Decaneas sells Panopticon Gallery

Tony Decaneas has announced that he is selling Panopticon Gallery of Photography to Jason Landry, a Boston photographer and program and operations manager of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, who plans to continue the gallery at its same Boston location and under the same name.

Decaneas founded Panopticon as a photolab in 1970, and not long after added the gallery. He reports that his first exhibition was in a one-room, basement gallery at 187 Bay State Road in Boston. The gallery moved to 69 Newbury Street, then back to the original location, then to Moody Street in Waltham, before finding its present spot in the Hotel Commonwealth at 502 Commonwealth Ave. in Boston. He writes: “My vision was to create a showplace for local contemporary photographers. That gallery is now the second oldest photography gallery in the United States.”

The photolab continues as Panopticon Imaging in Hingham, which Decaneas sold to Paul Sneyd. And beginning May 14, Landry will take over Panopticon Gallery. Decaneas notes that he plans to curate an exhibition of Vittorio Sella photos this fall and, with Landry, organize a Panopticon 40th anniversary exhibit in 2011. And Decaneas adds: “I committed to an exhibition of Jason's photography at Panopticon Gallery (coming this May) before either one of us had any inkling of the idea that he would be taking over Panopticon Gallery. True story.”

Boston art bus launches

The Boston Art Dealers Association is launching "The Art Bus," a free shuttle between the Newbury Street and South End art districts in Boston. Service begins tomorrow, April 3, and continues on the first Saturday of each month, from noon to 4 p.m., between September and June.

To ride, you must pick up a pass at one of the member galleries. (For a return trip, you'll have to get a second pass.) The bus stops at Thayer Street and Harrison Avenue; Newbury and Berkeley Streets (in front of the Church of the Covenant); and Newbury and Dartmouth Streets (in front of Fitz Inn parking lot).

MA, RI subsidize millionaires, cut the arts

The state of Massachusetts has been slashing funding for the arts – and much else – so why is it handing out subsidies to the financial industry? And as Rhode Island plans arts cuts, why are its politicians offering subsidies to a millionaire businessman?

Masschusetts Governor Deval Patrick is proposing to cut the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s budget by 3 percent to $9.4 million for the fiscal year beginning July 1. That’s on top of major cuts last year, which together would add up to a 26 percent cut for the state art agency over the two years.

Certainly times are tough, so the arts have to make sacrifices like everyone else. Except apparently the financial industry.

Wednesday, the Massachusetts Economic Assistance Coordinating Council approved a multi-year $22.5 million tax break for insurance giant Liberty Mutual to help it build a $300 million office tower at the corner of Berkeley Street and Columbus Avenue in Boston. That’s on top of a $16 million tax break from the city of Boston over the next 20 years. So $38.5 million in city and state tax breaks spread over two decades, or corporate welfare of $1.925 million a year. Just eliminating this one special corporate handout would pay for at least 65 percent of the $2.95 million that would be cut from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

As Blue Mass Group notes, Liberty Mutual told the Boston City Council on March 12 that it had no intention of leaving Boston whether it got the government subsidy or not. As for the 600 new jobs the company pledges to create here, Blue Mass’s Shirley Kessel writes:

“Liberty is promising to create, at its 2500-employee Boston headquarters campus, an average of 30 jobs annually for the 20-year term of the tax break – barely 1% hiring growth that will be invisible in a company this size, and indeed, under one-fourth the number of jobs Liberty has created annually (125) since 2004 WITHOUT any tax break.”

That’s some creative economy.

Meanwhile, Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri is proposing cutting all the state’s arts grants, while he and other Rhode Island politicians are courting millionaire former-Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling about moving his video game company 38 Studios, now headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts, to Rhode Island in exchange for tax breaks.

The Providence Journal reported on March 24:

The Rhode Island connection grew out of a chance meeting between Schilling and Governor Carcieri at a March fundraiser at the pitcher’s Medfield, Mass., home. The two fell into conversation about 38 Studios.

“My sense was that he wasn’t particularly thrilled with the reception he was getting in Massachusetts, so I said: ‘Come on down, we’d be happy to talk to you,’” Carcieri recalled.

Schilling took him up on the offer and came to Rhode Island several times in the past few days, meeting with House Speaker Gordon D. Fox, Economic Development Corporation Director Keith Stokes and several other state officials.

And you thought Rhode Island was broke.

Denise Kaigler, chief marketing officer for 38 Studios, tells The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research:

• 38 Studios has been contacted by several states and as part of normal due diligence, we have participated in several discussions. Yes, Rhode Island is one of the states with which we have been in contact. We have not disclosed the names of the other states.
• The various states are initiating the contact.
• Details of the discussions are confidential.

When we try to figure out priorities for our government spending, a problem is that we never really debate our government budgets as a whole, including all areas of spending and tax cuts. We think arts spending is being cut to fund police or firefighters or teachers or care for the elderly and poor. When really what's happening now is that everything is being cut, except for special backroom socialist subsidies for millionaire capitalists that don't pop out as line items on government budgets.

Those government gifts to millionaires have to come from somewhere. Special tax deals for individual businesses hurt the rest of us because government then has to make up for this loss in income by increasing taxes elsewhere (meaning you and me) or cutting police or firefighters or teachers or care for the elderly and poor. Or the arts.

One rough rule of thumb for lawmakers and capitalists: If a business advertises regularly on network television, it probably doesn't need government handouts.

Of course, this problem is not new. A decade and a half ago, Massachusetts changed the way its mutual-fund industry is taxed so that last I looked it was saving the industry more than $100 million in taxes annually. The Boston Globe recently reported on a Massachusetts program that gives businesses tax cuts in exchange for creating jobs. Except that the Globe report suggests that there's little oversight – so that, for example, Nortel Networks, which pledged to add 800 jobs, actually cut 2,055 jobs. And yet it continues to get the tax break.

This is "business" as usual, locally and across the country.

Update:
Also, AT&T, 3M, Deere & Co, Caterpillar and other major companies are projecting that the recently passed federal health care program will cut into their profits. In particular because the law eliminates a subsidy to businesses that was part of the Medicare prescription drug program passed in 2003. How did it work? To encourage businesses to continue covering retirees, the government picked up 28 percent of companies' costs – then it allowed companies to not pay taxes on the entire cost of their drug plan spending, plus the part the government paid for.

The old plan was a bit like your boss taking you out to lunch. She pays. You take the receipt, return to work, and submit your meal for reimbursement.

Previously:
Nov. 2, 2009: Fine arts not in Patrick’s Creative Economy?
June 29, 2009: 23 percent cut for MA cultural council.
June 14, 2006: Your tax dollars at work: “A decade ago, the state changed the way Massachusetts’s mutual-fund industry is taxed in a way that, according to our Department of Revenue, will save the industry roughly $132.4 million this fiscal year and some $141 million the next.”

King Tut threatens MFA with curse

Offended by “greatest tomb ever uncovered” ads
















Tutankhamun – best known by his nickname King Tut – is threatening to put a curse upon Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts unless it retracts advertisements it has been airing on public radio claiming its “The Secrets of Tomb 10A” exhibit features “the greatest tomb ever uncovered.”

The 14th century B.C. Egyptian pharaoh made his statement during a press conference held on the steps of the museum’s State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance overnight. “Djehutynakht’s tomb is pretty great,” Tutankhamun said via an interpreter. “But the greatest ever uncovered? His tomb – Tomb 10A, as the MFA so inelegantly calls it – is like a firefly compared to the sun that is my tomb.”

When Tutankhamun’s tomb was unearthed by British archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, the treasures inside were hailed by The New York Times as “equal to art objects of any age.” When Carter died in 1939, the Times called the tomb’s unearthing “the most dramatic discovery in the history of archaeology.”

“And I’ve seen that ‘Leonardo’ that everyone’s talking about,” the mummy added, while making air quotes and referring to the rumor published in The Washington Post that the MFA may secretly have a painting by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci. “It’s no Leonardo. And it’s not even that good a ‘Leonardo.’"

Tutankhamun declined to comment on a recent report in The Journal of the American Medical Association that said he died of malaria combined with a degenerative bone condition, and that his penis "is well developed." "How dare you ask such questions of the pharoah," he sputtered, by way of his translator, before storming off with a stiff-legged gait. "This press conference is over!"

Jose Luis Blondet is leaving BCA

Jose Luis Blondet will leave his post as curator of the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts on June 1 to become curator of special initiatives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Blondet tells The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. Asked what the new job will entail, Blondet says half-seriously, half-joking: “I don’t know. Something really special. If it’s not special I won’t do it.”

Blondet joined the BCA (pictured above) in September 2007, arriving from Dia: Beacon, where he led the museum’s education and outreach programming. At the LA County Museum of Art, Blondet says he’ll be working in a newly created position under director Michael Govan, who had lead Dia when Blondet worked there.

Since Blondet is departing, we asked him for his take on the Boston art scene and how it might be improved.

“Contrary to what I expected and what people told me, people were extremely receptive and welcoming [in Boston] … and I felt that from the beginning,” Blondet says.

“I’m still amazed by the work of the fantastic artists in Boston and I had no idea of their work and they deserve huge recognition,” Blondet says. In particular, he singled out Taylor Davis for praise: “every time I look at one of her works, I’m truly in awe.”

“One of my dreams here at the BCA, but I understand why it was not possible at the time, is to have more traveling exhibitions that originate at small nonprofits here like the BCA,” Blondet says. Traveling locally-organized shows would help “project” the work of local artists outside of town, he says. Artadia, he notes, is planning something like this next year, when it aims to present exhibitions of Atlanta art in Boston (at the BCA, Blondet says) and Boston art in Atlanta.

He called for greater critical and academic attention to individual local artists: “We don’t take artists so seriously. No one would think about lecturing about Matt Rich’s work or Taylor. I think they are doing interesting work. There is a big division between the academic world and the art world.”

“I think that many good things come the way of Boston. Like Helen Molesworth at the ICA is fantastic. Jen Mergel at the MFA, wow! We have deluxe people working here and we will see the results of that,” Blondet says.

The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research noted that neither Mergel, who grew up in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood and has spent most of her career around Boston, nor Molesworth have shown much interest in locally-made art in the exhibits they organize.

“Even if they don’t work with Boston artists, the quality of their shows, the originality of their vision will no doubt be highly beneficial to the local community,” Blondet says. “…A more cosmopolitan, a more international art scene will benefit Boston artists.”

Related:
Nov. 3, 2007: Our report on Jose Luis Blondet's arrival at the BCA.
Dec. 28, 2009: Yokelist Manifesto 6 in which we proposed local artist roundup exhibitions "be swapped across New England, and then also swapped with regional art roundups from, say, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia."

Saya Woolfalk interview

Plus: She performs at Tufts University on April 2














On Jan. 15, we spoke with Saya Woolfalk at Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford, Massachusetts, where her installation "The Institute for the Analysis of Empathy" is on view through April 4. (See our review here.) She performs at the gallery at noon on April 2. Below are excerpts from our interview in which she talks about the mythology she's invented for recent works like "Ethnography of No Place" and discusses her influences.

"’No Place’ is utopia, from the Greek. The idea was to construct a whole other system, and in the system people are part plant and part human, and change color and gender, and now are affecting the people in 2010 and mutating their genetic materials to become more like them. So kind of trying to capture the dreams and desires of people that I speak to on a daily basis. ... So we dream and desire for this. Well what would it look like, what could it look like? These people change color and gender so what would it look like to have a world where difference is something which is constantly mutating and is explicit?"

"Right now there are actually three temporalities. There's the present, so 2010. Then there's the future of the future, 'No Place,' which is represented in ‘Ethnography of No Place.’ And then in between those two is a future dystopian world called 'The Land of the Pleasure of Machines.' ... It's actually a part of the ‘Empathic Imaginaries’ video, it's an animation at the end of the video. ... They are all represented here, but the ones that I'm really focused on right now are the Empathics, which is ‘Empathic Imaginaries,’ and 'No Place,' which is the past project. In ‘Ethnography of No Place,’ Rachel Lears and I decided to work together on a collaborative project kind of in response to the ideas that I was being exposed to in the Whitney [Museum's Independent Study] Program. And so we decided we'd construct a future utopian world where we could play with ideas and come up with what would a future utopian world look like. We kind of culled the imaginations of people who we came in contact with, curators and studio assistants I had at the time, their logic became part of the piece. I made one chapter for the Japan Society for their butoh festival, so one chapter became about death and dying. So taking the world, capturing information from it, and then transforming it into this material for this future utopian world, that was the process of the production. And doing it with this anthropologist, so everything in the video is documented in kind of pseudo ethnographic tone. But, you know, there's a little bit of a critique of anthropology thrown in too, the failures of anthropology, because we also kind of created this subjectivized anthropologist. It's not a truth-speaking person, it's someone who has a subjective position and understands their own limitations and failures and expresses it in the context of this document."

"It's called ‘No Place’ for a reason. It's not supposed to necessarily be a utopia. It's just a kind of thought experiment that doesn't put out any rules or regulations or specificities. Utopian projects generally have very specific rules that say these are the things that would produce a utopia. Part of this project is that it leaves is more ambiguous. And it constantly changes. With more information that gets captured by the people who I'm in touch with or talk to or collaborate with the contours of the place change. Maybe it's more of a kind of actual life project, where the criteria for what desire looks like changes over time."

"Women in the woods of upstate New York find the bones of a No Placean they're the people from the future. And they excavate the site and from contact with the bones they start changing. And so this is more of a kind of rumination on how human beings could actually biologically, spiritually, collectively become something which they are not already, which they desire to be. That's what the project is about."

"It is about what people dream or long for. And that kind of goes back to feminist projects, which was in part about trying to capture longing, or there was a lot about the desires of women, what they look like and how they are represented. Which is basically the foundation of the entire project. The easiest one to point to is ‘Womanhouse,’ where groups of women got together and attempted to insert representations of their own experiences into this collectively run building in Fresno, California. ... With the Empathics, it's every clear. It's not going to necessarily be groups of women in the permutations into the future because I don't want to limit it to women's perspectives. As it is now, the group of women I work with, we use a kind of model like the ‘Womanhouse’ model. I went and looked at how ‘Womanhouse’ actually produced some of its projects. ... Women get together, they kind of brainstorm, they kind of collectively develop a project, and then they perform a piece or they produce an artwork. And that was the strategy, the method that we used to actually choreograph the performance. So that's a very direct example. But also in the do-it-yourself approach, the use of craft. Without feminist artists opening the door for contemporary artists to use craft method in high art, I don't think that my work would be legible to many people. And then also this idea that you can transform your material conditions through representing your desire, that's a foundational idea in the project and the way I was taught about feminist practice."

"The reason it was a utopian project was because we were reacting against the way the ISP [Whitney Independent Study Program] was thinking about approaches to art making. It was so critical, it was so distopian in some way. That you look at the world and you critique it and by critiquing it you can somehow understand it better. I don't think that's a problematic system or method, but I thought that wasn't the method I wanted to use. I wanted a more generative -- well what are the possibilities, what are the permutations of the possible."

"’The Land of the Pleasure Machines’ is actually where ‘No Place’ gets generated. So between the present and the future of the future there is the Land of the Pleasure Machines. So the idea is that even though the Empathics are attempting to get to a utopian place, they end up conjuring and connecting with a dystopia. I call it a dystopia because people have given up their flesh bodies to consume. But they're actually generating this utopian place within their own society. So although this society as it is is dystopian their drives end up being somewhat utopian as well."

Saya Woolfalk "The Institute for the Analysis of Empathy," Tufts University Art Gallery, 40R Talbot Ave., Medford, Massachusetts, Jan. 21 to April 4, 2010. She performs at the gallery at noon on April 2.

Portrait of Woolfalk at top by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. Behind her you can see, from left, the "Ancestor" sculpture/costume (2005), the "Fruit" sculpture (2010), and the No Placean "Skeleton" (2010) sculpture on the glowing platform. The next image is an excerpt from Woolfalk and Rachel Lears's video "Ethnography of No Place." At bottom is a photo of, from left, the "Self/Landscape" (2008) sculpture, "Energy Flows" drawing (2009), and a glimpse into the "Empathic Dream Box" video installation (2010).

Re: “Yokelism with your wallet out”

Is it all about the money?

That’s what Boston artist and critic Franklin Einspruch suggests in his thoughtful March 25 post "Yokelism with your wallet out" at his blog Artblog.net, arguing that the fundamental problem with the Boston art scene, the reason it continues to be stuffy and square, is that Bostonians don’t buy art.

[Correction: We are ashamed to admit that we carelessly put words into Mr. Einspruch's mouth in the original version of this post. As he notes in his comment below, "I don't find the Boston art scene stuffy or square in the least." In fact, it is we at The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research who find the Boston art scene stuffy and square. Please forgive us for this crude act of projection.]

Einspruch is responding to painter, critic and Boston University teacher Dushko Petrovich’s Yokelist essay “How to start an art revolution: A manifesto for Boston” in the March 14 Boston Globe, which proposes a top-down revolution lead by our august nonprofits – a new Harvard art degree program, new local satellite venues for the Museum of Fine Arts and Institute of Contemporary art, as well as offering grants, free tuition and housing for local art students to keep them around here after they graduate.

Einspruch has a more market-oriented approach. He suggests research be done to determine the extent of Boston collecting. He says Boston may be a better town for curating than dealing – but this may still help build artists’ and curators’ careers. He proposes linking potential collectors in the region’s tech industry with local artists working in new media, which is one of the standout sectors of Boston art and helps distinguish the town from other art communities. He calls for greater critical and curatorial attention to local comics and illustrationy art, which he notes also has lower prices which makes this work affordable to students and other beginning collectors. He calls for the creation of young collectors groups to cultivate new collectors. (Einspruch says Google only notices the group sponsored by the Copley Society, but the MFA and ICA both have such groups as well.)

Einspruch concludes, “Bostonians, and everyone else, will buy art if they see something they like and can afford. To think otherwise is to succumb to anecdote. Don't idly wish for philanthropy and state intervention - make something great and get it out there.”

Einspruch is right that Bostonians don't buy (enough local) art. He is right on in calling for study of the Boston art market to determine exactly how it's doing and seeking ways to promote distinctive clusters of locally-made art (tech, comics/illustration, I’d also include conceptual art).

But is it all about Boston collectors? Many have long noted the dearth of Boston collectors (in Providence the situation is even worse) and that major local collectors often prefer to go shopping in New York or fairs like Miami rather than buying here, even if the same work is available here.

This is part of a syndrome that you see among our major museums and media outlets – and even our artists. The ambitious folks here want to be part of the big game and correctly recognize that the big game isn’t here. So they focus their attentions elsewhere – or on art made elsewhere. Our local museums suffer from the worst sort of provincialism – they act as if any art made here is second rate just because it’s made here. And they have helped train local collectors to think this way too.














Still, you might be surprised by how challenging New England-made art can be sold here. Samson Projects in Boston made a number of sales from its recent abject, absurd installation (pictured here) by William Pope.L of Lewiston, Maine, to local collectors as well as national and international clients. Pope.L may be an exception, as he’s already showing at major museums. But successful local galleries work hard to build a broad collector base, recognizing that a strong art business is not just dependent on local collectors.

So if we’re talking about the local market we have to also address the market for locally-made art nationally, and internationally. Which brings us back to the hurdle that, as I’ve noted before, one of the salient characteristics of Boston’s second-city syndrome is that everyone here is convinced that everyone else here sucks. Because if they didn’t suck, they’d be in New York. And it’s going to take a lot of effort to convince folks locally and elsewhere that good art is produced here because everyone agrees with us that we suck. Which prompts another question: When was the last time that a local gallery, museum or publication helped launch a local artist onto the national scene?

But, again, how much are local gallery sales, or the lack thereof, responsible for the Boston art scene's stuffiness? Across the country there are artists who make a living substantially from selling their art (plus grants/fellowships), but most artists subsidize their art-making with other endeavors. And that’s the case here as well with artists having day jobs teaching, working in galleries or museums, writing, designing, and other arts-related activities. Pope.L, for example, has taught at Bates College in Maine for years. It seems unlikely that local sales would increase enough that many local artists could quit their day jobs.

It may be a sort of chicken-and-egg problem. Has the Boston art market not grown and collectors looked elsewhere because Boston art is stuffy and square? Or is Boston art stuffy and square, and our exciting artists move elsewhere, because Bostonians don't buy art?

Ultimately you have to say the Boston art scene is stuffy and square because the art is stuffy and square. Money from more Boston collectors would certainly help local artists, and might allow artists to spend more time focused on just making art, but the stuffiness and sleepiness of the Boston scene is due to a failure of artistic ambition, of nerve. Which is reinforced by curators, critics, historians and collectors who ignore what is going on here and do little to help build an audience for it nationally or internationally. The curators, critics, historians and collectors should be incubating and cultivating the best of it. They should be alerting local artists that it’s time to get off your asses and impress the nation. Or as Einspruch says, “Don't idly wish for philanthropy and state intervention - make something great and get it out there.”

For example, the psychedelic awesomeness produced by Fort Thunder, the Hive Archive and Dirt Palace in Providence during the late 1990s and early 2000s happened almost totally outside the art gallery and museum business. Some have since developed gallery and museum world careers – Jim Drain being apparently the most successful at this – but the great art was primarily sparked by a passion to make great art, not in expectation of tapping into the world of collectors.

Last December, a reporter from The Washington Post tagged along with big shot Miami collector Mera Rubell as she made a whirlwind tour of Washington artists’ studios. Her comment to one sculptor summed up the whole scene: "If you were living in New York, you'd be pushing your work a lot harder.”

It's an apt reflection of the Boston scene too: "If you were living in New York, you'd be pushing your work a lot harder.”

If we want a more exciting local art scene, all of us – artists, curators, critics, collectors – must push our work a lot harder.














Related:
The last few months have seen a small flurry of writing by other folks about Yokelism. I’ve been meaning to comment in depth, however other obligations have kept me from doing so yet. But the essays are all worth checking out. In addition to Einspruch and Petrovich’s essays, Edgar Allen Beem wrote a Dec. 22 essay on “Yokelism & the Dangers of Provincialism: The Greg Cook-Sebastian Smee Dialogue” at YankeeMagazine.com and Kyle Chayka has written three essays – “Sourcing Local for Boston Art” (Jan. 26), “Rebooting Boston’s Art Inferiority Complex” (Feb. 3) and “A Better Boston: Artists’ Perspectives” (Feb. 11) – at the New York art website Hyperallergic. Also Joel Brown commented on Yokelism at HubArts.com on Feb. 12: “His ideas are good, although I'm not sure he's chosen the most effective moniker for the movement he's trying to start.”

On Oct. 7, 2009, Real Art Ways in Hartford teamed up with WNPR's "Where We Live" radio show to present a live on-air discussion entitled "Locating Creativity: Can Art and Innovation Revitalize Hartford?" The organizers produced a short blog, which includes a recording of the event. The blog also offers a thoughtful post by Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins, in which he argued:

"It isn’t about one big thing. It’s about an ecosystem of organizations, businesses, artists, activists and entrepreneurs. Hartford is a city that has made some dramatically bad development decisions, ideas that perhaps seemed forward thinking at the time. What those decisions have in common is a search for a 'big bang,' the big project that will be the spark that makes other things happen. It is past time to think differently about development, to recognize the significance of the local, the already existing, the modest, the creative, the idiosyncratic."

And out in Seattle, Jen Graves started a Yokelist-type discussion with her April 7, 2009, essay "The Vancouver Problem: Why is Vancouver art so much better than art here? A rant to get the conversation started" in The Stranger. Blogger Regina Hackett responded to Graves on April 14, 2009.


Previously:
Yokelist Manifesto Number 1: Boston lacks alternative spaces?
Yokelism at the 2008 Boston Art Awards.
Yokelist Manifesto Number 2: Montreal case study.
Yokelist Manifesto Number 3: Hire locally.
Yokelist Manifesto Number 4: We need coverage of our living artists.
Yokelist Manifesto Number 5: We need local retrospectives.
Yokelism update: Coverage of our living artists: Sebastian Smee responds.
Yokelism update: Dangers of Provincialism.
Yokelism update: Re: Dangers of Provincialism.
Yokelist Manifesto Number 6: Could the CIA help?
Yokelism at the 2009 New England Art Awards.

Pictured: William Pope.L performance and installation at Samson Projects in Boston, as photographed by The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research on March 20, 2010.