Taking Down Minutes:
On Carl Pope's The Bad Air Smelled of Roses

text / Gean Moreno

Carl Pope often emphasizes that The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, begun in 2005, is a writing project.1 Thus far, some ninety letterpress broadsides make up his ongoing essay on Blackness. I am using these two words very deliberately, as both essay and Blackness refuse to remain still as signifying units; each finds its meaning in the forms that it inaugurates, reminding us that knowledge is a process as much as a body of information, a search that deeply implicates the tools we use. And each of these two words also reminds us that certain cultures, like certain literary forms, are engaged in immanent processes of generation and regeneration. Responding to the obstacles and intensities that they encounter in the world, they adjust and morph, find new qualities and new modes of expression.

Carl Pope, detail of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005—present, letterpress broadsides, dimensions variable (courtesy of the artist)

"The essay," Adorno once wrote, "does not let its domain be prescribed for it."2 It invents its own shapes and charts its terrains as it traverses them, pushing frontiers with every new attempt. As such, essay anthologies, when good, always risk becoming exercises in incongruity.

"Form fills the function in an essay that images do in poetry: form is the reality of the essay, and form gives the essayist a voice with which to ask questions of life…."3 Form, in other words, is the malleable element that accounts for the essay's flexibility: it meets whatever demands are put to it while allowing the text to be hybrid and impure, deviant and unexpected, playful or elusive, delirious or demanding. It empowers a voice, in its idiosyncratic modulation, to surface—that is, it's a method for educating the ear. But beyond this openness to form and tuning to distinctive tones, the essay also always begins when there are things to be said regarding something in the world. And this obligation—its only one—to objects and occasions is what makes the essay not only always of the present but also "the present in the course of its articulation, its struggles for definition."4

Carl Pope, detail of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005—present, letterpress broadsides, dimensions variable (courtesy of the artist)

Yet, this belonging to the present is paradoxical, because what the essay ultimately articulates, as it scrutinizes some aspect of the world and teases out its virtues, flaws, and meanings, is the possibility that this very world might embody new values and criteria, which may shepherd it toward a different arrangement. The essay is the present as it labors to articulate a future, marking its point of origin. This is why Lukacs calls "the essayist... a pure instance of the precursor"5 while Adorno claims that the essay is invariably about "what is loved and hated."6 The essay always presupposes the future and advocates one way or another.

Carl Pope, detail of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005—present, letterpress broadsides, dimensions variable (courtesy of the artist)

In America, perhaps more deliberately than anywhere else, the essay consigns itself to the future. Think of Jefferson's or Emerson's foundational essays. Follow Stanley Cavell as he sheds light on how the writing of Walden is the writing of America: a country still looking for its form. Feel the furious, incandescent forms of the half of America that had for so long been condemned to the shadows in James Baldwin's merciless lines. Read in Cornel West, bell hooks, and Richard Rorty the return of the public intellectual to a country manipulated by Big Interests. In America, the essay has predominantly placed itself at the service of more just reconfigurations of the world. At its best, it has been an enterprise of radical dreamers, the instrument they employ to articulate their desires and often ours—or what become ours.

While Pope does not operate in the realm of literature, he still aligns himself with this tradition insofar as the essay, in all its flexibility, reaches beyond its protean textual character, leaving the page behind to take up residence in contexts unimaginable to other forms of writing. Think of the film-essays produced by Chris Marker, Chantal Ackerman or Nicolás Guillén Landrián. Consider Basquiat's spray-painted aphorisms. The essay, viewed from a certain angle, can accommodate them all. But it must also, in the way that other forms of writing don't always have to, attend to the differences that unexpected media bring into the picture. In Pope's case, the use of the broadside—as a charged vernacular object—can't be overlooked. After all, it has served as the support for the literature of our agora, as the location where our social body registers its utterances. It has been used to announce almost everything we need, do, and want, from political campaigns and upcoming concerts to supermarket specials and, as Nicholas Mirzoeff reminds us, the unpardonable advertising of runaway slaves.7 The broadside teleports us from the closed universe of the book to the open space of the marketplace, from the exclusive realms of refined culture to the energized—and often savage—exchanges of the quotidian.

Carl Pope, detail of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005—present, letterpress broadsides, dimensions variable (courtesy of the artist)

The history of the broadside beyond the protected territories of the art world resolutely informs Pope's installations of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses. Stapled to the walls in large groups, these broadsides signal less a kinship with nearby paintings than they allude to the overtaken plywood sheets that cover abandoned buildings' windows and papered-over columns under highway overpasses: the notice boards of the neighborhood. In a way, Pope's objects long to have it both ways. They want to be out there and in the exhibition space as well—to be art and quotidian exchange, public discourse and private expression.8 This oscillation pervades The Bad Air Smelled of Roses. As one of the broadsides explains, in a shifting font and undulating musicality that keeps pace with the project's overall shifting ontological status: It was & it is. It is and it ain't! It wills & it won't. It do's and it don't.

Carl Pope, detail of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005—present, letterpress broadsides, dimensions variable (courtesy of the artist)

To the careless glance, Pope's broadsides may all seem to speak the same Black English, a limited repertoire of cadences and tones. But close reading quickly unravels any perceived homogeneity. Take, for instance, the juxtaposition of As a Black woman I feel an urgent need to find radical solutions and Calgon take me away!, which establishes an antithetical structure—engagement and escapism. One statement reaches for current political debate while the other appropriates yesteryear's questionable advertisement. They differ so much in tone and intention that their juxtaposition exemplifies incommensurability. Elsewhere, the juxtaposition of incompatibles such as the self-consciousness of This project started in confusion and will end in disarray and the strange, almost Burroughs-like loss of language-control in Meat me at the edge of the repressed barrier produces friction and sparks. Here, it's almost as if the liberties taken with language might extend to the body, as if the violence done to language could cross some psychic or maybe even physical threshold. The sentence schizophrenically alludes to both the dehumanizing injustices of slavery and the inhuman depths of a sadomasochistic ecstasy.

Carl Pope, detail of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005—present, letterpress broadsides, dimensions variable (courtesy of the artist)

Instead of the monotone chorus, The Bad Air Smelled of Roses reveals a multitude of disparate voices, the grain of each impossible to confuse with those around it. There are trickster voices, radical voices, intellectual voices, pop voices, ancient voices, ambiguous voices, queer voices, mystical voices, TV voices, and even the voice of internalized oppression—NO DANCING, exhorts one broadside, in crisp black capital letters on a white field. This mixture of "found" expressions further bars similarity by often blurring the line between personal and collective utterance, between things that may have been piped out of someone's deepest recesses and common utterances just floating in the air. Ultimately, as it runs the gamut from the inspired to the internalized, the political to the pointless, and the individual to the shared, The Bad Air Smelled of Roses alludes to the polyphony and diverse textures of Black English's epistemological space. It runs on multiple tracks. It may be the oral dimension of a cultural totality, but that totality is so varied and actively evolving that it can hardly be apprehended in any global sense through a handful of indexical instances.

The utterances compiled for this project come from different places. Some find their source in expected locations such as the words of Malcolm X. Others fly in from unexpected directions, blind-siding us: Descartes' texts, and Casablanca, for example. A contingent, I would venture, has unknown trajectories, which even Pope can't name precisely. With such a multiplicity of points of origin, Pope's broadsides both locate Blackness where we didn't think to look for it and take on a dialogic quality: fundamentally different positions share the same space of exchange. It is the concert that they produce—a combination of incommensurable juxtapositions and easy glides, jagged and smooth zones—that gives The Bad Air Smelled of Roses its topology and texture.

With a texture made up entirely of borrowed materials, the writing in this writing project is peculiar. Carl Pope—these two words no longer name an author, but increasingly seem to just point to the transcriber, the instrument which those who live in Blackness use to reveal the plurality of their songs. As such, Pope's authorship coalesces precisely where authorship is no longer identifiable, where writing becomes something like transcription. But before we sign off on this as a loss of agency or authorial thereness, before we tangle ourselves up in discourses that simplistically and disingenuously discount the authorial role, let's consider the option of looking into the agency—anyone of its substitutes—of the medium who attends to the immaterial traces of the real. This, too, involves a deliberate positioning in the world, a willingness to be both conjurer and recorder—a recorder who has to figure out how to textualize a voice without turning it into something else. As both Ishmael Reed and Avital Ronell know, we are the secretaries of spirits. Our job is to take down minutes. Sole ownership on what is said has been relinquished, but how it is said is still a hands-on job for the medium-writer.

Carl Pope, detail of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005—present, letterpress broadsides, dimensions variable (courtesy of the artist)

In light of this, it is fair to say that Pope's writing project enlists a textuality shaped by oral properties and in ghost sounds. It works by picking up the right frequencies, by knowing where the verbal gem—in everyday vernacular or inherited speech—is to be found and how it can be polished. This is, then, neither a question of an absolute purity of transcription nor of an author in complete control of the material. It's a negotiated space, like the field of the self-conscious ethnographer or explorer. To write something down always involves a series of decisions, but making decisions doesn't always mean a complete overhauling or filtering of the source material. Things, cadences, and gestures speak. Voices communicate more than just words. Pope's goal, it seems, is to not muffle the various dimensions of their communication.

If the multitude of voices transcribed in The Bad Air Smelled of Roses indicates the complexities of the epistemological space that Pope calls Blackness, it does not create a definitive portrait of anything or deliver some defined truth. Instead, it represents Blackness because these voices refuse to coalesce into things. Nor is this quite heteroglossia—we certainly get a variety of fragmentary and local styles, an agglomeration of quotes, a chorus of distinctly different voices which evidence a proliferation of distinct subjectivities. The Bad Air Smelled of Roses clues us in to what Blackness may be insofar as it is exact in its inexactitude, in the multiplicity that it alludes to, in the definitions it refuses to deliver. It offers not only an "expansive meaning," as Pope proposes, but perhaps a perpetually expanding one as well.

So what is Blackness, then? "For me," writes Pope, Blackness not only includes notions of African-American identity but also cosmic/galactic ideas as well as everything that exists outside the edge of the repressed barrier of our individual and collective consciousness. The unseen, the intangible, the entire realm of the subconscious and various psychological/emotional states are also poetically associated with Blackness. Blackness contains everything we don't know, can't know, about to know and all things misunderstood or forgotten.

Blackness is what is on the other side—of the knowable, the familiar, the tangible, and the seen.

Blackness, then: a different way of wording the world, to use Stanley Cavell's distinctive terminology. This multidimensional and active epistemology, embodied in the modulation of voices in Pope's project, refuses to coalesce into an inert and unshakeable totality. Instead, this unstable, emergent totality constantly generates and regenerates new coherent forms. Formed in the shadow of denial and negation, shaped by the constant shifts it has had to endure, and modeled after the local realities it's had to incorporate, this epistemology has become a fluid state, constantly morphing, healthily expanding, remaining the very opposite of the unmovable monoliths that are dominant cultures. As Ishmael Reed, among others, has pointed out, it is an epistemological space that shares blurry edges and zones of indistinction with other epistemologies. It is unburdened by the yoke of pre-established, closed definitions or by the need to defend claimed territory. It trades, appropriates, and negotiates with other modes of being. In some ways, it's that parallel or future "unknown," often signaled by the places where Black odysseys lead—Sun Ra's and Samuel Delany's outer spaces, for instance. Pope marks these faraway destinations with a silver broadside on which 11:11—the number of Cosmic synchronicity—has been elegantly embossed.

Carl Pope, detail of The Bad Air Smelled of Roses, 2005—present, letterpress broadsides, dimensions variable (courtesy of the artist)

Blackness, then: a realm that has become difficult to see behind the dominant culture's relegation of "Blackness" to the circumscribed space of its Other. A space hidden behind the projection screen erected where the houses awaken to different visual and verbal grammars and the tracks cross—a trope in the American psyche for the border of repression, if there ever was one. A proliferating, rhizomatic quilt of shared narratives and the compilations of their remixes produced every time they are retold in new locales. Surely, Pope is approaching Blackness as an American essayist, but Blackness transcends America. It also exists in geographies that may seem far from his surveying mound: in the Black Atlantic, in the Black Andes, in the new multi-hued medinas of Europe, in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in ancient Egypt—as Sun Ra and Reed remind us. Its coordinates are both geographical and temporal. It runs parallel to the West, waiting for it in the future.


NOTES
1. For this and all other Carl Pope quotes in this text, see Carl Pope, "Artist Statement: ‘The Bad Air Smelled of Roses,' (2005-Present)" http://www.themindofcleveland.com/roses.html, accessed April 1, 2009.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Essay as Form," Notes to Literature, volume one. Sherry Weber Nicholsen, tr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 3.
3. Edward W. Said, "The World, the Text, and the Critic," The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, 52.
4. Said, 51.
5. Quoted in Said, 52.
6. Adorno, 3.
7. Nicholas Mirzoeff, "Days of Race: Democracy and Black Reconstruction in the Work of Carl Pope," keynote address given at the National Cityscapes Conference, Cleveland Institute of Art, March 27, 2008. Reprinted at: http://www.themindofcleveland.com/archive_daysofrace.html, accessed April 1, 2009.
8. Pope seems to have eased some of these tensions in projects like A Celebration of Blackness, 2006, and The Mind of Cleveland, 2007-2008, which involved billboards and audience participation as an essential component, along with gallery exhibitions.


Gean Moreno is an artist, curator and Contributing Editor of ART PAPERS.