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A limited selection of 100 books within the first edition run includes an original silkscreen print, signed and numbered by the artist. Orders are limited to one book per household. Special edition copies are not eligible for returns or refunds.
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Pope.L: My Kingdom for a Title
Edited by Courtney Willis Blair
Endnotes by Kandis Williams
Co-published by Mitchell-Innes & Nash and New Documents
8 3/5 by 11 4/5 in. 21.75 by 30 cm.
274 Pages, Cloth Bound, hard cover
ISBN: 978-1-953441-05-8
First Edition (2021)
My Kingdom for a Title is a collection of writings by artist Pope.L documenting his use of language as a mode of visual, narrative, and performative story telling.
The act of writing has been integral to how Pope.L works from the start and is arguably the most consistent element in his practice. These works take various forms: scripts, short stories, scribbled notes, large scale installation, and painting—many never before released. Assembled here for the first time, My Kingdom for a Title allows the breadth of the artist’s engagement with language to be fully assessed. Within the book, Pope.L’s work is supplemented with extensive endnotes sourced by artist Kandis Williams.
Pope.L is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries, and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create artworks in various formats including writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal, and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race, and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money, and uncertainty—not necessarily in that order.
One might presume that a collection of Pope.L’s writing spanning the artist’s decades-long career would be, itself, a performance. My Kingdom for a Title enlivens the artist’s fascination with language as a core mode of inquiry. An artist known for his strenuous public crawls that often include pedestrian and volunteer participation in a mixture of rehearsed and spontaneous study, such as “The Great White Way” (2001-09) and most recently “Conquest” (2019), My Kingdom for a Title is equal parts a peek at the artist’s sketchbook and a career retrospective through Pope.L’s iterative textual analysis.
