Pope.L Talks Gender in Art

Visual and theater performance artist William Pope.L is best known for his interventionist public art, including the 2005 installation-on-wheels project, “The Black Factory.” Recently commissioned by the Carpenter Center of Visual Arts to create an installation that incorporates the building, the only North American structure designed by architect Le Corbusier, Pope.L has created a performance piece and exhibition in the Carpenter Center. The Crimson sat down with Pope.L to discuss his thoughts on masculinity, the role of arts in a liberal arts education, and “Corbu Pops,” his upcoming Carpenter Center installation.



The Harvard Crimson: Give us an overview of your initial ideas for this exhibit and how the Carpenter Center became its home.



William Pope.L: I was invited to do a commission here as part of a series of exhibits at the Carpenter Center. I had three other proposals before this one....my first proposal dealt with how the Carpenter Center is meant to interface with students. I thought, could I do a piece that would circle around all those interests the fact that the student population is very important to this community, as is archive life?

I wanted to collect saliva from students of color and urine samples from the white students, to display them, and to let them age over time to see what kinds of information—just by looking at them visually—could they tell us about these populations. But of course we ran into legal problems about owning the DNA of other people.



THC: Your visit here included both the opening of the exhibit and a performance piece with Harvard students. How did you want these students to approach this piece?



WPL: Their role is to choose, to involve themselves in something that requires something different from them. I expect them to think about what they’re doing, but at the same time I expect them to take risks and to simply allow themselves to be a part of something where you don’t judge right away, because it is different from what one is used to.



THC: Since you are both a visual and theater performance artist, how do you integrate these two art forms to communicate your artistic message?



WPL: I think that “getting your message across” is a popular expression. What people imply is that when people do something, there is only one message that they’re trying to communicate. In most cases, the reason people have difficulty communicating is because they have more than one intent.

People want to can what you do so they can package it for a certain kind of delimited consumption. I understand why that is, but that’s not the way my work operates. I can, however, reduce it to a blurb and that says, “Corbu Pops is a visual and sculptural exploration of modernity, masculinity, and whatever relationship exists between them.”



THC: Do you have any advice for how the average Joe, who is interested in looking at art but doesn’t have any formal training, might approach your work?



WPL: I think everyone should be interested in the story of gender and in stories about the power of winning and losing. In the battle of gender—at least from the written text that we have available—men seem to be winning a lot...SEEM to be.

I’m interested, to be very basic, in “guyness.” What is guyness? What is masculinity? What is the relationship between masculinity and the modern period that we still live in? Forget post-modernism; without modernism there is no post. So how did we get to this thing called masculinity, and why is it so invested in being great? And why is it always building all these monuments to itself?

Yet it seems like masculinity is very fragile sometimes. I think all along I was interested in doing something that was social and perhaps pushed the boundaries of what was appropriate. I think Le Corbusier was a very troubled man in terms of his masculinity. For many years until his thirties he was not sure how he felt about women, and he seemed more relaxed when the women in his life were defenseless. Here you have this guy who based his career on monumentality and greatness, yet in some ways his biggest fears had to do with women.



THC: You are an artist but you also have the role of an educator. How do you think the creation, practice, and interpretation of the arts should be taught at academic institutions like Harvard?



WPL: What I find interesting about the arts in education is creating a healthy suspicion of the status quo. Institutions should create a safe environment where that kind of exploration can be fostered. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a critical assessment of the quality of that suspicion, because not all of it is equal.

For me, the arts is all about taking risks and pushing the boundaries of an area: of chemistry, neuroscience, music, theater, or whatever. An artist will perhaps ask a question differently, with a different tone that may allow one to see the problem differently. In some cases, it will ask the question impractically, which I think is of value.

I think we make practicality very important in America, and there is a celebration of people who only do things because they make money or because they have results. But many things that humans do do not have a clear result. It’s a fact—you cannot predict that A will result in B. So we glorify this kind of certainty in the face of the lie that we can never have it. The stuff I’m interested in, I just admit that I’ll leave it to the void of exploration. I can’t promise you what the result will be. I can only promise you the commitment to leap.

—Interview conducted, condensed, and edited by Monica S. Liu.