An Artist Who Restlessly Roams Social Landscape

Nobody would ever mistake Adrian Piper for a formalist artist. Her videotapes, performances, photographs with text and the rest are not concerned with refining the distinctive visual and physical properties of the different mediums she uses. The Boston-based Piper has not spent 30 years laboring to--as the formalist critic Clement Greenberg would have put it--entrench a medium in its area of competence.

Piper is instead one among scores of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, went about breaking the fierce grip that Greenberg’s brand of formalist thinking had on much American art. In light of this, it’s difficult to know quite what to make of a small survey of Piper’s work since 1973, newly opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art. For it singles out a specific medium as its main organizing principle.

Guest curator Dara Meyers-Kingsley has brought together Piper’s electronic work, which uses tape-recorded video or audio. There are six installations, seven single-channel videos and 15 audiotapes; total running time for the tapes exceeds six hours.

The selection includes some of the most compelling art Piper has made, including an installation centered on a videotaped recitation that has only been exhibited once before. “What It’s Like, What It Is #3” was a standout in “Dislocations,” the Museum of Modern Art’s 1991 exhibition in New York of commissioned sculptures and installation works.

Piper has built a square amphitheater with bleacher seating. In the center rises a square monolith, topped with four video monitors. The monitors are on the same level as a band of mirrors that rings the room, which becomes an infinity chamber reflecting the video image into deep illusionistic space.

Floors, walls, ceiling, bleachers, monolith--every square inch of Piper’s amphitheater has been painted white. Overhead, 54 ceiling floodlights transform the space into a reflective realm of blazing, blinding whiteness. It almost hurts your eyes. The room is part interrogation chamber, part surgical amphitheater.

Soon, it’s clear what’s being questioned and dissected. On the video monitors, an African American man, shown from the neck up, recites to the audience seated in the stands a straightforward litany of self-descriptions. While a soundtrack plays a danceable ‘70s disco hit by the Commodores, the talking head declares: “I am not lazy. I am not sneaky. I am not horny. I am not shiftless. I am not crazy. . . .”

Into an environment of oppressive whiteness Piper has inserted two resolute images of male blackness. One is a successful, pleasurable picture from mass entertainment, represented by the Commodores. The other is wholly anonymous, in which an ordinary individual is trapped in the hall-of-mirrors that is modern media culture; there, all he can do is repeatedly deny the stereotypes relentlessly used to identify him.

Part of Piper’s success as an artist comes from the refusal of her work to try to pin down the elusive issue of identity. Questions of race and racial politics have been pervasive throughout her career, but that’s exactly the point: Identity, her work proposes, is a question, not an answer; a range of choices, not a fixed essence; a socially inflected organism, not autonomous. “What it’s like” and “what it is” rub against one another, creating friction, heat and sometimes sparks.

As the form of an amphitheater and the use of television and popular music all suggest, Piper’s art is theatrical. In work like “Funk Lessons” (1983), a taped performance in which she teaches the rudiments of street style to an assembled crowd, or “My Calling Card” (1987-88), in which she holds two racial consciousness-raising Q&As;, one with a black audience, one with a white audience, her work is made with an acute consideration of audience in mind. That audience is never monolithic.

This theatrical emphasis is already evident in the show’s earliest installation, which is also one of its best. “Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma” (1978) offers an illuminating collision between art culture and street culture.

On the rear wall of a small room that pointedly recalls the “white cube” of the traditional type of gallery where contemporary art is shown, Piper has installed a single, framed, black-and-white photograph. The picture shows a crowd of several dozen black men and women descending a staircase in an urban setting, while their style of dress suggests the photograph may date from the 1960s. Its slightly grainy appearance implies it came from a newspaper or magazine.

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An unidentified photographer shot the image from the bottom of the stairs. The solemn-faced crowd thus seems to be advancing straight toward any viewer standing inside the white cube. Emphasizing a direct mode of address, a man at the front of the crowd has raised his hand at you, and he’s giving an affirmative, thumbs-up gesture. Yet from audio speakers mounted on the wall comes a woman’s soothing voice, which repeats over and over: “It doesn’t matter who these people are. They’re parts of a piece of art, which is part of an art exhibition in an art gallery.”

What’s disconcerting about Piper’s carefully orchestrated “piece of art” is the degree to which everything in it focuses on you, not it. The heightened self-consciousness even extends to the way the disembodied voice has anticipated your inevitable first question on seeing the photograph--who are these people?--and has offered the dismissive answer that it doesn’t matter.

If you’re like me--and, I suspect, like many people--you don’t like being told what to think. “It doesn’t matter who these people are” is met with an almost involuntary response: “Why not?” From there, it’s a very short distance to an awareness that you too are very much a part of this piece of art, in this show, in this gallery. If the people in the photograph don’t matter, apparently you don’t matter either.

Piper can be very good at this kind of theatrical give and take, which gets beneath your skin. Sometimes she stumbles, as in an achingly corny installation about what it meant to her to turn 40; it collapses into a heap of cliched props, such as a discarded suit of armor and specimen bottles containing blood, sweat and tears (oy). Elsewhere the lively aesthetics of theater sometimes get swamped by the sonorous snore of education (Piper, not surprisingly, is also a college professor).

But art’s identity can often be characterized by what it rejects--not unlike the man in Piper’s blindingly white amphitheater, who recites a litany of what he is not. Theatricality had been a reject of the self-contained formalism so dominant when she began her work. Whether that explains why this survey excludes everything but Piper’s work in the inherently theatrical form of electronic media I cannot say.

That’s because the show has no catalog to examine the issue or argue its curatorial case. It does come with a graphically clever if tongue-twisting title: “MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper’s Videos, Installations, Performances and Soundworks, 1968-1992.” (Even here there’s a puzzle, as nothing in the show was made after 1991.) Given the popularity of electronic media in today’s art world, perhaps the show’s oddly exclusive focus just represents the museum’s desire to be fashionable.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Nov. 5. Closed Monday.