Waiting for Pope.L

This essay is an excerpt from ‘Pope.L: Hospital’, edited by Margot Heller, Rob Spragg and and Karli Wu, and co-published by South London Gallery and DISTANZ Verlag, Berlin. The book documents the artist’s solo exhibition at South London Gallery in 2023, which tragically turned out to be the last in his lifetime. 

In December 2023, when I learned that Pope.L (1955–2023) FIG.1 had passed away, my first thought was about the entangled transcendence of him having even survived to the age of sixty-eight in the first place. I mean, like – damn, right? What a thought!

Pope.L was one year shy of the average Black male life expectancy in the United States – another reminder that the average life expectancy for Black men is less than that for white men, white women, and Black women across the board. Pope.L spent his career exploring both the risks and the opportunities that came with surrendering his verticality: the pathways he chose to crawl along rather than walk, the locations he chose to haunt as a means of exploring and challenging strategies of being othered in the world. For me, there was always a tension and terror wrapped up in his performances. In relinquishing parts of his power and privilege to achieve the works he produced he was constantly treading a line by assuming a profound level of physical vulnerability, and, accompanying that vulnerability, a lingering chance that in each performance all it would take for him to be at real risk of harm would be one of the folks he encountered – a member of the public, a representative of the state – deciding that he might be some kind of Black threat.

We are raised in the shadow and echo of these narratives, instructed toward the class politics of respectability as a means of hedging against being misread via the disfiguring veil of supremacy. Button your shirt up. Keep your hands clean. Brush your hair. Fix your face. Here was an artist who for decades had intimately traversed and engaged with New York as a subject and partner, transmogrified by the dirt of its streets and the ink of its newspapers and all the invisible fault lines in between, yet still found himself in so many ways safeguarded and untouched. Those who witnessed Pope.L’s work became part of the work, assuming, either directly or indirectly, the responsibility of its custodianship, caring for the artist and his liveness, an aligned protection as a blessing. In this way, Pope.L was truly and mutually held, both by those who knew him well and by those who happened upon his extraordinary being, often while on ordinary journeys of their own. Speaking to his strategic horizontality and its capacity to edify, the artist commented: ‘It’s kind of uplifting, crawling, if you’ve never tried it, you should’.

I first met Pope.L in person at the opening of his survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). This was in the fall of 2019, only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic set upon us, with the complete and total breakdown of the world and its systems, and the staggering loss of lives that followed. That evening, when I encountered Pope.L, I realised as I caught sight of his baseball cap and anorak that I and many others had actually just been in the galleries with him, shoulder to shoulder, as he had – true to his tradition, and in his trademark way – unassumingly wandered through the space, intently watching us as visitors watch him, Pope.L-the-artist, across screens and images, traces of traces. Inside MoMA’s hallowed walls, each of us was a guest hosted by, and immersed within, the terrific arc of this artist’s creative history. Now, as we both dawdled in the lobby, awkwardly taking in the breadth of the room from the vantage point of the coat check, I introduced myself to Pope.L-the-man, shook his hand, and thanked him for his contributions as Pope.L-the-artist. He smiled, adjusted his backpack and, much to my surprise, thanked me back.

Pope.L’s final exhibition, hosted at South London Gallery FIG.2 FIG.3 FIG.4, is titled Hospital. Pope.L.’s mother, Lucille Lancaster, was a nurse, and his grandmother, Desma Lancaster, an artist and a cleaner, so here was someone who came from a line of kin for whom the infrastructures of care were key economies. The aspiration to make a living as a carer for others – the bodies of others as a nurse, the homes of others as a cleaner, and, perhaps, the imagination of others as an artist – is a performance of trust and labour enacted as a means of grappling with questions of sustainability and intergenerational power inequity as these change shape and carry on. Engaging with the etymology of the show’s title, via hospes, meaning ‘guest’ or ‘visitor’, and hospice as a place where the terminally ill enter to prepare for the end of a life, the artist reflected on the project of Hospital, noting that ‘[I am] thinking about my own body, the bodies of people I care for, and bodies that may not be there in the future’.

Given the very many triggers within an American medical industrial complex that regularly fails those situated at the margins, Black people often have troublesome relationships with hospitals: if you grew up in a house like mine you were probably reminded at least once a week by a family member that you go to a hospital to get sick, not to get better, and so are better off staying out of hospitals entirely if you can. True to their word and caution, both my parents departed their lives on this physical plane away from hospitals. As for many Black folks, this was a radical commitment to stay in the world with the living, rather than with those who had been marked for death, a commitment fought for and maintained to the very end. With this in mind, an exhibition titled Hospital, held at an art institution, brings up all sorts of pertinent questions:

Does art that passes into museum space run the risk of being contaminated by the ‘contagion’ of the institution itself?

If a cultural institution is transformed into a hospital, does this transform its capacity for care, too?

Is the labour of art, initiated by artists, ‘life-work’ – with art history and curatorial practice, as exercises of the academy and thus, by default, to some degree ‘death-work’ – or is it something else entirely, perhaps suspended somewhere in between?

Do artworks – and the artists who have given birth to them – heal by being institutionally acquired and conserved? Or are they instead in decay, en route to a gurney as soon as they arrive, separated from the vitality of the world beyond?

Is imagination even possible within institutions, or is the institution in and of itself an ‘ideas morgue’?

How will artists and their artworks be remembered if they make it in, but don’t make it out?

And are these institutional spaces, with all their hegemonic weight, and their echoing of imperial and colonial traditions of maintenance and utilitarian sanitisation, actually making us sick?

Pope.L delivers us into the existential guts of cultural work and superintendence with his simple alchemy of renaming the site and reclaiming the space: a hospital as an art institution as a body in passage towards health or departure from life that sweats, pisses, shits, bleeds, vomits, cries out, and murmurs restlessly in the middle of the night. Within the hermetic seal of the hospital, we, as ungoverned bodies, conspire to wildly enact and express in mixed company the things that we are trained at home to respectably shut away and keep private.

Through the transformation of the gallery into a hospital, we become intruders, ghosts, and invited guests all at once, transported into the vulnerable liminality between living and dying experienced by cultural labour – workers and art objects alike. At the same time, our consciousness is raised about all the ways in which art institutions and hospitals pathologically share a consistent struggle to adequately perform the work of truly loving the unbridled and unscripted modes of improvisation that operate within their edifice. Hospitals, like art institutions, with their illogical theoretical constraints, violent bureaucracies, and classical tonnage are often entirely unprepared to engage with the real and tactile needs of actual human beings, especially Black ones. Facts: They just ain’t ready for us. When we enter these spaces we are at once rendered forcibly exposed, while at the same time required to trust a site that has wounded us time and time again, giving ourselves over to the systems of the institution as its own ruptured body and unstable machine. In Pope.L’s Hospital we are therefore reminded of the very many rituals of alienation and belonging – what the artist at points describes as ‘have-not-ness’ – that commonly occur when passing into institutionalised spaces: rituals shared between spaces of art and infirmary spaces alike.

On 18th July 1991, Pope.L embarked on what is often referred to (and perhaps revisioned and sanitised) as Tompkins Square Crawl but was fully titled by the artist as How Much is that Nigger in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl. This was just over a decade after his first crawl in Times Square in 1978 FIG.5. For this piece, the artist made his way in a suit, this time with a potted flower in his hand, through the storied space of Tompkins Square Park. This park was my park, the park I played in as a child growing up in the East Village, the place where I rode my father’s shoulders as he, in his role as photographer, went to document and bear witness to the political actions that took place there each summer like clockwork as the degrees climbed: trash cans set ablaze as a signal of something coming, NYPD batons hammering the surrounding fence, a grim rhythm. As an emerging art historian invested in performance, this was the work that, two decades ago, initiated a budding me into Pope.L’s practice of performing with the city as a stage. Throughout my growing up, this was a park that insisted on being a site of uprisings, rebellions, and occupations by those marked, surveilled, and policed as an affliction to the advertisement of New York, like so many I knew so well – Tompkins Square Park was a home for the houseless, a reterritorialised state for those relegated to the edges by the state, in the face of ongoing gentrification and the brutality of cultural and economic dispossession. Pope.L knew this well, and he knew those people in this statehood, too. He also knew that so many who were familiar with these edges often could not, and did not, survive the immense pressure of the forces that held them there.

On that day in 1991 his crawl was a crawl interrupted: the cops were called by a Black businessman. Mired by his own Black respectability, this public witness and visitor shouted at Pope.L’s white cameraman documenting the artist in action: ‘You make me look like a jerk! ... I wear a suit like that to work!’ So offensive to his sensibilities, Pope.L’s crawl was deemed worthy of being criminal by a body that wasn’t his own, grappling with the weight of Black selfhood, just like his own. This, too, was the hospital, the sanatorium, or even the asylum: an intervention on behalf of the public that makes us wonder whether we, the artist and this outraged passer-by, are looking out or looking in, and who exactly is on which side of that ‘glass’ in between. Respectability here becomes its own ailment and mutilation to be cleaned, bandaged, and cured – or perhaps, without hope, identified as terminal and in need of hospice in its own right.

The horizontality of Pope.L’s practice of crawling is something that has rarely been noted as an early contribution to disability justice, but it intersects intensely with the rise of Crip Theory and, colliding with the catastrophe and urgencies of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sick Woman Theory. This feels important to call on here and now. The artist’s work provides a profound commentary on how class is a racial construct, and – conversely – how race is a class construct. Pope.L evinces how both race and class  are belief systems that require a spiritual commitment, a following of an unquestioning faith to adhere to, protect fiercely, and abide by. Hospitals, then, have always been a part of the artist’s work, whether implicitly or explicitly, where crip politics and the history of Blackness in its manufacture are inherently co-dependent and mutually mobilised to stigmatise and unlove as a political agenda, always and necessarily intertwined.

By giving up his verticality, Pope.L chose to come closer to an understanding of the constructed reading of Blackness in all its stereotypical fiction, tokenism, mythos and fetishised brokenness. To insist on this discovery, and to move through systems of care in the street, meant choosing to arrive at a location where one is intended to be rendered invisible, anonymous, and abject. The artist, however, refused these parameters and made a life in the world that was specific, uplifted, and empowered, considering instead where there might be breaks and holes that could lead to new-found modes of liberation. In this final project, we can perhaps see Pope.L’s lifetime of crawls as leading to this very point: Hospital is a room of waiting and delivery, a place to rest, to relinquish control, to want and wail, and, perhaps – as Black is raised and told – to never leave again.