Pope.L review – savage satire from Y-fronts-wearing trickster famed for gruelling ‘crawl’ across New York

Modern Art, London
The late American took on liberal presumptions and the commercialism of Black culture, even dressing in white bunny ears and underpants

Seven squares are pinned to the wall, each one painted in the high style of American minimalism: pure, austere variations on a theme. At the centre of each is printed the phrase “negro idea” followed by an apparently random number (51, 37, 666). What is Pope.L, the late, great trickster of contemporary American art, getting at?

Perhaps it is a critique of how minimalism, with its ethos of art-for-art’s sake, excluded politics from art? Or a comment on how racial categories are as constructed (and as subject to fashion) as the theories underpinning contemporary art? Or is it a riff on how the edifice of western modernism is built on stolen ideas? Then again, maybe the deployment of an outmoded racial category is simply designed to discomfort the liberal pieties of those people likely to visit this art gallery just off Piccadilly.