William Pope.L: Showing Up To Withhold

American artist William Pope.L’s multi-disciplinary art practice has insistently concerned itself with the manner in which difference is demarcated economically, socially, culturally, and politically. Widely acclaimed for his provocative performances, installations, photographs, drawings, and paintings, the work of this prolific artist has permanently shifted art world discourse around race and inequality, as well as around each medium he has opted to use.

In addition to functioning as a catalog of Forlesen, Pope.L’s 2013 exhibition at the Renaissance Society, this book uses the three main components of that exhibition—Skin Set Drawings: The Space Between the Lines, the latest iteration in this series of drawings ongoing since the late 1990s; the sculpture/audio work Du Bois Machine; and the video installation Unfallen—as platforms upon which to build an exploration of the relations between the works in Pope.L’s practice over his 30-year career.

Texts include essays by Lawrie Balfour, Nick Bastis, Lauren Berlant, and K. Silem Mohammad, and an interview between the artist and Hamza Walker. [publishers’ note]