William Pope.L – The Black Factory

This project is a continuation and exploration of some of the challenges I encountered in the six years I have been working on The Black Factory project (see description below). This project, for me, was heavy on management and fundraising and low on direct artist engagement. As a result, it was difficult when I was training Black Factory workers to provide them a real sense of what was at stake in asking them to "peddle" difference. And further, in peddling difference how do you move from a playful capitalist gambit to a radical reappraisal of how we consume difference and to what end?

I would like to spend my three weeks at Bellagio re-thinking the first principles of The Black Factory. I would like to write a pamphlet and make a set of drawings describing the hawking of egalitarianism via Tocqueville's quandaries regarding democracy in 19th C. America. Based on these activities, my concrete goal is to build a new performative enterprise based on the independent itinerant peddler of early America. I would carry, in a specially constructed knapsack or traveling case, a similar complement of goods, tools and apparati now carried in The Black Factory truck. I would travel by bus or on foot along a loosely predetermined itinerary. I would set up my gear on sidewalks or knock on doors or appear at country fairs to sell my wares, only the real product I'd be selling is a discussion around difference. This strategy would provide me a more grassroots access to what happens on a larger scale in The Black Factory concerning its stirring up of discussion on the problematics of Americans and difference.

Background on The Black Factory 1999 - 2005

Currently The Black Factory is about to set out on its national tour. This will encompass 12 stops across 25 states in six weeks. In 2004, we embarked on a mini-tour, which encompassed six stops in four states in ten days. The four years leading up to the two tours was made up of fundraising, research and a lot of soul-searching about the nature of blackness and difference in America. This project evolved within the contours of my art practice for twenty plus years. During this time, my work-process tended toward the centrifugal; moving out and across a wide variety of media including painting, sound-work, fiction-writing, performance, theater, sculpture, installation and object-making.

The Black Factory is a performance-installation built into a panel truck and also enlists other media; such as artist's books, objects made on site, video, the web, and a promotional brochure (to 'sell' the Factory and encourage new venues).

The Black Factory travels throughout America to bring blackness wherever it is needed. The truck consists of three compartments that unfold to create an interactive public environment made up of a library, a workshop, and a gift shop.

Through the circulation of promotion material, the web and by word-of-mouth, The Black Factory makes contact with a range of host-communities that invite the Factory to visit. The host spreads the word to the local community and asks them to 'get the black out.' Whether it's the high-school football field or the foot of the steps of City Hall, the location chosen for the Factory to stop and set up shop becomes the drop-site: folks arrive ready to share the objects they've collected, things that reference blackness for them (from copies of The Souls of Black Folk and images of Martin Luther King Jr. to Ku Klux Klan hoods or the ashes of Jacqueline Oasis Kennedy).

This gathering of individuals and their materials, in its ideal realization, takes on the form of a lively grassroots rally whose very nature provokes questions about what it means to be different. As the community offers up its 'objects de blackness,' the Factory channels the exchanges in two different ways: some objects are placed on display on the Factory's library or website; others are fed into the workshop's pulverization area, where they are immediately broken down and turned into the powder that the Factory then uses to manufacture its signature line of products for sale.

While processing is underway, visitors survey the library's holdings, watch as the work of pulverization unfolds, browse in the gift shop, or stand back and marvel at this playfully seditious community enterprise in which they have become participants.

At once a mobile marketplace that trades in provocation and a nomadic laboratory for crafting consciousness, The Black Factory gathers, shapes, and repackages materials and experiences that challenge us to see the creative potential nested within the polarized politics of race in America. Wherever The Black Factory appears and sets up operations, it catalyzes a participatory process of public engagements with issues of cultural difference. It combines sculpture, installation and performance to pose questions about identity, community, and consumption that attempts to work its way under our skin.

The Black Factory welcomes visitors to begin the process of contemplation and consumption by proffering their own examples of cultural materials that reference blackness. These racialized relics are either included in the library's archive (live or web) or marked for pulverization by the Factory's workshop, where one-by-one they are reduced to pulp. Combined with a little of the industrialized magic of capitalism, this pulverized blackness becomes the raw material for a host of new products: home-made 'treatments,' bottled water, blank books, prayer mats, and souvenir yellow duckies.

By collecting, recycling and peddling the ingredients for re-thinking blackness, The Black Factory transforms the tensions and contradictions of race into a dynamic field of possibility. The Factory performs an inward-reading outreach effort. It encourages us to take hold of the stereotypes of race and class which bind us to our indecision and apathy and to turn them inside out. It challenges us to grapple with the habitual ways in which we consume products, identities, and ideologies. It extends open arms to those who feel certain that they have already settled all of these difficult questions, as well as to those who are still actively struggling with them. It asks us to rise to the task of collaborating to build a community based not upon erasing but rather embracing our differences and contradictions.