It's impossible to look at Adrian Piper's art without periodically looking at Adrian Piper. Questions of identity are posed with relentless regularity in her mixed-media artwork and, more specifically, the 51-year-old artist's own multiracial identity is examined with a blend of academic rigor and controlled fury.
Although she began in the mid-1960s by making conceptualist-art-influenced, image-and-text-reliant art that sought a theoretical understanding of the nature of objects and experience, Piper quickly went from such musings to a consideration of her own physical presence in American society. She's been doing that ever since, as her heady and, for that matter, bodily retrospective at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County attests.
This handsomely installed exhibit is at its pithiest in the side-by-side installation of two self-portraits. In her 1981 pencil drawing "Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features," Piper emphasizes her broad nose, full lips, and luxuriant Afro hairdo. Her direct gaze in this drawing seems emblematic of how her art confronts you. Hanging next to that drawing is a 1995 photograph altered with oil crayon, "Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady." Piper still stares out at you with a no-nonsense expression, but her hair is long and straight. The photograph's background has been painted a vivid red, prompting you to wonder if this person is nice or angry. Further complicating matters is the cartoon-style balloon encapsulating the woman's thoughts in Ebonics-inflected fashion: Whut choo lookin at, mofo.
Piper grew up in an upper-middle-class Manhattan family that identified itself as black. Her father, a real-estate lawyer, was one-eighth black; her mother, a City College administrator, was one-quarter African-American and had some Caribbean ancestry. Having met the light-skinned Piper on a few occasions over the years, I can vouch for her ability to "pass" for white. Regardless of whether such considerations should matter in our evaluation of a person, they still do matter in a society that stubbornly remains color-conscious.
In tackling such issues, Piper the artist brings to bear the analytic tools of Piper the philosopher. She studied art at New York's School of Visual Arts and philosophy at City College of New York, received a master's degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, and is now a professor of philosophy at Wellesley College. When it comes to Kant, she can.
As a multiracial person moving through largely white academic circles, Piper often found herself at dinner parties and other events where people assumed she was white. Sometimes, people with college degrees supposedly certifying their intelligence would tell racist jokes, expecting her to laugh along. Instead, starting in 1986, she would hand them this calling card:
Dear Friend,
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.
Incidentally, there's a stack of these calling cards in the exhibit, and you're free to take one with you. After all, you never know when it might come in handy. The directness of such an encounter—responding to a racist crack by handing over a calling card—speaks to the importance Piper places on how her body is perceived within a social context.
Like other body-conscious artists who artistically came of age in the 1960s (Yvonne Rainer comes
to mind), Piper developed work in which performance, photographic and video documentation of performance, and mixed-media artwork addressed (and occasionally undressed) the female body.
One of the earlier Piper pieces in this retrospective, "Catalysis III" (1970), is a photo documentation of the sullen-faced young artist walking down a crowded city street. Around her neck hangs a sign that reads WET PAINT. In this and similar pieces, Piper calls attention to her altered self, and it's curious to consider whether it's more disturbing that some people notice or that others seem completely oblivious.
Lest you get the impression there isn't room for anyone else's body in Piper's art, many pieces show you otherwise. In "Free #2" (1989), a black-and-white photograph of a black man being lynched has the silkscreened red-lettered words LAND OF THE FREE superimposed on top of the image; a second photograph depicting two cops and a police dog holding down a black man adds the red-lettered words HOME OF THE BRAVE. This is not subtle, but neither is racially motivated violence. There's no denying the power of such image-and-text pieces, but their obviousness makes them less resonant than Piper's most mind-tickling and mind-troubling art.
One of her most challenging pieces is "Cornered" (1988), a mixed-media installation that includes copies of her father's birth certificate, a table and chairs that evoke a screening room, and, most importantly, a video monitor installed in a corner of the gallery. In a masterfully written, 16-minute video monologue, the artist, seated in a corner, states that most white people have at least a little blackness in their heritage. She proceeds in a bracingly calm voice and with an unyielding stare to list the possible responses to her assertion. Her presentation is so logical and all-encompassing that it's enough to make a Klansman run for the hills and make a "white" liberal shift nervously in the gallery seat.
Near the end of this philosophy professor's speech, she asks, "Which choice will you make?" The camera zooms in on her face as she concludes, "This is not an empty academic exercise."
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