Adrian Piper addresses the Art Institute of Chicago
Adrian Piper addresses the Art Institute
of Chicago
That’s right, you too may become a sexy muthafunka.
Isn’t that what we all wish for anyway? Get down and
boogie and you may already be on your way.
Adrian Piper, philosopher, conceptual artist and cultural
critic, addressed the Art Institute of Chicago community and
provoked her audience to get funky during an interactive,
multimedia presentation.
An introduction is always afforded to speakers
in the School of the Art Institute’s Visiting Artists
Program. Piper’s was exceptional. Her lecture was preceded
by a welcome from Barry McLain, Chairman of the Board of Governors;
Tony Jones, President of the School of the Art Institute;
Lisa Wainwright, Graduate Division Chair and finally, Romi
Crawford, Coordinator of the Visiting Artists Program. 
Piper’s was the best-attended lecture thus far, the
third of a series entitled “Call and Response: Art in
the Age of Hip-Hop Culture.” The “Call and Response”
lecture series, “explores the influence of hip-hop music
and culture on global art making and art discourse.”
In keeping with the “call and response” nature
of hip-hop music, many of the events are in the form of discussions
or dialogues examining the impact that hip-hop culture has
had on contemporary art making as well as art historical scholarship.
To say Piper’s reputation preceded her is an understatement.
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is a conceptual artist whose work,
in a variety of media, has focused on racism, racial stereotyping
and xenophobia for over three decades. She has exhibited at
the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney
Museum, the Gallery of New South Wales, the Musée d’Art
Moderne de Ville de Paris, as well as the Paula Cooper and
Thomas Erben Galleries in New York.
Piper received her B.A. in Philosophy from the City College
of New York and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
She spent a year at the University of Heidelberg studying
Kant and Hegel. She is the recipient of National Endowment
for the Humanities, Andrew Mellon and Woodrow Wilson Research
Fellowships, and her principal publications are in meta-ethics,
Kant and the history of ethics. Her two-volume collection,
Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-Art
and Art Criticism 1967-1992 (MIT Press, 1996) are now in paperback
editions.
Piper was the President’s Council’s Honorary Visiting
Artist, with the Council in full attendance at the lecture.
The eminence of the guest speaker roused fanfare, including
a long entry line into the auditorium. Piper’s presence
even managed to drown out comments made by one of her preceding
speakers that unintentionally derogated the student body.
In her introduction, Lisa Wainwright pointed out how Piper’s
intellectualism utilizes a “necessarily subversive imagination
[within] society.” An example of this “subversive
imagination” came early; Piper did not begin with a
verbose speech. Rather, she suggested “tools for listening
and watching.” The audience watched a video projection
that asked them to respond in certain ways. These included
nodding one’s head, standing and bouncing comfortably
on one’s knees, and clapping hands in time to music.
Piper explained she hoped for a multi-sensory experience.
Piper screened her video piece of 1983 entitled Funk Lessons.
Filmed at the University of California at Berkeley, Funk Lessons
displays a youthful Piper addressing a crowd of college-age
men and women. She explains basic tools for dancing to funk
music, and the tools we are viewing are very similar to those
in the 2003 audience were emboldened to use. Funk is “modular
and improvisational,” intones Piper in 1983. “Anyone
can do this.” She shows the crowd the “two-step”
dance move (which, for those who don’t know, is a step
in one direction, and then the other, shifting one’s
weight, preferably in time to the music). Music continues
to play and we watch as the on-screen crowd tries out their
new moves.
This format continues for instructions on the “shoulder-shrug”
and “hip isolation.” Clips from the television
program Soul Train punctuate the exhibitions from Piper’s
California crowd. Soul Train used to air on Saturday mornings,
a kind of dance club on television; the show brought to its
viewers the newest in music and improvisational dances. Most
of the Soul Train dancers did the latest moves better than
everyone else and created new ones — they were professional
dancers.
In the video, Piper explains that not everyone has to feel like they must dance in that way — and that well — to “funk.” The participation is what is most important. In Piper’s “Notes on Funk” from 1985, she writes: “My immediate aim in staging the large-scale performance (preferably with sixty people or more) was to enable everyone present to GET DOWN AND PARTY. TOGETHER...The aim was to transmit and share a physical language that everyone was then empowered to use.”
The audience of 2003 has by now become engaged with the music
and the dancing, but is abruptly sobered by a film clip of
a representative of the Alabama Citizen’s Council. A
white man declares Negro dance and music immoral and a threat
to society. The “Funk Lessons” continue. In the
video Piper speaks of the influence of black music and dance
on white people. She shows clips of rock and roll performances;
one example is Chuck Berry’s influence on Elvis Presley.
The Piper of 1983 tells us her reactions to her social experiment,
explaining that anyone can dance and funk, as well as her
hopes that people will drop their inhibitions and use their
fresh moves. A lighthearted spirit is restored and gives the
audience a laugh when a man offers funk to us: “Funk
to You” flashes across the screen.
The video presentation continued with clips from contemporary
films. Each included a scene involving multi-ethnic people
dancing together. Scenes from Bulworth, Save the Last Dance,
Bringin’ Down the House, Head of State, and The Guru
were included. Piper did not comment specifically on her choice
to include these clips; their intrinsic support of Piper’s
thesis could have been strengthened.
The audience is finally confronted with a still image: a dancing
Shiva statue that is placed above three figures overlying
a constellation of stars. Each of the figures is covering
or blocking out a sensory activity. One is covering its eyes,
another the ears, and the final, the mouth. The image is replaced,
but the only change is in the attire of each of the three
figures. Music accompanies the images, which is a kind of
chanting and rhythm. Piper begins to dance on stage, while
the image continues changing in this manner. Piper entices
the audience to dance with her, on stage and in the audience,
and soon the hall is turned into a dance party.
After several minutes of dancing, Piper returns to the podium
and begins to explain. Shiva is the harbinger of truth —
“what you get once beyond the surface” she begins.
The Shiva dance relates to the cyclical model of the universe.
Shiva also breaks apart stymieing traditions, and is both
the embodiment of sexuality, “while [also] remaining
the embodiment of asceticism.” Shiva and dancing remain
separate and not invested in “the ego trips that are
used to give our lives meaning.” Dancing, Piper explains,
retains a “central role in traditional cultures.”
It is “essential to decision-making and cementing bonds.”
While in our society dance functions as a kind of self-display,
experiences like this improvisational group shuffle are intended
to make one “lose inhibitions” and release tensions.
All of this, Piper explains, is bigger than sex (dancing is
often conjoined with sex). Instead, while one is dancing,
the self becomes apparent as part of the universe.
Hip-hop music and culture embody these principles; the rhythmic
music and dance of hip-hop have become universally popular.
Originally conceived and disseminated by black Americans,
Piper suggests this universal appeal is so because content
and rhythm “stem from a place before acculturations,
separations...were felt.” In “Notes on Funk I-IV,”
Piper explains what remains to be attained:
“A comparably miniscule degree of cultural parity; that is, the respect and recognition of identifiably black cultural conventions as a rich and aesthetically legitimate art form — not just due jazz in all its topical abstraction and formal complexity, and easier to accept for precisely that reason, but due to black popular culture as well, because it is so explicitly and intimately tied to the African roots of black creative expression.”
Piper explicitly states that black culture has been “appropriated
or assimilated into white culture.” Examples include
“the Rolling stones appropriation of Don Kovay, Bo Derek’s
appropriation of cornrows, Al Jolson and Fred Astaire’s
appropriations of minstrelsy, Peggy Lee’s appropriation
of Ella Fitzgerald, etc.; the list is endless.”
Piper’s luring the audience to dance and participate,
rather than remain passive observers, amplifies her argument.
She observes that the activity was unselfconscious. Those
who could not be seen by others enjoyed their movement as
much as those more readily observed. Piper theorizes that
a bond needs to be present before discussing the major problems
of the world because there needs to be a kind of abstract
discussion independent of languages and concepts. This could
be construed as a sentiment like “all the world needs
is music and dance and we can all get along,” which
is unfortunate, because a reading in this way undermines the
profundity of Piper’s argument.
Piper offers the example of Nelson Mandela’s presidential
inauguration, during which he danced in celebration. Present
cultural constructs urge us believe that it is ridiculous
for dignified people to clap and dance. Rather than distilling
her argument, Piper acknowledges that the notions are complex
and are issues for physicists and philosophers alike. She
suggests that the sensibilities that allow uninhibited, improvisational
dance and rhythm are essential to societal function.
As she has done throughout her career, Piper continues to
pose constructive yet critical questions of our society. As
the critic and curator Robert Storr writes in the introduction
to Piper’s “Essays in Meta-Art,” Piper perseveres
in her “seemingly quixotic devotion to logic as an antidote
to myth,” maintaining the belief that if “it is
not entirely within the grasp of logic to change the world,
changing consciousness, which is the locus and origin of our
crippling misperceptions, is.”
Adrian Piper came to Art institute of Chicago to bring her
ongoing fight to us. It shifted its shape, and hid in a form
as innocuous as dance. But becoming a sexy muthafunka is not
so easy — Piper reminds us we must struggle to leave
behind much of what we cherish as individuals and societies.
So this writer would like to follow in the footsteps of the
man in “Funk Lessons” video by wishing: Funk to
You!
Image courtesy of Adrian Piper
Special thanks to Romi Crawford and the Visiting Artists Program
for help acquiring images.