Residency III Paper II


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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