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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Alex Needham Arts editor

Artist Pope.L, famous for his crawling performances, dies aged 68

Pope.L crawls Saturday, Oct. 5, 2002, in Portland, Maine as part of an exhibit by the artist at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art. During his career, Pope has eaten copies of the Wall Street Journal while sitting on a Boston street corner, and handed out money while chained to a bank in New York wearing only his underwear. (AP Photo/Joel Page)
Pope.L crawls in Portland, Maine, in 2002 as part of an exhibit at the Maine College of Art. Photograph: Joel Page/AP

The American artist Pope.L, famous for performances in which he crawled through the gutters of busy American streets, has died aged 68, his gallery confirmed.

His first show since 2011 for a British non-commercial institution, the South London Gallery, opened only last month and was critically acclaimed. The artist attended the opening of the exhibition, which was titled Hospital. He died at home on 23 December in Chicago.

William Pope.L at the show “Art After White People: Time, Trees & Celluloid.
William Pope.L at the show Art After White People: Time, Trees & Celluloid. Photograph: Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Pope.L, who was also known as William Pope.L, made his first crawling piece in 1978. Wearing a business suit and pushing a potted plant, he crawled the length of 42nd Street in New York on his hands and knees, taking him across Times Square, then heavily populated with homeless people, sex workers, drug addicts and others at society’s margins.

This act of vulnerability, endurance and abjection made his name and was followed by more than 30 others, including a 2001 crawl, while dressed in a Superman costume and with a skateboard strapped to his back, from the bottom of Broadway to the artist’s mother’s house in the Bronx.

William Pope.L crawls along a Portland sidewalk as a way of creating empathy for those who live in a horizontal world as homeless and downtrodden souls.
William Pope.L crawls along a Portland sidewalk as a way of creating empathy for those who live in a horizontal world as homeless and downtrodden souls. Photograph: Portland Press Herald/Getty Images

The Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle described the works as “gruelling, extreme, stupid and brave … the artist adopting the position of the penitent or the religious fanatic, the most base and abject of those at the bottom”.

Pope.L also gained notoriety for a 2000 performance in which he sat, covered in white chalk and naked except for a jockstrap, on a toilet placed on a rickety tower.

The artist then proceeded to eat an entire a copy of the Wall Street Journal, washed down with milk, a response to an advertising campaign that suggested that one only needed to touch the newspaper to become prosperous.

A work by William Pope.L. at The International Exhibition Of Contemporary Art (Fiac) In The Grand Palais, In Paris, France
A work by the artist at the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art (Fiac) in the Grand Palais, Paris. Photograph: Jean-Marc Zaorski/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

He was born in New Jersey to a single mother who struggled with drug addiction; other close relatives, including his father, aunt and brother, endured periods living on the streets.

When Pope.L was 11, his grandmother introduced him to a portrait painter whose house she was employed to clean, and who encouraged him to draw.

Pope.L first studied at the prestigious Pratt University before a lack of funds forced him to drop out; after taking factory jobs he ended up at Montclair State University.

Pope.L at Modern Art gallery, 7 Bury Street, London with four of his artworks behind him
Pope.L at the Modern Art gallery in London in 2021. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

His crawl pieces were partly inspired by necessity. As he told the Guardian in 2021, “I wanted to find a way of doing anything I wanted that didn’t need anyone to support it. I didn’t need a room and I didn’t need objects. I just needed the opportunity, which I could create myself.”

Pope.L’s work delved into the position of Black people in American society, the way they are perceived and their lack of power. For his work The Black Factory, he drove around the US in a truck asking people to donate items that suggested Blackness to them, receiving objects ranging from the racist to the random.

Map of the World is a map of the United States made from 4,000 hot dogs attached to plywood in a grid of vertical and horizontal segments.
Map of the World is a map of the United States made from 4,000 hot dogs attached to plywood in a grid of vertical and horizontal segments. Photograph: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images

“I realised that for a lot of white people, mostly white people, their experience of race is personal,” the artist told the Guardian. “They don’t see it as a larger political context that you have people who are empowered and people who are not.”

The artist used to give out business cards that described him as “the friendliest black artist in America”.

Black Drawings by William Pope L. is seen on exhibit the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art.
Black Drawings by Pope.L on exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP

In recent years, Pope.L had received the acclaim of heavyweight institutions. He won the top prize at the Whitney Biennial in 2010, and a 2019 retrospective took place across both the Whitney and MoMA in New York.

In a statement, his gallery Modern Art said: “Pope.L fundamentally challenged and changed the last 50 years of visual art in the United States.

“His elegant, indeterminate, and often humorous, yet bitingly poignant criticism of our history has only recently begun to be fully recognised.” A memorial is planned for spring 2024.

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