The following essay was published on the occasion of This Machine Creates Opacities, a group exhibition commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Commissioned for the Carpenter Center’s Level 1 gallery, Pope.L’s 2009 exhibition Corbu Pops consisted of an installation of eponymous sculptures accompanied by drawings and assemblages, as well as a video documenting a performance staged at the exhibition’s opening that included the artist alongside twelve student performers.
In the work’s original presentation, large sheets of rosin paper, held in place with strips of black gaffer’s tape, partially covered the ground, marking a sharply lit stage where a long, L-shaped table sat in the spotlight, its surface smeared with petroleum jelly. Photocopied excerpts from seminal critiques of modernist architecture and urban planning as well as Pope.L’s contract with the host institution, all annotated by the artist, were decoupaged onto the structure’s surface. Additionally, some stainless steel pots looked overflowed with a black goo that spilled all over, including on the paper-covered floor and several sculptures. Scattered around, under, and piled on the table were Corbu Pops (2009): scale models of the Carpenter Center’s Le Corbusier-designed building roughly cast in Hydrocal and attached to what looked at once like a popsicle stick and the handle of a hatchet or sledgehammer. A sound work played on two small boomboxes placed on the floor next to the table: Music for an Autistic Modernism (2008–9) featured a slowed-down Max Roach drum solo that, as Pope.L described, “[sounded] more like god-muttering or thunder” if not “the stamping of elephants underwater.”
Across the room from this ensemble, another stage in the shape of a triangular prism was thrown into relief under floodlights. More like a “Whac-A-Mole” than a proscenium stage, this hollow, wooden structure was held up by a beam resting on the ends of the lobby’s L-shaped leather-and-concrete seating. On its largest, slanted side, Pope.L painted looping, biomorphic, dripping brushstrokes—a mashed-up mass of facial organs: several eyes, a few noses, an ear, a pair of lips, and lots of skin folds. The surface of the platform was pierced, in two rows, by twelve holes through which the performers poked their heads. On the evening of the exhibition’s opening, a group of Harvard students, dressed in black and wearing nitrile gloves, appeared anonymized, donning vinyl, chubby-cheeked pink baby masks and round-framed glasses recalling Corbu’s iconic eyewear. Their Dada-inspired routine involved a chorus of grunts and groans occasionally disrupted by the perturbing comprehensibility of racial epithets.
Throughout the run of the exhibition, the hollow-eyed masks were hung behind the empty stage, where visitors could watch video footage from rehearsals on a monitor. This work, Modernism and Masculinity a.k.a. Modernism, Race, and Mr. C (2009), came equipped with intertitles narrating the formation of the project and referenced art historical debates about modernism’s indebtedness to African visual culture and appropriation of so-called primitivism. The video featured excerpts of an interview with Sheldon Cheek, a scholar working on the Image of the Black Archive & Library at Harvard University—a research initiative on the representation of Blackness in the history of Western art—as well as archival materials, including a photograph of Le Corbusier, recognizable only by his spectacles, with the caption “Dressed as a cleaning woman, on holiday at Le Piquey, ca. 1930.”
By drawing on the double entendre of casting, both in terms of the roles that actors assume and the process to create the sculptures, the artist brought full circle his critical inquiry into the institutionalization of circumstances under which one’s representational agency undermines another’s capacity for self-determination. Furthermore, the scene of Pope.L standing among interchangeable, pink-masked faces seemed to suggest a sardonic reversal of how gender and racial codes could afford distinguished individuality to some while framing others as no more than representatives of a category.
In the periphery of these large installations stood two sculptures titled Commemorative Lamp (2009). Glowing faintly but warmly, with tapered and domed shades fitted on assorted wooden stands, they appear domestic, DIY, and discrete, as if performing their own objecthood. Additionally, a series of drawings titled Tomorrow Inside . . . A Democracy Inside The Fly . . . An Architect Is A Cloud Of __ With A Fly In It . . . Inside the Putrid . . . And . . . In The Desert of Modernism The Ruptu a.k.a. Saying (2009) were lined up just above the horizontal divide on the half-white, half-black painted wall behind the table. Made with stationer’s materials, mainly Bic pen and liquid Wite-Out on faded financial documents, the closely hung framed works display a quivering line of doodled phrases, including “modernism” here and “democracy” there, that nonetheless remain difficult to follow due to the many ellipses that sit between the words or the margins they cut into.
The art of Pope.L betrays the senses of abjection, eroticism, or infantility that an aesthetic norm keeps buried under its veneer of social conventionality. His signature investigations address the institutionalized values of modern art, and their main protagonist is often the figure of a Black man, subjected as much to reductive presumptions as unwarranted projections. Reflecting major themes in the artist’s practice, including his scrutiny of signs, their efficacy and exchange value, Corbu Pops presents a political aesthetics of race and gender via critical engagements with the legacies of the twentieth-century avant-garde.
On the institutional runway-cum-table, the artist was serving modernism—tokenized, streamlined, ready-made. The installation, a deserted mise-en-scène, evoked a jammed-up assembly line of sorts. The academy, after all, can be where the curious, carefree sweetness of childhood meets the trimming, hammering, and molding of the senses. Furthermore, against the backdrop of modernist experiments with art education, Pope.L foregrounded the tension of a gendered and racialized appetite for cultural consumption as a condition for highly staged possibilities to converse with the canon. If the architect’s nickname “Corbu” likened him to a raven (corbeau in French), then Pope.L made it “pop” with a sense of the ravenous. Perhaps in response to the modernist conception of domestic architecture as a machine à habiter (“machine for living in”), where forms were to remain yoked to their clear-cut functions, Pope.L discussed the building as a “confusing machine,” one that “manufactures disorientation in the form of a dark, viscous liquid. Unlike a washing machine, this machine creates opacity.” One can only wonder if the artist also meant this as a metaphor for the organizational spirit or air of operations that has permeated the building throughout its life. Can this machine ever create transparency?
In the original installation, a glass of water sat, rather inconspicuously, on a small shelf—a counterpoint to the maximalist outpourings in the foreground. With a proto-conceptualist aura, Well (2009) not only made a silent expression of a range of exclamations having seemingly canceled each other out but also stood as a tongue-in-cheek statement on the delimitation of standing reserves, untapped potentials, and the elements of resourcefulness. A clear reflection of the exhibition’s critical tinkering with the legacies of Dada, Arte Povera, and institutional critique, this work recalls a sentiment pivotal to Pope.L’s practice, which remains well captured in his unforgettable aphorism—preceding and carried forward into Corbu Pops—that Blackness is “a lack worth having.”*
* Lisa Melandri, “Interview with William Pope.L,” in exh. cat., Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid (California: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2007), 21.
