"Portable Gray (PG), interdisciplinary in scope and dedicated to experimentation, offers a forum for artists and scholars to consider how collaboration can enrich their practices and foster new discoveries. Encouraging contributors to play with artistic and literary forms and modes in order to challenge long-held ideas, PG features essays, interviews, poetry, art, and musical compositions, among other works." [...]
[...] New York. You can do anything in NY. You can do anything in New York and nobody pays any attention. At least not New Yorkers. Seeing someone carry a surfboard on a subway, take a dump in the middle of Mercer, have sex in Tompkins Square Park, walk around screaming. It's all part of the city and we all just walk by, barely noticing. It's normal.
One day in 2002, cars were pulling over, stopping traffic, and drivers getting out of their cars to see what was going on. Doormen were coming out of their buildings to catch a glimpse. Superman, Black Superman, was crawling up Broadway. He was being trailed by a crowd of onlookers and people with cameras. Who was this clearly crazy, wild haired, homeless Black man with a skateboard on his back, and what was he doing? Crazy homeless people don't really do this. But neither do sane people. Nor do actors or advertisers. What was going on? And still, he crawled. Belly on the ground, military style, each foot of ground traveled coming with great effort and difficulty.
I, like many who followed Superman, was in on it. It was Pope.L's performance. I'd known him for about a year, having met and hung out at a Creative Capital artist retreat, and I knew that he was performing the next installment of his performance The Great White Way-a crawl up the entire length of Broadway, about a mile at a time. I knew it was one of his crawl pieces and knew his work. BUT, I wasn't prepared for how visceral and affecting it would be. It was the first time I'd seen his work live. People didn't know what to make of it. It didn't fit in a preconceived box. Pope.L was taking up and using space in a deeply unusual and disturbing way. It was amazing.
