Review: Pope.L – savage satire from a trickster with Y-shaped moves, known for his grueling crawls through New York

Modern art, late American London embraced liberal assumptions and the commercialization of Black culture, even wearing white bunny ears and underpants. At the center of each is the phrase "Black idea" printed alongside a seemingly random number (51, 37, 666). What is Pope.L, the late, great American contemporary artist and trickster, doing? Perhaps one

Identical squares are attached to the wall, each painted in the great style of American minimalism: pure, austere variations on a theme. In the center of each is printed the words "The Negro Idea" along with an apparently random number (51, 37, 666). What is Pope.L, the late great con artist of contemporary American art, up to?

Perhaps this is a critique of how minimalism, with its art-against-art ethic, left politics out of art? Or a comment on how racial categories are as constructed (and subject to fashion) as theories of contemporary art? Or how the edifice of Western modernism is built on stolen ideas? Then again, perhaps the establishment of an outdated racial category is simply designed to upset the liberal pieties of people likely to visit this art gallery off Piccadilly.

The only thing that is certain is that Pope.L cannot be pinned. The influential artist and writer, best known for his grueling "crawling" in New York, did not use art to understand himself. Instead, he used its tools to dismantle the liberal assumption that other people and societies can be easily understood, classified, and explained. He was less interested in being "seen" than in making his audience look at themselves and the world anew, paving the way for a new generation of artists for whom identity—meaning conformity to external expectations—is not just a creative trap but a form of control.

The way words and images fall into fixed categories (cliché and kitsch, respectively) is a recurring theme. In Identity What We Lose to Real For, completed a year before the artist's death in 2023, wooden letters like those used to teach children the alphabet fall out of their frame, confusing a short text that resembles a dense concrete poem. The surface is splattered with paint, reminiscent of the expressionism of a toddler's drawing and coloring (neighboring sets of scribbled Xs and Os similarly evoke conceptual painting and a half-understood game of n' and t's). Art here destroys conventional ways of thinking and naming.

Short films documenting a series of Pope.L performances are shown in a back room. Embraced in a Superman costume and with a skateboard strapped to his back, the artist crawls on his belly from the Statue of Liberty to the Bronx. As strangers pick him up, you wonder why so many are offended by this performance, but not affected by the many homeless people in New York.

In a lecture-performance, he places his work on the "Walk of National Consciousness" and the world swarms in every work in the show: a white painting may look like a romantic abstraction, but it is actually, as the text on its edge tells us, an image of Dick Martin Luther King as seen from Pluto. Fifteen years after Pope.L made this split, it just so happens that research was conducted on Kazimir Malevich's Black Square in 1915. The monochrome painting, long regarded as a symbol of the sublime possibilities of art, was discovered to have a hidden title: Negroes Fighting in a Cave.

Here is further evidence for Pope.L's argument that art can never be completely divorced from the nature of the world that produces it, no matter how pure a painting appears. This point is clearly demonstrated in his long and highly complex engagement with the work of Robert Ryman, a survey of his monochrome white paintings now on display at the Barbican in London).

Pope.L memorably described himself as Ryman's "son" and therefore obligated to "follow in his footsteps to the front door of the family mansion and set it on fire." While it is a shame that this show does not include any of his most direct responses to the painter, the two exhibitions can be seen in productive counterpoint.

Pope.L: Selected Works: 1978–2022 is at Modern Art, London from 13 October to 14 November.