HUMOR HAS ALWAYS BEEN A KEY INGREDIENT IN THE WORK OF PERFORMANCE ARTIST ADRIAN PIPER. SHE KNEW DECADES AGO THAT THE WAY TO GET PEOPLE THINKING ABOUT RACE, SEX, MISOGYNY, AND BIAS WAS TO GET THEM LAUGHING FIRST
Text by: Aimee Walleston
A beautiful intruder in the predominantly white-male world of American conceptual art in the late ’60s and ’70s, Adrian Piper used her physicality, visage, and kinetic, uncompromising intellect to pose trenchant questions about race, gender, and identity. Before artists like Chris Burden became renowned for creating performances that used the self and corporeality to produce shocking, explicit, and sometimes violent artworks, New York–born Piper was dousing herself in wet paint and walking through Macy’s department store, or riding the D train while drenched in fetid eggs, milk, vinegar, and fish oil. Piper used her being as a lightning rod for on-the-spot audience engagement. Her works often seemed to explore her own discomfort with society’s view of her as a light-skinned Black woman by reversing this uneasiness and putting viewers in the crosshairs. But, however confrontational these works may be, they’re equally possessed of a wry, energized vitality that employs humor to test the boundaries of her audience’s internalized racism and misogyny.
Comedy asks people to change their minds, and it refuses to ask politely. When humor infiltrates high art, it usually doesn’t—in the immortal words of Rodney Dangerfield—get any respect. In the work of Piper, who currently teaches philosophy in addition to practicing art, heady intellectualism was never antithetical to belly laughs—both were and are legitimate responses. “Piper’s really smart—there’s a fierce intelligence around the work, which I love, but there’s also the humor,” says artist and Piper contemporary Carolee Schneemann. (In her legendary 1975 performance piece Interior Scroll, Schneemann removed a letter to a film critic from her vagina and read its contents to her audience.) “She’s very funny. She’s got an unexpected, almost sly aspect around the forms she’s developing.” In Piper’s art, built-in sight gags, including cartoon bubbles, make use of comedic tropes to engage her audience in deeper questions. In her 1980 work It’s Just Art, Piper questioned her audience’s “moral lassitude” in the face of depictions of the Khmer Rouge catastrophe while disco dancing to “Do You Love What You Feel” by Rufus and Chaka Khan. A later work, Funk Lessons, was a series of collaborative performances in which Piper gave lessons on dancing to funk, entreating her art-world audience to a literal interpretation of “fuck art, let’s dance.” The concept played with internalized and externalized racial preconceptions, and her audiences responded at times in anger at its just-below-the-surface implications.
Vito Acconci, infamous for his seminal 1972 work Seedbed, in which he sequestered himself under the floorboards of the Sonnabend Gallery and masturbated while vocalizing his fantasies to the gallery-goers above, makes the claim that in many performances from the ’70s humor is often afoot—yet never fully enjoyed. While humor could be viewed as the foot in the door to these intellectually rigorous works, Acconci says, “People who have a resistance to conceptual art seem to think exactly the opposite.” Performance art has been endlessly spoofed in mass culture because it is often seen as pretentious and trying to impose an obtuse intellectualism on its audience. As Acconci says, “I thought the performances in the ’70s were funnier than other people did. They were funny with some kind of purpose: humor means that you’re not so channeled on something that other things can’t come in. It allows for second thoughts and constant reconsiderations.” Because Piper’s works are tinged with honest attempts to reconcile her identity with the racist and sexist mindsets that challenged her, recognition of her humor can, mistakenly, seem counterintuitive to the gravity of the work. This walking on eggshells is the unavoidable legacy of comedy’s cruelty, especially as humanity works toward a universal ethics. Minstrelsy was once considered humorous. It is now seen in its truer form: abject racism, the echoes of which continue to haunt us.
It is this fear that disturbs artworks that explore race. Kalup Linzy, a younger artist creating performance-based films, is also balancing on this tightrope, and cites Piper as a source of inspiration. In one of his most well-known pieces, a 2003 video titled All My Churen, Linzy plays several male and female characters all engaged in various family and romantic dramas, with a subtext of racial, gender, and sexual stereotyping. Because Linzy is a Black man depicting Black characters, one could perceive a connection to Piper’s work, based on their shared inquiries into race. But Linzy sees a different connection: “The gay child, in most families, doesn’t have a huge voice. People don’t want to deal with that sexuality. They’d rather sweep it under the rug. In Cornered [a 1988 video performance in which Piper questions her audience’s discomfort with her stating that she is Black], a lot of the things Piper says are how I feel about being gay. She can pass as white if she wanted to, I could pass as straight if I wanted to. It’s different, but it’s the same, you know?”
Piper continues to make work, and her performance pieces from the late ’60s onward have left a legacy that touches a wider audience than the art world from which it arose. Piper’s inspection of her own identity in relation to stereotypical perceptions of young Black men informed her famous Mythic Being series, in which she took on the persona and perceived agenda of a Black man, placing photographs of herself in the gallery section of the Village Voice (the images often included a thought bubble, one of which read: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear).
These pieces were at once funny and serious, and one can see echoes of this work in contexts far broader than the art world. When the comedian Dave Chappelle, in one of his final sketches for Chappelle’s Show, wore whiteface and demonstrated how his taste in food and culture would change if he were white, he was challenging not just his audience’s preconceived notions of racial identity but also his own. This is a slippery and challenging slope. As Linzy explains, “People don’t want you to sugarcoat things. But people don’t want to be told what to think or what to do—you have to see humor as a way to get people to open up. The journey through tragedy often ends at the humorous and the ridiculous.” In the hands of Piper, these journeys show us the way ahead. They clear a path for humorous—and humanist—recalibrations of thought.
Image © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin
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