Chapter 2: Differing, Drawn

English, Darby

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Chapter 2: Differing, Drawn

Darby English

To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror

Of the ongoing Skin Set Drawing project that he began in 1997, Pope.L says, “There is no such thing as one drawing.” All direct quotations of Pope.L are from conversations with him and the...

Author

Darby English

PublisherYale University Press

PublisherHutchins Center for African & African American Research

Related print edition pages: pp.42-85

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00170.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-18031

Chapter subject tags:Pope.L, William, 1955-Black race--ColorHuman skin color in artRacism in artDrawing, American--20th centurySatire in art

Chapter 2: Differing, Drawn

The passage of a life should show; it should abrade. And when life stops, a certain space — however small — should be left scarred by the grand and damaging parade. Things shouldn’t be so hard.

— Kay Ryan, “Things Shouldn't Be So Hard,” 2005

Of the ongoing Skin Set Drawing project that he began in 1997, Pope.L says, “There is no such thing as one drawing.”1 All direct quotations of Pope.L are from conversations with him and the author, June and July 2016. This essay is deeply informed by those discussions. To ensure that viewers have an experience consistent with this claim, Pope.L stipulates that public collections hold and display the Skin Set Drawings in multiples. He also prefers that, wherever they appear, they be near other art, as though to borrow its artiness when their own supply of it seems to get low. So, one is likely to find oneself before a clutch of sheets decorated by Pope.L with prominently displayed phrases, along with a bevy of interstitial musings and doodles, that the word “provocative” barely captures. The phrases started out as an accrual of notations (more on which below), later developed and exhibited as Skin Set Drawings. An early presentation filled an entire wall (fig. 14); at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Skin Set Drawings occur twenty at a time (fig. 15); and in a New York installation in 2013 (fig. 16) they were hung to cover a long wall in an uneven grid.

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Description: Skin Set Drawings a.k.a. White Drawings by Pope.L, William

Fig. 14 / Pope.L, Skin Set Drawings a.k.a. White Drawings, 1999–2001. Marker, ballpoint, coffee, pencil, and correction fluid on graph paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm). Installation view of Hole Theory at The Project, New York, 2001

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Description: Installation view, MoCA by Unknown

Fig. 15 / Installation view of Selections from the Permanent Collection, February 8, 2014–April 12, 2015, at MOCA Grand Avenue, courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

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Description: Installation view of Pope.L's Colored Waiting Room by Forrest, Brian

Fig. 16 / Pope.L, Installation view of Colored Waiting Room at Mitchell, Innes & Nash, New York, 2013

White People Are Pun (2001–3; fig. 17) is one of the simplest Skin Set Drawings we have, and clearly illustrates what Pope.L intends by hoping that we will see writing before we see drawing. He places the title phrase in the center of an 8½-by-11-inch sheet of standard graph paper, working in capital letters with a traceable number of swift strokes of thick black watercolor. Each letter has a tripartite structure: a hasty stratigraphy shows a first, framing layer of stick-figure forms written in blue ballpoint ink, then a tracing, by brush, with dilute black watercolor, before a scanty application of more concentrated black marker ink. We can identify the layers readily by the prosaic drawing implement and mark-making style specific to each: the ballpoint pen allowing for continuous, pivoting strokes, the watercolor brush for a broken sequence of occasionally overlapping touches, and the marker for a staccato series of tonal highlights.

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Description: White People are Pun by Pope.L, William

Fig. 17 / Pope.L, White People Are Pun, 2001–3. Ballpoint, marker, correction fluid, cut in paper. Framed: paper, 10.81 × 8.5 in. (27.46 × 21.59 cm); frame (black with gold/glass), 11.94 × 9.44 × 0.6 in. (30.32 × 23.97 × 1.59 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee

To look at words written this way on a page, of course, is to find much to see in the body of a single letter — to register not only something of the word’s weight but also the tension between its role in a verbal message and its visual condition of being-for-itself. Reading is not necessarily suspended, but by spacing out and interrupting it, these letters do disfigure it to an important degree. All these felicities of drawn writing give the word “white” in the drawing a special inflection: it’s worked up three times, in as many shades of black, before being freed to do its indicative or symbolic work as an integrated unit of verbal data. What we might call the “identity” of WHITE is here given by the formation of the word itself, on an occasion whose meticulous distinctness continues to assert itself. (Again and again we’ll find ourselves in just this clash between the normative and the experiential, between color differentiation as we know it and as it operates here.)

In the detail (fig. 18) we see that Pope.L has placed an arrow between the right stem of the “h” and a flaccid-looking ring drawn in ballpoint pen three rows of the graph paper’s grid above it and half the height of one of those rows. The ring constitutes an illustration for which Pope.L appropriates the H in WHITE to serve as the first letter of a caption: HALO. By confining this emendation to an interstice, he marginalizes the display of signs as such — that is, of representations of, say, purity or sacredness. The arrow and the word HALO move in opposite directions from the stem of the H. This ambiguation is crucial: at once the inaugural figure of HALO and a mere part of WHITE, the H serves two masters, its equivocation running meaning aground. While the reading mind fixes on the phrase WHITE PEOPLE ARE PUN, the looking mind sees that phrase as a body consecrated by a flaccid ring of gold, a color given not by the pen the ring is drawn with but by a word itself born of two independent inscriptions. Neither mind, alone, can reckon the sheet in its totality, which, anyway, would be the wrong kind of reckoning. Remember: there is no such thing as one drawing.

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Description: White People are Pun, detail by Pope.L, William

Fig. 18 / Pope.L, White People Are Pun (details)

The ongoing notational practice from which the sentences come is one thing and its transposition into Skin Set Drawings another. I deal here with the physical outcomes of the latter procedure, in which Pope.L explores a variety of ways of ordering and marking the page and tinkers with the informational status of mark-making and its presentation. A sprawl of letters, words, and possible significances retains a concept of semantic spread that proves fundamental for the project’s management not of language as such, but of language as we use it to effect differentiation and negotiate differences. Semantic spread functions here both conceptually and actually, as when Pope.L highlights the apparent accident — by marking with pen, say, the perimeter of a drip of coffee. At mid-left he uses ballpoint first to highlight two seemingly errant traces of watercolor (fig. 19), then to caption them in the way he captions the halo: “This is okay because it has nothing to do with race,” reads the enigmatic insistence, its referent otherwise unworthy of special notice. Clearly the drawing has something to do with race, but Pope.L’s indicative mood is just that, a mood, and shuns explication — and this, precisely, is what the Skin Set Drawings for Pope.L have to do with race. Their business with race, we might say, is to loosen the anchors that would secure its meanings.

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Fig. 19 / Pope.L, White People Are Pun (details)

The watercolor blurs Pope.L highlights have cognates all over the page that go undistinguished: below and above the E in PEOPLE, between the arrows to the right of ARE, etc. A given Skin Set Drawing may comprise a burgeon of such accidents, emendations, and interventions, all in their way making clear that no space is innocent, that every point in a textual field is a potential meaning-space over which vigilant watch is advisable. This noise makes a Skin Set Drawing difficult to see at once. As modestly sized as most of these pictures are, teeming minute marks, and occasional negations of figure/ground distinction, mean that vision must accumulate a Skin Set Drawing rather than gobble it whole (figs. 20–22). One gathers it up piecemeal, a first pass invariably failing to register marks upon which a later viewing may linger.

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Description: Purple People Are I'll Fuck You Whole Family and Cut They Shit Off by Pope.L,...

Fig. 20 / Pope.L, Purple People Are I’ll Fuck You Whole Family and Cut They Shit Off, 2011. Mixed media on Masonite, 24 × 18 in. (61 × 45.7 cm)

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Description: White People Are the Future by Pope.L, William

Fig. 21 / Pope.L, White People Are the Future, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm)

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Description: Brown People Are Aaa Lounge Act at the Bakery by Pope.L, William

Fig. 22 / Pope.L, Brown People Are Aaa Lounge Act at the Bakery, 2010. Mixed media on paper, 12 × 9 in. (30.5 × 22.9 cm)

Equally important is the dependency of certain especially murky drawings on the reading advice administered by the sharper ones. Step back, and you see the project’s stout idiomatic consistency belied by variations in script, visual weight, and the statements’ temper. Particularly when reckoning with these more visually abstract examples, one may register more fully the presence not alone of Pope.L’s marking, writing self but of his peregrinating thought. By this I mean a sincere and strenuous, but finally unsystematic, attempt to use drawing to try to materialize the actuality, for him, of being and doing. Or, better: to figure the simultaneity itself of doing while being — an effort that’s hard to reconcile with the generalizing tenor of the surface messages.

Comparably strong in White People Are Pun, that creative-thinking presence takes the form of the s’s flanking the word “pun”: a full-sized, marker-toned s at right that would have pluralized the word were it not canceled out with correction fluid, and a diminutive, pen-drawn, and circled one at left that converts “pun” to “spun.” The reworkings both divulge and illustrate a paradox at the heart of the notion of the pun — the linguistic capital of mixed meaning, a trick of language that delights in defeating singularity — that, revels, even, in the plural trajectories that its signifying activity follows. The readings “white people are spun” and “white people are puns” prove significant in one’s apprehension of the drawing. In this way the project draws itself out and along, pointing in countless thematic directions as it goes. Clearly, a stark feature of the output is the pleasure Pope.L takes in both massing and chiseling at this propagation. Somehow plain to see is the quantum of libidinal repression he has not brought to bear on this stuff.

Pope.L composed Blue People Are the Niggers of the Atmosphere (2008; fig. 23) in six rows, one for each line of text. To aid his centering of the text in the field, a dotted line bisects the sheet vertically. Axially assured as the result may be, what’s here for the gleaning is not information in the graph-papery sense of that term. In more than ten locations on the sheet, pooled blue marks suggest another process — executed, perhaps, on the preceding sheet of the same graph-paper pad, or just nearby on the table. Although strident and stiffly capital, the letters possess little of the technicity of the gridded environment into which Pope.L introduces them. Clearly there’s labor in each, but letters with curved parts — B, O, R, G, and S — receive special attention. Filigreed O’s and G’s, for example, are offset in a way, given an almost independent character relative to the words they populate. As though another kind of thinking wandered in and diverted the temper of the transposition.

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Description: Blue People Are the Niggers of the Atmosphere by Pope.L, William

Fig. 23 / Pope.L, Blue People Are the Niggers of the Atmosphere, 2008. Graph paper, Bic pen, marker, Wite-Out, and acrylic, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm)

Here again, a putatively modal difference between looking and reading does not hold. What commands our interest are those words made from stacks of line. Far more than evoking the intentness of a dwelling mind, they suggest an image of the sometimes fluid, sometimes floundering path of thought itself as it’s embedded in any communication. The way Pope.L draws writing, the specific way of thinking needed to do both, shows through. In line 5, a void set within parentheses marks (fig. 24) reminds us that we don’t always think in words — that, essentially, a word used is a thought moored. Again, spotlighted incident urges attention to those places in a system of representation where signs fail fully to form, or even to appear. In such a situation, thinking doesn’t stick, but that’s okay — sometimes a respite from signifying is felt as indulgence. Pointedly frustrating alternations between meaning and meaninglessness form a kind of conceptual moiré, a dither, through which one assimilates the process. One senses that this is every bit as much a coping mechanism as it is an art procedure.

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Description: Blue People Are the Niggers of the Atmosphere, detail by Pope.L, William

Fig. 24 / Pope.L, Blue People Are the Niggers of the Atmosphere (detail)

Scripted writing on graph paper (a support freighted with Conceptualist "aura") will trigger a tension between the quadrilateral rationality of the preimaged field and the slanting tendency of handwriting. Sometimes the tension itself is richly evocative. The ventilated letters of Purple People Are the Color of Blood After Several Days on the Radiator (2009; fig. 25) invite a sustained view of the grid below. At first glance, all the cascading ornament looks like a kind of downward seepage from the letters’ bodies. In fact it exceeds the textual field. Knowing that drips can’t drip in a vacuum, we might infer an infinitesimal space between paper and pigment through which they might plausibly fall. This imaginary Interspace—forced into mind by the drawing's form—would be different in kind, but not in effect, from the oxygenated zone time and heat would need to change the color of blood in precisely the way this sentence evokes (fig. 26). Here, a Skin Set Drawing's absurd claim is consistent with one way that color change occurs in the world.

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Description: Purple People Are the Color of Blood After Several Days on the Radiator by Pope.L,...

Fig. 25 / Pope.L, Purple People Are the Color of Blood After Several Days on the Radiator, 2009. Bic pen, marker, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm)

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Description: Purple People Are the Color of Blood After Several Days on the Radiator, detail by...

Fig. 26 / Pope.L, Purple People Are the Color of Blood After Several Days on the Radiator (detail)

Green People Are My Brother Frank (2004; fig. 27), along with several other Skin Set Drawings, differs from my first examples in two critical ways. Here, the color of the subject people matches the drawing’s dominant hue. And the sentence-image — drawn in marker and colored correction fluid, laid again onto an armature of ballpoint stick-figure capitals — vies for presence with another of Pope.L’s interstitial drawings, this one in ballpoint, showing a bird of prey looking down from a rocky perch, the path of its vision marked by a broken red line. The bird’s line of thought terminates in the space just above the A and N of “FRANK.” Across the way, at the end of another course of line segments, the bird’s thought appears, crammed onto the envelope of a hot-air balloon: “I see the sea below and the sea sees me. We entertain the idea of each other.”

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Description: Green People Are My Brother Frank by Pope.L, William

Fig. 27 / Pope.L, Green People Are My Brother Frank, 2004. Ballpoint, marker, oil paint marker, colored correction fluid, artist’s hair on paper. Framed: paper, 10.81 × 8.44 in. (27.46 × 21.43 cm); frame (black with gold/glass), 12.44 × 9.94 × 0.75 in. (31.59 × 25.24 × 1.91 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee

This sheet also spotlights a number of the types of incident that regularly occur when one writes by hand while hunkered over a surface. A hair fallen from the artist’s head, for example, and fixed to the paper with transparent glue, pulls the sheet’s physicality into extremely close association with Pope.L’s own (figs. 28, 29). There’s more to the intimacy cryptically figured here: Pope.L did have a brother called Frank, who was alive and well until a couple of years after the artist made this drawing. Idiosyncratic as this example seems, we will find Pope.L’s green people much further afield in other drawings than the artist’s brother Frank: they’re “pea fuckers” and “powder”; they’re “on rice”; they’re “leave-it-to-Beaver with his cleaver and his shadow” (figs. 30–33). This “population” teems with states, properties, and positions. An inelegant community, ostentatiously different from themselves, they remain apart even when they're brought together (fig. 34).

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Description: Green People Are My Brother Frank, detail by Pope.L, William

Fig. 28 / Pope.L, Green People Are My Brother Frank (details)

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Fig. 29 / Pope.L, Green People Are My Brother Frank (details)

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Description: Green People Are Pea Fuckers by Pope.L, William

Fig. 30 / Pope.L, Green People Are Pea Fuckers, March 2003. Ballpoint, marker, correction fluid, colored correction fluid, acrylic, coffee on paper. Framed: paper, 10.87 × 8.44 in. (27.62 × 21.43 cm); frame (black with gold/glass), 12.5 × 10 × 0.69 in. (31.75 × 25.4 × 1.75 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee

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Description: Green People Are Powder by Pope.L, William

Fig. 31 / Pope.L, Green People Are Powder, 2003. Ballpoint, marker, correction fluid, coffee on paper. Framed: paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (27.94 × 21.59 cm); frame (black with gold/glass): 12.5 × 10 × 0.69 in. (31.75 × 25.4 × 1.75 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee

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Description: Green People Are on Rice by Pope.L, William

Fig. 32 / Pope.L, Green People Are On Rice, 2003. Ballpoint, marker, correction fluid, coffee on paper. Framed: paper, 10.87 × 8.44 in. (27.62 × 21.43 cm); frame (black with gold/glass), 12.5 × 9.94 × 0.63 in. (31.75 × 25.24 × 1.59 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee

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Description: Green People Are Leave-It-To-Beaver with His Cleaver and His Shadow by Pope.L,...

Fig. 33 / Pope.L, Green People Are Leave-It-To-Beaver with His Cleaver and His Shadow, 2004. Ballpoint, marker, oil paint marker on paper. Framed: paper, 10.87 × 8.44 in. (27.62 × 21.43 cm); frame (black with gold/glass), 12.5 × 10 × 0.75 in. (31.75 × 25.4 × 1.91 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by the Drawings Committee

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Description: Black People Are a Cave Inside an Earthworm by Pope.L, William

Fig. 34 / Pope.L, Black People Are a Cave Inside an Earthworm, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm)

Black People Are a Cave Inside an Earthworm (2011; fig. 35) is a good example of a type of Skin Set Drawing in which drawing as such enjoys primacy over the drawing of writing. Both open and closed letter-forms vie for legibility amidst cascades and rivulets of differently sized pen and ink lines. The B in BLACK alone comprises five line segments; the c in the same word occurs in a major variant and a minor; and Pope.L embeds EARTHWORM in a nest of varyingly evincive marks. The work includes letterforms great and small, along with a great deal else.

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Description: Installation view of Black Is, Black Ain't by Van Eynde, Tom

Fig. 35 / Pope.L, Installation view of Black Is, Black Ain’t at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2008

It will be clear by now that these examples I’ve lingered on suggest to me some ways to talk about what the Skin Set Drawings are and do. White People . . . narrates its incidents and emendations as part of its primary demonstration; one can’t fairly promote one of these several pithy utterances over the others. Blue People . . . displays a conviction that if we could ascertain social division in the ether, we would. In the interspace between the Purple People . . . and their support, Pope.L appears to inscribe time and thematize the change of state in which something becomes different to itself — the blood on the radiator baked dark — a figure of damaged life, but an open figure here purple instead of brown. The gazing bird in Green People . . . touts a theory of recognition: its thought-line penetrates the word ARE, effectively construing being as being-in-relation, and the chiastic structure of the bird’s musing (“I see the sea and the sea sees me”) and its follow-on (“we entertain the idea of each other”) firmly establishes the theme of relationality — as firmly as it can, that is, in a sketch of transitory copresence between a bird and a body of water.2 Surely the bird’s perch will be brief; and the balloon — punctured in two places — is hardly the picture of durability.

In a manner I think best perceived by looking at all the other examples concurrently, the quarreling signifiers across Black People Are a Cave point up the project’s involvement with questions concerning world-picturing. By drawing this picturing, as it were, Pope.L takes a step beyond theory to establish the visibility of modern social thought’s inclination not only toward formula and system but also toward the interpellation of persons to bind such systems’ sets. Rather than show its viewer anything at all, a Skin Set Drawing wonders what may be salutary, in our real and imaginary encounters with others, to make our trustiest interpretive strategies fail.3 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 account of this rapture seems apposite here: “On the platform of physics, we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists; but they are: — Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! — But the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. . . . I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the shape of the head of the man he talks with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me.” Emerson, “Experience,” 1844, in Self-Reliance and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1993), 87. Emphases in original. Teeming with nuggets to pick out, the picture taunts us: an insect says “I was a negro once”; at center right, some imploring words read “give the savages lunch, not freedom.”

Believing that the historicity of subjectivity is representable, Pope.L here hitches that conviction to his ongoing dispute with abstraction. In theory, details like these are latches that, when thrown, would disambiguate the mess draping the paper, down to the blotches of coffee and ketchup. But the mess only mounts with the project’s onward march. The sampling pictured only begins to suggest the gamut of transformations undergone by the prevailing image-idea (that is, the 8½-by-11-inch format and the pictorial structure of a written sentence) as the Skin Set Drawings’ peculiar way of thinking proceeds — and of sharing, through drawing, what is thought (figs. 36–40). Equally clear is how crucial addendum and amendment are for the series: not only is the thinking here perpetually soft and spongy, but so are the particular missives by which it becomes public. To consider any range of sheets is to face a kind of inscrutable meter, one that measures fluctuations in energy, confidence, and writerly and descriptive will. Color, stroke, texture, line, transparency, loudness, poetic density, impudence, self-involvement: nothing that can change remains the same. Such a range even lays bare the hygroscopy of paper itself.

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Description: White People Are Angles on Fire by Pope.L, William

Fig. 36 / Pope.L, White People Are Angles on Fire, 2003. Pen and marker on paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm). The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum Purchase made possible by a gift from Barbara Karp Shuster, New York 2005.4.3

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Description: Black People Are the Tie That Binds by Pope.L, William

Fig. 37 / Pope.L, Black People Are the Tie That Binds, 2004. Pen and marker on paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm). The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg 2011.11.6

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Description: Green People Are Hope Without Reason by Pope.L, William

Fig. 38 / Pope.L, Green People Are Hope Without Reason, 2003–4. Pen and marker on paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm). The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum Purchase made possible by a gift from Barbara Karp Shuster, New York 2005.4.1

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Description: Yellow People Are Black People with Tragic Genitalia by Pope.L, William

Fig. 39 / Pope.L, Yellow People Are Black People with Tragic Genitalia, 2004. Pen and marker on paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm). The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum Purchase made possible by a gift from Barbara Karp Shuster, New York 2005.4.6

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Description: Red People Are a Novel Set in the Head of a Watermoccasin by Pope.L, William

Fig. 40 / Pope.L, Red People Are a Novel Set in the Head of a Watermoccasin, 2004. Ballpoint, ink, marker, and oil marker on graph paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm)

The title of a given Skin Set Drawing is the sentence the drawing contains. In fact, the concretely existing artworks impart to these fantastical sentence-images the only realness they will ever attain. Aside from us viewers, the real people most pertinent to this enterprise are the legion that Pope.L himself has been since he set out. To focus and propel the project, Pope.L uses subjects that are virtually always on his mind (the unappeasable appetite for meaning, and the rife assumptions that art should satisfy it — art like his somehow especially, given its avowed interest in matters real and present to him) to focus and propel an ongoing notational practice. A given Skin Set Drawing transposes and gussies up a Skin Set Note (figs. 41–44), which is a kind of rehearsal stage for the high-stakes wordplay that the whole project enacts. I’m comfortable suggesting to you that the project’s manifest subject is the problem of being, and aiming to remain, present to difference — to its perpetual surfacing, its definitively mixed content, the untold ways it abrades knowing, eats into settled conceptualizations, mauls them. With this image to illustrate the sense I intend, I’d refine this characterization by gesturing toward the point, in a process of thinking, at which difference gives way to differing without ever returning to that prior state. This, the Skin Set Drawings suggest (to me), is the actuality that rises to view when one dwells in a sustained way on the distinction between being and doing.

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Description: Skin Set Notes 1 by Pope.L, William

Fig. 41 / Pope.L, Skin Set Notes 1, n.d. Coffee and pencil, 6.5 × 4.1 in. (16.51 × 10.48 cm)

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Description: Skin Set Notes 3 by Pope.L, William

Fig. 42 / Pope.L, Skin Set Notes 3, n.d. Ballpoint, 5.5 × 4.5 in. (13.97 × 11.43 cm)

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Description: Skin Set Notes 4 by Pope.L, William

Fig. 43 / Pope.L, Skin Set Notes 4, April. 2009. Ballpoint, 4.5 × 5.5 in. (11.43 × 13.97 cm)

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Description: Skin Set Notes 5 by Pope.L, William

Fig. 44 / Pope.L, Skin Set Notes 5, March 6, 2005. Ballpoint, 4.5 × 4.4 in. (11.43 c × 11.11 cm)

Let me try filtering this a bit by noting the status of the Skin Set Drawings in Pope.L’s art practice. In few of their qualities does one glimpse the Pope.L one knows best. That artist is chiefly identified with durational performances and other projects best reproduced in time-based formats; for him, static objects mainly arise during pauses in the action. Pope.L built his name and the conceptual basis of his practice on a succession of endeavors involving endurance, shock/spectacle, and, sometimes, engagement with unsuspecting nonart audiences. Since the mid-1980s he has adapted these modes to changes in his intellectual program and physical condition (some, such as his trademark crawls, have recently become impossible for him), but “action” continues to typify the main branch of his art.

With the Skin Set Drawings, the terms of viewer engagement are less explicitly participatory, but no less involved with liveness and the dynamics of movement. Language figures in much of Pope.L’s work but rarely takes center stage; he initiated the Skin Set Drawings to create in his practice a dedicated space for writing. Still, they’re functionally notational for him, occurring on the margins of his work and (until very recently) made up only of what was readily available in his home and studio. Originating in down time and transitional periods, the drawings transpose into sentences those fragments that constitute the Skin Set Notes, which Pope.L writes in bulk, typically one color/skin set at a time. These transpositions now surface in paintings and sculpture, too.

In an important article of 1977, the semanticist Edward Sagarin attributes the blurring of this distinction to “the tyranny of isness”: uses of the verb “to be” that mistake behavior for identity, and, through everyday language, shore up the fiction that being is permanent and immutable.4 See Edward Sagarin, “Doing, Being, and the Tyranny of the Label,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 34, no. 1 (March 1977): 71–77. See also D. David Bourland, Jr., “The Semantics of a Non-Aristotelian Language,” General Semantics Bulletin 35 (1968): 60–63. Sagarin’s and Bourland’s analyses have a cognate in E-Prime, a language principle devised around the same time by psychoanalysts, whose patients were asked to express themselves without use of the verb “to be.” See esp. Steven A. Elkind, To Be or Not to Be: An Investigation of Linguistic Relativity by Altering the Language of Encounter Group Members in a Manner Suggested by General Semantics Theory, PhD diss., California School of Professional Psychology, Los Angeles, 1976. My thanks to David Frankel for recalling me to this topic. The Skin Set Drawings make a show of change, though not their own changes so much as changes to the personality motivating the hand that executes them. Temperament clusters form and break, often from within, and, upon this breakage, skin sets stir and multiply. (In this perpetual meditation on color words, being, and describing, “skin set” is the artist’s term for each group of people of one color in the works’ sentences.) In the process, Pope.L generates a surplus of difference and produces it as a presence. In the necessarily fractional character of any synthesis that would try to clarify this much difference, any immodesty would show through. There really is so much difference that any attempt to clarify it is effectively spoiled in advance.

In the early, less object-oriented drawings, Pope.L’s attempt was less to do with the material properties of language than with its representational/communicational ones. He began the project in 1997 by drawing on 20-by-30-inch pulp paper before moving to 8½-by-11-inch graph paper “to make it less important.”5 Early in the Skin Set Drawing project, the work started physically to break down. As is Pope.L’s wont, he was using easy-to-come-by materials, the sort of stuff he knew would never be in short supply in the remote Maine town where he lived, taught, and experimented at the time. Anyway, the ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise he was using to inscribe messages onto newsprint caused a chemical reaction between material and support that proved too much for the work to bear. Pope.L found a solution to the problem of the dissolving support in drugstore graph paper, which is made marginally sturdier than pulp sheets by the sizing used, and the finishing needed, to fix the imprinted grid. And in materials somewhat better suited to notational drawing that were ready to hand at his desk — pencils, a variety of pens and markers, watercolors, correction fluid, coffee, and hair fidgeted from his face and head — Pope.L had a fund of means to transpose what he calls his “skin set notes” into the Skin Set Drawings, whose urgency of visual appeal (as though they got their look from a style of technical communication keen on accident prevention) crosses with their cryptic messages as surely as the bars of their gridded framework. Downsizing kept the exercise marginal, in a format-driven sense, and came with a freedom to work whenever that allowed some of the intense privacy of the utterances’ origins to carry over to the drawings displayed. Reducing the works’ physical scale had another, crucial entailment: Pope.L had decided at the outset to keep making Skin Set Drawings until they numbered something like 2,500. He chose a really big number (one he no longer recalls precisely) in order to build into the project not “temporality” alone but the full train of unknowable, concrete life changes that would impact on his ways of working, his materials, his mentality, and everything else that it means for him “to be.” At present, the project comprises hundreds of drawings (figs. 45–48). So designed, it is like a life project given the form of an endless autograph, one legibly candid about the discord of inner life, and about the discontinuity it imposes on what we sometimes call “outlook.”

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Description: Black People Are Cross-Over by Pope.L, William

Fig. 45 / Pope.L, Black People Are Cross-Over, 2001–2. Mixed media on paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm)

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Description: Green People Are White People Who Can't Escape Their Blackness by Pope.L, William

Fig. 46 / Pope.L, Green People Are White People Who Can’t Escape Their Blackness, 2008. Graph paper, Bic pen, marker, Wite-Out, and acrylic, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm)

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Description: Brown People Are a Gas at Room Temperature by Pope.L, William

Fig. 47 / Pope.L, Brown People Are a Gas at Room Temperature, 2011. Mixed media on paper, 11 × 8.5 in. (29.9 × 21.6 cm)

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Description: Skin Set Painting: Brown People Are a Theory About Green People by Pope.L, William

Fig. 48 / Pope.L, Skin Set Painting: Brown People Are a Theory About Green People, 2011. Mixed media on vellum, 36 × 23.8 in. (91.4 × 60.3 cm)

Looking too closely at one drawing, or at a telling few, carries the very risks that Pope.L engineered the project to manage. There’s no single point from which to assess the project’s totality, or its internal transformations.6 As of this writing, Pope.L’s New York gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, divides the Skin Set inventory into color groups, a scheme as hilarious as it is ironic. It would seem that the tradeoffs of entering a commercial relationship with Pope.L involve accepting not only the structural incompleteness of his vast production but also the manifold constraints it imposes on one’s best efforts at stock management, accounting, and, of course, revenue production. Unavoidably it “depicts” Pope.L’s course through the pathless woods of experience and consequent changes in state. We track the materially translated activity of a mind turning all this over. On some crucial level, then, the Skin Set Drawings are their changes. Again, they’re a life project, given the character, if not precisely the shape, of the very topic they attend and contemplate: life as the exercise of varying expression, as abject submission to time, exposure to change, capitulation to disorder.

Pope.L developed most of the Skin Set Drawings by controlling the experiment with a formula: x people are y. He refers to the variables respectively as subject and object. In the first twenty or so Skin Set Drawings, the subject colors were white and black. After a short while, Pope.L realized that few viewers would understand that the Skin Set Drawings aren’t about race. Then came a palette of more unmistakably imaginary colored people: tan, brown, gray, green, blue, yellow, chartreuse, red, purple, and orange. As you’ve seen, most variations on the formula use the word “are” — the second-person plural of the verb “to be” — to equate the aforementioned people with a stunning, scandalizing array of virtually imponderable places, things, conditions, and sometimes other people. In the equational predication “x people are y,” Pope.L has something of a readymade: a familiar, prefabricated usage whose elasticity permits exploration of its extraordinary figurative resourcefulness.

The raw vernacular of “x people are y” seems perfectly adapted to Pope.L’s Crayola palette of subjects and their risible objects. But inhering in this is another aspect of the project’s core seriousness: the mutually offsetting relationship between the normative and the experiential. That is to say, Pope.L’s acceptance of this vernacular is accompanied by a sincere effort to be able to laugh at its objectifying logic, so indifferent to so many aspects of what it costs to exist. The drug- or art-supply-store paper is already a kind of laughter, as are the everyday materials Pope.L uses as implements — these last including nonart scatterings like ashes, drips of coffee and condiments, errant hairs, tears, and so on. This ancillary matter also laughs, compelling the production of drawing in its conventional sense to mix with the untidy realness of making: its time, yes, but also the ostensibly nonart activity occurring on the same scene — drinking, eating, scratching. What determines the representational effect of all this will be the atmosphere on the scene of viewing: one’s own irreducibly private sense of what, precisely, the art object is. What has Pope.L presented for my consideration?

For all the messiness, some representational integrity obtains. Subject and object do not necessarily strike us as disjunctive. The compositional, chromatic, and orthographic harmony that gives a particular sheet its look also produces an effect of wholeness that influences interpretation. (At one and the same time, we detect nonsense and feel that sense is being made.) The handwriting is itself fairly consistent; in a given drawing, it may strike us as good or bad but not both, the script as either imitative or inventive but not both. By limiting its means in this way, a Skin Set Drawing shows forth as a dispatch from a single laboring consciousness, its projection less like some public kind of writing and closer in spirit to diary entry or love letter.

To the extent that a given subject/object pair is experienced as incongruent, the reader exposes an intolerance for illogical truth that the more allover examples openly challenge. A number of the Skin Set Drawings even give a first impression of superb design; they’re pretty. In certain cases, the tight fit between figure and ground — felt especially strongly in sheets where Pope.L all but conceals language — causes me, at least, to experience subject and object as extra equal. That is, the visual statement (the picture) all but overtakes the utterance — almost muting the articulation, almost canceling the people-object sequence. This is to say that while the Skin Set Drawings never go totally abstract, some occupy the pictorial dimension so strongly as to render their written aspect less of a jotting and more of a claim. The more lushly visual examples, I think it is fair to say, work like pictures do. Their program as image soars outward from their purely verbal world toward a self-sufficient impression whose core plausibility makes the embedded sentence ring absolutely true despite a patent falseness. It is as though the drawing itself somehow fulfilled the condition of equivalence asserted in a sentence such as “Orange people are the grid on the ceiling” — like, they just are (fig. 49). Still and all, this (potential) truth-effect needs a prior condition in order to be possible; probably that’s the drawing’s already having conjured, by the evidence of the sheer manual labor needed to make it, something like a human presence.

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Description: Orange People Are the Grid on the Ceiling by Pope.L, William

Fig. 49 / Pope.L, Orange People Are the Grid on the Ceiling, 2012. Mixed media on paper, 12 × 9 in. (30.5 × 22.9 cm)

It’s hard not to see a perversion of the demographer’s art in all of this. Customarily, graph paper displays the results of a computation, such as a population pyramid. The Skin Set Drawings, however, traffic exclusively in irreal images, representations of people who aren’t and never will be. Inevitably one pulls words out of the picture — one wants to know what they mean. Probably many of us experience this as a need. What is a sentence, after all, if not a prelude to the lucidity of a reading? It’s so easy to get hung up on what the speaker might be saying about people, and on how elliptically, moodily, and opaquely his saying it might go. In the project’s tendency to at once court and then frustrate (if not condemn) reading, it’s tempting to view it as thematizing the viewer/listener’s desire — a desire that tends to go unquestioned even when continually unmet — to get behind the artist’s statements about people, to get hold of the meaning one feels certain these things harbor.7 Blue people are the niggers of the atmosphere? The buried intuition, once it surfaces, is pretty straightforward: there are precious few places we can conceive that we do not proceed immediately to order in our own images, or, rather, in our ordered images of the peopled world. On its own, the patent un-realness of blue people ought to stimulate alertness to the project’s interest in the invention of people first in order to divide humankind “in accordance” with our diversity and then to heap added significance upon that division, to make it teach — as though being people, and diverse, weren’t enough. Alas, they aspire to no sociological validity at all. Instead they express concern over a condition — one we may recognize as our own — wherein human existence becomes an occasion for summary, description, measurement, assessment, an impulse that would sentence human singularity to a self-consistent repeatability that is, finally, unlivable in the extreme.

Word and image point to but never peak in a moment of insight. Color doesn’t describe. The demonstrative faculty of equational predication repeatedly malfunctions. No one’s observing the logical authority of ARE (its power to equate un-alike phenomena). “People” keep getting made up and made over into unthinkable objects. The encounter is with a thinker who is already well down a path of thought, one whose topic is not people. The Skin Set Drawings lay down a swath of heavy discourse about difference — sometimes punchy, sometimes appalling, sometimes inscrutably personal. It’s a mile long and growing. Yet the logically inconsistent nature of the thinking they do, its strictly iterative demeanor, its consignment of color to counter-factual revelry — such qualities drain the project of the moral weight that so much discourse about difference would typically attract.8 The aphoristic structure of the drawings probably originates with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Remarks on Colour (written in 1950–51, published in 1977) Pope.L first read as an undergraduate and knows deeply. Pope.L shares Wittgenstein’s fascination with the uncertainty that emerges from the concrescence of logical color concepts with colloquial or private ones. For all the “implications” we feel certain they must have, the drawings hold fast to a poetic slightness (and an ontological commitment to doubt “to be”) that keeps the discourse spry and, most important, open.9 This is an instance where understanding what the drawings are shows itself to be vastly more important than asking what they do. People can’t exist, and difference qua difference cannot jell, in this atmosphere. This much difference needs the radiating ongoingness of the gerund form: hence, “differing.”

As I suggested earlier, Pope.L effects this decisive shift by the counter-logical use of written language as a medium of drawing. The Skin Set Drawings evince a clear affection for the autonomy of the page and the pliant architecture of the hand-formed word.10 We might say that writing begins to approach drawing as it deforms in the way that can occur when one writes without the downward pressure and resistance facilitated by a supporting surface positioned to accommodate the writing posture into which early education initiates us. They are drawings of writing in its most materially processual sense: images of handwriting and its graphic registration of changes to everything from implement, to place, to mentality. Every alternation of shape, weight, tone, and mood, every shift in attitude toward the occupation of page space (faint, bold, allover, cinched, noised up from below, etc.), and toward pitch and legibility, matters. The question of balancing verbalness and visuality in a given statement — a hugely fraught terrain for black artists, from whom statement is demanded constantly — appears also to be preoccupying for Pope.L. But the project continually brings home the distinction between statement and thesis: dwelling exclusively in the terrain of statement, it keeps thesis at bay. In this way the drawing can go on.

A given sentence may strike us more as deep than as long — in the manner given by Pope.L’s occasional tendency to dwell on the extendibility of a letter, thickening and heightening it, temporally distending it. Each of these actions points up the functional equivalence between a letter and every other kind of mark. Ancillary verbal activity may space out a statement — opening the tiny pockets of time needed, say, for puns to compound, or for illogic to confound, the connotation of a small cluster of words. The extended letter, the graphically intensified space between letters and words — both of these serve to deepen statement without doing anything so pretentious as to imply “insight.” In a similar spirit, the works routinely call out the dispersive character of terms that ordinarily would localize or describe — color terms most prominently, but also referents like “the grid on the ceiling” or “a theory about green people.” I think the project’s definitive intellectual activity is precisely this elaboration — this drawing, or drawing out, of writing. Assuming empathic resonance, it asks the onlooker, “Must the writer alone know the feeling?” Such an art extends the hope of visibility to those factors in a human life, so easy to avoid or elide, that manifest the creativity of history. One such factor we call imagination, and that’s the word I prefer to describe the seat of Pope.L’s enchantment with language’s splendid and dangerous plenitude.11 Not content to plead through the hardness of an object for assurance that his effort to connect will succeed, Pope.L capitulates to literalist theatricality, lodging his attempt in a grossly supersized variant on the modernist series. This format has the related benefits of offering something for everyone, as well as being a discrete literary process whose ongoing motion causes its every utterance to affect both the previous and the impending utterances.

Everything actually and conceptually true about the Skin Set project recommends care in handling the questions we use it to ask, even as it clearly engages huge questions about scales of epistemology (my knowing, our knowing, knowing as such), and about the fraught historical ontology of artists from whom paraphrasable representation is always demanded. Drawing is a marginal practice for Pope.L, who produces these works in a space that he occupies ritually: speaking of it, he invokes “that world of the desk,” his chosen pronoun — “that” — inviting our immediate identification with the kind of place he means. The intimacy of “that world” is given precisely by its utter appropriateness to oneself, to one’s corporeal range, to the tools and habits one employs in private exercises of self-curiosity and the application of one’s basic competences. One special feature of such a space, of course, is the wholeness, or the sense of wholeness, it confers to all the fragments that alight upon or issue from it.12 In fact the modernist fantasy of a systematic self-accounting holds no sway over Pope.L. A principal viewing effect of the Skin Set Drawing project’s definitive self-difference is to forestall any romanticization of the kind of consummately integrated, individualized aesthetic system that carries its practitioner from one self-discovery to another. As though, for the purposes of the project, he were more person than individual, Pope.L modifies the crypto-autobiographical tendency of serial art in the drawings’ duly messy, theatrically iterative succession of nonidentical issuances.

I suspect that the permission needed to instantiate and sustain a practice of self-curiosity as intensive as the Skin Set Drawing project is granted as a term of a prior conviction. I would define that conviction as a belief that there’s something representable in the liveness — the vital interconnection — of all the elements, material and metaphysical, comprised by that world of the desk, from the many incommensurable senses of self converging there to all the thoughts transpiring there, from the merely entertained to the actualized; a belief that the accumulation will suggest some answer to the question “How do I know?” Pope.L works in close enough proximity to the paper that stray matter, such as perspiration or hair, will find its way to the surface. To call these “interventions” would grossly overdetermine them, but Pope.L does take measures to ensure that they remain and aren’t overlooked. To these ends, hairs may be glazed in place with a transparent, superficially colorless medium such as synthetic glue. Perspiration and tears dry clear, but they also leave salty traces in tiny patches of shimmering, buckled paper. The unusually expository Green People Are My Brother Frank labels these elements (see fig. 27). Hairs and tears don’t find their way into works composed by an artist on the wall. In the occasional hair or tear, we see evidence of a change in orientation from the horizontal plane of the table on which the work was made to the (conventionally) vertical one of artistic communication. By now it should be clear that such changes of state are critical (temporal) factors in the “art work” we eventually behold. At this conjuncture of private creation and public consideration, changes not to the drawings per se but to their location make sensible Pope.L’s desire to share them. There's something that I want you to see.

Like any wordplay, the Pope.L-ian variant requires a playmate. Like all art, it’s at this stage that it does or does not reach us — that we’re invited to move toward this other, at which passive looking simply isn't possible, with no promise of a payoff. The proliferation of drawings enfolds many seductions, a lot of plain silliness, genuine sadness, and more than ample opportunity to feel embarrassed by the pleasures they give. Myriad information types rush you; your concepts must bend and multiply as the transaction demands. What’s sought is a viewer who won’t interpret conceptually jarring or temporally abrupt changes to the program as betrayals. I don’t mean to condescend; it just seems fair to presume that few viewers will be entirely unconflicted in granting Pope.L the right of speech freedom that he so persistently asserts. You're going to use the N-word whether you like it or not.

Viewers eager to empathize may sense behind all of this an imagination laboring strenuously, attempting to render some understanding, feeling compelled to share a pleasure, or bit of despair, or a freshly disclosed face of the world. We sense this in a way that feels certain, but also insubstantial. The present situation is real, but also thin. Thin: to me an especially fine term for the quality of sense that the Skin Set Drawings make, and for the way we know whenever a subject and object connect purely imaginarily but with a force we find convincing. “How anything is known is so thin,”13 Kay Ryan, “Thin,” The Niagara River (New York: Grove, 2005), 30. My emphasis. writes the poet Kay Ryan, in a mood of epistemic humility that I find to be deeply in league with the Skin Set Drawings, with the difference that, in the present case, the draftsman is both engine and object of this thin knowing.14 Listen again to Ryan: “How anything/is known/is so thin.” Although these words cannot but sound judgy to any reader who ever felt she knew something, here Ryan in fact presents a potent image of epistemic humility. The object of her glance is the slightness of substance that attaches and alienates knower and known. Even in its coarse fragmentation, this sentence thickly describes the emaciation of knowing (we choose to hear a charge of our epistemological weakness). Again and again in Ryan’s poetry, the speaker faces an iridescent realness that at once intensifies her perception and retards her knowledge-making faculty. Within this limitation, some capacity other than lucid conceptualization thrives — something like the capacity for serene copresence with what eludes understanding, a knowing that is not knowingness. In a poem called “No Names,” Ryan’s speaker, having encountered this realness directly, tries accounting for it as one would any worldly thing. Only:

There are high places
that don’t invite us,
sharp shapes, glacier-
scraped faces, whole
ranges whose given names
slip off. Any such relation
as we try to make
refuses to take. Some
high lakes are not for us,
some slick escarpments.
I’m giddy with thinking
where thinking can’t stick.

Ryan, “No Names,” The Niagara River, 60. Rather than word it away in some image, Ryan’s speaker turns to face us while pointing at places and lakes within the reach of consciousness but not words, known to us but as yet unattained by language. Rather than pry its way in, her speaker sits with itself, in that queerly ecstatic state that befalls this speaker when the need to know goes unmet, or is met with the knowledge gained from unsticky thought.

There’s thinness, too, in the ersatz grandiosity of the project’s ARE — the term Pope.L chooses to stress the precariousness of being, in a way to name what doing modifies.15 Of this dimension, Emerson spoke of setting oneself up in the “strong present tense.” The laborious metaphorizing needed to produce this cache of object-images indicates pretty straightforwardly the project’s questions about being, its skeptical view of being’s compatibility with knowing and description. To reflect in this way on the practices of meaning and peopling persons is to examine our concrete transformation in a process that discards intimacy and insight in favor of images, trading individuals for readymade content. Pope.L manages this risk for himself by adding formats, making the project more elastic and the crypto-autobiography still more secretive. I’ve alluded to the fact that after commencing the drawings he expanded the Skin Set project to a kind of format that is a plenitude unto itself. As of this writing, it additionally comprises paintings on both paper and canvas, a two-part broken-cone sculpture made of glued wooden letters, and an evolving multimedia work featuring a functioning, chair-mounted overhead projector upon whose surface Pope.L has placed a pie dish in which tiny plastic letters float in dyed liquid. But it’s all one thing.

Logically, then, anxiety quickly sets in for anyone who approaches the project with a prior commitment to the distinction between the changes in art that one generally feels free to track and describe (changes to practices, components of those changes) and changes to practitioners (that is, the variances in their ways of being and doing that constantly modify their art). I doubt I’m alone in thinking that a real discomfort attaches to the cultural-historical accounting of this latter. To accept the distinction is already to admit a prior thesis: that our work on art is somehow different, and probably better, when we contain the dynamic, indeterminate movement within a maker’s ego; that the inconstancy of a corpus is best managed by separating a maker’s being ego from her making ego, and keeping these separate. Better how? Well, by holding a tight focus on the making ego, we abstract the person who makes from the person who lives, and thereby objectivize our inquiry. In this way we are better able to focus undistractedly on what matters, to quiet our fear of biography while surrendering none of our nosiness. But Pope.L isn’t giving us this one: his art works overtime to short-circuit such a cauterization, precisely not by projecting pictures of his life but by opening up fragmentary views upon ongoing experiment. Which is a way to think about the representability of living as such.

We say this a lot now, but I really do want to “take seriously” the part of this project that uses our instituting words — such as color words, the verb “to be,” or the intimated “I dare you” — to make the artist unlocatable and indescribable. (As against a usage, say, that would institute him as his difference.) In the Skin Set project it is as though Pope.L were so completely identified with his changes as functionally to invalidate coherent speech about his “identity.” The combination, in such a move, of critical force and difficulty was a problem to which the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis often returned. Here he is: “The enemy against which the defenses of society are feeblest is its own instituting imaginary, its own creativity. This is also why it is against this danger that the strongest protection has been set up . . . in the denial . . . of the instituting dimension of society.”16 Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 1988, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford, 1991), 153. In such a situation, any “irruption of the raw world becomes a sign of something, is interpreted away and thereby exorcised.”17 Ibid. The precipitous recent rise in the visibility of fatal misappropriations from the fund of knowledge we’ve established about one another may seem the wrong subject to confront with the Skin Set Drawings in hand. Oblique speech about urgent affairs is typically a way of asking for trouble. There’s little more than cold comfort to be got from recognizing that Pope.L’s reflections aren’t on people at all, but on something more like the possibility of human significance without meaning.

What does it mean to look at these pictures now? Now, when one wants quick relief from the various forms of hardness Pope.L builds into these reflections? Now, when one may experience that desire for relief as a necessity, or even an entitlement? It’s one of Pope.L’s nervier qualities, as an engaged artist, his refusal either to provide this relief, irrespective of the claims of the moment, or to deal “directly” with topical themes. In this stubbornness he effectively proclaims that the elusiveness of satisfying conceptualizations is a determinate historical phenomenon, or at least an experience in its own right — at any event, a clear indication that something is occurring.18 In fact, Pope.L understands that Wittgenstein failed to identify this problem in any of the other vicissitudes of logical color concepts that he grasped so clearly.

Possibly the Skin Set Drawings’ fixation on the faculties and qualities of nonexistent people wouldn’t matter were it not for the fact that this is how the project frames, as it orders a view onto, the actually existing historical person who has made a life project of their manufacture and display. As a way to counter his destruction by abstractions, he dons the wear of a subject actively taking issue with the social-historical process that fabricates individuals by coercing the psyche to give up its initial objects and world and to invest instead in socially instituted objects and divisions. The project understands the skin sets that have been utilized historically, in organizational schemes both marvelous and terrible, to manifest the intention of existing institutions to shape individuals in such a way that they’re bound to reproduce the regime that has produced them.19 See Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 151. As Castoriadis writes, “The minimal requirement for this process to unfold is that the institution provide the psyche with meaning — another type of meaning than the protomeaning of the psychical monad.”20 Ibid., 149. But, having not yet relinquished those initial objects or world, Pope.L’s sets remain open.21 Listen to Pope.L’s operative definition of set: “To call a group of things a set is to separate it from the world as unto itself. Yet this does not mean the things that make up the set do not have relations with the rest of the world.”

We can only make a Skin Set Drawing mean by reestablishing meaning in its socially instituted form. For all their imagining, there is a sheer fact that the Skin Set Drawings compel us to recognize: while the notions of color and being are sufficiently stable to allow us to use them without debilitating anxiety, they are also sufficiently lacunar to bear an indefinite number of modifications.22 Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 152. If they appear to remain occupied with what is true only in the imagination, that’s because they are. The way the Skin Set Drawings know, in their incessant positing (and refusal to elaborate), concerns not the phenomenal world but rather the abstractions we employ to adapt the beings and things of that world to our uses for them, to make them instructive. Their “people” are fictions, everlastingly fugitive entities; indeed, what keeps the skin sets open is not only formal variation but also the catch-and-release rationality Pope.L brings to their objectification. That is, the putatively integral nature of a colored people is undone by the sheer zaniness of all the things they are. Projected thoughts consider people apart from meaning; this much is critical to the project. As such, a drawing’s sentence effectively reconciles persons with the indefiniteness of an instant.

Pope.L’s art maintains a conviction that, as Castoriadis writes, “the a-meaning of the world [what’s real as opposed to what’s symbolic or socially instituted] is always a possible threat for the meaning of society.” The Skin Set Drawings project a world whose only possibility of existing would require a laceration of the web of instituted significations, the creation of an aporia through which an inexhaustible provision of alterity could storm the scene.23 Ibid. The thing is, color as we actually know it already functions in just this fashion, insofar as everyday color language places alterity on flagrant display. One aspect of the Skin Set Drawings’ own social life seems germane at this stage. When people familiar with the project talk about it, interest routinely gathers around the objects; it’s far from uncommon for fans wholly to misremember or even deny the relevance of the subject-people of this or that color. And they proceed, as fans do, to talk in terms of favorites and to recite their cherished objects by heart. The wisdom of this casual practice inheres in recognizing that color simply isn’t germane. What drives the project itself, and, I would guess, a good measure of viewers’ interest in it, is the primacy of art facts that, here, presuppose the perpetual disfigurement of color — and the cultural logic of colored people grouped by set — in a frolic of reassignment. We needn’t do more than pause at a supervening art fact backing all this up: plasticity of color was axiomatic for the visual arts right from the jump. What gives the Skin Set Drawings something to resist, not to mention considerable work to do in and against the culture they occupy, is the lack of any corresponding doubt, lack of any feel at all for alterity, in accepted folk uses of color.

We all imagine color radically all the time, but our color concepts admit but a fraction of the paradox that our color-talk takes for granted. That’s why the “subject” of Pope.L’s sentences always includes a color word. It would be imprecise to say that we find a color there, because he seldom renders these color words in the hues they would portray. The project parades usages, representing our words of institution as harnessed to an instituting function — because the phenomenon’s political and historical complexity still needs spelling out, and its explication will not be accommodated to anything like a “cultural logic” of color. The most sophisticated modern theories of color never faced facts about color’s most consequential worldly impact, namely in the spheres of race and racialized (and putatively nonracialized) existences.24 Some pertinent aspects of this historiographic challenge to art history, cultural studies, and aesthetics are addressed in my 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

In his justly esteemed Remarks on Colour — which Pope.L considers pivotal for his own work — Ludwig Wittgenstein describes how our usages constantly demonstrate the dispersive, spread-out and spreading nature of color, contravening all its agreed-on laws.25 Wittgenstein began compiling his notes on color in March 1951. They remained unfinished upon his death later that spring. According to his theory, there exists “no commonly accepted criterion for what is a color, unless it is one of our colors.” Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Shättle (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), 4e. Here, by use of the pronoun “our,” he refers to a single, hypothetical community of speakers. Wittgenstein’s logic surfaces the subjectivism and intratribal disputes involved in disagreement about sameness of color. It demonstrates color’s adaptability to its contested condition, by reference precisely to everyday language’s suffusion with imprecise, unrefined color usages that cast doubt on every color-derived truth. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the modern anxiety about the concept of pure color implies a broad consciousness of small differences among phenomena that can be related but will not be equated — differences of the same sort that color theory buries in order to narrate color in a geometrically consistent fashion.
In this connection, writing about the phenomenon of favorite colors, Wittgenstein stresses their role in helping us to negotiate the tension between color-chart color and worldly color. (“People reserve a special place,” he writes, “for a given point on the color wheel, and . . . they don’t have to go to a lot of trouble to remember where the point is, but always find it easily.” Ibid., 17e.) By his logic, one’s favorite color is a repository for the faith one places, wittingly or not, in the validity of the concept of pure color. One’s affection for one’s favorite colors matters, in part, because the ease of locating it matters. This indulgence not only reinforces the integrity effects of supposedly rational discourse but also provides a durable ground for one’s experience of clarity (intellectual) and agreement (social) and all their attendant pleasures. Every one of our usages indicates that uncertainty extends to the very heart of the problem of color as we know it. “Our color words characterize the impression of a surface over which our glance wanders. That’s what they’re for.” Ibid., 25e. Early in that text, the philosopher discusses a few of the methods of abstraction employed to establish modern color truths, having found those methods surprisingly quotidian. Citing the German physicist Georg Christian Lichtenberg’s 1775 declaration that sightings of pure white are exceedingly rare, Wittgenstein wonders,

So do most people use the word wrong, then? And how did he learn the correct use? — He constructed an ideal use from the ordinary one. And that is not to say a better one, but one that has been refined along certain lines and in the process something has been carried to extremes.26 Ibid., 2e. Emphasis in original.

In other words, Lichtenberg’s refined construction — in this case an entire theory of color — solved a practical problem generated in the conflict between an abiding desire for the concept “pure white” and pervasive disagreement about where, among all the possible worldly candidates, to find it. Clouds, snow, rice, silk, that patch of the color wheel? Lichtenberg’s solution had merely abstracted the disagreement away, showing Wittgenstein that our inherited theories of color are essentially an archive of negotiated settlements among color authorities who share an insatiable appetite for theory. And not just any theory, but the kind of theory that would totalize all the stuff that pretheoretical discourse about color, by its nature, granulates.

Distinguishing his own project from that of Lichtenberg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Philipp Otto Runge before him, Wittgenstein sought “not . . . a theory of color . . . but rather the logic of color concepts. And this accomplishes what people have often unjustly expected of a theory.”27 Ibid., 5e. My emphasis. Runge’s theory, for instance, had constrained the investigator to insist that “‘white water which is pure is as inconceivable as clear milk.’”28 Philipp Otto Runge, quoted in ibid. For Wittgenstein this is obviously a problem not of color but of concepts and of language. When “we cannot describe (e.g. paint), how something white and clear would look, . . . that means: we don’t know what description, portrayal, these words demand of us.”29 Wittgenstein, in ibid. In fact uncertainty and indeterminacy extend to the very root of the concept of color and of the sameness of color. One cannot speak except illogically about any color’s stable, self-consistent character, because “someone who speaks of the character of a color is always thinking of just one particular way it is used.”30 Ibid., 12e.

But Wittgenstein never grants extralogical significance to any of the contradictions observable in every use case that the Remarks on Colour accounts. Instead, he tacitly upholds the cultural logic of color that would stabilize the racial order, despite the innumerable spoken revolutions that logic continually faces from color-capable language-users the world over. Pope.L, under the considerable, combined pressures of Wittgenstein’s erasure or blindness and the manifold teachings of his own black existence, adapts the philosopher’s key insight into color, namely that the color words we use to detail an object describe reflections off it that our eyes record — an object’s effects on appearing to us — and no more. Such words do not designate qualities of objects, yet our everyday talk about color relates colors with the things and beings of the world in ways that equate appearance and identity in just this way. In Wittgenstein’s discourse, the really true truths come to light in the social negotiation of color. Color words illustrate nothing more vividly than the problem of other minds.31 In an oft-cited scenario discussed in Remarks on Colour, Wittgenstein imagines an acquaintance describing the color of a wall to him by calling it “a somewhat bluish yellow,” a hue for which Wittgenstein lacks a concept. He attributes the lack to the absence of a corresponding pure or saturated color. Because he cannot point to the right location on a color chart, he is unable to demonstrate understanding to his acquaintance. Ibid., 20e. He later writes, “Here I would like to make a general observation concerning the nature of philosophical problems. Lack of clarity in philosophy is tormenting. It is felt as shameful. We feel: we do not know our way about where we should know our way about. And nevertheless it isn’t so. We can get along very well without these distinctions and without knowing our away about here.” Ibid., 21e. Remarks on Colour inventories some of the puzzles buried in our received facts about color, puzzles arising from the succession of entanglements that the realness of color forces the mind to confront.

But when the cultural game board unfolds, Wittgenstein either demurs or finds himself indisposed to play. Which is funny, because, while Remarks on Colour reveals a staggeringly deep intuition about political-cultural abuses of color, it stops dead short of actual insight. Even when it occurs to Wittgenstein to contemplate the concept’s value to natural history (Naturgeschichtlichen), he decides, “This concept might only have a very limited use.”32 Ibid., 18e. And in his closing passages on color-blindness — gorgeous, beautifully reasoned passages that confirm Wittgenstein’s skepticism — he avers that we miss nothing by “failing” to be able to think in pure or saturated colors. “Are people for whom this concept is not at all natural missing anything?33 Ibid., 20e. With Pope.L, I think a black American reader can go only so far with Wittgenstein. One thing a person alien to the concept of pure color will likely miss is the not inconsiderable range of “pure color” — based justifications given for upholding grossly unequal structures of thought and practice in modern political culture. Wittgenstein never classifies color as a social problem per se; it’s enough for him to disclose a logical problem that finds expression (as it were) in verbal communication. Even in his most relentless attacks on “the importance of the concept of pure or saturated color,” the interest-free mortgage on souls that the concept offers racialism entirely escapes his notice.34 Ibid., 18e. By their reading effects alone, his many encounters with the idea of pure white put tremendous pressure on the posited ideality of the color. But they never approach a registration of whiteness’s political historicity.

If the Skin Set Drawings “show” anything, it’s that one can think in a Wittgensteinian spirit about the radically dispersive functions of color without suppressing their sociality. The operative fantasy of these works relieves color of all descriptive responsibility (this can also be said of the Remarks on Colour). Pope.L’s stronger reading of Wittgenstein’s book modifies the starting point altogether, by granting the actuality of differing its due status as a supposition — and, still more, by taking morally seriously the divergences between putatively identical phenomena. Finally, it retrains the focus of the investigation, deftly placing the interlocutor on the scene of a particular description. That scene is construed as a mutual consideration, a communication in which the investigator has no hiding place: he foreswears the analytic distance that Wittgenstein problematizes but cannot surrender.

If the Skin Set Drawings think color in terms of its historical and social function as a vocabulary of institution and division, they do so in order to open it — permanently, as it were — onto historicity. The forms of its appearance and its representational effects change in accordance with developments in the life of their creator. Color functions as a dispersive rather than an ordering factor — remember, each skin set is open to implication with the others. In this way Pope.L alludes to a mixture we can think of as cognate with multiracialization. For someone I know, “multiculturalism” is a kind of aide-mémoire for everything the Skin Set Drawings are and do. And indeed, Pope.L’s candy-colored cosmology was anticipated in one of the most notorious sequences in comic book history — from the Green Lantern number published in April 1970, in which an ancient black man yanks Green Lantern into cultural consciousness (fig. 50).

~

Description: Green Lantern/Green Arrow by Adam, Neal

Fig. 50 / Green Lantern/Green Arrow, April 1970 (text: Dennis O’Neil; illustration: Neal Adams)

In the time and place of Green Lantern’s oath “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” the dominance of the black-white relation in cultural picturing has ended. Among the Skin Set project’s more troubling facets is the fact that Pope.L created it in and for a time quite unlike the one Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams narrated, a time when, as today, one is struck again and again by the inability either to accurately describe existing conditions or to give way to more precise formulation. (To be fair, we do sometimes add brown.) Within the Skin Set cosmology, mixture figures a certainty rather than an aberration. Determined to transgress, the members of one set continually confound one another, as well as the members of other sets. The Skin Set Drawings understand color as a human creation, and humanity as a subject drawn in color — both sustained, both altered, through the constant contest and reassignment of meaning that occurs in contextually responsive discourse about people today. Understood this way, human thought and action can effect changes to color, and its understanding, in a manner consistent with everything else we know about change and complexity. This is to say, color is not the privileged form of difference in Pope.L’s project. There is no thesis about difference; there is only differing.

Adapted to the historicity of contemporary difference, Pope.L converts the formulation from the problem of other minds to the problem of our common life.35 In this way, the Skin Set Drawings loom large in Pope.L’s sustained dispute with abstraction, a dispute that directs its consternation at the invisibility of the privilege built into the act of brushing the figure aside. Pope.L understands that this move is deeply involved with a fantasy of a personalized aesthetic system that need make no provision for the vicissitudes of human mentality, which no maker can escape, except within the terms of a manufactured self-world (whether this is a philosophy of language or a painting practice). The crypto-figural nature of the Skin Set Drawings’ representational program means an engagement with human subject matter in its more ramified sense, an engagement secured by Pope.L’s expressive avowal of historical actuality. He drives us undaunted over rough ground, seemingly in pursuit of what, to him, represents the actual movement of thought. That movement, most legible in the project’s material promiscuity, bears all the marks of psyche. Listen, again, to Castoriadis: “However . . . watertight the type of individual into which it has been transformed, the irreducible being proper to the singular psyche always manifests itself in the form of dreams . . . transgressions, contentions . . . but also in the form of singular contributions to the more than slow alteration of our social modes of making/doing and representing.”36 Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 152. Emphasis added. The Skin Set Drawings place their faith in the instituting power of these “singular contributions,” by which I mean a power not to solve but to phrase differently the problem posed by instituted signification to human being, and this in an idiom presupposing plenitude rather than privation. The project’s chronic alterity does not strike us as disjunctive because there is an essential plurality of societies, synchronic and diachronic. In Pope.L’s moral fantasia, the meanings of these societies have an insurmountable historicity, given by their synchronic coexistence and contact with each other. In the Skin Set Drawings’ immersive unreality, we actually existing people — who all the time double unwittingly as social facts — may find welcome estrangement from instituted meaning.

We don’t know what portrayals these words demand of us. Best to consider them, to try to follow them, to think spontaneously along with them; also best not to be constantly on the lookout for nuggets to pick out. Famished for statement, I want to say that Pope.L may be drawing up a new language for difference — only this sketch will not be transposed. Then I am struck again by a fundamental fact about the project: it has no ambition to supersede the irrationality of real life. Adapted to the quiddity of being historical, to continuously differing from himself, Pope.L leaves us alone with the works’ purely material elements, the raw data of thought before they vanish into consumable parcels.

1 All direct quotations of Pope.L are from conversations with him and the author, June and July 2016. This essay is deeply informed by those discussions. »

2 Surely the bird’s perch will be brief; and the balloon — punctured in two places — is hardly the picture of durability. »

3 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 account of this rapture seems apposite here: “On the platform of physics, we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being, and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard, or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists; but they are: — Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! — But the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. . . . I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the shape of the head of the man he talks with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me.” Emerson, “Experience,” 1844, in Self-Reliance and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1993), 87. Emphases in original. »

4 See Edward Sagarin, “Doing, Being, and the Tyranny of the Label,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 34, no. 1 (March 1977): 71–77. See also D. David Bourland, Jr., “The Semantics of a Non-Aristotelian Language,” General Semantics Bulletin 35 (1968): 60–63. Sagarin’s and Bourland’s analyses have a cognate in E-Prime, a language principle devised around the same time by psychoanalysts, whose patients were asked to express themselves without use of the verb “to be.” See esp. Steven A. Elkind, To Be or Not to Be: An Investigation of Linguistic Relativity by Altering the Language of Encounter Group Members in a Manner Suggested by General Semantics Theory, PhD diss., California School of Professional Psychology, Los Angeles, 1976. My thanks to David Frankel for recalling me to this topic. »

5 Early in the Skin Set Drawing project, the work started physically to break down. As is Pope.L’s wont, he was using easy-to-come-by materials, the sort of stuff he knew would never be in short supply in the remote Maine town where he lived, taught, and experimented at the time. Anyway, the ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise he was using to inscribe messages onto newsprint caused a chemical reaction between material and support that proved too much for the work to bear. Pope.L found a solution to the problem of the dissolving support in drugstore graph paper, which is made marginally sturdier than pulp sheets by the sizing used, and the finishing needed, to fix the imprinted grid. And in materials somewhat better suited to notational drawing that were ready to hand at his desk — pencils, a variety of pens and markers, watercolors, correction fluid, coffee, and hair fidgeted from his face and head — Pope.L had a fund of means to transpose what he calls his “skin set notes” into the Skin Set Drawings, whose urgency of visual appeal (as though they got their look from a style of technical communication keen on accident prevention) crosses with their cryptic messages as surely as the bars of their gridded framework. »

6 As of this writing, Pope.L’s New York gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, divides the Skin Set inventory into color groups, a scheme as hilarious as it is ironic. It would seem that the tradeoffs of entering a commercial relationship with Pope.L involve accepting not only the structural incompleteness of his vast production but also the manifold constraints it imposes on one’s best efforts at stock management, accounting, and, of course, revenue production. »

7 Blue people are the niggers of the atmosphere? The buried intuition, once it surfaces, is pretty straightforward: there are precious few places we can conceive that we do not proceed immediately to order in our own images, or, rather, in our ordered images of the peopled world. On its own, the patent un-realness of blue people ought to stimulate alertness to the project’s interest in the invention of people first in order to divide humankind “in accordance” with our diversity and then to heap added significance upon that division, to make it teach — as though being people, and diverse, weren’t enough. »

8 The aphoristic structure of the drawings probably originates with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Remarks on Colour (written in 1950–51, published in 1977) Pope.L first read as an undergraduate and knows deeply. Pope.L shares Wittgenstein’s fascination with the uncertainty that emerges from the concrescence of logical color concepts with colloquial or private ones. »

9 This is an instance where understanding what the drawings are shows itself to be vastly more important than asking what they do. »

10 We might say that writing begins to approach drawing as it deforms in the way that can occur when one writes without the downward pressure and resistance facilitated by a supporting surface positioned to accommodate the writing posture into which early education initiates us. »

11 Not content to plead through the hardness of an object for assurance that his effort to connect will succeed, Pope.L capitulates to literalist theatricality, lodging his attempt in a grossly supersized variant on the modernist series. This format has the related benefits of offering something for everyone, as well as being a discrete literary process whose ongoing motion causes its every utterance to affect both the previous and the impending utterances. »

12 In fact the modernist fantasy of a systematic self-accounting holds no sway over Pope.L. A principal viewing effect of the Skin Set Drawing project’s definitive self-difference is to forestall any romanticization of the kind of consummately integrated, individualized aesthetic system that carries its practitioner from one self-discovery to another. As though, for the purposes of the project, he were more person than individual, Pope.L modifies the crypto-autobiographical tendency of serial art in the drawings’ duly messy, theatrically iterative succession of nonidentical issuances. »

13 Kay Ryan, “Thin,” The Niagara River (New York: Grove, 2005), 30. My emphasis. »

14 Listen again to Ryan: “How anything/is known/is so thin.” Although these words cannot but sound judgy to any reader who ever felt she knew something, here Ryan in fact presents a potent image of epistemic humility. The object of her glance is the slightness of substance that attaches and alienates knower and known. Even in its coarse fragmentation, this sentence thickly describes the emaciation of knowing (we choose to hear a charge of our epistemological weakness). Again and again in Ryan’s poetry, the speaker faces an iridescent realness that at once intensifies her perception and retards her knowledge-making faculty. Within this limitation, some capacity other than lucid conceptualization thrives — something like the capacity for serene copresence with what eludes understanding, a knowing that is not knowingness. In a poem called “No Names,” Ryan’s speaker, having encountered this realness directly, tries accounting for it as one would any worldly thing. Only:

There are high places
that don’t invite us,
sharp shapes, glacier-
scraped faces, whole
ranges whose given names
slip off. Any such relation
as we try to make
refuses to take. Some
high lakes are not for us,
some slick escarpments.
I’m giddy with thinking
where thinking can’t stick.

Ryan, “No Names,” The Niagara River, 60. Rather than word it away in some image, Ryan’s speaker turns to face us while pointing at places and lakes within the reach of consciousness but not words, known to us but as yet unattained by language. Rather than pry its way in, her speaker sits with itself, in that queerly ecstatic state that befalls this speaker when the need to know goes unmet, or is met with the knowledge gained from unsticky thought. »

15 Of this dimension, Emerson spoke of setting oneself up in the “strong present tense.” »

16 Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 1988, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford, 1991), 153. »

17 Ibid. »

18 In fact, Pope.L understands that Wittgenstein failed to identify this problem in any of the other vicissitudes of logical color concepts that he grasped so clearly. »

19 See Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 151. »

20 Ibid., 149. »

21 Listen to Pope.L’s operative definition of set: “To call a group of things a set is to separate it from the world as unto itself. Yet this does not mean the things that make up the set do not have relations with the rest of the world.” »

22 Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 152. »

23 Ibid. »

24 Some pertinent aspects of this historiographic challenge to art history, cultural studies, and aesthetics are addressed in my 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). »

25 Wittgenstein began compiling his notes on color in March 1951. They remained unfinished upon his death later that spring. According to his theory, there exists “no commonly accepted criterion for what is a color, unless it is one of our colors.” Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Shättle (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), 4e. Here, by use of the pronoun “our,” he refers to a single, hypothetical community of speakers. Wittgenstein’s logic surfaces the subjectivism and intratribal disputes involved in disagreement about sameness of color. It demonstrates color’s adaptability to its contested condition, by reference precisely to everyday language’s suffusion with imprecise, unrefined color usages that cast doubt on every color-derived truth. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the modern anxiety about the concept of pure color implies a broad consciousness of small differences among phenomena that can be related but will not be equated — differences of the same sort that color theory buries in order to narrate color in a geometrically consistent fashion.
In this connection, writing about the phenomenon of favorite colors, Wittgenstein stresses their role in helping us to negotiate the tension between color-chart color and worldly color. (“People reserve a special place,” he writes, “for a given point on the color wheel, and . . . they don’t have to go to a lot of trouble to remember where the point is, but always find it easily.” Ibid., 17e.) By his logic, one’s favorite color is a repository for the faith one places, wittingly or not, in the validity of the concept of pure color. One’s affection for one’s favorite colors matters, in part, because the ease of locating it matters. This indulgence not only reinforces the integrity effects of supposedly rational discourse but also provides a durable ground for one’s experience of clarity (intellectual) and agreement (social) and all their attendant pleasures. Every one of our usages indicates that uncertainty extends to the very heart of the problem of color as we know it. “Our color words characterize the impression of a surface over which our glance wanders. That’s what they’re for.” Ibid., 25e. »

26 Ibid., 2e. Emphasis in original. »

27 Ibid., 5e. My emphasis. »

28 Philipp Otto Runge, quoted in ibid. »

29 Wittgenstein, in ibid. »

30 Ibid., 12e. »

31 In an oft-cited scenario discussed in Remarks on Colour, Wittgenstein imagines an acquaintance describing the color of a wall to him by calling it “a somewhat bluish yellow,” a hue for which Wittgenstein lacks a concept. He attributes the lack to the absence of a corresponding pure or saturated color. Because he cannot point to the right location on a color chart, he is unable to demonstrate understanding to his acquaintance. Ibid., 20e. He later writes, “Here I would like to make a general observation concerning the nature of philosophical problems. Lack of clarity in philosophy is tormenting. It is felt as shameful. We feel: we do not know our way about where we should know our way about. And nevertheless it isn’t so. We can get along very well without these distinctions and without knowing our away about here.” Ibid., 21e. »

32 Ibid., 18e. »

33 Ibid., 20e. »

34 Ibid., 18e. »

35 In this way, the Skin Set Drawings loom large in Pope.L’s sustained dispute with abstraction, a dispute that directs its consternation at the invisibility of the privilege built into the act of brushing the figure aside. Pope.L understands that this move is deeply involved with a fantasy of a personalized aesthetic system that need make no provision for the vicissitudes of human mentality, which no maker can escape, except within the terms of a manufactured self-world (whether this is a philosophy of language or a painting practice). »

36 Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” 152. Emphasis added. »

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