Trinket, 2015

A trinket is a small, cheap, disposable thing—a bauble. Pope.L’s trinket is enormous and, one guesses, expensive; it’s a contradiction that speaks to the conflicting ways political discourse makes use of the flag. His flag differs from a typical American flag in several respects. It is longer in the “bars” and it has an extra star that may represent the expanding promise essential to the mythology of American democracy. The stitching of the flag has been prepared so that the stripes will fray at various lengths. Over time the solid plane of the cloth will give way to a many-tendrilled hydra. Blown rigid by the fans, which are capable of producing winds well over fifty miles per hour, the flag is physically imposing—a divider of space that recalls Richard Serra’s monumental steel slabs or Bruce Nauman’s corridor works. The massive volume of air generated by the fans adds to the sculptural complexity: all of this air needs to go somewhere (and what is not dissipated in the vast spaces of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA is sucked out through ceiling vents). Trinket participates in a long history of contemporary art works that have incorporated the American flag, including famous paintings by Jasper Johns and installations by Cady Noland, among others.