Adrian Piper

I Am the Locus #2 of 5
1975

African-American artist Adrian Piper is most often referred to as a conceptual performance artist. The black and white image to the left is a still from a performance Piper created in the mid-70s that deals with gender and identity. In the piece Piper, a black female, dresses up as a male. She puts white make-up all over her skin, draws on a mustache, and wears a black afro as well as sunglasses as she walks down a crowded street. Walking toward the viewer with a hand to her mouth holding what seems to be a cigarette, one would fully believe the character she is portraying. No one in the image is looking at her which leads us to believe she successfully played her role of a third world boy. In the image she has created a white fog-like substance around her entire body and expanding toward the top of the piece. She writes 'Surrounded and Constrained' in rough black writing with all uppercase letters.

Adrian talks about the performance as a scary experience. She is quoted, "The early street works were very important and even frightening experiences...I always felt threatened, I mean a policeman could have arrested me for disturbing the peace" (Archer 123). She goes on to explain that this change in identity made her a stronger person and she felt more flexible in the end. For this performance specifically she focuses on the idea of being anonymous, fully questioning any type of identity and drastically changing her own by creating what she calls a "mythic being". She is both 'hostile and removed' from the people she encounters on the street. The writing on image refers to the idea that she is surrounded by a number of people, yet constrained by this identity she has created.

For me the piece doesn't seem to be as strong as she may have been hoping to create. While the idea of creating a sort of alter-ego and walking down a crowded street would seem to make a point about identity, it is useless unless the viewer knows of her true identity. Without this prior knowledge, the viewer may not know what the text is referring to. I see a light-skinned male from a different country walking down a crowded United States street. I feel that he is surrounded by so much opportunity but yet he feels constrained by his identity. If I were a person walking down the street when she did this performance, I don't think it would have any effect on me. Our culture has become so diverse that it wouldn't seem out of the ordinary, but the year the piece was performed really has an impact on the way people view it.