An introduction to the work of the controversial visual and performance artist William Pope.L.

This book is a three-part report on the long-term collaboration between artist Pope.L and curator Dieter Roelstraete which revolves around issues of connectedness, home, and migration, while addressing art's relationship to knowledge. Begun in spring 2016 with an invitation, extended to the artist by Roelstraete and his colleagues Monika Szewczyk and Adam Szymczyk, to participate in the fourteenth edition of documenta, Pope.L's contribution took on the guise of an immersive, seemingly omnipresent sound installation titled Whispering Campaign, consisting of thousands of hours of whispered content-addressing nationhood and borders-broadcast throughout Athens and Kassel using both speakers and live "whisperers." A mere month after the closing of documenta 14 in Kassel, a second chapter of the titular campaign was inaugurated at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts, revolving centrally around the exhibition and art intervention project Brown People Are the Wrens in the Parking Lot, curated by Yesomi Umolu-a complex, multifaceted enterprise that involved a more or less conventional art exhibit, a DIY media campaign, a thematic library, video interviews, and a series of events ranging from impromptu performances and DJ sets to an expansive program of talks, presentations, and debates. This campaign-cum-exhibition took place at a significant moment in US history dominated by debates over immigration, race, and the plight of the 99 percent-dominated, in a sense, by constant campaigning.

William Pope.L is a visual and performance-theatre artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries and confronts issues of race, sex, power, consumerism, and social class.Made with very low-key materials, his extended corpus of drawings deals with

The first-in depth publication to critically investigate the impact of Pope.L's early performances on his career Pope.L (b. 1955) is a consummate thinker and provocateur whose practice across multiple mediums - including painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, theatre and video - utilizes abjection, humour, endurance, language and absurdity to confront and undermine rigid systems of belief. Spanning works made primarily from 1978 to 2001, member: Pope.L, 1978-2001 features a combination of videos, photographs, sculptural elements, ephemera and live actions. This volume, published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, presents a detailed study of thirteen early works that helped define Pope.L's career. It features essays by curators, artists, filmmakers and art historians, plus an intervieww and artistic interventions by the artist. These components are supplemented by thirteen detailed plate entries that highlight key details of each work. The entries engage performances that are rooted in experimental theatre such as Egg Eating Contest (1990) and Aunt Jenny Chronicles (1991) as well as street interventions such as Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece (1978), ATM Piece (1996), and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001-2009), among others. Together these works highlight the role of that performance has played within a seditious, emphatically interdisciplinary career that has established Pope.L as an influential force in the history of contemporary art.

Going beyond the 'blackness' of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L—five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role. Work by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its "blackness," with audiences often expecting or requiring it to "represent" the race. In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness—his metaphorical "total darkness"—primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation. English examines the integrative and interdisciplinary strategies of five contemporary artists—Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L—stressing the ways in which this work at once reflects and alters our view of its informing context: the advent of postmodernity in late twentieth-century American art and culture. The necessity for "black art" comes both from antiblack racism and resistances to it, from both segregation and efforts to imagine an autonomous domain of black culture. Yet to judge by the work of many contemporary practitioners, English writes, black art is increasingly less able—and black artists less willing—to maintain its standing as a realm apart. Through close examinations of Walker's controversial silhouettes' insubordinate reply to pictorial tradition, Wilson's and Julien's distinct approaches to institutional critique, Ligon's text paintings' struggle with modernisms, and Pope.L's vexing performance interventions, English grounds his contention that to understand this work is to displace race from its central location in our interpretation and to grant right of way to the work's historical, cultural, and aesthetic specificity.

Pope.L: Proto-Skin Set explores early works the artist (William) Pope.L (born 1955) made between 1979 and 1994 exploring materiality and language. Published in this volume for the first time are the artist's Proto-Skin Sets, a selection of mixed-media collages and assemblages that the artist began making as a student in the 1970s engaging the social constructions of language, race and gender. Treating language as an image and images as a language, these works anticipate his ongoing project Skin Sets, text-based works that employ language to construct pointed, absurd and layered messages about the vagaries of color. The publication also includes a five-part document from 1979 that is part of an open-ended set of written works titled Communications Devices, and a new interview with the artist conducted by Pope.L's studio administrator Aliza Hoffman and curator Bennett Simpson.

Poetry. "The book I have in mind is a kind of model for forms of attention and exchange (i.e., distribution) that already exist and which can be dramatized and focused through a book's form (something book artists have been aware of for a long time now, but which has also been a part of our Modernist heritage since the mid-twentieth century, if not from the very 'beginning' think of certain movements of Zukofsky's "A" for example or Williams's Paterson). The book as a site for our sociality, our socialism. The book as a site for the examination of complicity, process, exchange. The book as a place where communal issues become shaped and reshaped. The book as a powerful circuit of mutual regard, conviction, and care. The book as a model of radical and extensive participation. The book as..." Thom Donovan."