Art that Pops - A new installation by William Pope.L transforms Carpenter Center into a playground for challenging ideas.

Helen Molesworth was recently musing about the Carpenter
Center for the Visual Arts,
the only building on the North American continent
designed by the modernist architect and designer
Le Corbusier. The cement structure swirls with columns, diagonals, curves, layers, levels and a ramp that confoundingly does not lead to a front door (in part because there isn’t one). The building, she says, looks like a machine with its insides turned out.

“The Carpenter is the only avant-garde building at Harvard, and it plays with the idea of: What is a building?” says Molesworth, curator of contemporary art at Harvard University Art Museums. “It’s ‘utopic,’ which means ‘problematic’ because it imagines an ideal user who doesn’t exist.”

Yet Molesworth has, indeed, imagined an ideal user in artist William Pope.L, whose site-specific installation Corbu Pops opens Thursday, Feb. 19. After a lecture by Pope.L at 6 pm, a dozen Harvard students will offer a live performance. The performance will be videotaped, and afterward spliced with archival material and interviews from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, one of the project funders. The video will be incorporated into the exhibition, which continues through April 5.

The installation takes its name from the three-dozen, 30-pound “Popsicle” sculptures Pope.L designed in the style of the Carpenter’s architecture. Integral to the show’s central message about racism, the towering hand-held pops, used in the performance as well as in a display, will be covered with a black viscous liquid.

For the theatrical component, Pope.L is working with students to write a score of rumbling, groaning Dadaist-style sound poems, and to construct a special puppet stage modeled on the “bop the groundhog” game.

“In my career, I’ve found I’m interested in the high and the low,” says Pope.L, who teaches theater at Bates College in Maine. “The fact of being invited to Harvard to do a project and wanting to do something a bit messy interests me.”

Pope.L produced five working drafts before settling on Corbu Pops, which explores his career-long questions about racism, consumerism, and artistic mastery, as well as faces off against the Swiss-born architect as an anti-muse.

Le Corbusier’s idiosyncratic style has been a potent launching point for Pope.L’s debut at Harvard, where the site for the exhibition sits along the outside perimeter of the Yard and serves as a challenge to its restrained New England architecture.
Pope.L also knows something about navigating on the fringes and causing public confusion, if not disturbance. His signature works are “crawls” in which he dons a Superman outfit, straps on kneepads, and spiders his way between two politically and socially opposing places, such as Wall Street and Harlem. He has created installations out of mayonnaise, peanut butter, Pop-Tarts and his own body.

It’s fitting, too, that the project received support from the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Fund through the Learning from Performers program at the Office for the Arts. The late Ivers, victim of a still unsolved murder in 1983, was an experimental artist who grew up in Brookline and graduated from Harvard, where he is legendary both for his exuberance and for pushing against mainstream practices in theater and music. Like Pope.L, Ivers was a provocateur.

Thomas Lee, who oversees the OFA program, hopes the residency will channel the iconoclastic spirit of Ivers, who chased artistic ideas and expression rather than financial success.

“Students don’t like to get messy,” says Lee. “They like to be neat and succeed. I hope this experience will give them a new way of seeing and expressing themselves. This will allow them to play. A sense of play can sometimes be missing from what they do.”
Molesworth agrees. She hopes to challenge the “clean and proper” perception of the Yard and open a dialogue. Because so few museum collections have extensive work by contemporary African American artists, she also sees the project as an opportunity to feature an under-represented voice.

“I’m impressed by how Pope.L’s work comes out of a Brechtian tradition,” she says. “You want to laugh and cry simultaneously at patterns of nonsense that pick at the scab of racism and consumerism. It’s that pleasure and grossness of picking at a scab.”

Alicia Anstead edits Inside Arts magazine and teaches arts journalism at Harvard Extension School. She is the 2008 Nieman Fellow in Arts and Culture at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

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