The Plain Dealer | Steven Litt  |  June 07, 2013

The Plain Dealer: Dragging a 10-ton truck across Cleveland: William Pope.L's two-day "Pull!" starts tonight

It might look like a procession of religious penitents, or perhaps the most bizarre one-float parade in the history of Cleveland.

Chicago artist William Pope.L is unleashing a two-day performance piece called "Pull!" on the streets of Cleveland this weekend.

Scores of volunteers will physically drag a 10-ton delivery truck across the city to underscore the importance of work in contemporary life.

Another goal is to weave together the east and west sides of a city famously divided by the Cuyahoga River.

"One way for people to share a value is to do something together," Pope.L said Friday in a garage at Berea Moving on West 150th Street, as a mechanic fiddled with the engine of the truck, a fully functional 1989 GMC Forward Control.

Pope.L said his piece is about "shared labor and values."

"We all have to work &mdashl; work defines what we find meaningful and valuable in our lives," he said.

Crew members will pull the truck in 11-member groups for shifts lasting two to four hours. They'll lean into a large, black-painted wooden yoke that looks like the kind of thing you'd use to hitch oxen to a wagon.

A driver will sit inside the truck and steer. Scores of other volunteers will shuttle the "pullers" to and from their cars and provide food and water. Pope.L's students from the University of Chicago, where he's an associate professor, will record everything with sound and video gear.

After a 7 p.m. launch party at the Beachland Ballroom in Collinwood tonight, the procession is to roll through the night to University Circle to participate in the Cleveland Museum of Art's Parade the Circle event from noon to 2 p.m. Saturday.

From there, the truck is to head downtown. When it reaches Chester Avenue and East Ninth Street, it will be driven to the city's West Side on Sunday, where it will roll from west to east to the West Side Market for a concluding celebration with live music at 7 p.m.

All aspects of the event, organized by Spaces gallery and funded mainly by a $50,000 grant from the Joyce Foundation, are free. A route map and schedule on are on the Spaces website.

"I'm scared &mdashl; I'm scared in a positive way," Pope.L said. "I hope everything goes well."

Students and faculty from Chicago will participate directly in the pulling, along with Clevelanders representing a cross section of the city.

Among them will be 40 residents at the Emergency Men's Shelter at 2100 Lakeside Ave. in Cleveland. Unlike the volunteers, the shelter residents will be paid $10 an hour.

"A lot of people can't volunteer and be involved in art," Pope.L said. "In the case of people who are jobless or homeless, [paying them] is a way to provide dignity."

As the truck proceeds slowly through the city, a large screen on its back will project images of Clevelanders at work, ranging from historical pictures of heavy industry in the Flats to contemporary construction sites.

The sides of the truck are emblazoned with poetry, song lyrics and images of work, superimposed on what looks like crumpled sheets of newsprint. Pope.L said he wanted to evoke the "living newspaper" agitprop performances popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

Pope.L, 55, is an acclaimed conceptual and performance artist. The "L" in his late name stands for Lancaster, his mother's maiden name, he said.

Pope.L participated in the prestigious 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the USA Fellowship in Visual Arts.

His pieces often involve excruciating physical ordeals he undertakes in public to engage audiences outside museums and the art world.

He is known most widely for a series of 40 "endurance" pieces, titled "eRacism," in which crawled from one point to another in American cities. In the late 1970s, for example, he crawled along 22 miles of sidewalk on Broadway, Manhattan's longest street, while wearing a Superman outfit with a skateboard strapped to his back.

"Art has utility," he said. "In museums, it's muffled, it's protected. By taking it outside of its protective context, like a ball, you can get more out of it. It'll get scuffed up, but you can fix it with duct tape."

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