Seven squares are pinned to the wall, each one painted in the high style of American minimalism: pure, austere variations on a theme. At the centre of each is printed the phrase “negro idea” followed by an apparently random number (51, 37, 666). What is Pope.L, the late, great trickster of contemporary American art, getting at?
Perhaps it is a critique of how minimalism, with its ethos of art-for-art’s sake, excluded politics from art? Or a comment on how racial categories are as constructed (and as subject to fashion) as the theories underpinning contemporary art? Or is it a riff on how the edifice of western modernism is built on stolen ideas?
Then again, maybe the deployment of an outmoded racial category is simply designed to discomfort the liberal pieties of those people likely to visit this art gallery just off Piccadilly. All that is certain is that Pope.L cannot be pinned down. Best known for his gruelling “crawl” across New York, this influential artist and writer didn’t use art to make himself understood.
Instead, he used its tools to dismantle the liberal presumption that other people and communities can easily be understood, categorised and explained away. He was less interested in being “seen” than in making his audience look again at themselves and the world, and paved the way for a new generation of artists for whom identity – in the sense of conforming to external expectations – is not only a creative trap but a form of control. This is most apparent in Pope.L’s deep suspicion of the commercialisation of Black culture, and the stereotypes that serve to commodify and defuse it.
His satire is savage and furious, closer in spirit and ambition to the provocations of Dada than to any more straightforward satire of the art world. Take the photograph Foraging (Mr Mau Mau), in which he appears in white Y-fronts and white bunny ears, with a note pinned to his chest referencing the Kenyan anti-colonial uprising (and Britain’s notoriously brutal repression). More Y-fronts are framed on the walls, smeared in brown and white fluid and handwritten insignia (“I have something important to share with you – Cliff G”).
The numbered series is entitled Real Kitsch. The way that words and images settle into fixed categories (cliche and kitsch, respectively) is a recurring theme. In Identity What We Lose to Real For, completed a year before the artist’s death in 2023, block wooden letters like those used to teach children the alphabet fall off their frame, further confusing a short text that reads like a dense concrete poem.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
