Eat Notes. Eating the Wall Street Journal, 2000, Volume 2.
[the artist], 2000.
Plastic comb-bound book (15 x 10 cm.), 16, [1] pages. Illustrated in black and white and with color ink jet prints pasted down onto blank leaves; a yellow Post-it with handwritten note, "vomit", and a short handwritten text, "other side of the hole" with a pinhole by the artist in the final leaf (note the copy reproduced in Bessire's monograph has no modifications). Signed by the artist, "Pope L." and with a small sticker with the image of a pitcher, both on the rear wrapper panel. ~ Stated "Volume 2" which we understand to be the documentation of the second of two performances of the work. There were at least four books in this series (the final labeled Volumes 4&5). Documentation to accompany a performance piece by the visual artist William Pope.L (1955-2023), the self-described "friendliest black artist in America". The piece, titled Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000), included the African-American artist perched on a toilet atop a large wooden tower alternately ingesting the capitalist daily, flour, milk, and mayonnaise. Eat Notes contains a description, with illustration, of Alcohol Shelf, and notes on consumption and holes. "Pope.L was a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice used binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create art works in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applied some of the same social, formal and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race and community. The goals for his work were several: joy, money and uncertainty— not necessarily in that order." (Mitchell-Innes & Nash). Signed by the artist, "Pope L." and with a small sticker with the image of a pitcher, both on the rear wrapper panel. [OCLC locates no copies; Bessire. William Pope.L, Friendliest Black Artist in America, pages 74-75]. A professor of theater and rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, William Pope is an African-American artist whose installations and performances challenge stereotypes about black male identity. He is known for his "Crawl" projects, in which he crawls through city streets including ones in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Budapest, Hungary. Many of these projects were funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, but funding from that entity terminated in 1996 when Pope walked the streets of Harlem wearing a 14-foot-long cardboard phallic projection.
He stirred controversy in late 2001-2002 with his traveling show "William Pope.L:eRacism," organized by the Maine College of Art in Portland. It is the first large-scale exhibition of work by this artist to gain attention since the 1996 walk, but application for NEA funds was denied. However, the Andy Warhol foundation did support the project with 50,000 dollars. Of the NEA denial, the artist says: "Whether they intended it or not, it's a good thing to raise these issues, and I hope it gets people looking at the image of cultures we have as a nation."
Source: ARTnews, February 2002, "NEA Back in the Spotlight," by Barbara Pollack
Price: $2,500.00