“Art hurts. Art urges voyages – / and it is easier to stay at home…” -Gwendolyn Brooks
In William Pope.L’s exhibition William Pope.L: Trinket currently on view at MOCA Geffen in Los Angeles, language competes with silence, or language is silent, or silence is language. Then again, language competes with wind, silence competes with wind, or wind is language. Wind connects the viewers in the room with the blindfolded performers, with the hundreds of onions, uncut, like a massive suppression of tears. The onions, painted boldly and arranged mostly on tables, have already begun their internal collapses, but their flesh are intact, so anyway if we do cry, maybe it’s that the wind is too strong, or the questions are too painful, such as those prompted by the massive American flag (with a rogue 51st star), flapping wildly, tattering slowly, and looking very far from the neat, classroom-corner version most Americans probably grew up pledging. I’m grateful to Pope.L for making me remember to question a pledge I haven’t uttered in ages. Standing before the beautiful-maniacal flag that whips with the force of four, industrial-sized, film set fans, I felt weighted by the pledge’s all that means something different for many Americans in light of the proclaimed liberty and justice we are supposed to all receive.
Plenty of us have a complex relationship to the flag; for instance, at a talk I attended last month at MOCA, Pope.L revealed that the company that manufactured his flag afterwards refused to sew on the 51st star—were they frightened by the question an extra star provokes? The artist, who is African American, also spoke about his own history with the flag: “Growing up as a young black man who is radicalized you are supposed to hate this thing, but somehow I accepted this flag as something that was part of me too.” Perhaps his “part of me” sentiment speaks to the problematic all, as Pope.L suggested that he felt only “part of” what the flag (thus the pledge) claims to offer…equality, for one thing, and following that, faith that it will be delivered. Sadly, it’s not new to say we are one nation divided, by race, class, and so on, but it’s important to remember, and Pope.L’s Trinket contributes to this conversation in a stirring way. The relentless whipping of the cloth makes escaping impossible—even if you close your eyes, you can feel it. There’s a kind of speech there. It’s loud.
The persistence of wind makes fitting if unnerving companion to a live performance called Migrant that unfolds beside the flag. At certain times in the day, a pair of blindfolded figures emerge, fumble to a wall of pegs, and take up sets of waiting garments. With heavy, otherworldly gestures the figures feel their way into uniforms of black shoes and stretch pants, white parkas and kneepads, and long, lightning-white wigs that hang over their faces like Van Winklian beards. I felt something between terror and fascination watching them, a voyeur to beings that seemed to be beyond help. The accompanying wall text provides some further context:
“Following instructions provided by the artist, [the performers] exchange silent words or find poses to hold for hours. Migrant, Pope.L has said, is inspired by Samuel Beckett’s existential novel How it is (1968), in which two ‘creatures’ crawl through an apocalyptic landscape of mud and bones. ‘What to do,’ Pope.L asks, ‘if you move in a world without mend?’”
“A world without mend” is also a world in which language ceases to matter. The terms “being,” “figure,” or “creature” all strive to describe who or what seems no longer human in this world beyond hope. Pope.L has created an astonishing representation of the grimly titled How it is. After dressing, the performers feel their way to a three-story, wooden scaffolding where they crawl and grope through the open gridwork like ghosts in an abandoned tenement house. Occasionally, one would pause to tie a black silken tatter to part of the structure, as though in this she had some purpose, albeit born of an atrophied everything. So in the shadow of our massive American flag, we are brought to question How is it, and standing there in the pummeling winds I had the thought: maybe the figures were half-heartedly seeking shelter from weather only some of us could choose to escape.
Migrant raises similar questions as those raised by Pope.L’s earlier performances, particularly his crawls (which are exactly what they sound like), and especially in regards to: “What to do if you live in a world without mend?” In a 1996 interview in Bomb, Pope.L articulates a sentiment on homelessness and the associated loss of humanity that those living on the street automatically inherent. He explains:
“I decided to literally put myself in the place of someone who might be homeless and on the street. I wanted to get inside that body. Like, what does it feel like? In certain yogas there are body-memory exercises. By treating your body in a certain way, by putting your body in a certain physiognomic situation, you can force it to experience in ways it normally wouldn’t. In New York, in most cities, if you can remain vertical and moving you deal with the world; this is urban power. But people who are forced to give up their verticality are prey to all kinds of dangers. But, let us imagine a person who has a job, possesses the means to remain vertical, but chooses to momentarily give up that verticality? To undergo that threat to his/her bodily/spiritual categories—that person would learn something. I did.”
The admission of body and spirit to dismantling—to entering new and frightening categories of being— is most likely the best path toward genuine empathy. For there is no language that can emulate another’s understanding like the body can understand when opened up to other experiences, feelings, modes of being of another. Witnessing Pope.L’s work, we glimpse that which is easy to not see in the world otherwise. And as he explains, in the same interview: “My take on homelessness in New York was that we’d gotten too used to seeing these people on the streets. I hadn’t gotten used to it, but it seemed as if people were devising strategies in order not to see the homeless. We’d gotten used to people begging, and I was wondering, how can I renew this conflict? I don’t want to get used to seeing this. I wanted people to have this reminder.”
Pope.L’s comment makes me think of something Muriel Rukeyser wrote: What do we see? What do we not see? I would add: What do we feel? What do we not feel? And by not allowing ourselves to see and feel, what do we as a nation suffer?
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Pope.L’s work. I abandoned the onions rotting quietly on a table in paragraph one and left out other pieces in the exhibition, other questions about our country, about race, about histories we haven’t learned from, and existences we refuse to see. Partly this is a failure of language to be a body, a particular body that knows how it is, what it is like, without trying to say. Gwendolyn Brooks warned us, about art, not to stay home; we might all do well to heed her warning, and investigate the works of Pope.L further. His voice is crucial for our time. On that note, I’d like to end with an image from Trinket I’ve been carrying, that is painful but important to feel:
Fruit flies were beginning to digest some of the onions in the next room. In the shadow of our American flag, some figures could hardly move.