The Great White Way [Enlarge in New Window]

William Pope.L: The Black Factory

Unless they're in combat, most people do not think about getting from one place to another by clawing their way along the ground, but that strenuous mode of transportation is exactly what William Pope.L chose for his part in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

For Pope.L, whom Lowery Sims, director of the renowned Studio Museum in Harlem, aptly named "the poet laureate of male performance artists," the piece required him to make the trip between the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to the Bronx via Broadway and the Harlem River Bridge -- a distance of some 30 miles -- on his belly, and it's not over yet. His incremental journey, in three parts per year, will take five years to complete.

Before you start shaking your head in disbelief, you should probably know that Pope.L -- that is his given name -- has been performing this piece, which he calls The Great White Way, dressed in a Superman outfit with a skateboard strapped to his back, like a shell on a tortoise. It lets him rest without having to halt his progress.

As a work that tests the limits of human endurance and as a demonstration of entrenched racial attitudes, The Great White Way is not the most extreme of Pope.L's performances, nor is it his first street crawl. (That one took him up the Bowery, traditional home of the human ruin, in a business suit.) His career as a raging conceptualist has also seen him eat and spit up The Wall Street Journal and tie himself to a Manhattan ATM (automatic teller machine) wearing a skirt made of dollar bills and give out the money.

"Haves" who had become inured to "have-not" panhandlers were not ready for a panhandler-ish black man trying to give them a few dollars, and Pope.L caused a stir. Though he spends most of his time in quiet Lewiston, Maine, where he has been teaching performance, film, and black theater history at Bates College for more than 10 years, Pope.L tends to push hot-buttons. He made headlines in 2001 when a National Endowment for the Arts grant he had won was suddenly withdrawn. He has also made paintings with peanut butter and jelly and other cheap foodstuffs typical of the diet of working-class families, and he has walked around Harlem dragging an enormous white cardboard penis.

The same degree of imagination, intelligence, and politically charged humor has now gone into The Black Factory, a collaborative exhibit exploring what it is to be black, or not, in America today. It will travel to cities and towns across the country in a custom-built tractor-trailer outfitted with a video-monitored Relation Room, for events and discussion; a Library, for archiving materials and ideas; and a Gift Shop.

At each stop, local citizens will be asked to contribute whatever object might represent the meaning of "blackness" for them. Pope.L will then pulverize part of the newly archived object and use the resulting material to make a sculpture for the Gift Shop. "As the objects travel," he says, "they become a kind of family that will communicate the heterogeneity of what blackness is."

Pope.L compares The Black Factory to a community bookmobile or itinerant circus train with a racial theme. Confronting audiences with distressing dichotomies of class, race, and culture can upset them, he says, but at least "it allows for a conversation to start," in places where there had been suspicion and silence.

"I want to invite people into the experience so that their choice of blackness can be educated by others," he explains. "I think it's important for people to see that there can be a cohabitation of difference."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Installation | African American Themes | Labor | History | Northeast | 2001