Learning to Be Human: An Interview with William Pope.L

Everyone has to before they walk. Even so, it is also true that when people achieve a certain status, they may feel they are more important than another person. The rich look down on the poor. The beautiful look down on the plain. The powerful look down on the weak. But status is fleeting, we all begin on the same level with the same luck. Crawling brings us back to basics. We crawl, as small children, not because we are humiliated but because we are learning to be human. Crawling is a way to remind ourselves of our common struggle to be human. --Statement for Bringing the Decarie to the Mountain It was motherhood that initiated my struggle to be human. Pathetic as it is to admit, it wasn't until I was enraptured with the helpless person I held in my postpartum arms that I truly understood what it meant to walk in another's shoes. The simplest things seemed monumental to my son, like trying to lift his weak neck from the pillow or line up a piece of toast with his lips. Crawling seemed colossal, and I wept when he finally reached the couch. Perhaps this arrival at compassion, delayed as it may have been, is what ultimately brought me to the work of performance artist William Pope.L. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The first photograph that I saw of Pope.L showed him inching along a city street, belly barely off the ground, clad in a soiled Superman suit. His glasses were skewed; he wore kneepads with holes, a skateboard strapped to his back, and a determined but drained look upon his face. By that time, the baby who taught me empathy was enamored of his own equally threadbare superhero costumes, and I was as taken with the image for sentimental reasons as I was piqued by its impetus. As I began to research Pope.L's work, which spans at least twenty years, I was most struck by these as he referred to them, performance pieces in which he took to the streets in the name of, and in support for, those who lived upon them. By literally crawling, his face centimeters from the cement and at one with the detritus and dirt, Pope.L became a visible bodily metaphor for the struggles that the homeless and disabled endure on a daily basis. Since the late 1970s, Pope.L has completed dozens of crawls in many countries, as well as countless performance pieces, nearly all of which ask viewers to reconsider their socially ingrained presumptions about class, race, and by extension, privilege. He routinely has a camera person with him to record reactions of passersby, which range from vociferous protest to nervous dismissal. His most critically acclaimed to date, The Great White Way (GWW), is a continual work-in-progress in which Pope.L plans to journey from the Statue of Liberty more than twenty miles uptown. As he is only able to complete the laborious segments intermittently, it is estimated that it will take over seven years to finish. Obviously it is a journey far more epic than my son's trek across the living room. Nevertheless, viewing images of a bedraggled Pope.L in his blue and red suit, resting on a sidewalk after one of his more grueling crawls, I cried again. In an age of overly cerebral, self-obsessional artwork that is difficult to decode (even if one wished to), here was an honest act of selfless symbolism. I wondered, whose work was truly difficult?; whom was I seeing, not just in the art world but in real life? And finally, in an age of inflated celebrity gods, who were my real heroes? These questions compelled me to introduce Pope.L's work to my students, and his work became the mainstay of our discussions on contemporary art's potential to change lives, as well as a way into discussing such unfashionable concepts as charity and poverty. But seeing art in reproduction pales in comparison to engaging with it, so when I heard that the artist would be organizing a mass crawl up the slope of Montreal's Mont Royal this past June, I took part. The performance, titled Bringing the Decarie to the Mountain, was part of the Decarie, a community-based exhibition project organized by the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts. …

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