We are made of what cannot be seen. Adrian Piper defines herself as “1/32 Malagasy, 1/16 Nigerian, 1/8 Indian”, she has a male name and a female body. She made black subjectivity her artistic, civil, political and existential signature. In her first seventy-six years of life she painted, produced videos, photographed, created installations, drew and performed, going through the post-war period asking the world how it sees itself and what kind of identity it feels like. “Race Traitor” is the title of the unmissable retrospective (more than one hundred works, of which here we trace the identikit of the most significant and those linked to stylistic or expressive caesuras of the artist) with which the PAC of Milan presents the sixty years of career of the multifaceted New York artist and philosopher. Wandering inside the large bright spaces of the structure means breathing in the power of the message and inspiration of her work.
Installation view of the exhibition “Adrian Piper. Race Traitor”, edited by Diego Sileo. PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan, 2024. Courtesy PAC. Photo Nico Covre, vulcano.agency
The first works are in the field of painting and drawing: Piper immediately showed one of the predominant objects of her interest, identifying it in identity. She does not disdain to portray herself, even if in transparency (or in a photographic negative), nor does she disdain to stray into psychedelia altered by the LSD effect, recalling themes present in “Alice in Wonderland”, the famous literary work by Lewis Carroll, considered at the time milestone of inspiration. It is the period of works such as “LSD Self-Portrait from the Inside Out”, “Barbara Epstein with Doll” (the doll was a recurring element of Piper’s artistic poetics) or the later “Food for the Spirit”, a photographic installation composed by nude self-portraits in front of the mirror which, proceeding from the beginning to the end of the series, shows the fading into the darkest black of the artist’s figure. The final years of the 1960s are also marked by a minimal style, but above all marked by geometric spatiality, in which Adrian Piper’s creativity develops outside of two-dimensionality to approach volumetric structures (“Recessed Square” and “Double Recessed”). In works such as the “Hypothesis” series, the space-time sequence of the photographs is associated with diagrams that recall the flow of the hours of day and night.
Installation view of the exhibition “Adrian Piper. Race Traitor”, edited by Diego Sileo. PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan, 2024. Courtesy PAC. Photo Nico Covre, vulcano.agency
It is with “Art for the Art World Surface Pattern” (1976) that the ethnic question and political awareness definitively burst into Adrian Piper’s artistic creativity and practice. The installation is in fact a cube covered with journalistic clippings reporting some real atrocities encrypted by Piper’s provocative signature: “Not a Performance”. As we will see later, the use of a real newspaper (or magazine) is a characterizing element of her artistic production. The thread continues with the questions of “Close to Home”, a photographic series in which the observer is asked a list of questions regarding how many times (and in what way) he/she interacts with black people in daily life. Geometric seriality returns in the recent installation “Das Ding-an-sich-bin” (2018): audio voices, geometric shapes and mirrors interact in a sort of linguistic Babel tower that recalls the centrality of the human being. In “Here and Now” (1968), the passion for spatiality becomes once again magnificently maniacal: on sixty-four sheets (as many as an ideal chessboard) there are boxes that self-describe the position in which they are found.
Installation view of the exhibition “Adrian Piper. Race Traitor”, edited by Diego Sileo. PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan, 2024. Courtesy PAC. Photo Nico Covre, vulcano.agency
Political consciousness returns in the “Political Self-Portraits”: the project is expressed with a series of self-portraits in which there is also a list of facts and ideas that have allowed her to mature and solidify her own awareness. Civic awareness that explodes in the work dedicated to her mother, “Ashes to Ashes”, a photographic polyptych that denounces the damage of smoking and which crosses her rebellious commitment at the moment in which the artist, on the occasion of an exhibition scheduled at MOCA of Los Angeles had refused to exhibit one of her works because Philip Morris was among the sponsors of the event. At this point the exhibition path becomes increasingly immersive in black consciousness. “Race Traitor” is the title of the exhibition and catapults us into a self-portrait of the artist in the act of asking ourselves if visual traits can really determine an identity exactly. “Ur-mutter” takes us back to the origins of humanity: an extremely poor woman and son from Africa ask us about the primordial place of the human race. The declination of this work is even stronger when compared to a photo in which Jeff Koons is surrounded by white and Asian children. “Pretend” also plays on the dual level of white and Indo-European self-centrism through the juxtaposition of images of brutality committed on black Americans by the police.
Installation view of the exhibition “Adrian Piper. Race Traitor”, edited by Diego Sileo. PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan, 2024. Courtesy PAC. Photo Nico Covre, vulcano.agency
This socio-political awareness probably reaches its peak in “Black Box/White Box”, a powerful and dramatic double cubic installation that screams indignation at us in the face of Bush sr. which congratulates white policemen, placing images alongside the beating of the African-American taxi driver Rodney King (Los Angeles, 1991). “Everything” is the title of a project started in 2003 and is also a pessimistic reflection on the role and presence in the United States of an artist like Piper and of the missing changes within the Stars and Stripes society. In fact, since the previous year, the artist moved to Berlin to overcome disillusionment: dance at this point becomes cathartic and necessary and portrays the artist in some videos shot at Alexanderplatz. Before moving to Europe, the series “Vanilla Nightmares” had tried to strengthen the indignation against the stereotypes to which blacks in America are subjected, also using some of the characteristics most commonly attributed, in a negative sense, to the Afro-descendant world: from violence to sexual dimensions, from congenital laziness to theft.
Installation view of the exhibition “Adrian Piper. Race Traitor”, edited by Diego Sileo. PAC Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Milan, 2024. Courtesy PAC. Photo Nico Covre, vulcano.agency
And, again, a photographic series of exceptional simplicity and effectiveness should be mentioned: “Catalysis”, in which, among the various declinations, the part in which Adrian Piper, to get noticed on the subway, inflates a piece of chewing gum with her mouth is truly iconic and above all white. The gloss of this exceptional exhibition must be entrusted to the male alter ego of Adrian Piper: “The Mythic Being” is in fact truly iconic, with the moustache, the men’s wig and the sunglasses and is functional to her artistic research about what could happen to a living being who is still Afro-descendant, but male-oriented. This mythical being shows himself as a provocative intruder among the art gallery advertisements published in the historic weekly “The Village Voice” and in the gradual transformation from she to him in the thematic project “I / You (Her by her)”.
Info:
Adrian Piper: Race Traitor
19/03 – 09/06/2024
PAC – Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea di Milano
https://www.pacmilano.it/exhibitions/race-traitor/
I am Giovanni Crotti and I was born in June 1968 in Reggio Calabria to be reborn in June 2014 in Piacenza, the city where I live. My income is guaranteed by digital consultancy, and I then spend it largely on art and letterature: I have been and am a content curator and organizer of cultural events for artists, galleries and institutional spaces, as well as a writer of exhibition reviews, creatives of every era and books.
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