Many of us woke up on December 27 to the news that the singular Pope.L had passed on Saturday. For many black and brown contemporary artists of my generation, Pope.L is singular, the one who provided a possibility model for who we might be. I am still in a state of shock…
As I look back over his lifetime of work — from his peanut butter paintings and white flour performances to his lectures, sculptures, drawings, and crawls — I feel especially grateful for the permission he gave me and my peers to be simultaneously abstract and pointed, to be crazy and also critical, to be truly interdisciplinary, to let the reality of our over-determined bodies be the work and yet never limit the work. It was lessons learned from Pope.L that I drew upon when, in 2013, I conceived of a column called Endurance Tests. I hoped it might give definition to what I recognized as a particular mode of being and working for contemporary black artists — my friends and peers. The mode was transdisciplinary and somehow often resistant to the very idea of discipline. Indeed, refusal — as well as a constant reconfiguration of the relational — seemed to be fundamental to this mode.
I was taking a cue from Pope.L when I named it Endurance Tests. In RISK WORK: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967 - 1987, Faye Raquel Gleisser appropriately positions Pope.L’s early work within the context of a then-emergent form sometimes called “endurance art.” Alongside Tehching Hsieh (yet another singular force), Gleisser argues that Pope.L’s works “draw out the relationality of endurance — of doing and undergoing — and how it differently positions artists and their audiences vis-à-vis ideas of safety and the need for protection or self-defense.” Because like Hsieh — and unlike Abramovic or Burden, for example — Pope.L understood that his work such as ‘Times Square Crawl’ (1978) and “The Great White Way” (2001-9) would necessarily also include state apparatuses of control (i.e., the cops), and would never — because they could never — be strictly about his individuated ability to endure. They would always have to also be performances about control (exerted upon him), and violence (done by others, or a collective of others, to him).
From 2013 - 2018 I conducted these interviews as an irregular column for the brilliant and now-defunct contemporary arts journal Art Practical. An important online publication for artists in the Bay Area in particular and West Coast US in general, AP was innovative in how it paired an open invitation (welcoming reviews, critiques, interviews, and creative non-fiction from writers, scholars, and artists alike across all media) with rigorous editorial and ethical standards. Although by 2013 I’d already been writing and publishing for 15 years, AP is where I learned how to write with precision and intention. While their website is no longer active, you can find most of the pieces they published on the Wayback Machine, including writings from Ronaldo Wilson, Angela Hennessy, Claudia La Rocco, Tavia Nyong’o, Sofía Córdova, and so many others.
“Endurance Tests” was an irregular column on current explorations of representation, the ethereal, and compulsiveness by black artists working in the field of performance. Across profiles and interviews, the column took seriously the proposition of performance as a repeatable and assimilable text. “Endurance Tests” examined contemporary performance-makers actively syncretizing the many implications of blackness: illegality, contagion, maladaptivity, and a privileged relationship to cool.
Over the next month or two, in homage to Pope.L’s life and practice, I’ll be reposting the “Endurance Tests” columns here. Beginning with my consideration of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Tanya Lucia Bernard’s 2013 procession “With Everyone and for the Good of Some.” Bernard is the former Arts and Culture director for Black Lives Matter. Alcántara is one of the co-founders of Movimiento San Isidro (the San Isidro Movement) — a coalition of artists and activists organized to resist the Cuban government’s repression of artistic expression and social dissent. Along with thousands of political prisoners, Alcántara has been incarcerated for over two years; Hyperallergic recently published his powerful missive of resistance and resilience from inside.
I wanted to start this series with this essay because of the questions that now decade-old work raised for me regarding the meaning of the artist procession when it is robbed of state sanctioning. But, like Pope.L, neither the work nor the artists themselves exist outside of their own political context, and this makes “With Everyone…” of particular relevance on the occasion of Pope.L’s passing. State repression and racial violence is not merely material for an artwork: It is also the context in which black artists and all post/de/anti-colonial artists operate. Understanding this get us closer to the necessary positioning of the term “endurance” — when applied to an art practice — to which Gleisser is pointing.
I hope you enjoy re-reading or reading, for the first time, these conversations and interrogations into the state of black livingness as told by black artists. As I post this, I’m pouring one out for Pope.L — who made so many of our practices possible.
Known Artists: The Catholic Church, the Cuban State, and the People
first published in Art Practical on October 16, 2013
Q: When is a sheep not a sheep?
A: When it is a work of art.—Stuart Hall1
In some respects, the job of the artist is to make meaning by imagining something other than what already is. On September 12, 2013 artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Tanya Lucia Bernard began a 600-mile walk across Cuba in a performative response to the country’s complex relationship to spirituality, state control, and religion.2 Bernard and Alcántara carry with them an oversized papier mache sculpture of Oshún, Orisha of love and maternity and Cuba’s patron saint,3 finding a new place to stay each night by way of strangers they meet on the street. They will conclude their journey in El Cobre, site of the sanctuary of the Roman Catholic saint La Virgen, in early December.
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