William Pope.L, some things you can do with blackness… (Kenny Schachter Rove, London, 2005)
There are books that document exhibitions and books that extend them. This one does something closer to the second.
Published on the occasion of Pope.L’s show at Kenny Schachter Rove in early 2005, some things you can do with blackness… is a 36-page softcover catalogue that holds, in printed form, a body of work that was never designed to stay still. The Black Factory — the mobile project at the centre of the exhibition — operated as a truck, a social encounter, an archive, and a redistribution system. It collected objects associated with blackness, processed them, and returned them altered. The catalogue does something analogous: it takes actions that happened in time and on streets and in rooms, and gives them a second life as image, diagram, text, and sequence.
What makes the book unusual is that it doesn’t resolve Pope.L’s work into a single legible statement. The Skin Set Drawings appear alongside working diagrams for Chocolate Fountain, documentation of The Black Factory tour, and a photograph of Pope.L crawling Broadway in a Superman costume as part of The Great White Way (2002–ongoing). These are not illustrations of a thesis. They are components of an operating system that the book keeps running, quietly, on the shelf.
On scarcity
Kenny Schachter Rove was a small London gallery with a short operational life. The publications it produced were made in limited quantities for a specific exhibition context — not distributed through major art book channels, not reprinted. some things you can do with blackness… carries an ISBN, which places it in the bibliographic record, but finding a copy in good condition is another matter.
Pope.L’s institutional profile grew substantially in the years following — culminating in major retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2010) and MoMA (2019) — and with it, demand for primary documents from his mid-career practice. This catalogue, from a London show in 2005, sits precisely in the period between his emergence and his full institutional recognition. It is the kind of object that was easy to overlook at the time and is now genuinely difficult to locate.
For a library concerned with performance art, with American art of the 2000s, or with the printed afterlives of socially engaged practice, it belongs. Not as a rarity for its own sake, but because the work it documents remains active — and because Pope.L, who died in 2023, left a body of work that will only become more carefully studied. His obituary in the New York Times gives a measure of his reach.
The copy offered here is in very good condition. It will not be easy to find another.