reviews william pope.l
william PoPe.l:
art after white PeoPle:
time, trees, & Celluloid…
Santa monica muSeum of art
8 Septem ber – 23 Decem ber
For an artist who’s thrown masticated wads of The Wall Street Journal branch is red, as if dipped in blood, with a small pool of red accumulated
into crowds of spectators while sitting on a toilet ten feet in the air, naked beneath. While Pope.L seems careful to avoid topical references – the
and covered with talcum powder; sauntered the length of 125th Street in archetypal resonances of the work is part of its power – it’s difficult not
Harlem wearing a six-foot codpiece; and traversed 22 miles of Manhattan to think of Hurricane Katrina: that tragic intersection of environmental
sidewalk on his belly wearing a Superman suit, William Pope.L’s exhibition catastrophe and bureaucratic negligence that shook so many skeletons out
Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid… would seem at a glance of America’s racial closet.
rather tame: a quiet, darkened installation of basically neutral objects (palm A video projected on a screen mounted to the scaffolding adds
trees, pieces of furniture, file storage boxes), with the only overt provocation another layer. It plays like a satellite feed from the last surviving storm
nestled in the title. shelter: a man wearing a large rubber mask of former US Secretary of
But it’s the ‘after’ that clinches it: an uneasy sense of cataclysm, of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stands at the door of another box-filled
something dying, disappearing or gone. The front half of the gallery is storeroom, beside a small model of a sinking ship. As he stares into the
taken up with a grove of potted palms that looks to have been hit by a camera, expression frozen in a caricature of bureaucratic gravity, fake
hurricane, trunks strewn at all angles and fronds scattered everywhere. In blood oozes from his eyes, drains down his shirt and slacks, and collects in a
the back, behind a tall black scaffold-like structure, a jumble of furniture glistening pool on the floor. It’s an alarming image, as much for its stillness
– chairs, coffee tables, a crib, a television set – is piled in the corner like a and quiet as for its violence.
massive snowdrift. Small doors set into the walls around the perimeter of None of these ominous threads – the trees, the blood, the boxes,
the gallery offer a glimpse of what appears to have been preserved: narrow the stiff smug grimace of this once very powerful man – come together
storerooms filled with towering stacks of file boxes. in anything so neat as an argument or a prediction. The work has the air,
The narrative is ambiguous – where are we? What happened? rather, of a dream or vision: a haunting, even elegiac meditation on power in
What’s in all those boxes? – but several menacing details point to a cutting America at the verge of what may well be its decline. Holly Myers
strain of racial critique. The trees, for instance, have a dry, dusty pallor that
turns out to be multiple coats of white paint – a skin of whiteness that will
smother and kill the trees before the show is up. The tip of one low-hanging
Art After White People:
Time, Trees, & Celluloid,
2007 (installation view,
Santa monica museum of art),
mixed media, dimensions
variable. photo: bruce morr.
courtesy the artist.
artreview 202
November_REVIEWS.indd 202 26/9/07 13:42:02
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