Adrian Piper’s “Cornered” and “Everything”: Debunking Notions of the Post-Racial Moment
(for New Orleans, Meghan Williams, Sean Bell, et. al)
Maybe, just possibly, blackness is an avant gard/experimental performance; just as performances that push corporeal frontiers or urge ontological shifts in the manner in which human beings relate to sometimes hostile and other times lulling geographies. Blackness, as Adrain Piper, E. Patrick Johnson, and other noted scholars theorize, is just as slippery as the definitions of experimental/ avant gard performance. Depending on where one is positioned or positions oneself on this stage called the globe, the United States, New York City, or some other space, Blackness looks and performs quite differently than one might assume.
E. Patrick Johnson teases out the complexities of this issue in his book Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. In the introduction, Johnson writes, “Blackness, too, is slippery—ever beyond the reach of one’s grasp. Once you think you have a hold on it, it transforms into something else and travels in another direction. Its elusiveness does not preclude one from trying to fix it, to pin it down, however—for the pursuit of authenticity is inevitably an emotional and moral one.” (2) Johnson reveal here how blackness serves as a means to wiggle out of the crawl space or what Marcus Wallace refers to as the “scrawl” space of identity as it is constructed by genetic and social structures.
While I am sure Blackness oscillates, wiggles, rewinds and “sidewinds” as Richard Schechner speaks of as a characteristic of performance, Blackness still is. I cringe at the thought of not being able to index at the site of collective and “intimate history”, joys, traumas, cultural practices and kinship Blackness. I am concerned about writers, thinkers and artists who assert we are in moving into a post-racial moment. Who decides this? Who is empowered to make such decisions? And what cost, if I choose to accept this thrust, do I pay not move pass this skin and this experience in this skin and these memories and these relationships to jump on the post –racial moment.
In “Cornered” Adrian Piper bursts the collective bubble of white and Black America. She reveals that most of us are Black. Furthermore, she suggests that Blackness is a dilemma. At first I was unnerved by this presumed assumption but soon she revealed what I interpreted as the real problem. The issue is what are our strategies for dealing with our collective Blackness? This, at first, I believed was directed solely at the white people watching the video, but Blackness is a genetic and social fact Black folks have to deal with as well. Piper proposes that white people should not assume everyone is white or that everyone wants to be white. Furthermore, she hints to the Black folks who may be watching that we should be doing something about this Blackness issue as well. We should be insisting, resisting, proclaiming and performing our Blackness no matter the social costs. For Piper, passing is not an option. The film concludes with an invocation—Welcome to the struggle, the “beautiful struggle” for wholeness and Blackness and voice.
May 2, 2008. I am still a little groggy from pulling an all-nighter. An organization called Creative Time is on Campus for the “Everything” project. The project centers around Piper’s most recent artistic work that was recently installed at Elizabeth Gallery. Creative Time is on campus painting “everything will be taken away” on people’s foreheads with henna paint. Barabara Pollack’s article “Adrian Piper, “Everything” includes an important quote about Pipers work. She quotes, “Once you have taken everything away from a man, he is no longer in your power. He is free. “ She adds, “This quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the inspiration for Adrian Piper’s “Everything” series.” I planned to have my forehead painted, but nevertheless I slept instead.
I ventured to the gallery to see the exhibit. Having admired Piper’s work from afar it was a little disheveling seeing it so up-close and personal. Stark white walls and the ominous phrase disorient me. This is clearly about space, power, race in the Minimalist tradition she is known for. A hard to make out video of Meghan Williams are situated in one corner. The mirror watches, or reflects, me as I watch the video. I feel tugged and pulled as if Piper is standing here asking interrogating me in the calm and subdued voice she utilized in “Cornered”. She asks, “What are you going to do for Meghan?” My kinship with her, Piper and Williams, makes me even more ill-at-ease. I cannot make out her voice. I cannot make out my own.
I am not in a dark room with several chairs. I see a grid and dots, dancing a freaky choreography. The dots are connected by lines. I feel alone. Perhaps, the dots represent my relation to those around me. Again the Minimalist aesthetic employed by Piper, makes me feel the room is naked and that I am taking up a lot of space. These open spaces make me feel as if she intentionally left the room bare so that I can think, not so much about the art, but my relationship to it.
Piper’s work is about global positioning. It is about finger pointing. Although in “Cornered”, Piper says she does not mean to antagonize her audience I believe she does , and rightfully so. Everything has been taken away, and now even Blackness is being stolen by progressives, liberals, artists, scholars who choose not to deal with the messiness and presence of it.
Suggested Media and Readings
Sweet Honey in the Rock “We Who Believe in Freedom”
Johnson, E. Patrick, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
www.elizabethdeegallery.com
www.adrainpiper.com
http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/performance/piper.html
http://www.timeout.com/newyork/articles/art/27943/adrian-piper-everything
see "Cornered" posted to the blog
ebony noelle golden, mfa
furiousflower@gmail.com
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