Blacks, whites and other mythic beings: Adrian Piper has long pursued twin careers in art and philosophy. In response to a traveling retrospective, the author ponders the artistic consequences—and seeming contradictions—of Piper's analytical observations about race - Critical Essay

Does race exist? Henry Louis Gates, Jr among others, believes not. Labeling race a biological myth, the Harvard scholar has added that from a social and political perspective, race is best understood as a metaphor for something other and not an essence or a thing in itself. (1)

Adrian Piper's career has been, in single sense, an exploration of this theory. As a light-skinned black woman who, she points without in works like Cornered (1988) and My Calling (Cards), 1986-90 could easily pass for white, Piper questions the validity of racial categorization and examines the prevalence of racial stereotyping. If race cannot be defined through science or be determined by means of a person's visual appearance, she asks, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason does it continue to retain like a powerful hold on the human psyche? And what, if anything, can be done to uncover its artificiality in a way that will sap the foundations of its power?

Many artists have explored the subdue of race in recent years, on the other hand Piper has been conducting her inquiry from a rather rare position. For the last quarter hundred she has pursued parallel careers as a visual artist with an extensive international exhibition history and as a professor of philosophy, generally on the faculty of Wellesley corporation If autobiography provided the starting point for her exploration of race and racism, philosophy has shaped the form of her inquiries. on the other hand in the process, the application of abstract philosophical principles to this seemingly intractable social riddle produces certain contradictions which indicate that even Piper is not immune to the insidious fictions of race.

The foregoing reflections are occasioned by the agency of "Adrian Piper: A Retrospective," a traveling display curated by Maurice Berger for the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of Maryland. The display which this critic saw last winter at the fresh Museum of Contemporary Art in novel York, is currently on view at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in Greensboro, NC Writers upon Piper's work, including several of the essayists in the catalogue, watch to insist on the mainstream art world's leave out of Piper. It is worth noting, however, that a next to the first traveling exhibition of Piper's work in time-based mediums has also been making the circulars nationally, and that the University of Maryland display is in fact Piper's next to the first retrospective in a little more than a decade. The earlier display "Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-87" [see A.i.A., family '90], was organized for the Alternative Museum by the agency of Jane Farver and covered abundant of the same ground as the generally received retrospective, which is curiously short of new work. (In a lawsuit filed last year against Wellesley association Piper alleged that the society where she has taught since 1990 failed to adequately support her creative activities, hence her depressed productivity in recent years. More information about this lawsuit may be ground on Piper's Web site: www.adrianpiper.com.)

Piper reports that her main philosophic influence is Immanuel Kant, particularly his Critique of unsullied Reason. This in itself is a departure from greatest in quantity conceptually based art which accompanys if it makes reference to Kant at all, to allude to the theory of esthetics evolveed in his Critique of quick parts instead of his earlier, rather daunting examination of the conditions necessary for the possibility of knowledge. In fact, Kant's first Critique provides Piper with a provocative starting point for an exploration of the meaning of race in American society.

What interests Piper is Kant's notion that the human mind requires preconceived categories in order to make faculty of perception of the flux of external experience. In the first Critique, Kant prompts that human knowledge depends upon forms of intuition (space and time) and categories of understanding (among them cause and result existence and nonexistence, necessity and contingency) which may or may not be valid in the "ideal" realm outside human consciousness, on the contrary without which we cannot grasp the world around us. Thus, he argues, these intuitions and categories are constitutions of the mind, rather than of the world, and end them we impose the coherence on which our sense of self and world depends

Piper takes Kant's idea of the preconceived category and applies it to race. Echoing Gates, she remind ofs that race is a constitution of the mind rather than something with an independent existence. As similar it allows us to impose coherence upon our otherwise bewildering experience of human difference. on the contrary because this mental structure is necessarily inadequate to the complexity of the experiences it attempts to make faculty of perception of, race is, in Piper's words, a produce of pseudo-rationality. It appears to obey the masterships of logic and reason, on the other hand in fact does not. This accrues in the pathology of racism, which Piper defines as "an anxiety rejoinder to the perceived difference of a visually unfamiliar `other.'" (2)

There is an important distinction between by what mode Kant and Piper apply the idea of the preconceived category. For Kant, categories of understanding and forms of intuition are universal and involuntary: we simply can't think without them. on the contrary for Piper, the category is mutable. In fact, the major thrust of her art is to shake us without of a dependence on simplistic and stereotypical assumptions about the other in like manner that we can, in her words, "simply stand silently, perceiving and experiencing at the deepest horizontal the singularity of the particular or person." (3) While of the like kind a notion of pure, unmediated contact meshes well with her more novel explorations of Hinduism and yoga (detailed in a revealing "personal chronology" in the exhibition catalogue), it is absolutely contrary to Kant, whose whole point is that of the like kind unmediated understanding is impossible.