Biting Lines, Hurting Stains: My Afternoon with Pope.L’s Art in SoHo

por Juan Butten

There are days when you walk through New York looking for answers and end up finding cracks. Today was one of those days. I decided to take refuge from the SoHo heat by stepping through the doors of The Drawing Center on Wooster Street. I wasn’t looking for a history lesson, just a space to breathe. What I found inside, however, left me breathless. The exhibition “Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L” is not just an art show; it is a human whirlwind captured on paper.

Walking through the galleries, it is impossible not to be moved by the rawness of William Pope, that kid who grew up in Newark dodging the instability of poverty and went on to become a giant of conceptual art before leaving us last year. Seeing his works is like peeking into an intimate diary painted with cheap ballpoint pens, coffee, correction fluid, glue, and even hair. In his “Failure Drawings,” a piece of a paper towel or a notebook page transforms into a battlefield where racism, consumerism, and the absurdity of daily life are torn apart with bare hands.

But what truly blew my mind was the invisible yet titanic work of those who made it possible for this chaos to hold such a profound meaning for us, the visitors. Hats off to the curatorial team led by Laura Hoptman, Rebecca DiGiovanna, Isabella Kapur, and consultant Hamza Walker. Making more than two hundred pieces—many of them rescued from archives that had never seen the light of day—talk to each other in such a fluid and heartbreaking way is a work of art in itself.

The curators did not limit themselves to hanging pictures in chronological order; they created a living experience. They had the enormous sensitivity to understand that for Pope.L, drawing a line of ink on a grimy paper was exactly the same as dragging his own naked body across the New York asphalt in his famous performances. The curation makes you feel the passage of time, the pain of the social wound, and the brilliance of the absurd joke the artist throws in our faces. Organizing such a vast, porous, and shifting universe, and making the everyday viewer connect with the artist’s human fragility, is an absolute curatorial triumph. I stepped out onto Wooster Street feeling that drawing, as Pope.L used to say, is certainly an act of provocation. And boy, does it provoke us.

#PopeL #CertainlyAnAct #TheDrawingCenter #ContemporaryArt #ArtCuration #SoHoNY #WorksOnPaper #JuanButtenChronicles #JuanButten