Pope.L. The Beginning of the World (with Inter-continental Missiles and Chipmunks).

eRacism

In February 2004, Artists Space in New York opened part of eRacism, a retrospective of William Pope.L. The show was split across three venues: Artists Space, The Project gallery, and the Mason Gross Galleries at Rutgers University.

The title is wordplay. It can be read as erase racism. It can also be read as a new kind of racism, with an e attached like everything in the internet age. Pope.L lets both meanings stand.

At Artists Space hung a new work from 2004 with a long title: The Beginning of the World (with Inter-continental Missiles and Chipmunks).

A wall of peanut butter

It was a wall sized painting. Crude, biomorphic forms, like creatures not yet fully formed. Absurd bits of text. Toy ambulances. The title and imagery led The Brooklyn Rail's reviewer to think of nuclear disaster, though nothing was spelled out.

The whole surface was coated in Skippy peanut butter. Not a few strokes, but a thick, glossy layer across the wall. Here peanut butter was paint, ground and sculptural material at once.

Then it was left alone. For the length of the show, no one wiped it or replaced it. It met the air, the lights, the breath of visitors. It deteriorated in its own way, and the smell grew stronger by the day.

The reviewer called the work an endurance act. Endurance for whom? Perhaps for both the painting and the person standing before it.

A child's worry

Pope.L has used food for a long time. The same retrospective included Eating the Wall Street Journal, from 2000, a toilet set up as a throne, with spoiled milk, Heinz ketchup and soiled newspapers. And Pop Tart Frieze, from 1998, with drawings on Pop Tarts.

These foods were not chosen at random. They are cheap, packaged, found in every American supermarket. According to The Brooklyn Rail, his work draws on childhood anxieties about food going bad, with milk as the central sign.

In a household without much, spoiled food is not only a matter of smell. It is a lost meal. Money spent with nothing left. That worry sits close to poverty, and in America poverty cannot be separated from race.

Smell as plain speech

Pope.L is known for performances that put his own body in uncomfortable situations in public. With The Beginning of the World he moved that discomfort into the material. Without the artist present, the wall still made visitors endure, through the nose.

The colour of the material matters too. Peanut butter is brown. Spread thick and glossy across a wall, it prompts associations viewers would rather not voice, and the review that year voiced one bluntly. Pope.L did not explain. He let the material carry all its meanings, including the uncomfortable ones.

Consumption, race, poverty: these can be addressed with slogans. Pope.L chose to address them with a jar of peanut butter left out too long. Visitors could skip the words on the wall. They could not skip the smell.

Thirteen years later he again let food dry on a wall, at the Whitney Biennial. See the essay on Claim (Whitney Version).