POPE .L | What I Do All Day When You’re @ Work

POPE .L

What I Do All Day When You’re @ Work

New York City, USA: Artspace, 2019

20.3 x 27.9 x 15.6 cm

Edition of 25 signed and numbered copies

A burnt-out light bulb housed in a box made of binder board and book cloth. 

"Pope.L addresses the most significant issues of our time, but that does not mean his work is without humor. This edition consists of a light bulb signed by the artist and nestled in a beautiful handmade box that would typically house an object of great worth. A light bulb is the symbol of a brilliant idea, and here Pope.L is poking fun at the cliché of the artistic genius. The light bulb is exhausted, and thus no longer has any practical value, but the idea itself, endorsed by a renowned artist through his signature and enshrined in a sumptuous container, is nevertheless fetishized. The work seems to imply that in American consumer culture, anything can be packaged and sold."

- Jeanne Gerrity

"Exhaustion is just another word for being tired...

There is a John Prine song called "Angel from Montgomery‎" (1971). In many ways, the song is about just being tired… I wish I'd channeled it to make this edition but...

However, if I had, if I had, I would have been thinking: time, time passing, time wasting—a woman, maybe a man, you know a woman-man, you know what I'm saying—anyway she's standing at the window like it’s a parapet, a light bulb dangles from the ceiling, she's leaning out the window and it feels like she'll lean that way forever*—that's the sort of situation I'd have been channeling...

Instead I thought: there, there is, there is an inside not accessible to an outside therefore not intimate yet visible yet infinitely a part a a across an entire universe on either side of a a a glass a mere lighting fixture filled with vacuum—something old, something blue, something borrowed, something new, something totally, totally, totally you—yes, yes, yes, you—totally you—I'm talking to you, I've always been talking to you.”

- Pope.L 

* a reference to Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne ("They are leaning out for love/And they will lean that way forever/While Suzanne holds the mirror”)?