, absences, but we create this fiction around knowledge.
That's as much of your question that I remember.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
It was a long one.
For you, how useful is ignorance? I guess this is also kind of related to failure, which I know you've spoken about. Someone asked you during a walkthrough of your recent exhibition at 52 Walker, Impossible Failures (2023), how you got to the end results, and you said desperation, and you also said failure. And I was just thinking, how much do you know of your work when you are creating it? Is it that you have an idea you want to get towards? Do you have a physical sense of the manifestation because you work in so many different media?
Pope.L:
I say the most difficult media is probably people. Most interesting, most frustrating, perhaps. You know, there are all these consciousnesses that have to come together in order to create something. That's why I guess I'm interested in not just art performance but maybe more group activities like theater or filmmaking. But I guess I'm always coming from what I don't know. And if I have a big ‘don't know,’ that is provocative for me.
Charlotte Burns:
You are often referred to as a provocateur, but it seems much deeper than that. More about your capacity to hold several seemingly contradictory ideas at once and in a capacious, generous manner and then the discomfort that that works sometimes embodies and often produces in the viewer who is also often a participant. Most people find it hard to sit with discomfort, and in contrast, your practice seems predicated on your ability to sit deeply with discomfort, and you give viewers an encounter or a possibility of doing the same.
What if we were all able to do more of this? How do you do it? How might people do it? What might happen if we did?
Pope.L:
Well, usually, I find that you have to risk something, you have to give something up, and according to how generous you are, that's what you're gonna get back. The crawls required a lot. I had to give up my verticality. I had to give up my ability to protect myself. I had to give up expectation. I couldn't think about what the next five feet was going to be. If I did, if I started thinking that way, I never would've done it. I mean, there's no way.
Charlotte Burns:
How profoundly did that change you, those crawls?
Pope.L:
I think it made me more tired.
Charlotte Burns:
[Laughter]
I can imagine.
Pope.L:
Definitely that, yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
Especially in the New York heat.
Pope.L:
Yeah. I got kind of beat up. I screwed up my back. I did do that.
Charlotte Burns:
Permanently?
Pope.L:
Yeah, the vertebrae. Because when I was doing it, I had to have my back curved because I'm on my elbows. I did this military-style crawl, so you're constantly with your head up, and you're back in an arch. And I was doing other things at the time that probably didn't help. I was doing a very kind of physical theater at the time as well, and I was doing construction for a lot of it. I think the accumulation changed my body.
Charlotte Burns:
How important is that physical discomfort to you? Because you've said things about stepping into a familial conversation around self-destruction, that you needed to step into it because you hadn't found yourself able to solve it.
And I wondered about that aspect of the kind of erosion of yourself or the possibility of that erosion of parts of yourself physically in order to get somewhere, and the limits of that endurance of duress.
Pope.L:
Yeah, I think it's like if someone had told me, “well, if you do this,” and I did talk to people, doctors, and stuff, but I was a bit stubborn, and when I go into some of these pieces that I know are gonna be problematic physically, I have to suspend judgment. Again, I cannot think about the next five feet. Now other people do that for me, you could say, like my mom or someone like that. When she was alive, you know, she'd check me basically, but I didn't tell her about a lot of the things I did so…and of course, you know, as an adult, you know, you have to make your own decisions. But I thought that for me, during the times I did the longer crawls, homelessness was a really big issue and that it, how would I do that in a way…it didn't match the scale of the problem, but it was, I wanted my commitment to be at the right scale, if you will.
The shorter crawls, in the beginning, were what they were, but the sites were really important, like the Tompkins Square crawl [How Much is that Nigger in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl (1991)] was, was it two weeks or month after they had the riots there and they kicked everybody out of the park because they still had the blockades up and the cops were still patrolling. But that wasn't so much about length as it was about sight. But I think it was a scale thing when I…I did think about it. I didn't just do it, and it took X number of crawls to get to the longer ones. And I just wanna say here, because we're doing like a kind of a public thing that initially it was supposed to be a group crawl, but I couldn't get anybody to do them.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
I didn't know that. I didn't know they were originally conceived that way. I thought they evolved into that.
Pope.L:
No, I was writing grants for them and going to see, you know, gatekeepers of performance programs. And I remember one time I went to a really interesting meeting where the person just said, “No, this is about you. It's not about anybody else but you,” and I said I didn't think of it that way. And they were doing public performance, but I think they're doing mostly objects and stuff like that. But I thought, you know, there's a different kind of way of dealing with the public and there's different kinds of ways of making monuments. They don't have to be the static thing. They can change all the time. And I thought this crawl idea and mass crawls, like the long crawls and the mass crawls, they were getting at an appropriate scale.
Charlotte Burns:
They were getting towards a monumental.
Pope.L:
Yeah, and you have to talk to people about it, you have to maybe adjust your scale to certain bodies, or you have to make certain kind of accommodations, like do you have to crawl the whole five miles? No, you crawl, but you can. If you have children, you can't require them to do the same thing as an 18-year-old.
Charlotte Burns:
I've read that the group crawls, in some way, were kind of a mess. Like you had some kinds of men treating it like a competition or like a race.
Pope.L:
Yes. Yes.
Charlotte Burns:
Or other people thinking that everything was about you when you were trying to situate it in the group, but that for you, it was really important to try to move that work into a group gesture. But that's really interesting because I had no idea that it began in that way. I thought it was something that evolved.
I know that in 1992 you started doing those group works, and you said in 2019, when you did Conquest—which was a kind of blindfolded group crawl through downtown Manhattan—you said that it gave you a different vantage point or different sense of ownership of the work of who it belonged to.
Pope.L:
Yeah. It got out of hand. [Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
Would you do it again?
Pope.L:
That's a really good question. If I did, I mean, it was supposed to be in a different location. You know, working with New York City, it's kind of complicated, and I was working on two other projects almost simultaneously; the MoMA show [member: Pope.L, 1978-2001] and the Whitney [Museum of American Art] choir piece, [Pope.L: Choir (2019)]
So I had to see, okay, how can I adjust to scale again, somewhat about scale. You're dealing with a lot more people, a lot more feelings, a lot more ages. Actually we said we're gonna have to do it through demographics. You know, I don't want just 18-year-olds. I totally don't want 18-year-olds only. I want to have accommodations for older people. I wanna have accommodations for pregnant women, they were a few. And that takes a lot of collaborating, discussion, and compromising. I want it to be in the Bronx. maybe near my mother's house, but that was kind of selfish.But it ended up where it ended up and it's okay. This is a learning thing. So maybe the answer to your question, would I do it again, if I could do it in the Bronx? Yes.
Charlotte Burns:
Why do you wanna do it in the Bronx?
Pope.L:
Well, the Bronx is really open. There’s a really strong Hispanic population, working-class population, Black population. And like I said, for a long time my family lived there.
Charlotte Burns:
It's also relatively flat. I remember that from running through it from the marathon.
Pope.L:
Oh, it's wide open space and there's lots of highways. And getting across a highway with like 150 people would be really an interesting problem to solve.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, absolutely.
It also speaks to this kind of tension that seems to be a feature of your work, which is between attracting and involving the audience and also potentially repelling them.
[A white noise sound]
That was some audio from Pope.L’s work Dust Eater a.k.a. White Woman Eating A Donut (2007-2009/2022). That work was also on show in Impossible Failures, the exhibition at 52 Walker.
I was thinking of Vigilance a.k.a Dust Room (2023), the work you recently did at 52 Walker. It's an enclosed white cube with large air ducts coming out of each side that occupies most of the central space. In it you've captured dust particles that resulted from knocking a wall down, and there are these fans forcibly blowing the dust around and it feels slightly violent and chaotic but you can't touch it. There's a sense that you might, or it might touch you, but you can't touch it. And again, it seemed like this kind of force of repelling and attracting at the same time, something kind of magnetic, I guess in the true sense about the work.
Is that that something you strive for?
Pope.L:
Maybe or I guess probably. I mean, humor sometimes will do that in my other work, like with the crawls where I'm doing something that's very strenuous, but I'm in this ridiculous suit. You know that in some ways some people don't think I should wear because for them, the icon of Superman belongs in white culture. For me to try to own it seems ridiculous, and people would tell me that as I crawled. They would remind me, “Dude, you can't do that.” I'm doing it.
Charlotte Burns:
Whereas for you, it was so personal and to your aunt.
Pope.L:
Yeah but it's also tied to so many people find that icon, if not important, it's a memory tag. It's sutured itself into the culture in such a, an interesting way. I mean, superheroes, the desire to be beyond death through this vicarious deal. I find that interesting. But some people can own that freedom and some people can’t.
Charlotte Burns:
And some people will be reminded of that.
Pope.L:
Yep.
Charlotte Burns:
But what's interesting is thinking about rumor at the beginning, that's something you'd said about Chris Burden, that he existed for you as a rumor. And I realized that for me, I have an image of you standing chest puffed up in the Superman suit that has for me, replaced any other Superman. I can't think of any of the other actors. It's sort of superseded the Superman of the movies in a way.
Pope.L:
I never thought about it. Never thought about the crawls of the long, early, long one. Great right way crawl. Which was the Superman crawl. It's like a long-running TV show.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
It is horizontal.
Pope.L:
Yes. That's how we started. Yes.
Charlotte Burns:
I was gonna talk to you about death, just a nice light topic. That's how we started, we just mentioned it again with Superman. This idea of moving beyond death. Your art seems so often to remind one of the limitations of our existence. There's a lot that phrase, or there's a lot that's under duress, from flags to your body to the contamination of water in the Flint pieces [Flint Water (2017)]or even in Choir.
Do you think about death in your practice? Do you think about death in your life? How much of that sense of the inevitable existential collapse is part of the work?
Pope.L:
In some ways, I think doing the work is a denial of thinking about it because I'm so busy. I keep busy. I was looking on my refrigerator today and there's a picture of my family…it's a long time ago. It's a while ago. Maybe 20 years, maybe more. Anyway, I looked at that picture and I started counting how many people were still alive, and only one of them is, me. My brother is still alive. He wasn't in the picture at the time. Literally, he was out and about. But everybody in that picture who took that picture that day is gone.
Charlotte Burns:How does that feel when you sort of sit with that?
Pope.L:
Well, the funny thing is, I'm looking at this picture and partly it's up there for my son so that he, he met most of these folks, you know, at one time. But he's very young, so his memory is not too sharp. So maybe that's one reason to have it. But it's funny, I didn't, like I said, sometimes I keep busy, so I don't think about death, and I guess a lot of us deal with it that way or you'd sort of do it maybe poetically or some circuitous mode. But when I saw it and I said, well, hadn't I noticed it before? I mean, I noticed it, but it didn't really hit me until I started counting.
Charlotte Burns:
So for you, is art a way of, for you personally, reaching beyond that staking a claim to something ideally beyond that?
Pope.L:
I don't think I'm that brave. I think that it's inevitable that you're going to, well that you're on this journey, right? And we all know how the journey's going to end. Not exactly. Of course. And I think it's a nibbling away at this large thing and it's ridiculous, you know? It's kind of funny in a way, people, but it's really nibbling. It's like your little mouse. Life is this huge piece of cheese and I think all mice are probably like this. People are, their eyes are bigger than their stomachs, and so they just nibble away, nibble away, nibble away, nibble away, nibble, nibble.
Charlotte Burns:
You talked about your work, you were asked by MoMA about how readings of the earlier crawl pieces might change given current and ongoing conversations about the violence done to Black bodies. And you said, “The answer is always the same, survival. Because the history that created the problem is the same. How to unencumber oneself from an institutionalized past that has marked one before one is even in the world.” And you've talked about this feeling the way you do. You've said not just because you're inside a Black male body, but because of the people before and around you who have these bodies designed for you. It's a way to survive by discarding yourself like you're someone else's condom in your own pocket, which you described as a mix of righteous stubbornness and poignancy in that denial.
There's something there about what you said about generations looking at a family photograph, looking about people before you and bodies. You just mentioned your son. Has your thinking around the body shifted?
Pope.L:
I think, you know, when I was younger, I was thinking about this the other day and thinking how I did some of the things that I decided to do. I mean, I always thought about them. I've been reckless, I suppose. But typically, I do think about these things before I do them, and I plan them to the degree that you can control it. But then at a certain point, you have to come to the conclusion. I've done my research. This is as much as I can know now. What do I do now? Do I commit or do I not commit? And when I was younger, I must admit that I thought less, but I always did think there were a lot of people I grew up with, you know, in the street, in the neighborhood. My thought process was much deeper than many of the people I knew. Some of these people would kill people or hurt people very badly. There's no big depth between, “I'm a kill you motherfucker" and killing them. So I was a fucking philosopher compared to these people. But you know, some people might say, oh, it's reckless, but they maybe hadn't met the folks I grew up.
Charlotte Burns:
Did you ever feel reckless? Do you feel reckless?
Pope.L:
I've been accused of it, you know and like I've said before, when I tell the story about doing crawls, especially this, well, the solos and my mother advised me that perhaps I was giving up the wrong message like that I wanted to hurt myself and that I really needed to rethink that and I did change some things in how arranged them or performed them. I mean, it's just certain point I realized when I was planning crawls, am I gonna fucking do this or not? I don't know everything. I can't know everything. Let's give it a shot. Oh, and it got interesting real quick so that I didn't expect.
Charlotte Burns:
You didn't expect it to be so interesting? Or you didn't think five feet ahead, I guess.
Pope.L:
No, I didn't. I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you feel proud of those works now when you think about them? Do you feel pride in your work?
Pope.L:
I don't know. I feel tired when I'm thinking about doing them. I understand better now, my mother's worry like if my son had said, “Okay, Dad, I'm gonna crawl in your shoes,” I’d say, “Wait, look, we should talk about this.” I know what it can do to you and I know it can happen. In a way, by doing them, I was researching them. So, but of course he wouldn't listen probably.
Charlotte Burns:
Such as the nature of generational shift.
Pope.L:
Yes. Yeah. And you know, and at a certain point, I'd have to ask myself, “Are you being a hypocrite?” He needs to find out, but it'd be horrible. I’d say, “Don't tell me.” I'll do to him what I did to my mother. Just don't tell me. Just don't tell me. Tell me after you're done.
Charlotte Burns:
So ignorance is bliss in that scenario.
Pope.L:
In some ways, yeah, in some ways. In some ways.
Charlotte Burns:
If you were gonna do a monument now, what would you do? Would you create something like a performance like that? Would you create something physical and vast and permanent?
Pope.L:
Actually, I'm working on something like that now. I was asked to work this project that's barring decommissioned confederate monuments.
Charlotte Burns:
Oh, Hamza [Walker]’s show.
Pope.L:
Yeah, exactly and I'm involved with that and again, it's one of these journeys. You know, I had a monument that I could mess with and change— so many of them, you can't change, you have to give them back, which is really curious, you know, what are they gonna do with all these things? Just put them in storage and pay for the storage forever? But anyway, I guess it's sort of like radioactivity. So I lost my monument, he told me two weeks ago or a month ago. So I don't have a monument anymore. I'm sort of in the show, but I'm not in the show.
Charlotte Burns:
Did they take it back? Did they change their mind?
Pope.L:
I guess the people who were going to lend it, because myself and Kara Walker, we could physically change ours, but most of them you can’t. That's the agreement. You can borrow them, but you can't physically change them but now I don't have one.
Charlotte Burns:
Guess that is changing in real time the way you think about the show.
Pope.L:
Well, it's again, you know, one of these things like working with Hamza is always, is, it's always gonna be an interesting journey anyway. But I wasn't surprised in a way because if it actually forced me to be, to get real about it more and I realized, well, not having a monument might be a good thing. And then I found out they have these thing called crumbs. Crumbs are like the bolts that secure the monument, things like that. Or they have very wrapping wire or these cast iron straps or something like that and people make them into trophies, at least I've seen a couple. There'll be this bolt and it'll be on this, like a trophy base pedestal and then it'll have like what monument it's from and things like that. A little history and you can buy these people, collect them.
Charlotte Burns:
Did you get to pick your monument? There’s so many.
Pope.L:
Yes, but you know, I think what is only 200 of them are around. No, I have been decommissioned? Is that the number out of 800? Something like that. They are hard to come by. They're so radioactive, lending them is a whole issue. So this show is supposed to happen this year? Yes. But now it's been pushed, so we can really do it. So I might get my monument back, but in a way I don't want it because I had to actually think about this crumb thing.
So I have this idea I'm gonna do with the crumbs and because, you know, these monuments are more about verticality, and I said, I wanna do something more horizontal.
Charlotte Burns:
And also, so much of your work is about the productive lack, I think you've called it, whether that's documentation around performance, whether that's the void, holes. That sounds like an interesting continuation.
Pope.L:
The thing about these crumbs is that I know they're mostly probably cast iron, maybe, I'm not sure, bronze and I was thinking somehow, maybe it's this thing I do by putting things together that rub it a certain way, like the feelers at the end of an insect.
But you know those stores you can go into, GNC?
Charlotte Burns:
I think I've seen the logo.
Pope.L:
Well, they have, they sell body-building protein, shit, all these different concoctions that are supposed to be healthy for your body. Who knows? But I'm thinking of grinding down the crumbs till they're very, very small. And then sort of making my own concoctions of health products, and we can sell them in the gift shop or something.
Charlotte Burns:
I wanna ask you a little bit about how you work with institutions. You've worked with such a huge range of spaces. We're talking now about the show at LAX Art with Hamza Walker and Kara Walker. How does your thinking shift in relation to the institution at hand? You've had these big shows with MoMA, you did Choir with the Whitney recently. You have the show at 52 Walker, and obviously, the performances through space and everything else you do which is vast. How does your thinking sort of scale and shift?
Pope.L:
Well, in some ways, you're working with an institution, you have to learn their way, how they work, and it can be very frustrating. I mean, MoMA is a very complex place. The rules that follows are not my typical rules. There's a learning curve there. But I realized if I was gonna be successful in collaborating with these folks, I had to learn their language and I had to find ways to explain to them why I want to do something. Why and sometimes how. It's better to have both actually. If I could tell them physically how to do it, then sometimes, you know, cause that's what they're wondering and like, how are we gonna do this? It's a crazy idea or silly idea and you have to place it in context. And it took me a while to realize that as a maker of things, the collaboration with your team is really vital. If you want them to follow you, your breadcrumbs have to be very visible.
Charlotte Burns:
That's so interesting.
Do you see yourself as the author, the sort of playwright, and they're your actors? How do you see your role?
Pope.L:
Well, sometimes, you know, as the leader of the project, sometimes you're not leading. I think of a friend of mine and Jim, you know, watching Jim run a meeting was very eye-opening. You know, he's really good. Just watching how he confers agency to the group and how fun it can be. I never thought of it that way when we were younger, that's when we're in our twenties and it was a gift. He just would do it. He didn’t train to do that. It's just something he has.
Charlotte Burns:
I'm curious about the acquisition MoMA made of your performance objects, which then led to the member performance survey exhibition.
I imagine there were some quite specific instructions and discussions about how those performative objects live on and express their posterity, the memory of them in that museum context. Did that keep them more alive for you or did it memorialize them for you?
Pope.L:
Well, I think it's two things. I think that allowing other people to see them and to be with them instead of just me and they're in some storage, in a way that's kind of silly and it's an opportunity. It's according to how MoMA will take care of the memory of those things and the physicality.
And I've seen how they've done shows like a Joseph Beuys show would be apropo maybe to what I do. I'm more techy than he was, but is a roughness to what I do. And my work is about a kind of, I think you've mentioned in your notes, your question, decay and absence. But if they can be good shepherds of the material and they think they can, I mean, museums fuck up. Some people say that they only fuck up, but if they fuck up the right way, maybe it's okay. So hopefully they’ll fuck up the right way.
Can you curse on your show?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, of course you can.
Pope.L:
I just threw myself into the fucks.
Charlotte Burns:
Throw yourself with abandoned. That's totally fine.
You talked about the decay, but you said once you were told that your work borrow relation to Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, and you said, “once I looked up their work, I denied any connection. Ha. They were already packaging up their mess for the galleries in the museums, whereas I wasn't thinking about that.”
Now, obviously you are thinking about that with MoMA, you've had to sort of package up that mess. But I guess what you're talking about more is the saleability and the consumerization of the work?
Pope.L:
Just a quick answer is like, unlike those people, they have specific, what would you call 'em? I guess they are series like I don't, I don't think in terms of series, I think in terms of sets of things. Until you have a set, you know, and within a circle you have this uncountable number of things. I work from one look to another, look to another, look, to another look. I find that McCarthy and Kelley, they pretty much work in series, one thing after another, after another, after another and that way. I don't do that. So even though I've tried to put some mess into institutional situations, I really haven't had the chance to really go at it. In some ways I guess 52 Walker, even though the mess is controlled to a certain degree. I like the idea they gave me that I could, you know, like MoMA, leaving the dust on the floor can be a problem, from a hole you made. So I think that was more of an expression of what I'd like to do with mess if I had a chance to.
Charlotte Burns:
How messy would you make it if you could?
Pope.L:
Oh man. I would make it safe. Maybe. Mostly. But you know, like removing every wall, in a space and just having no differentiated areas. That would be one way. The other one would probably be use of outside and inside like don't make that a differentiation and then have them agree that it, we will do the show in winter.
[Laughter]
Oh, that would be fun. People have their coats on, they can, we have milk chocolate and shit, you know, and just hang out but they'll never, they'll never agree to that. You know, they'll never agree to that.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you have a they in mind?
Pope.L:
Oh, I’d go back to MoMA. I'll do a second, I'll do a matinee with them.
Charlotte Burns:
A winter matinee.
Pope.L:
Yes. A winter matinee. Open up the whole of the first floor. But that would be a big ask.
Charlotte Burns:
Especially because some of those walls are new.
Pope.L:
Yeah. But it'd be an interesting show though, I think.
Charlotte Burns:
I think so too. And also this reaches deeper into your relationship with land and who land belongs to and the resources of the land as well.
Pope.L:
Yeah, I think I could do more. I've been thinking about how to be more invested and who has what, who can own what? Who can be what? And does it have to even be a what?
Charlotte Burns:
Which is something you've been concerned with since, I'm thinking of works like the ATM piece (1997) where you've positioned yourself chained to Chase Bank wearing a skirt of money, which you tore off and gave away, or eating the Wall Street Journal. So much is about power and power is shaped by money.
Have your perspective on that changed given the sort of durational aspects of some of those performances, ways of thinking? Is it related to something you said recently about, you know, you're moving towards a position where you're trying to create something that you can't even encompass yourself, this ambition to be more than you are.
Pope.L:
Maybe it's not to be more than, it's to challenge my own comfort about what I can encompass, you know? And then you come up with something that you could never have conceived of previously. So you surprise yourself. Maybe you learned something, maybe you ruined something. Maybe you fuck up something.
Charlotte Burns:
So can I ask you, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and the one that motivates you to get up in the morning?
Pope.L:
I worry about my kid, I guess. Worrying about someone is interesting for me. I mean, there was so much stuff going on in my family at one time that if I actually allowed myself to worry, I wouldn't have done nothing and I had to find a way to compartmentalize it or whatever the word is. Maybe that's sometimes why I work so hard, I don't know. But having your kid is different, you know, and being in love is different because you know that whole thing, you worry about those people. And, but for him, because, you know, he's, I know he's a teen, I know that he is strong, but still.
Getting up in the morning, I don't know. I still have these times, they're not as frequent as they used to, but sometimes I just will stop and go, this is a great place.
Charlotte Burns:
Why are they not as frequent?
Pope.L:
Because I worry more.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
The nights are longer.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time.
Pope.L:
No problem, babe. It was really nice talking to you, Charlotte.
Charlotte Burns:
Thanks so much to Pope.L for that brilliant conversation.
You can hear more about Hamza Walker’s upcoming confederacy monument exhibition by checking out episode two of our documentary podcast, The Art World: Hope & Dread, “American History Axed.”
Next time, I’m in Potomac, Maryland exploring one of the largest and most ambitious recent private museums, talking to its co-founder and director, Emily Rales.
Emily Rales:
Once you come through, we arrive at the bridge and this is kind of a threshold between the commotion of the outside world and entering this kind of sacred precinct of architecture and nature.
Charlotte Burns:
I can already feel my senses relax.
Emily Rales:
Oh, good.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
So join us from Glenstone Museum next time on The Art World: What If…?!
The podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.