Always confounding, always hilarious, always relevant, always visceral, William Pope.L is a performance artist, visual artist, and professor whose work comments poignantly and lucidly on the stickiest societal issues—race, class, homelessness, and oppression. For Pope.L, teaching and practicing have always been intertwined. Given the constant use of white symbolism in his work, his current professorship at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, might even be viewed as a performance of sorts. Pope.L is a black man teaching at a school whose population is largely white, in a town whose population is—or was—almost entirely white. Recently, Lewiston has seen an influx of immigrants from Somalia, causing class and racial conflict in the blue-collar factory town.
From his experience working with handicapped populations in upstate New York, to his subsequent teaching jobs at various schools in New York and New Jersey (the states he grew up in), to his current work as a professor for Bates College's Theater and Rhetoric Department, Pope.L has drawn inspiration from students. While many artists teach to support their careers, Pope.L is clearly dedicated to his students and to the practice of teaching. Chalkboard Editor Nick Stillman spoke to Pope.L about teaching, learning, and his recent work.
Nick Stillman: How did you start teaching?
William Pope.L: Well, according to my mother I was meant to teach. Some people know things about you that you can’t see in yourself. My teaching career started with a workshop situation. I was working with a handicapped population in New York and New Jersey. I was in undergraduate and graduate school at the time, and I worked with a learning disabled population in upstate New York at a camp. Some people had observed me working with younger people and had the idea that teaching was how I would eventually make my money. Then, through my theater work, I eventually got a call from Bates College.
NS: Maine is an interesting coincidence as a place to teach and work, given all the potentially white symbolism there: the people, the snow. Was this tension, so to speak, an influence in your wanting to teach at Bates?
WP.L: Fangs can be attractive and fearsome. Bates was a white jewel gleaming on the crown of possibility. Here's a school that's known to be a top college in the country, and it was attractive and exotic for that reason. On the other hand, because Maine is very white, it was intimidating and alienating. Once I went to a convenience store and saw white people buying liquor and cigarettes with food stamps. I had seen black people doing that, but I had never seen white people doing it. Then I realized that there are so many cultural overlaps between Lewiston's working class white population and the black population I'm familiar with. That was one thing that really made Maine feel less foreign.
NS: Have your classroom experiences influenced your art? What are some perspectives you may have gained from your students?
WP.L: I think about teaching all the time. I think I would always teach regardless of where I was in my career. The interaction with people younger than you, who come to you and say, "please lead me through this process"—you can get things from them that you can't from a professional. Students don't have to know what they're doing—that's the whole idea. The claim for expertness . . . that pressure is just not there in the teaching environment. It's very energizing. No matter how professional one becomes, one still does not know.
NS: How difficult is it to maintain a viable career as an artist while also devoting full-time energy to teaching?
WP.L: It's a juggling event, a matter of trying to balance your energy. At the same time, if I had the choice of having a full career as an artist or not teaching, I would still always want to teach. When an artist’s career starts to blossom, it doesn't always mean his or her life is getting better. Think of winning the lottery. People who win it think that their new life won't be attached to their old life, but what they find is that the old life gave them something, and they realize the new life may not be the savior they thought it was.
NS: Tell me your version of what's happening in Lewiston with Somali immigration.
WP.L: It seems to be a matter of misrecognition and renegotiation. Many Somalis who live here now apparently came because of economic reasons. It's cheaper than Portland, Maine. But in Lewiston, you already have a white population struggling economically, so when a new group comes in, it puts pressure on an already stressed economic environment. But it's played out in terms of race. The race issue is much more distracting than the economic one. The problem is not that there are so many Somalis in Lewiston, but that they arrived so quickly, so there's the sense that there are a lot. Now, the Somalis take on the historic position of those who are blacking, cannot contribute, are needy, and therefore are a problem. That's a historic function.
NS: If, as you've said, artists change the world and make things happen, then what would you do with the World Trade Center site?
WP.L: Well, you know what I'd do? I think what I'd like to do is leave it the way it is, but not leave it the way it is. Daniel Libeskind understands that the real estate there is priceless. He feels that he has to replace the buildings that were there. He's also not a fool. He knows he has to make a humanistic monument, so he makes a garden inside the building. What would be interesting to say is "maybe we are arrogant." Maybe to rebuild would mean to simply make a park like any other park; to create something horizontal, not vertical; to sacrifice all possible monetary gain from the site; and through that sacrifice, create a monument. We could dig a hole over 11 years the depth of 1/11th the length of the no-fly zone in Iraq.
NS: Your performances and your tendency to work with food as a medium for your visual art often results in work with either no end product at all or an ephemeral one. Is that a conscious decision of yours?
WP.L: Sure. Especially when I didn't have continuous income. I didn't want to depend on a gallery situation, but I also wanted to speak to those situations whose enterprises are based on the idea that a work of art always remains the same. I think I wanted to use materials that spoke to the ephemeral issue and also spoke to working-class culture instead of the upper-class culture that tends to be the gallery audience. Of course, with performances, you don't need the framework of galleries to do business. There's no economic exchange. The artist is freed from the usual limitations artists are bracketed with. If you're an artist, why should people support your work? Especially if you claim to be questioning the apparatuses that support you.
NS: Which performance of yours was the most taxing physically?
WP.L: Probably Burial in 1998, which I had to be removed from. [This was the second of two Burial pieces Pope.L executed. In it, he buried his entire body except his head in the ground. He had intended for the piece to last for 12 hours but had to be removed after six. –ed.] Whenever your body is limited in a drastic way, the immediate feeling is of course helplessness, but there’s also a comfort in knowing what you are in such a literal way. It's almost frightening. It seems almost counterintuitive to put yourself in there, as the earth changes around your body. I've always done this in the worst conditions—it's been incredibly hot. So the world is acting on you from above and below, depleting your forces. It's kind of a will-controlled death in a way. The idea is to try to pace out death to the point where I survive.
NS: What are you working on currently?
WP.L: One thing I'm working on is my website project, www.distributingmartin.com. I began the project by wanting to hang a big banner in Harlem, reading "THIS IS A PAINTING OF MARTIN LUTHER KING'S PENIS FROM INSIDE MY FATHER'S VAGINA." I couldn't get anyone to agree to put it up. (Laughter.) You laugh, but it's true. Then I decided my attitude was too material. I started thinking, "Is there a way to approach this with less money, less permission?" So I took the same phrase and printed 5,000 posters and disseminated them from 125th Street in Manhattan to the World Trade Center—the beginning of disseminating his symbolic body. Then I mailed postcards, then I began printing it in newspapers and inserting them in interviews like this one.
So the project takes place in steps. The eighth step is a bioengineering project. I obtained some DNA of Martin Luther King. At MIT, artists are invited to work on projects involving science. I wanted to take the DNA material and extract it into a piece of fruit, have someone eat it, then have the DNA seek out genes in the body and change those genes. The scientists said, "That's illegal." I said, "Yes?" The problem was that when the DNA was put in the fruit it became stale. So we developed a way to put the DNA in the fruit, then have it become dormant until it's eaten, when it will activate. So, what’s the target? Apparently there are these possibly bogus genes called "peace genes." So we made a model of that gene and retrofitted the MLK gene to seek it out. The piece goes on.
