William Pope.L


Here is a photo of my black self sitting on a mountain of rubber in my reinvention of Allan Kaprow's 1961 environment called Yard. I call mine To Harrow. My version is composed of tires, cardboard, Vaseline–filled body bags, plaster body parts, incandescent light bulbs (white and red), surveillance cameras, and an audio track of an Obama impressionist, Cyrus Malik, reciting a compost of the words of Kaprow, Pynchon, Cronenberg, and yours truly. There I go again! Talking about myself as if it were I who matters in this ransom of absence. Indeed, reinvention, as a genre, is a cross between parricide, biopic, and necromancy. Helen Molesworth, bless her aura, curated me into this ghost-hunt. Hauser & Wirth New York, as steered by Marc Payot, Blair Taylor, and Iwan Wirth, spared no dime in helping me transform Kaprow's playground into a meadow of want.