Piper's Art In Object

In what way do we get to know ourselves? How do we identify ourselves in a historical and political context? Adrian Piper, as an African-American female, has brought the thought to the masses with her processed photograph series- The Mythic Being project. Piper overlaid her pictures with paints and added thought balloons above her head, giving the fixed objects in the photographs meanings of art. Such activity helps to transform the objecthood, to use Michael Fried's term of non-art, of the photographs into a form of art by implanting a theater for the viewers. One of the themes in Piper's project, Locus, took place on the street in Massachusetts, provides us with a closer examination of how Piper utilized the ordinary street scene and passersby to lodge a theater through our understanding of the historical context of the 1960s and Piper's awareness of her being an African-American. She transfigured objects into art through her creative installation of the viewer's theater context in the photographs, regardless of Fried's claim that such condition actually destroys the essence of art (Fried, 152).

Object, as defined in Webster dictionary, is "something material that may be perceived by the senses; something mental or physical toward which thought, feeling, or action is directed (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)." As we further analyze the word, we find that "objecthood," with a suffix Ð'-hood, represents more by giving the word a condition of the material state. In the discussion of Fried's essay, he alleged that a generally acknowledged art could degenerate if the art is more of a state of objecthood then the center of focus to the spectator. Objecthood, coming along with a theater, which is the condition of viewers interacting with the artwork, is what Fried perceived to be non-art. (Fried, 152)

The "objects" in Piper's photographs are the street and the random people who happened to be at the site when the pictures were being taken. Do we consider a person an artwork? In the eyes of one's parents, the answer might be positive; from a religious perspective, one may argue that human beings are an artwork made by god. However, our intuition tells us that we usually consider a person an artwork when one is being painted or sculptured by an artist. Do we recognize public infrastructure as an artwork? As a modern citizen with a basic economic sense of the functions of an efficient government, we have already taken for granted the public goods, the streets, for instance. Even though the public provision of goods is, to some degree, aesthetically oriented we would all appreciate visually enjoyable public goods. It is the game that Piper played that gives us a new perspective to look at her pictures in a social context beyond the surface of the photographs.

In The Mythic Being series, Piper tried to appear like a male African-American, with a conspicuous Afro wig, a pair of big sunglasses and the fake mustache. Here, she successfully made herself an artistic object in the photograph by contrasting her indifferent appearance and rather "excluding" image to the rest of the photograph. In addition, she constructed a theater to the photograph by provoking the fact that she is actually an African-American female in disguise. She led us to read the purpose of her art and guided us to walk into the theater of her photographs. Piper once noted in her 1978 installation Aspects of the Liberal Dilemma, one's main concern is "to understand and recognize the work, to master it and fit it in with art you already know, that is, to come up with an appropriate comment about it at the appropriate time." (Schollhammer) That is, Piper encourages the spectators to recognize her work with the viewer's own understanding and interpretation. In contrast, Michael Fried concluded that, "whatever the dedication, passion, and intelligence of its creators," the mode of such work seems to be "corrupted or perverted by theater (Fried, 168)." Piper's art philosophy directly conflicts with that of Fried's. The Locus photograph series, now exhibiting in the Smart Museum as art, allows the viewer to appreciate the artwork in a context other than only the picture itself, a fact that starkly challenges Fried's theory.

Fried proposed "the espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theater, and theater is now the negation of art (Fried, 153)." So, what's the theater of Piper's photographs? It is the political and psychological theater in the viewer's perspective at work. Is Piper's work the negation of her own art? Certainly not. The black and white photograph and paints seems to have taken away the possibility of biased interpretation of racism, and avoids the differentiation between peoples. It constructed a theater for all to read and to appreciate the meaning behind the scene. Moreover, according to the viewer's personal background and past experience, the theater of the photographs can be very flexible. One of the main reasons