CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/25/2020

Cover-to-cover provocation in 'member: Pope.L, 1978–2001'

Featured image, from Pope.L's iconic 1991 performance, "How Much Is That Nigger in the Window a.k.a. Tompkins Square Crawl," is reproduced from MoMA's remarkable new artists-book-like exhibition catalogue, member: Pope.L, 1978–2001. A properly deep investigation of thirteen of the artist's defining early works, it also contains unique design details like a die-cut single hole punched through from cover to cover and a cropped, or cut, corner—perhaps alluding to the defunct practice of marking discounted or sample LPs, but certainly also punning gestures in their own right. "'Have-not-ness' is a hole at the heart of the body of work that forms this exhibition," Stuart Comer writes, "a project defined as much by voids, ghosts and the passage of bodies and time as it is by material objects and histories. To the degree that the multivalent work of Pope.L occupies a zone between actions and objects, between past and present, this hole becomes an occasion to problematize such binaries, structures of difference in aesthetic terms that find an echo in the heavily bifurcated social and racial relations Pope.L has endeavored to destabilize throughout his career. member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 draws together a constellation of diverse materials constituting artworks that to varying degrees have attempted to inhabit this hole, this space of lack. Pope.L claims that it is a 'lack worth having,' a process of coming to terms with an absence of resolution that speaks to the 'dynamic of pain, loss, joy, radicality and possibility in the experience of being black.'"