The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists - Review

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Sarah K. Rich

Yale University Art Gallery New Haven Connecticut October 13, 1998-January 3, 1999

Last October the Yale University Art Gallery, with support from the Yale Center for British Art, opened "The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists," exhibiting the work of Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce and Keith Piper. The modest yet powerful show, organized by Daphne Deeds, curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Yale Art Gallery, displayed the work of three British artists who have received limited exposure in the United States. The banner advertising the show, a British flag drained of its colors and turned into a modulated field of grays and blacks, referenced, if only implicitly, Paul Gilroy's 1991 book There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack. But while Gilroy's ironic title underscored the dynamic and mutually inflecting categories of race and nationality (and the tendency of both cultural studies and the "new right" to deny the priority of racial constructions in that relationship), the subtitle of the Yale show contradicted that project. The phrase "3 Black British Artists" linked the work of Biswas, Boyce and Piper as products of artists who share a racial and national identity, as "Black" in a British context refers to people of Anglo-African and Asian extraction. The fidelity to this racial coding was somewhat problematic and it might have been wiser to follow Gilroy's lead and link the work according to shared dynamic practices - artistic practices which, in this instance, were effectively joined in the project of destabilizing the very categories of race mobilized by the subtitle in its effort to contain them. Such dissonance established between the visual and linguistic promises made to the viewer at the threshold of the exhibition equivocated the curatorial mission of the show. Nevertheless, the works featured in "The Unmapped Body" were by no means diminished by such preliminary packaging.

Piper's contrapuntal CD-ROM installation Message Carrier (1998), projected onto a 10-foot wall, delivered an expansive cyber environment consisting of a central site with links to a number of tributary locations. The central site is occupied by a black male face composed of cut and pasted facial features, alluding to the pre-digital method of identifying a criminal's face through the use of a flipbook of different facial characteristics. The face floats around the image of a video camera lens trained upon the viewer, from the center of which extends a radar wand setting off a curt alarm every time it passes over the flipbook face. The subsidiary locations explore tropes of surveillance and scientific discourses such as craniology and ethnography that have historically policed the black male body.

Message Carrier was strongest when it forced the viewer to participate in the surveillance activities it critiqued. Watched by others in the room, the participating viewer could choose, for example, to help the floating face elude the radar wand by moving it out of the way with a mouse. (This was a frustrating process, as the wand was quicker than the mouse action). Another site, however, presents a black male face with the imperative command "Interrogate" written over it. As the viewer passes the mouse cursor over the face (to the driving rhythms of loud hip-hop music in the background), the face resists by moving his head back and forth to avoid the cursor's touch. Piper's piece thus not only investigated the capillary workings of power through surveillance, but leads participants to interrogate their own relationship to the ideological underpinnings of technology by virtue of their engagement with the CD-ROM mechanism itself. Dragging one's finger along the heat-sensitive mouse pad and making choices among the technological paradigms presented, one becomes aware of the ways in which one's identity (coded according to categories of race, gender and class) impacts the way in which he or she moves through the site. Cyberspace is anything but neutral here. For Piper, it is a highly politicized space saturated with histories of control and resistance, demonstrating the extent to which anyone's relation to cyberspace will be inflected by their historical relationship to those systems of control.

While the viewer was drawn into physical contact with Piper's piece through the manipulation of the mouse, many of Boyce's contributions to "The Unmapped Body" likewise emphasized the tactile. In her installation "Do You Want to Touch?" (1996-98) Boyce used both organic and synthetic hair extensions that were braided, woven and tucked into provocative bundles that the viewer, a term that becomes thoroughly insufficient here, was invited to handle. Such an immediate tactile relationship to the objects directly subverts the distance upon which exhibiting institutions, in their emphasis on the visual, have historically depended to ensure their authority. Boyce's work also challenged the stability of racial signifiers. British cultural critic Kobena Mercer cunningly analyzed the means by which hairstyles actually construct complex identities in his 1994 essay "Black Hair/Style Politics." He demonstrates that although hair seems an extension of the body and therefore a "natural" index of race, careful styling socializes human hair, turning it into a highly self-conscious negotiation of cultural codes.(1) In her mixture of the organic and synthetic, of blond, brown and black fiber, Boyce's permutated arrangements of hair offer a hands-on extension of Mercer's ideas.