I’ve been looking at William Pope.L’s Eating the Wall Street Journal today. For this work which he performed on several occasions Pope.L peruses, reads from, eats and then spits out sections of this newspaper which reports on economic and business news.
Pope.L’s work is mainly a commentary on race issues and the complications of being a black man working in a white man industry. He uses his body in his work so his blackness is obvious to the consumer of his work. This is also something he is interested in how we consume art as a product that can be bought. Some of his actions are humiliating, crawling through the street, wearing nothing but a jockstrap smearing his body in food products and viewers or consumers are forced to witness this aware of how their consumption exploits.
I am interesting in eating. What it is to eat. In his paper to accompany Eating the Wall Street Journal he notes ‘ Hunger isn’t hunger anymore. It’s constructed. ‘. I think he is referring to the way that most of us do not every experience real hunger, food is accessible, it’s a choice, a game. Shops are stocked high with products; we simply buy what we need, no, what we want. We don’t need the kind of food that is in shops-we want it.
And what about eating or say consuming paper. We don’t need to have all this knowledge. We don’t need to understand- we want to. It gives us power, control, superiority, access to choices, access to an elite class. And so if you have come from a culture where reading and consuming paper is a luxury where does that leave you? You are part of this new educated culture but you are still an outsider constantly doubting you’re newly found knowledge. Having to justify what you are doing, always aware that people can see you, who you really are.
And for me my blackness is my feminity, my Irishness. These are the things that could exclude me from the world of white male ‘high art’. I thought all of this was irrelevant until I was reminded of how our world still revolves around the male ego in the Hollywood film Taken. Human trafficking especially the trafficking of women is still happening today and the only reason it exists is because there are men out there who will pay for women. Although we pretend that we’re past all that and that men respect women, why would this kind of stuff still go on if this were true?
