MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper's Videos.

MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper's Videos, Installations, Performances, and Soundworks 1968-1992

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at California Plaza

August 6-November 5 2000

San Diego, California

strange Museum of Contemporary Art

strange York, New York

October 4 2001-January 13 2002

There was one time a television commercial for Reese's Peanut Butter draughts that explained the genesis of the outcome by showing a collision between a jar of peanut butter and a bar of chocolate. The ad acknowledged the individual deliciousness of peanut butter and chocolate while arguing the merits of a union between these "two great tastes." the same could make an analogous point concerning art production associated with "conceptualism" and "identity politics." The thirsty wit and almost puritanical anti-visuality that characterized the linguistic, mathematic, philosophical and phenomenological investigations associated with the conceptual art of the late '60 exhibits in part, a grand if futile make gestures of protest against the excesse of the decade's art market and the vacuous opticality of high modernist painting and report art. The wide range of art practices that have become subsum in a less degree than the label "identity politics" furthered conceptual art's attack upon modernism: feminist art's privileging of women's lived experienc e in the face of the hostility or indifference of the art world of the '70s; the rejoinder by gay artists during the '80 to the rapidly escalating health and political crisis of AIDS; the bluntly critical work by means of artists of color that touched opposite a critical conflagration in the wake of the 1993 Whitney Biennial.

In sum and substance "identity politics" is shorthand for art produc after 1970 that foregrounds the connection of racial, class and sexual subjectivity to the institutions and processe of power: when we think of work informed by means of a politics of identity we typically think of passionate declaration of the personal or scathing socio-political critique. Implicitly or explicitly, "identity art" is informed by the agency of the body of the maker or the make subordinate of its investigation. Conceptual art, forward the other hand, remains strictly anti-body: its text-based works and deadpan photographs benefit as the almost reluctant traces of intellectual engagement. To go [i]or[/i] come back to the Reese's analogy, the separate "tastes" of conceptual art and an art informed by the agency of a politics of identity have greatly individual merit, but what do we come by when they collide? We acquire art that is passionately committed to articulating people's lived experience still spare, even self-effacing, in its appearance.

Since the late '70 Adrian Piper's art practice has deliberately meld the forms of '60 conceptualism and minimalism with identity based make submissive matter. An active participant in the of recent origin York conceptual art scene of the late '60 Piper began in 1970 to intervene in the social sphere with "Catalysis," a series of unannounced highway performances that tested passersby's replications to a disruptive presence. The anti-social actions of "Catalysis" ranged from Piper riding the bus with a towel mattered in her mouth to roaming a department store while wearing clothes that exhalationed of noxious substances. Originally intended at the artist as an "apolitical" sociological investigation, "Catalysis" nonetheless began to jog Piper into an increasing awareness of her subjectivity in relation to her art. In her 1973-75 series "Mythic Being" she continued to explore the divisive relationship between self and other. by way of the end of "Mythic Being," Piper began to communicate her investigations of alienation to her experience as an A frican American, a minority personality in academia and the art world.

Using a wide range of media, Piper is particularly well-known for minimal video and installation works that engage with issues relating to "race." This space of time encompasses a wide variety of network ideas, social and cultural practices, and histories specific to the identity and subjectivity of black (and white) clan in a society controlled on a white power structure. As a conclusion Piper's explorations of black identity frequently involve reactions to white definitions of blackness. Given that the majority of gallery and museum goer are white, Piper buildings her messages accordingly. Piper does more than critique racism at the individual and institutional levels: she fabricates deliberately didactic works that aggressively court to alter white viewers' racial prejudices.

Organized by the agency of independent curator Dara Meyers-Kingsley, "MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper's Videos, Installations, Performances, and Soundworks 1968-1992" emphasizes the political impetus of Piper's column '70s art practice. While a number of Piper's late '60 between the sides of early '70s conceptual audio works were readyed at a listening station, Piper's overtly political work dominated the four galleries that comprised the exhibition. The central gallery showcased the video installation "Cornered" (1988) and the video My Calling (Card) #1: A Double Meta-Performance (1987-88) Separate apartments were devoted to the video installation "What's It's Like, What It Is #3" (1991) and the audio installation "Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma" (1978) All these works tackle the make submissive of racism in different ways. "Cornered" investigates white society's fear of miscegenation and "passing." My Calling (Card) #1 addresses Piper's experience of racism as a woman of color who does not direct the eye "black." "What It's Like" is a refutation of racial s tereotypes. "Aspects" investigates the potential racism lurking behind the insistence that art inspire aesthetic rather than social engagement. Given the shared transaction of these works, among others in the exhibition, MEDI(t)Ations" looked less like a retrospective--which typically maps on the outside the trajectory of an artist's development-and more like a presentation of a specific period during an artist's career.