William Pope.L
“Like a chicken is made of meat, and a house is made of stone, black people are made of funny.” By turns jocular and deadpan, William Pope.L’s address, an entrée to his multimedia installation in the Carpenter Center’s main gallery, stirred up laughter somewhere between amusement and discomfiture. Allusions to Jacques Lacan took turns with Bed Bath & Beyond and studied lyricism gave way to cavalier musing, as the artist aerated the gravitas of his own words even as he spoke them.
In Pope.L’s category-defying practice, humor––and its relationship to questions of race, language, and authority––is no stranger to the serious, but rather its obverse and equal. This exhibition takes a rather tight-lipped Swiss architect as the object and subject of the artist’s sustained (serious) joke. The physical presence of Le Corbusier’s legacy in the very structure of the Carpenter Center itself (his only building ever completed in North America) reveals Pope.L’s reflexive sensitivity, his attention to formal and conceptual involutions. Miniature plaster models of the building––designated as “Corbu Pops[icles]” and looking somewhat like toy tanks––lay strewn throughout the installation and epitomize his stingingly self-conscious approach.
The installation consists primarily of a long, studiolike bench, bearing pots containing an unidentified gooey liquid (inevitably evoking Pope.L’s Black Factory, 2005–2006, an interactive installation he has staged in other venues). The bench is plastered with pages from books on modernism and architecture, scribbled with various jottings and drawings––a long-standing preoccupation of Pope.L’s practice. Like Adolf Loos before him, Corbu had little time for modernism’s penchant for illogic or for the frequent eccentricities and inconveniences of alternative embodiments. The architect’s “machine for living in” is here reduced to a mass-produced toy; his architect’s bench and texts are despoiled by random scrawls; the lucidity of his antiseptic, geometric propriety is muddled by the haphazard chaos of a nonsensical, anal-expulsive intervention. But as in any parody, the target is played with in earnest. “Humor,” Pope.L remarked in his talk, “is as formally serious as geometry. It’s just messier.”
