Kendrick Lamar + Carl Pope
“I'll prolly die from one of these bats and blue badges / Body slammed on black and white paint, my bones snappin',” Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning virtuoso Kendrick Lamar raps in a numbed roll. The track “FEAR.,” off his 2017 album DAMN., distills centuries of suffering and anger into a 7 minute 41 second testament. A collage of blues guitar, recorded Bible verses, eerie backwards singing, and Lamar’s elastic-voiced characterizations, the song starts as a reflection of personal anxiety and morphs into a statement on systems: the harm and disharmony of shared despair.
The weight of this historical trauma is compressed, in part, by an arrangement of trophies in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection. Carl Pope’s installation Some of the Greatest Hits of the New York City Police Department: A Celebration of Meritorious Achievement in Community Service (1994) is a material record of violence experienced by black and brown people at the hands of law enforcement. Miles Davis; Henry Dumas; Claude Reese, Jr.; Eleanor Bumpurs; Yusef Salaam; Victor Medina; and others are memorialized through improvised awards recognizing the cops who assaulted them. “This trophy collection maps the history of police brutality and trophy design, but it also traces a third history—the history of rewards that officers receive for killing Black crime suspects,” said Pope.
Incidents from 1949–1994 are engraved on the plaques of these grim honors. The tone is unnervingly congratulatory: 1STE PLACE FOR THE POLICE ACTION KILLING OF FRANK RODRIQUEZ / PATROLMAN RONALD MESZARES / 1960. Moments preserved in wood, plastic, marble, and metal recall dusty display cases housing selective institutional memory.
The impact of Pope’s work has amplified in recent years as systemic injustice against Americans of color is increasingly visible beyond those affected firsthand. In his words, “That's a reality that the families of those people who were killed by the police knew. And I think that reality is becoming more of a reality for the rest of us.” A refrain from early in DAMN., sampled from Bekon’s airy vocals, echoes: “America—God bless you if it's good to you.”
4/25/2019