Sometimes, early in their career an artist makes a body of work so powerful and singular, and so necessary, that it comes to define them, and critics end up measuring the rest of their work in its light. So it is with 68-year-old American artist Pope.L, whose belated first UK show now fills South London Gallery (SLG). In 1978, Pope.L crawled the length of New York’s 42nd street on his hands and knees, carrying a small potted flower as a sort of prop. He wore a thrift-store suit with a yellow square stuck to his back. Later, he went on to crawl from one end of Broadway to the other. He crawled around Tompkins Square Park and he crawled in Miami. These grim, high-endurance public performances made his name and bought with them a degree of both fame and notoriety.
Talking at the SLG this week, the artist said that a lot of people talk about “care” and “precarity” in the art world, but that as supportive as the art world can be, it is really all about power and money. He recalled that in the 1970s whatever support there had been for homeless people, and for physically and mentally ill New Yorkers, was withdrawn (in a brutal American version of “care in the community”), and that many, including the artist’s own father, aunt and brother, ended up surviving in dire circumstances on the streets.
In his many versions of Crawl, the artist put himself in danger. He could get run over as he crossed the street or attacked on the sidewalk. He risked assault and arrest, to say nothing of the physical and psychological demands this simple act made on him. He learned always to have people with him, even if at a distance. There was something gruelling, extreme, stupid and brave about Crawl, the artist adopting the position of the penitent or the religious fanatic, the most base and abject of those at the bottom. Crawl was something more than, perhaps other than, a performance.
A wreck is marooned on the floor of the main space at SLG. A ghost ship, a Mary Celeste, with no one on board. Instead of a crow’s nest a wrecked porcelain toilet bowl lunges from its plumbing into empty air. Another toilet, up on a now slumping, rickety tower, is clogged with newspaper. A number of fishing rods baited with yet more newspaper dangle uselessly over the side. The whole thing occupies the length of the gallery and it has run aground before hitting the red plastic butcher’s curtain at the entrance. The timber wreckage is snowed with thick white dust, as if it has come through a blizzard or had a run-in with a drug lab up the coast. The only signs of life are the milk cartons strewn over the deck. The white dust piles up on the superstructure and you can sprinkle some more yourself from the little bowls provided. “Dust, sprinkle at will,” signs say, helpfully. In one throwaway line Pope.L has remarked, “You always want a bit of whiteness around”.
The only thing missing here is the artist himself. The wreck in the room is a set for a performance that isn’t going to happen. In earlier versions of this work the artist has sat on one of those toilets up a tower, wearing nothing but a jockstrap, covered in flour and reading and eating his way through pages of the Wall Street Journal, lubricating the newsprint with milk as he forces it down. The performance was inspired by a WSJ advertising campaign at the turn of the century which implied that you don’t have to read the paper to benefit from it: buying it was enough. Like a talisman, just touching it provided you with knowledge, so consuming it might provide untold power and wealth. Pope.L sat on the can and ate the paper in a sort of parodic ritual. “It was yummy,” he lied.
High up on the gallery walls, speakers broadcast the sounds of dust sifting and falling and timbers collapsing and there’s a slow drip of liquids from various tipped-over bottles of cheap hooch arrayed on shelves, the drips catching in saucers and spattering on the floor. Some leaks down the walls, staining the new pale pink paintwork. Some of the liquid looks and smells like booze and sometimes you worry its blood or lymph or some other unnameable bodily secretion. Booze is a cheap way to self-medicate. For the artist all these bottles are also a nod to the rituals of Catholicism: “Catholics are into liquids and rituals”, he has remarked. A thin reek of ethanol pervades the gallery. It reminded me of the stink of a bar at 10am, and the solvent smell of disinfected hospital wards.
The title of Pope.L’s show is Hospital. Banners hung outside display pale pink versions of the familiar Red Cross symbol. But don’t expect much care or succour here. In the Old Fire Station across the road, two rooms elaborate the works with bottles and liquids. The best is the emptiest. A long shelf runs across the windows. On it sits a plastic drinking straw running through the lid of a cup (the sort patients who can’t raise a glass to their lips use). The cup has fallen to the floor and is dramatically spotlit. A stripped-down scene of an everyday incident, it left me teetering.
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The best thing here is Small Cup, beautifully filmed in an abandoned textile mill in Lewiston, Maine, in 2008. It is winter and sleet is falling. In the mill itself the artist has made a ramshackle scale model of the Capitol building in Washington. Chickens flap about and peck at the model, which has been covered in seeds. Goats trample over the toppled cupola, searching for food. The film flips between these animated scenes and views of the cavernous, empty mill, the harsh New England winter and the river flowing by, industry long gone. Funny and bleak and atmospheric, it is difficult not to equate the film with the insurrections in the Capitol on 6 January 2021 by supporters of Donald Trump. The film might almost be a premonition. A cup falls. The Capitol falls. Gravity has its way. People end up on their knees. Talk about precarity.