Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma

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.

Sincerely yours,

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

My Calling (Card) No.1 (1986-Present)

Reactive Guerilla Performance For Dinner and Cocktail Parties

Adrian Piper is one of the most innovative mainstream contemporary artists in America, although her work has never received the kind of recognition it merits. This is not only due to the way in which Black women artists are documented in the US visual art sector, but also because of the issues which are raised in her work and the various forms in which she explores them. Piper explores the terrain of multimedia art in which music, film, spoken narrative, and movement are blended together in a form of an autobiographical testimony. This is evident in works such as 'Political Self Portrait No.2' (1978) which utilises poster style imagery; 'Out of the Corner' (1990) which experiments with video technology; 'Pretend NO.2' which utilises newspaper photos with silkscreened text; 'Dear Friend...' which manipulates the genre of business cards and 'Safe', an installation exploring the medium of the still image with sound. What makes Piper's work innovative is her manipulation of these elements to produce a body of work which explores contemporary issues around class, sexuality, gender and race. The dominant reading of Piper's work invariably positions it as a series of autobiographical and testimonial visual/performance pieces. This is clearly the case in 'Dear Friend' and 'Political Self Portrait No.2.' Both these pieces examine the way in which a stereotypical depiction of Blackness is deployed within popular cultural environments - from gatherings and dinner parties to images in the mainstream media.

Yet this is only one aspect of Piper's work, which becomes overtly documented and positioned within a particular reading. Piper also explores the notion of whiteness, particularly in 'Out of the Corner' and the 'Chicago' audience/artist performance piece. In her work it is the white subject who becomes confronted with their position on race and gender, both figuratively and through the use of language. In this sense, Piper is not in the margins, but at the centre of a range of forces which she manipulates for varying effects and responses. The key element in Piper's work is the question of reading, whether it is a reading of the work itself, or a wider reading of the artist and the context she operates within. Piper has been read as a conceptual artist, as a feminist artist, as a mixed race artist, and as an academic (she has a Doctorate in Philosophy). Therefore, the question of how one reads, whether it is the artist or the artist's work, becomes a political site of struggle. This is the essence of Piper's work. In order to explore this question of reading we need to look at three major themes that run through the work.

The first major theme is the ideological framework which the work occupies. In this sense, Piper utilises contemporary ideas within semiotics to examine underlying or invisible systems of conventions and power systems. She explores the variety of ways in which the Black and white subject are constituted and positioned through language in the media. Piper consistently contests different, shared meanings or cultural terrains which establish what counts as knowledge. This is the ideological framework within which Piper's work operates - where the concepts of the Self and Other as articulated by writers such as Frantz Fanon are utilised as a mode of political action within the visual/performance arts to describe the endless circuit of opposed but interdependent identities involved in power relations.

A second major concern in the work is the preoccupation with highly visible popular cultural forms such as video, photography, posters, cards and audience participation. These media are appropriated to explore the invisible underlying elements of power relations: Piper re-positions these elements to say something different. For instance, 'Dear Friend...' uses the format of business cards to make a statement on racism; and the audience participation performance pieces take on the form of an Oprah Winfrey/Arsenio Hall chat show but become subverted when the live group participation performances becomes combined with a video. Piper uses her skills as a performer and a philosophy professor to push this form to the edge.

The content of Piper's work is the third major theme. She explores three complex interwoven strands which question her art in relationship to her own identity. The first strand is depicted within the issues the work raises. It is subjective documentation of American events such as the mass genocide of the native North Americans; the legacy of slavery; the 60s political movement, civil rights, the Vietnam war; Black Power and the feminist movement. The second strand is the way Piper mobilises philosophical and existential concepts into practical models of political action. She has produced extensive academic work in areas of the self and rationality. The third strand is depicted by the artist's ability to produce a piece of visual/performance work which can affect viewers, provoke change and at the same time experiment with the aesthetic form in which it is expressed.

To refer to the question raised earlier, how do we read Piper? She can be positioned as a contemporary artist who makes political, issue based work that comments on a variety of themes within race and gender and the politics of representation. Underlying this reading is the idea that Piper is also making a statement about the way the US contemporary art sector operates. Piper's work breaks with the stereotypical notion of how and what a Black Artist should be producing by taking on board complex philosophical and psychological concepts about identity within an experimental multimedia artistic format. Piper is fighting two fronts: the changing nature of racism and sexism in American contemporary society and the changing position of the Black woman artist within the contemporary art movement.

A retrospective of Adrian Piper's work is currently showing at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham until 2 November, 1991