I’Ve Got Conceptual Art in my Identity Politics

Abstract

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 New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, New York October 4, 2001-January 13, 2002 There was once a television commercial for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups that explained the genesis of the product 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. One could make an analogous point concerning production associated with and politics. The dry wit and almost puritanical anti-visuality that characterized the linguistic, mathematic, philosophical and phenomenological investigations associated with the conceptual of the late '60s represents, in part, a grand if futile gesture of protest against the excesses of the decade's market and the vacuous opticality of high modernist painting and pop art. The wide range of practices that have become subsumed under the label furthered conceptual art's attack on modernism: feminist art's privileging of women's lived experienc e in the face of the hostility or indifference of the world of the '70s; the response by gay artists during the '80s to the rapidly escalating health and political crisis of AIDS; the bluntly critical work by artists of color that touched off a critical conflagration in the wake of the 1993 Whitney Biennial. In sum, is shorthand for produced after 1970 that foregrounds the connection of racial, class and sexual subjectivity to the institutions and processes of power: when we think of work informed by a politics of identity we typically think of passionate declaration of the personal or scathing socio-political critique. Implicitly or explicitly, art is informed by the body of the maker or the subject of its investigation. Conceptual art, on the other hand, remains strictly anti-body: its text-based works and deadpan photographs serve as the almost reluctant traces of intellectual engagement. To return to the Reese's analogy, the separate tastes of conceptual and an informed by a politics of identity have much individual merit, but what do we get when they collide? We get that is passionately committed to articulating people's lived experience yet spare, even self-effacing, in its appearance. Since the late '70s, Adrian Piper's practice has deliberately melded the forms of '60s conceptualism and minimalism with identity based subject matter. An active participant in the New York conceptual scene of the late '60s, Piper began in 1970 to intervene in the social sphere with Catalysis, a series of unannounced street performances that tested passersby's responses to a disruptive presence. The anti-social actions of Catalysis ranged from Piper riding the bus with a towel stuffed in her mouth to roaming a department store while wearing clothes that reeked of noxious substances. Originally intended by the artist as an apolitical sociological investigation, Catalysis nonetheless began to nudge 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 the end of Mythic Being, Piper began to connect her investigations of alienation to her experience as an A frican American, a minority presence in academia and the 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 term encompasses a wide variety of complex ideas, social and cultural practices, and histories specific to the identity and subjectivity of black (and white) people in a society controlled by a white power structure. …