Pope.L might not name himself one of many most influential efficiency artists working within the US right now, however he has been recognized to move out enterprise playing cards declaring he’s “the friendliest Black artist in America”. Recognized for his provocative and infrequently absurdist works that cope with race, financial methods and language, the Chicago-based artist and educator works throughout a number of disciplines, from installations and movie to portray and writing. His work is as distinctive as it’s expansive. The hallmark of Pope.L’s observe is his use of iteration and intervention, each of that are evident in his Crawl collection, which noticed him transfer on palms and knees throughout giant swaths of New York Metropolis on a number of events between 1978 and 2001. These performances had been meant to counter “verticality”—an idea he makes use of to underscore the wealth and well being it requires to be socially cellular. The gruelling physicality of the Crawls was just one facet of them; equally necessary to the work was the response of onlookers, which might largely be summarised as compulsive avoidance.

Consuming the Wall Avenue Journal is possibly Pope.L’s most recognisable work, which has been carried out in a number of other ways since 1991, when he first sat on an American flag and began consuming pages of the Wall Avenue Journal, washing them down with milk and ketchup. It was a succinct commentary on the US’s glorification of capital and consumption, one made much more poignant when he restaged it on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in 2000 whereas sitting atop a bathroom and masking himself with flour to quickly color his pores and skin white. A brand new model of this work is on the centre of an exhibition on the South London Gallery (SLG). For this iteration, Pope.L has eliminated the dwell efficiency aspect and, as an alternative, three 4m-high picket towers, topped with bogs and in varied phases of collapse, will dominate the gallery’s important house. Round them, the Wall Avenue Journal points might be stacked and milk jugs scattered; a flour-like substance will accumulate over the entire of the set up all through the run of the present. The exhibition, which additionally contains earlier movie works like Small Cup (2008) and his Pores and skin Set drawings from 2013, would be the artist’s first institutional solo present within the UK.

The Artwork Newspaper: Starting together with your Crawls, a variety of your performances have a sure shock issue and the aspect of public response is commonly elementary to the work. Just like the Crawls, Consuming the Wall Avenue Journal has had quite a few iterations because you first carried out it. What was the general public’s preliminary response to this piece?

Pope.L: To start with some individuals had been perplexed. Some individuals had been pissed off. Some, particularly after I was doing the road model, ignored or averted me.

For the reason that dwell efficiency facet is not going to be a part of the SLG set up, do you see the work altering in which means once more because it turns into a extra sculptural, static expertise?

The which means of the brand new model will include a palimpsest of the earlier variations whereas staking out new which means territory, however length will nonetheless play a key function.

Why accomplish that a lot of your works exist in a number of totally different variations?

Versioning is a approach of making incompleteness and ongoingness on the similar time. The thought of a completed paintings is a fiction. The declare of “being achieved” is wishful considering and a bit impatient.

The movie Small Cup, which options goats and chickens trampling over a seed-strewn and ruined architectural mannequin resembling the US Capitol constructing, is an fascinating piece in relation to Consuming the Wall Avenue Journal. Each embody the destruction and digestion of US establishments that operate as symbols of energy. What in regards to the strategy of ingesting these symbolic objects is essential to the act of their destruction?

Each items deliver the excessive/low by way of some type of act of transformation. In each circumstances, gravity can be a collaborator. Using animals and gravity make the items extra impersonal, as if it’s the most pure factor on this planet for issues like governments to disintegrate.

Loads of your works, not least the 2 talked about above, depend on US symbols or ideas. Do you suppose these works will resonate in a different way inside a UK setting?

In all probability. However I believe the world of references I’m working in isn’t so particularly narrowly American—in truth, among the poetics of the works are derived from European romantic sources and their curiosity in dying and decay, and so forth, and so forth. And, lest we overlook, America was British earlier than it was America.

At SLG, there’s a recurring motif of accumulation, not solely the flour-like substance that may coat the Consuming the Wall Avenue Journal set up but additionally the marigold flowers that may pile up within the gallery’s Hearth Station constructing. What’s the significance of this accumulation total? And why marigolds?

Marigolds reference the medicinal but additionally mourning, celebration and dying. Accumulation speaks for itself.

Your shelf works usually function a mix of objects which have relevance to the place by which they’re displayed. From the place do you supply the objects included in these installations and what connotations have they got for you?

I began making shelf works within the 1990s. The content material for many of these works was natural supplies akin to onions or potatoes, or extra processed items akin to low-cost ingesting alcohol and youngsters’s issues. The bottles I’m utilizing within the SLG present are UK merchandise, both Buckfast or Cactus Jack ingesting alcohol. Each of those merchandise (Buckfast the older, Cactus Jack the modern) are marketed to younger individuals (or the kid within the grownup) as a reasonable means for altering one’s consciousness.

Let’s take a step again and have a look at your observe as a complete, quite than particular works. What initially drew you to efficiency?

I used to be drawn to it as a result of it required the juggling of a number of crafts and strategies directly. As well as, the witnessing of the work was extra direct and participatory but momentary.

You additionally work in movie, writing, portray, sculpture and different media. How do these varied types of expression communicate to one another? Is there a selected sort of media you usually return to?

Every speaks in its personal technique to a selected use and context however some key media that I return to repeatedly are gravity, natural supplies (together with the human physique), time and language.

In your artist’s e-book Gap Concept (2002), you supply some perception into your wide-ranging observe, noting that the shortage of one thing is an ongoing concern. In it you write: “I don’t image the outlet, I’m the outlet.” This gap has the facility to generate different holes, materials or immaterial, full or empty: “a voodoo of nothingness”, as you name it. This appears quite nihilistic. What’s the function nihilism performs in your work? And what’s its relationship to the absurdism that additionally permeates a lot of your performances?

That means is necessary. Simply because I worth nothingness or incompleteness or absence doesn’t imply I don’t worth which means. It’s simply that typically which means, our use of it, can be utilized to obscure which means or devalue it. After which there’s the plain: as a software, which means has its limits.

What can absurdity supply as a software of resistance and liberation? Usually are not current political figures (each within the US and the UK) additionally usually branded as absurd, and the way may absurdity now be a aspect of fascism quite than liberation?

The ultimate phrase of James Joyces’s Ulysses is “sure”. The final phrases of Samuel Beckett’s Ready for Godot is “They don’t transfer”.

• Pope.L: Hospital, South London Gallery, 21 November-11 February 2024