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"I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear" is from
Adrian Piper's 1974-1975 series, "The Mythic Being."
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Adrian Piper is a fair-skinned black woman. She is so light complected and keen-featured that her face must be studied to determine her racial origin. She can and has passed for white.
Her life-long explorations of race and the responses they've elicited are classically American: Why are we preoccupied with race and who spends their lives publicly and explicitly trying to figure it out?
In "Self-Portrait As A Nice White Lady" (1995), Piper, shoulders back and head slightly tilted, appears to be listening to a question when she's asking one: "WHUT CHOO LOOKIN AT, MOFO," rises in a crudely drawn thought balloon beside her head. The juxtaposition of Piper's demure, Lena Horne-esque face and the slang question conspire to tension.
That is precisely the point: We are supposed to be drawn in and thrown back.
However, Joyce Moore, visual artist, founder and director of the two-year-old, Columbia, Md.-based African American Artists Foundation, Inc. (AAAFI), says the tension created by Piper's art is half of cause and effect, and a call for balance. No art is an island, she maintains.
Moore is openly critical of Piper's artistic ability, the potential for sociopolitical fallout and dangling aesthetics before viewers of Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, 1965-2000 currently displayed until August 26 at downtown Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts (CAC).
Further, Moore feels Piper's art paints an incomplete, if not stilted, portrait of African Americans and their experiences.
"It's an educational opportunity," Moore says. "Any opportunity, no matter how it looks to the outsider, if it's an educational opportunity it needs to be taken, because you won't always have that opportunity. It's an opportunity to serve the community and that's what I came here for."
But where there is a complaint, there should be a solution. When does the art-viewing public, dismayed or perplexed by confrontational art, experience a "solution?" If art administrators feel any responsibility to their public, there will be an attempt at balance.
The CAC sought such balance by inviting Moore to institute programming to counter -- or augment -- Piper's exhibit.
During a previous visit to Cincinnati and after meeting CAC administrators, Moore was invited to devise a program as a counterbalance to Piper's exhibition, acquired long before April's racial disturbances following the shooting death of Timothy Thomas.
"They explained to me what their concerns were about the contents of the show and the problems this city had experienced," Moore says. She programmed LINES: A Cultural Collage of the Arts, to run Thursday through Sunday at the CAC.
There will be a Classical Jazz concert with performances by Ora Reed, Derrick Alton and Pharez. The Literary Connective is a literary discussion and poetry slam featuring Kofi of the poetry collective 144,000. LINES will conclude with Youthspeak, a forum-based discussion with area youths on current events specific to youth culture.
Artistic responsibility beyond the gallery is not new to Moore. She is trained in conflict resolution. She worked for 19 years at AT&T, where she procured African-American art for the corporation to educate its leaders on its value. It was a natural progression for her to start an education-based arts collective.
The AAAFI comprises artists who join the foundation by a juried process and then pay a flat membership fee. The nonprofit group's main purpose is to educate and expose the public to the vitality of African-American artists making fine art. The AAAFI also assists those artists in choosing venues to show their works. They gain entrée to galleries and other venues heretofore closed to them. It's strength in numbers.
Moore utilizes the foundation's growing presence to round out exhibits that would otherwise open and disappear without so much as an explanation or a question. CAC Senior Curator Thom Collins calls Moore's solution "a good idea." Collins says Piper's work emanated from her desire to explore minimalism. It is intentionally confrontational.
In Piper's 1974-1975 series, The Mythic Being, the artist portrays a slightly built, bushy-haired and mustachioed individual who publicly affects the persona of a man -- black or white? -- appearing at times menacing or gracious and effeminate at others.
In "Untitled Performance at Max's Kansas City, NYC" (1970) Piper appears, wandering around the nightclub covered head-to-toe with her eyes, ears, nose and mouth plugged.
At the bedrock of her often-unrefined presentations she drags the viewer into the piece. It's our reactions that tell our interpretations of ourselves and our relevance to society.
Piper's cerebral approach to art may be a result of her graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University. Or her art could be the sum total of an exhaustive internal survey of racism and her repeated exposure to it from every imaginable angle, because of her extremely light skin. She was in the vanguard of the emergence of conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s and 1990s, Piper propelled the development of identity-based art.
Taken as a body of work, Piper's art attempts to cement the ideal that art -- especially avant-garde and experimental art -- has the visual and visceral oomph to transform society.
Collins says Piper's manipulation of gender, class and race "challenge our ability to recognize someone as different and to draw upon our internalized feelings of what those differences mean.
"The issues that she tackles in this exhibition she actually foreshadows and comes back to later," Collins adds, referring to Piper's early works, "Multichrome Mom and Dad" (1966) and three 1965 pieces, including "LSD Bloodstream."
"I'm not so sure she's as much a visual artist as a statement artist, and I think she'd agree with me," Moore says. "When I originally saw her work, I didn't understand her work. I hadn't had a lot of time to engulf myself in her work." Moore concedes that the definition of art is a matter of perspective.
"I think anyone who comes to see art is coming to see what another person thought at the end of the day," Moore says. "I think you have a right to formulate an opinion of whether you do or don't like it and to articulate that. Every piece of art selected to go in our gallery, I don't like it. That doesn't make it bad art: It's just that I don't like it.
"Art is not just about art," Moore says. "Art is in some ways -- especially in the United States -- about something else sometimes. Look at the Brooklyn Museum. Why would a museum of that caliber select art for the sake of controversy when it's not even good controversial art?"
Piper leaves more questions unanswered than she answers. Among them are the politics of art, the responsibility of interpretation and even the unspoken weightiness of jealousy and privilege inherent in the gradations of skin color in the African-American community.
Moore reiterates balance and education should accompany art. Hence, Piper's work could be viewed as a backdrop for LINES. "Putting art together, sometimes opposites attract," Moore says. "Art is the cutting edge of what life is."
ADRIAN PIPER: A RETROSPECTIVE, 1965-2000 continues at the Contemporary Arts Center, downtown, until Aug. 26. The program series, LINES: A CULTURAL COLLAGE OF THE ARTS, will be presented Thursday-Sunday, also at the CAC.
