Books by Martha Wilson
member: Pope.L, 1978–2001
by Naomi Beckwith, Danielle Jackson, Adrian Heathfield, Adrienne Edwards, André Lepecki, Malik Gaines, Martha Wilson, Thomas Lax, Mark Bessire, C. Carr, EJ Hill, Martine Syms
An absurdist provocateur and brilliant interventionist, Pope.L is a seditious force in contemporary American art
Pope.L is a consummate thinker and provocateur whose practice across multiple mediums―including painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, theater and video―utilizes abjection, humor, endurance, language and absurdity to confront and undermine rigid systems of belief. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that will feature a combination of videos, photographs, sculptural elements, ephemera and live actions, member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 presents a detailed study of 13 early works that helped define Pope.L’s career. Essays by curators, artists, filmmakers and art historians, plus an interview and artistic interventions by the artist, establish key details for each work and articulate how the artist continues to think about the legacy of these ephemeral projects unfolding in time.
Among the works included are performances rooted in experimental theater, such as Egg Eating Contest (1990), Aunt Jenny Chronicles (1991) and Eracism (2000), as well as street interventions such as Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece (1978), ATM Piece (1997) and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–09), among others. Together these works highlight the role that performance has played within a seditious, emphatically interdisciplinary career that has established Pope.L as an influential force in contemporary art.
Pope.L (born 1955) is an acclaimed and prolific interdisciplinary artist best known for his provocative performances, such as ATM Piece (1997) and his decades-long Crawl series―most notably Times Square Crawl (1978), Tompkins Square Crawl (1991) and The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (2001–09)―in which the artist drags his body across New York City. Pope.L received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of Arts at Rutgers University and has exhibited internationally. He lives and works in Chicago.
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Nosy White Woman
A daughter explains to her mother why calling the police isn’t always a sound idea. A dad tries to understand how his influence over his children persists in their adulthood. A caretaking group of sisters must rely on each other, but one has a fierce drinking problem. Throughout Nosy White Woman, ordinary people, caught in the passing moments of their daily lives, confront the reality that the quiet societies they thought they knew aren’t really so simple after all, the morals not always obvious. In these sixteen stories, Martha Wilson turns a clear-eyed yet compassionate gaze on everyday experience, from rattled family discussions, to self-examination of body and voice, to increasingly present anxieties about the end of the world, stripping each one down with precision and sardonic wit to reveal surprising truths: that individual lives always intersect with the political, and that our small gestures and personal habits reverberate in the larger world of which we can’t help being citizens.
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