Maria Jones
Academic
Advisor: Fia Backstrom
1
October 2013
The Female Gender,
Adrian Piper, and The Dominant Culture’s Reaction
We
started out with beliefs about the world and our place in it that we didn’t ask
for and didn’t
question. Only later, when those beliefs were attacked by new experiences that didn’t
conform to them, did we begin to doubt… (Adrian Piper)
The
military, a masculine subculture of a masculine society, forces androgyny,
which leads to identity confusion and aggression. I began a project at the
beginning of this semester that focused on women and the military, attempting
to understand this confusion within myself. Upon further investigation of
fellow service women and through my own experiences, I have found society may
accept women in the military, but society does not acknowledge or remember
their service post facto.[1]
The project has led to a study of marginalization in society based on gender,
and research into artists like Adrian Piper who deal with identity politics.
Adrian
Piper is a conceptual artist and philosopher. She was raised in middle class
Harlem by educated, politically active parents, graduated from the School of
Visual Arts in 1969, and received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard
University in 1981. Piper’s work evolved from Minimalism[2]
to dealing with issues of race and identity politics in 1960s to present
(Piper). She was an important figure in the development of Conceptual art in
the 1960s and one of the few African Americans involved in the movement. Her
visual work explores the intertwining of racism and sexism.
Piper
is a black woman often mistaken for white due to her lighter skin tone, and in
the 1960s she began working from her personal experiences to create art that
discussed American society identity and gender issues as an outsider in a
predominantly white male culture. Her work is multi-disciplinary and includes
photography, performance, video and sound, and drawing. She often combines her
visual performances with text and photographic documentation. Piper’s
performance and visual art project, The
Mythic Being,[3] created
in 1973, explored society as a black male with aggressive tendencies in a white
masculine society (Reckitt 29). The character referenced as M.B was her alter
ego, a nameless aggressive black male with an Afro, sunglasses, and a mustache
whose actions and physical features were based on white stereotypes of African
American males (Hopkins). Piper developed a consciousness for the character
based on journal entries containing vivid emotional memories from her piece Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece
(1970) [4]
and journals from her childhood. She would turn these journals and
diaries into mantras and recite them repeatedly to get into character. She then
explored how she and others responded to M.B (Butler 283).
As
an artist, Piper used the Mythic Being
to explore through performance her own voice and identity as a black male,
empowering herself as an artist and an individual through manipulation of her
own history and body. Utilizing her body as the art object she affected her
surrounding environment, and also how the viewer perceived her work through her
action or inaction. Her use of possessive nouns in her M.B advertisements in the Village
Voice Magazine like “I” and “my” allowed viewers to place themselves in the
artist’s position and interpret the meaning for themselves.
Her
1975 piece The Mythic Being: I Embody (see fig. 1) is a black and white photograph
of herself dressed as M.B, her alter ego. She holds a cigar in her left hand,
wears an Afro wig, and sunglasses. She drew over the photo with oil crayon to
create shadow on the face, reflections in the glasses, built up the curls
around his face, and created a thought balloon that states, “I embody
everything you most hate and fear.” The oil crayon effectively turned the
grayscale image into an image of blacks and whites, hinting that the issue she
addresses via text is a literal color translation of black and white issue, a
racial black and white issue, and a political black and white issue effectively
addressing marginalization in a subtle manner.
Fig.
1 Mythic Being:I Embody, 1975. Adrian
Piper Research Archive, Berlin.
Piper believed at the time that aggressive
confrontation in her work was the catalyst for change in the viewer (Smith).
During the 1970s, black males were depicted through social media as angry,
aggressive criminals, and Piper wanted to explore this racial issue since it
differed from her experiences as a black female. The dominant white culture of the 1960s transformed the
righteous victims of the civil rights movements into a stereotype that could be
easily manipulated into a lower class in society’s hierarchy, and feared by
white men and women (Smith). Piper’s interpretation of a black male was a
direct reflection of the dominant culture of her time; and she utilized the
stereotypes created in the media to address the inappropriate reactions of
white culture. My work takes from these influences and utilizes elements of
military culture, which is the dominant subculture in the work I create, to
discuss injustices experienced by honorable women that serve. The statement
M.B. makes, “I embody everything you most hate and fear” addresses the viewer’s
feelings in a direct, personal, and racially identifying manner. Her strong
white blocky letter “A” to the right of her M.B suggests, as the artist, she is
in control and has the power through this identity, which is always the
underlying theme in racial, gender, and identity conflict.
Piper
further explored identity through her series 1974 Mythic Being: I/You (Her) (see fig. 2). The piece is made up of a
series of ten overdrawn photographs of the same image. It is a portrait of
Piper in the lower left corner with another woman’s face next to hers. There is
a speech balloon coming from Piper’s face in each image discussing how she had
been friends with this woman, been betrayed by her, and so could no longer be
loyal or trusting with her. As the images progress Piper draws over her own
face with a curly Afro, facial hair, sunglasses, a cigar, and eventually,
darkening the face to create her alter ego M.B (Smith 50).
Fig.
2 Mythic Being:I/You (Her) 1975. Adrian
Piper Research Archive, Berlin.
Where Mythic
Being: I Embody explored the identity and social conflicts of being a black
male in a white culture, Mythic Being:
I/You (Her) explores these issues as a woman in a male dominant culture. As
in all of her performances and drawings of her Mythic Being, Piper takes the authoritative defensive stance
addressing the viewer and creating a social reaction based on the viewer’s
perceived stereotypes and identity conflicts: in this scenario a pale black
female that could “pass”[5]
for white. As her female self, Piper patiently describes the transgression in a
sophisticated tone, denoting a feminine role she developed through cultural and
childhood experiences. Her face dominates the corner of the photograph, while
her white aggressor peeks from behind. Like Piper, my work examines the
transgressions women experience. I work in mostly white to represent
sterilization and institutionalization with a limited color palette of vibrant
blue, yellow, and red to contradict the white sterility. My work is restrictive
in size and utilizes symbols of restraint like steel and boxes to contain the
objects within. As Piper’s photograph is transformed into M.B her aggressor all
but disappears, and her tone and aggressive stance become a direct retaliation
on the viewer as a stereotypical black male. The dissolving transformation from
a delicate passive aggressive female asserting her power over a white female to
a white cultural reflection of a stereotypical violent black male is abundantly
clear, and allows her to discuss multiple racial and gender struggles in
American society all at once.
Like
Piper’s Mythic Being Project my flag box project is a deeper
exploration of my own identity as it has been changed by my military service,
how I respond to the objects, how other women, military or not, will respond to
the objects, and how the dominant culture will respond to the objects. My work
is influenced by the discussions of class and gender struggles Adrian Piper
addressed in her work the Mythic Being.
Although my work does not discuss race, my current flag box series addresses
the gender struggles and identity conflicts caused by being an outsider, a
female, in the dominant male culture of the military through sculpture, text,
and craft. Through the use of feminine crafts like crochet granny squares,
embroidered stars, woven rectangles, ceramic beads, and quilted five point
stars I create flags that represent the women that serve and their intact
gender identification. At the same
time, the segments of rebar representing honor, courage, and commitment, the
core values of the United States Navy, separate the viewer and restrain the
feminine objects within their sterile white triangles. The flag boxes, once an
honorific symbol, become a prison. Like Piper’s Mythic Being:I/You (Her) I am seeking a reaction from the viewer by
taking an aggressive stance about a situation that is not discussed often in
society. The feminine craftwork of the inner objects become encased and
entombed by the values upheld by participating in, and accepting, the changes
required by military culture. Adrian Piper creates strong discourse with her
abrupt statements about race and gender. Influenced by her strong discourse I
read into her quieter nuances to inform my work. My work is very much about
identity, loss of identity, overpowering of others through dominant culture. It
is also about the subtleties that require the viewer to look a little harder
and wonder what is under the surface.
Works Cited
Butler,
Cornelia, and Lisa Gabrielle Mark, eds. WACK!
Art and The Feminist Revolution. Los Angeles:
The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007. Print.
Hopkins,
David. After Modern Art 1945-2000.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 149-151. Print.
Piper,
Adrian. Adrian Piper Research Archive
Foundation Berlin. Research Archive Foundation Berlin.
Web. Aug. 2013.
Reckitt,
Helena, ed. Art and Feminism. New
York City: Phaidon Press, 2012. 204. Print.
Smith,
Cherise. Enacting Other: Politics of
Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and
Anna Deavere Smith. London: Duke University Press, 2011. Print.
[1] Service
women and their families who share their stories with me have strong emotional
reactions and have asked to participate without inclusion or recognition.
[2] According
to Adrian Piper Research Foundation, Berlin Piper was strongly influenced by her mentor relationship in
the 1960s with Sol Lewitt.
[3] According to Adrian Piper a mythic being is a fictitious or
abstract personality that is generally part of a story or folktale used to
explain or sanctify social or legal institutions or natural phenomena (Smith).
[4] Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece is a fifty-seven-page
document in which Piper recorded her daily physical actions for the month of
June. See WACK! Art and The Feminist Revolution for further explanation of this
piece.
[5] Passing
is a term used to describe people of African American descent possessing
lighter skin tones acting and claiming dominant white culture attributes to
benefit from the social privledges afforded to the dominant white culture
(Smith).
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