Two Memorials

Videos and ephemera from Pope.L, notes on Peter Simensky. Plus Anadol (no, not that one) and an economical French pinot noir

Pope.L, announcement card for a show at Horodner Romley Gallery, New York, 1994

Pope.L died last month, age 68. He was one of the artists I admired most, one of the first contemporary artists I became aware of, probably the artist whose shows I saw most often aside from those of people I know personally. His work was unbelievably scabrous and funny, elliptical and humane. In his performances, he insisted on versioning seemingly every piece every time it was reprised into something new, which captures his insistent evolution over forty years of making art. His intellect never flagged once. Reading some recent essays about him the past few days, I kept unhappily jolting myself by mentally changing the present tense to the past.

As a fan, I have a small collection of Pope.L material. In memoriam, I’d like to share just a bit of it.

ATM Piece (1997)
Though I can’t be sure, I seem to remember first hearing of Pope.L by reading about this piece in The Village Voice. I’d never seen video of it, however, until his 2019 retrospective at MoMA. Note the use of the term “EDP” by the police, short for “emotionally disturbed person.” Note also the distinctive editing—the video is more than mere documentation—which replays the EDP line to close the video as the cop rejects the dollar Pope.L offers him. There’s something almost Biblical about the gesture.

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Black Domestic aka Cow Commercial (1994)
A lot of Pope.L’s performance work engaged not just race but also gender—there’s a good deal of genderfuck going on in Aunt Jenny Chronicles (1991), Eracism (1992), and elsewhere, rooted in the impositions of Black masculinity. And then there’s class. In Thunderbird Immolation (1978), various Crawls, and here, in Black Domestic, he wears a suit while behaving in “crazy” ways in public places, which both adds a narrative complication—how can an EDP be so nicely dressed?—and an air of anxiety about a Black man losing perhaps not only his mind but a tenuous foothold in the middle class. Black Domestic is more of a video work per se than performance documentation, with a heavy Dada streak and some dense subliminal punning. Cow vs. car; the title’s double-edged implications of making a home for oneself versus keeping house for someone else; the substitution of a cow for a mule in an oblique invocation of that mythical promise that constituted the foundational Black experience of the American Dream’s BS.

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Sweet Desire aka Burial Piece (1996)
Amid Pope.L’s caustic body of work, this piece has always struck me as the most pointed. Jacob Lawrence makes an unexpected appearance, wryly noted in the intertitles. Pope.L stayed buried for eight hours in the summer sun with his nose just inches from a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Not long after this premiere, he attempted the piece again but had to be disinterred after four hours and taken to the hospital.

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Excerpt from Hole Theory (2002)
As Aria Dean fittingly puts it in her excellent essay on the 2019 MoMA show, Pope.L’s book Hole Theory may or may not provide the key to the artist’s whole oeuvre. Absence, negation, the void, lack, blankness and Blackness and the construction of meaning, the nature of identity, the paradox of something that is and is not.

Peter Simensky, August 2023. Photo by Lucy Bohnsack

I’d also like to note the death of someone else last month—Peter Simensky, the Chair of Graduate Fine Arts at the California College for the Arts. We knew each other not well but for a long time. After a gap of some years I had seen him at a friend’s birthday in later 2022. We talked a lot about the Bay Area and how it took a little bit of work to find a community there. He seemed to like teaching. It wasn’t a deep conversation but a friendly one. I always remember him having a great deal of intensity, of sheer presence, which never varied in our occasional meetings over the years.

A number of people have posted loving reminiscences about Peter on Instagram. One particularly striking one is by Kristan Kennedy, focusing on two works he made involving the dispersion of gold dust. An interview of Simensky by Kennedy appears in a catalogue for the exhibition Pictures of the Moon with Teeth, which took place in 2015 at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. It begins as follows:

Kennedy: Why go on? Why go on when the work we do has an indeterminate or immaterial value?

Simensky: I don’t think the work could exist in the first place without those conditions. When the work comes into being it is also slipping away, that is its beauty. Not just in a poetic sense but formally, materially. . . . Once cast off as a sea of particles moving in the air, it opens up, becomes a mass, a sculptural form, a column of light, a dancing vibrating hive—simply to go away again. The drama is in those moments of coming together, but ultimately the work resides as well in the falling away, residue, absence, or memory.

Wine
Domaine Claude Vosgien Pinot Noir 2021. The hideous façade might drive you away, but you should check out Franklin Wines in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, if you’re in the vicinity. It’s a great store with a large and varied selection that emphasizes natural and organic options without being annoying about it. On a recent icy Sunday I was browsing the cheap Burgundies when the manager recommended a pinot noir from the next-door region of Lorraine for only $25. And it was fantastic.

Domaine Claude Vosgien is striking when you pour it in the glass, lighter than some dark rosés, leathery-rusty, translucent with a wispy cloudiness that gives it a little mystique. The flavor is a chamber quartet version of a Burgundy. After a very brief and gentle burn-off, which reduces a yeasty bio edge, it tastes of orange rind, spicy cherry, violets and budding roses—botanical garden, as my drinking companion put it. It’s not aged in wood but it gives off a little tingle, and after several hours moves a half-step toward patent medicine. Buy it if you can find it, at Franklin Wines or elsewhere.

Music

Uzun Havalar—Anadol
Nothing but respect for my Anadol, the dreamy, shimmery drone-synth-psych project of Berlin-based musician Gözen Atila. This 2019 album—available, like her other records, on Bandcamp—is like the soundtrack to one of those great poorly dubbed ’70s B movies where something supernatural either is happening or isn’t and ends in an ambiguous freeze-frame. Uzun hava is a type of Turkish folk ballad, which Google translates as “long weather.” Probably wrong but lovely if true.