William Pope.L, the man behind the exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art titled "Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid. . . ," has never shied away from confrontation.
He once tied himself to the door of a Manhattan bank with sausage links and, clad only in a skirt made of dollar bills, tried to give the money away to passersby. Over a five-year span, he crawled along sections of Broadway, from Staten Island to the Bronx, wearing a Superman suit. This March, at Culver City gallery MC Kunst, he hung a female pirate statue upside down from the ceiling, replaced its head with a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. and turned it into a chocolate fountain.
For more than 25 years, the iconoclastic artist has been spitting out sharp satires and poignant meditations on consumerism, race, sexuality and poverty that subvert expectations and resist categories. His work is always irreverent, and to some perhaps even offensive.
Visitors to his first West Coast museum exhibition, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art through Dec. 23, can stroll through a forest of live palm trees painted white, recline on assorted furniture to watch a video projected on a billboard-style screen and peruse "The Semen Pictures," a series of digital prints of collages made from magazine images and the detritus of Pope.L's body and home, including hair, skin, blood and coffee grounds.
Created specifically for the museum, the three interrelated sections of the exhibition give an appropriately Hollywood twist to Pope.L's work.
The palm tree installation, titled "The Grove," evokes the popular Los Angeles shopping mall, but to Pope.L, the piece comments not on one particular site but on "the ideologies that Hollywood and malls share . . . that consuming is a form of self-expression." The paint, he says, is a metaphor for the hopes and desires we project onto palm trees, as symbols of an idealized Hollywood.
"We've superimposed onto this object a lot of different feelings about who we are and what we want. . . . And the question is -- and I guess you can ask this as an ecological question -- what is it really doing for us? Is it producing a fecundity? A growth?" In fact, the trees will slowly wither and die inside their toxic white skin.
Pope.L chose white not only for its racial connotations but also for its associations with emptiness and erasure. The exhibition's title, "Art After White People," also has a double meaning, at once respectful and dismissive of so-called white culture. "Am I following after a white model, i.e., in the trail of?" he asks. "Or is it 'after' in a sense of that which is obsolete?"
