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Blacks, whites and other mythic beings: Adrian Piper has long pursued twin careers in art and philosophy. In response to a traveling retrospective, the author ponders the artistic consequences—and seeming contradictions—of Piper's analytical observations about race - Critical Essay
Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Eleanor Heartney
Does race exist? Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others, believes not. Labeling race a biological myth, the Harvard scholar has added that from a social and political perspective, race is best understood as a metaphor for something else and not an essence or a thing in itself. (1)
Adrian Piper's career has been, in one sense, an exploration of this theory. As a light-skinned black woman who, she points out in works like Cornered (1988) and My Calling (Cards), 1986-90, could easily pass for white, Piper questions the validity of racial categorization and examines the prevalence of racial stereotyping. If race cannot be defined by science or be determined by a person's visual appearance, she asks, why does it continue to retain such a powerful hold on the human psyche? And what, if anything, can be done to expose its artificiality in a way that will destroy its power?
Many artists have explored the subject of race in recent years, but Piper has been conducting her inquiry from a rather uncommon position. For the last quarter century she has pursued parallel careers as a visual artist with an extensive international exhibition history and as a professor of philosophy, currently on the faculty of Wellesley College. If autobiography provided the starting point for her exploration of race and racism, philosophy has shaped the form of her inquiries. But in the process, the application of abstract philosophical principles to this seemingly intractable social problem produces certain contradictions which suggest that even Piper is not immune to the insidious fictions of race.
The foregoing reflections are occasioned by "Adrian Piper: A Retrospective," a traveling show curated by Maurice Berger for the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of Maryland. The show, which this critic saw last winter at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, is currently on view at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, N.C. Writers on Piper's work, including several of the essayists in the catalogue, tend to insist on the mainstream art world's neglect of Piper. It is worth noting, however, that a second traveling exhibition of Piper's work in time-based mediums has also been making the rounds nationally, and that the University of Maryland show is in fact Piper's second retrospective in a little more than a decade. The earlier show, "Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-87" [see A.i.A., Sept. '90], was organized for the Alternative Museum by Jane Farver and covered much of the same ground as the current retrospective, which is curiously short of recent work. (In a lawsuit filed last year against Wellesley College, Piper alleged that the college, where she has taught since 1990, failed to adequately support her creative activities, hence her low productivity in recent years. More information about this lawsuit may be found on Piper's Web site: www.adrianpiper.com.)
Piper reports that her main philosophic influence is Immanuel Kant, particularly his Critique of Pure Reason. This in itself is a departure from most conceptually based art which tends, if it makes reference to Kant at all, to allude to the theory of esthetics developed in his Critique of Judgment instead of his earlier, rather daunting examination of the conditions necessary for the possibility of knowledge. In fact, Kant's first Critique provides Piper with a provocative starting point for an exploration of the meaning of race in American society.
What interests Piper is Kant's notion that the human mind requires preconceived categories in order to make sense of the flux of external experience. In the first Critique, Kant suggests that human knowledge depends on forms of intuition (space and time) and categories of understanding (among them cause and effect, existence and nonexistence, necessity and contingency) which may or may not be valid in the "ideal" realm outside human consciousness, but without which we cannot grasp the world around us. Thus, he argues, these intuitions and categories are structures of the mind, rather than of the world, and through them we impose the coherence upon which our sense of self and world depends.
Piper takes Kant's idea of the preconceived category and applies it to race. Echoing Gates, she suggests that race is a structure of the mind rather than something with an independent existence. As such, it allows us to impose coherence on our otherwise bewildering experience of human difference. But because this mental structure is necessarily inadequate to the complexity of the experiences it attempts to make sense of, race is, in Piper's words, a product of pseudo-rationality. It appears to obey the rules of logic and reason, but in fact does not. This results in the pathology of racism, which Piper defines as "an anxiety response to the perceived difference of a visually unfamiliar `other.'" (2)
There is an important distinction between how Kant and Piper apply the idea of the preconceived category. For Kant, categories of understanding and forms of intuition are universal and involuntary: we simply can't think without them. But for Piper, the category is mutable. In fact, the major thrust of her art is to shake us out of a dependence on simplistic and stereotypical assumptions about the other so that we can, in her words, "simply stand silently, perceiving and experiencing at the deepest level the singularity of the object or person." (3) While such a notion of pure, unmediated contact meshes well with her more recent explorations of Hinduism and yoga (detailed in a revealing "personal chronology" in the exhibition catalogue), it is absolutely contrary to Kant, whose whole point is that such unmediated understanding is impossible.
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