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

Throughout her career, Piper has tended to favor the confrontational over the conciliatory, as other works in the exhibition demonstrate. In the '70s and into the '80s, she produced several bodies of work in which she questioned the categories of race and gender by making herself into a discomfiting "other." In 1970 and '71, she undertook a number of public actions in which she transformed herself in odd or repellent ways: walking around New York City wearing a "wet paint" sign; talking to herself in the subway with a plastic bag in her mouth; strolling into the legendary art hangout Max's Kansas City wearing ear and nose plugs, a blindfold and a pair of gloves.

Designed to break down her viewer's conventional responses to an unknown other, these actions eventually evolved into a series of public performances and photographs depicting a fictional character called "The Mythic Being." In order to create these works, Piper transformed herself into a lower-class black male, a figure she knew many whites perceived as an especially dangerous threat. Wearing men's clothes, an Afro wig, fake mustache and sunglasses, Piper went out onto the streets of Cambridge, Mass., where she was then living, and staged stereotypically antisocial actions--a mugging of a white friend, cruising white women--which she assumed white passersby would associate with her persona. The Mythic Being also turns up in a number of photo narratives in which "he" appears with speech bubbles drawn overhead. In one, what begins as a philosophical reflection on the apparent autonomy of consciousness becomes license to shove others out of the way. In another, The Mythic Being sits at a typewriter tapping out a Kantian text (written over parts of the image in comic-strip fashion) about the self's need for a coherent reality.

If "The Mythic Being" series exposed the absurdity of society's stereotypes of the young black male (with her slight physique, Piper looked anything but threatening), it also allowed the artist to explore the mutability of her own identity, by changing her gender and her degree of visible blackness. A related work (featured on the cover of the retrospective catalogue) is a drawing with the self-explanatory title Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981). Here again, Piper questions the visual as a criterion for categorizing others.

In a series of collage-drawings titled "Vanilla Nightmares" (1986-87), Piper challenged the notion of categories by forcing two incompatible stereotypes together. Here she reinvoked the fearsome persona of the black male by drawing black men on pages of the New York Times so that they seem to be accosting the white models in fashion spreads or invading a credit card ad. In the latter work, Piper makes the slogan "membership has its privileges" sound like a barbed comment on racial identity.

Decide Who You Are (1992) consists of a set of text and image works that operate in a similar fashion. Pictures of black life--a smiling middle-class black family, for instance--are flanked by text-image panels that critique the central image. One panel always contains a drawing of the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys, stand-ins for a willfully oblivions white public. The texts, meanwhile, present what so many whites choose to ignore, chronicles of the indignities and horrors visited on American blacks.