Embodiment of text after conceptualism: Language and video in Fast trip, long drop (1993) and Cornered (1988)

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content EMBODIMENT OF TEXT AFTER CONCEPTUALISM:
LANGUAGE AND VIDEO IN F AST TRIP , LONG DROP (1993)
AND CORNERED (1988)
by
Zemula Barr
________________________________________________________________________
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirement for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Zemula Barr
ii
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my thesis committee, Rhea Anastas and Liz Kotz, for your
dedication throughout this process and your invaluable insights into the complexities of
Conceptual Art. I am indebted to Tim Saltarelli and Anne Han from Elizabeth Dee
Gallery, who graciously facilitated my access to Adrian Piper’s video work, and to Laura
Korman, my dear friend who generously shared her studio apartment with me while I
conducted research in New York City. To Melinda Guillen, my fellow colleague and
friend, thank you for your constant assurance and advice. My deepest gratitude goes to
my mother and my father. Your support throughout this process has been invaluable,
even from far away.
iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii
List of Figures .................................................................................................................... iv
Abstract................................................................................................................................ v
Introduction.......................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1:
Narrative and the Fragmented Self in Fast Trip, Long Drop ................................. (1993) 11
Chapter 2:
Cornered .................................................................. (1988) and the Critique of Visuality 30
......................................................................................................................... Conclusion 44
Bibliography.......................................................................................................................49
iv
List of Figures
Figure 1: Still from Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993)..............................................................19
Figure 2: Still from Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993)..............................................................20
Figure 3: Still from Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993)..............................................................26
Figure 4: Adrian Piper, Cornered (1988)...........................................................................34
Figure 5: Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #1 (1986-1990)..............................................37
v
Abstract
This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Gregg Bordowitz’s Fast Trip, Long
Drop (1993) and Adrian Piper’s Cornered video installation from 1988. Heavily
influenced by early Conceptual Art, both Piper and Bordowitz bring language into the
aesthetic realm as a means of complicating visual representation and its meanings.
Bordowitz employs the literary strategies of fragmented narrative and allegory to disrupt
heroic depictions of people with AIDS used by the activist movement that flatten
individual subjectivities for the sake of coalition. Piper deconstructs visual signifiers of
race through the performance of logical argumentation, which creates a dissonant
relationship between the language she speaks and her visual performance as an art object.
Both artists’ use of video to embody these texts allows for the affective performance of
written texts, moving the Conceptual discourse away from the art object to the self in
relation to the broader social and political discourses of AIDS activism and anti-racism.
Introduction
Chantal Mouffe describes “critical art” as art that challenges hegemony on a
social and political level and contributes to the critique of dominant structures of
oppression. She adds, “Once we accept that identities are never pre-given but that they
are always the result of processes of identification, that they are discursively constructed,
the question that arises is the type of identity that critical artistic practices should aim at
fostering.”
1
Although Mouffe is presenting these insights from the current vantage point
in a discussion of how artists can critically intervene within a neoliberal political
environment, artists Gregg Bordowitz and Adrian Piper have been engaging with the
discursive constructions of identity as challenges to dominant hegemonic systems of
representation for quite some time. In their most well-known works, Bordowitz’s Fast
Trip, Long Drop (1993) and Piper’s Cornered video installation (1988), each artist
performs his or her writing through video, temporarily embodying subject positions that
previously existed in written form. When I use the term “embodied,” I refer to each
artist’s act of using his or her body not only as a source of utterance, but as a way of
attaching affective meaning to language through performance, subsequently rendering the
abstract concepts of language concrete. In Fast Trip, Long Drop Bordowitz counters
activist media portrayals of people living with AIDS by performing multiple
1
1. Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas,
Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 4.
2
representations of himself as a person living with AIDS. He formulates a fragmented
narrative made up of these contradictory performances, parodies of AIDS rhetoric, and
appropriated footage and imagery, all of which suggest that identity, and therefore
representation of identities, is always fluctuating in relation to outside influences. In
Cornered, Piper critiques hegemonic perceptions of race by juxtaposing her performative
embodiment of her written text with the seemingly contradictory concepts it expresses,
exposing the limits of visual perception.
What makes this comparison between these video works of Bordowitz and Piper
so intriguing is that despite the fact that Piper is a first generation Conceptual artist and
Bordowitz began making videos in the 1980s, each artist’s use of language in these
videos reflects the influence of Minimalist and Conceptual art and writing. Piper has
consistently cited Sol LeWitt’s work as a formative influence on her practice, and writing
in 1970, she claims that his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” printed in the Summer 1967
issue of Artforum “did far more for my artistic development than the previous eleven
years I had spent drawing nudes.”
2
In “Paragraphs” LeWitt argued that an artist’s idea
determines the physical form of the object, freeing the artist from the medium specificity
long enforced by a Modernist code of aesthetics.
3
LeWitt continued to be interested in
2. Adrian Piper, “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object,” in Out of Order,
Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992 (1975; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), 29.
3. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum (Summer 1967): 79-83. On page 80, LeWitt
asserts, “No matter what the form it may finally have it must begin with an idea. It is the process of
conception and realization with which the artist is concerned.”
3
material form and seriality in his painting and sculptural work, while later Conceptualists
such as Joseph Kosuth and the Art & Language groups in England and New York insisted
on the complete dematerialization of the work of art as an “analytic proposition.” These
artists turned to analytical philosophy for conceptual grounding, and although Piper
began studying analytical philosophy in 1970 and was tenuously connected to the Art &
Language New York group, she never completely abandoned the art object.
For Bordowitz, the Minimalist artist-writer as theorized by Craig Owens became a
model for an art practice that makes no distinction between the act of writing and that of
creating a visual work. Owens asserts that this movement toward the written word in the
work of Minimalist sculptors such as Robert Smithson signaled the beginnings of
postmodernism, ultimately putting an end to the Modernist separation of disciplines.
4

The movement from the verbal to the visual realm in the Conceptual Art not only
legitimated interdisciplinarity, but challenged the dogmatic authority of high Modernist
art critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Artists began to contribute to
the discourse surrounding their work and that of their colleagues while also availing
themselves of the pages of art journals to publish their text-based work that blurred the
lines between criticism and art production. Bordowitz similarly publishes writing in art
journals that exist as art criticism, with texts such as “My Postmodernism” (2003) and
“Dense Moments” (1994) often verging into the literary form of memoir or personal
4. Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, Scott
Bryson, et.al, eds. (1979; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 45.
4
narrative as a means of discussing the broader politics of AIDS. One of these texts,
“Dense Moments,” which Bordowitz refers to as one of his “literary pieces that I adapt
for the screen,”
5
is the loose framework for Fast Trip, Long Drop. The video, like the
text, follows the artist’s involvement in the AIDS activist movement from the 1980s
onward as well as his individual experiences as a person with AIDS. The video consists
of various monologues that Bordowitz performs as himself as well as an alter ego named
Alter Allesman. These versions of himself as well the character of Allesman embody the
various shifts in tone written in “Dense Moments,” which moves back and forth from
anger to resignation, and from hope to despair. At times Bordowitz’s many selves
address the viewer, either in anger or in jest, overwhelming the viewer as the overlapping
narratives cycle through at a rapid pace. In more than a few ways, Bordowitz’s
performance of personal narratives mirrors the narrative and language-based strategies
Yvonne Rainer employs in her early films beginning in the 1970s. In films such as
Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), Rainer weaves together personal narratives that are
often obscured by a non-linear structure, while simultaneously adding imagery and texts
to the film that disrupt the individual story lines.
Like the narrative framework of Journeys from Berlin/1971, Bordowitz’s many
performed subject positions fit within a fragmented narrative structure, interspersed with
documentary footage from ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) demonstrations
5. Gregg Bordowitz, “Dense Moments,” in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings
1986-2003, James Meyer, ed. (1994; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 112.
5
in New York City in the 1980s and early 1990s, interviews and conversations with friends
and colleagues (including Yvonne Rainer), performative monologues by other actors and
appropriated documentary images and footage of risk-taking stunts. All of these texts
interrupt the narrative provided by “Dense Moments.” The compiling of multiple forms
of media along with the use of appropriated footage, also brings to mind Craig Owens’
discussion of allegory in relation to Robert Smithson’s writing and sculpture, which he
defines a point when “language is broken up, dispersed, in order to acquire a new and
intensified meaning in its fragmentation.”
6
An overabundant “accumulation of material”
in Bordowitz’s video contributes to this fragmentation of narrative or form. Much of this
accumulation takes the form of appropriation, which Owens defines in a later critical
essay simply as when “one text is read through another” as demonstrated in the
photography-based works of Troy Brauntuch, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo
emerging in the early 1980s.
7

As Fast Trip, Long Drop presents a postmodern revisiting of earlier Conceptual
strategies, models for use of language in Cornered stem from Piper’s participation in the
1960s New York art world and her subsequent studies and academic career in analytical
philosophy. In addition, the political events of 1970, including the U.S. invasion of
Cambodia, student protests against the continuing Vietnam War and the emerging
6. Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” 43.
7. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” in Beyond
Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, Scott Bryson, et.al, eds. (1980; reprint, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), 54.
6
Women’s Movement inspired Piper to perform as an art object and move her art into a
broader social realm. That year Piper began her Catalysis performances (1970), in which
she altered her exterior presentation in abject ways and moved about in public spaces as a
way of confronting anonymous viewers to elicit a catalysis, or reaction for anonymous
people she encountered. For her later Mythic Being performances (1972-1975) Piper
dressed in drag as an African American man, and like in her Catalysis performances,
inserted herself in various public places, all the while chanting portions of her journal as
an internally significant mantra.
With Cornered, Piper shifts her use of language from an internal system of
meaning in her earlier performances to a direct mode of address, while also bringing her
performance back into the gallery through the use of video in an installation. Piper
begins the video by identifying herself as black and stating that this is something that she
and her viewer must work through together. Like Bordowitz, she challenges the notion of
a fixed identity by performing a verbal text, yet she knows her light skin, conservative
dress and bourgeois intellectual demeanor may suggest otherwise. After her statement,
Piper moves into a systematic rebuttal of her viewers’ hypothetical reactions to her
statement of racial identity, using a strong thread of logic much like a philosophy proof to
dislodge racist presuppositions.
Unlike Fast Trip, Long Drop, which barrages the viewer with a plethora of subject
positions and interjected imagery, the video component of Cornered consists of an
7
approximately sixteen minute monologue, performed in a single, unedited cut. As Piper
utters the text in a quiet tone, sitting with her hands clasped in front of her, it feels as if
Piper is addressing you and only you, yet her hypothetical arguments become almost as
disorienting as Bordowitz’s fast-paced narrative. Piper’s direct form of address is
particularly effective in eliciting a response or catalysis from the viewer despite the fact
that this interaction is formulaic and mediated by a video screen. Some of the words
Piper speaks in Cornered expand upon the text in My Calling (Card) #1: A Reactive
Guerilla Performance for Dinners and Cocktail Parties (1986-1990) and additional
content is derived from responses to her previous work that she systematically refutes in
the Cornered monologue. Although this technique is less closely associated with
appropriation or allegory in the way that Bordowitz employs, Piper is presenting her own
texts through the use of others as a way of refuting racist assumptions.
Fast Trip, Long Drop and Cornered are video works which engage in what
Michael Warner calls “poetic world making,” in which the authors envision a change in
the status quo by addressing publics or counterpublics through text, or in this case,
performed text within video.
8
Fast Trip, Long Drop addresses people living with HIV or
AIDS and challenges the way these individuals are depicted through activist rhetoric and
representations, but leaves the possibilities of a broader audience open through the
distribution of the video outside of AIDS activist channels. Piper’s written and video
8. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone
Books, 2005): 114.
8
work is primarily geared toward an enfranchised (and most likely white) art public as a
means of challenging racist conceptions of the other based on stereotypes. Despite the
fact that Piper is envisioning a more mainstream public as the recipient of her work, the
position from which she speaks is one of marginality, or counter to the dominant point of
view, aligning her strategies with those of counterpublics. Warner argues that
counterpublics often operate in ways that resist the model of the bourgeois public sphere
as theorized by Jürgen Habermas, in which private individuals come together in public to
engage in rational critique. This model of public engagement relegates one’s subjectivity
into the private realm, but Warner argues that counterpublics, especially those of gender,
sexuality or race engage in “protocols of discourse and debate [which] remain open to
affective and expressive dimensions of language. And their members make their
embodiment and status at least partly relevant in a public way by their very
participation.”
9

Video allows for this affective performance of text, presenting a space in which
gestures, tone and expressions can be seen beyond a single live performance, and much
like a written text, video has the potential to circulate and generate a reflexive discourse
surrounding the work and ultimately encourage the self-organization of publics and
counterpublics. Fast Trip, Long Drop has made its way to cable access television and
gay and lesbian film festivals, as well as the Whitney Biennial in 1995, with Bordowitz
9. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 58.
9
transferring the video to film in order to circulate the documentary beyond solely an
activist or art audience. It is additionally accessible through Video Data Bank and
UbuWeb online. On the other hand, Cornered stays in the gallery as a video installation,
with its circulation primarily happening through the written reviews and academic
discourse that surrounds it. Piper has published the script for the video in various art
journals as well, much in the way Yvonne Rainer disseminated many of her video scripts.
Publishing draws attention to the fact that written language is the framework for the
piece, yet the printed version of Cornered is missing the tone, pacing and visual
environment that more effectively confronts the reader.
Both of these video-based works emerged in a moment of political conservatism
in the United States in the 1980s and into the 1990s, characterized by heated debates in
the Senate over sexually explicit photos by Robert Mapplethorpe and Piss Christ (1987)
by Andres Serrano, which demonstrated the power of visual representation and the need
to fight for the visibility of marginalized groups in the public sphere.
10
Looking back at
these video pieces from a different historical moment, many strategies of affective
performance of text retain potential as a means of making oneself seen and heard in a
public realm, yet visibility has become increasingly more difficult amidst the inundation
of texts, imagery and video of a media-saturated culture. Adrian Piper and Gregg
Bordowitz present two powerful examples of critical practices which intervene in the
10. For a comprehensive analysis of these Senate proceedings, please see Carole S. Vance, “The War on
Culture,” Art in America 78, no. 5 (May 1990): 35-39 .
10
political discourses of anti-racism and AIDS activism, and hopefully from their example
we can continue to champion critical art that, as Mouffe describes, “foments dissensus,
that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate,” thereby
“giving voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing
hegemony.”
11
Both Adrian Piper and Gregg Bordowitz employ language as a tool for
disrupting visual representations that obscure and obliterate identities relegated to the
category of “other,” continuing the agonistic struggle for visibility on their own terms.
11. Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” 5.
11
Chapter 1: Narrative and the Fragmented Self in Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993)
Gregg Bordowitz insists that he is not a screenwriter, but his video practice is
inherently writing-based, with his autobiographical documentary Fast Trip, Long Drop
(1993) exhibiting some of the same literary and narrative devices in his written work.
For this reason, Bordowitz’s videos do not exist as elements in art installations, but rather,
he thinks of them as essays.
12
This particular video essay illustrates the tension between
Bordowitz as a subject and the larger AIDS activist movement of the late 1980s and early
1990s in New York City. A loose narrative framework for Fast Trip, Long Drop is
comprised of excerpts of the artist’s written text “Dense Moments” (first published in
1994), which Bordowitz supply the content for the monologues that he performs as
characterizations of himself, including a specified alter ego. These multiple subjects in
the video not only resist a singular experience of living with AIDS but they counter the
tendency of activist media to valorize individual struggles while glossing over the very
real underlying feelings of despair, anger and fear. Other actors appear in the tape to
perform parodies of AIDS activist rhetoric which fragment Bordowitz’s more personal
narratives. Further disruption to the narrative comes from borrowed footage that weaves
the themes of risk and lack of control throughout the video, the appropriation of which is
12. Gregg Bordowitz, “More Operative Assumptions,” in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other
Writings 1986-2003, James Meyer, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 286.
12
linked to the literary technique of allegory. Bordowitz’s use of video allows for the
embodied performance of his writing, which merges verbal and visual strategies and links
his work to the Conceptual legacy of the artist-writer while moving his practice beyond
the self-referential strategies of 1960s conceptual artists to address the larger political
struggle of AIDS activism.
When Bordowitz finished Fast Trip, Long Drop in 1993, he had been involved
with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) since the late 1980s. As part of the
Testing the Limits collective he co-produced the documentary Testing the Limits: NYC
(1988), while also acting as producer and videographer for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis’
ongoing educational outreach show, Living with AIDS. A large portion of the popular
discourse surrounding AIDS at the time circulated through television as well as print
media, and therefore AIDS activists like Bordowitz wanted to use the same medium of
video to intervene and alter the way AIDS was being discussed and people with AIDS
were being represented. Simon Watney, author of the highly influential book Policing
Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media from 1987, argued that “Fighting Aids [sic] is
not just a medical struggle, it involves our understanding of the words and images which
load the virus down with such a dismal cargo of appalling connotations.”
13
For Watney,
the problems with these words and images was the ways in which homophobia was
collapsed with the fear of AIDS. Although AIDS was affecting a large population of
13. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 1987), 3.
13
homosexual men, the conflation of AIDS with homosexual practices not only ignored the
other demographics also contracting the disease, but shifted the discourse about AIDS in
mainstream media to issues of sexual immorality as a way of rationalizing governmental
inaction on AIDS.
Watney’s analysis of mass media representations of people with AIDS influenced
Douglas Crimp to edit the 1987 “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism” issue of
October, in which he called for “cultural activism” that would counter these media
representations. In “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” from this same issue,
Crimp posits that
AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it,
and respond to it...This assertion does not contest the reality of illness, suffering,
and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of
AIDS, on which are constructed the representations, or the culture, or the politics
of AIDS.”
14

Crimp’s point that there is no single reality of AIDS coincides with Bordowitz’s
presentation of multiple subject positions throughout Fast Trip, Long Drop. This
resistance to an “underlying reality of AIDS” not only applies to the way that mass media
portrays people with AIDS, but also the way in which the desire to take control of
cultural representations through AIDS activist video and other media interventions often
morphed into a valorizing of the collective struggle that disregarded the legitimate
14. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October 43, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/
Cultural Activism (Winter 1987): 240.
14
feelings of shame, fear or anger that may also constitute a person’s experience with
AIDS.
Fast Trip, Long Drop “openly confront[s] the despair, the hopelessness and the
burn-out” Bordowitz and many other activists were feeling as the AIDS epidemic
continued unchecked into the early 1990s.
15
In 1993 AIDS-related deaths were
continuing to climb while that year’s Ninth Annual International AIDS Conference in
Berlin dashed many hopes for a working AIDS vaccine or new drugs for the treatment of
HIV and AIDS.
16
This point of crisis for the AIDS activist movement is mirrored in the
fragmented self Bordowitz performs in his video, which Bill Horrigan interprets as the
artist “effecting various exorcisms related to Bordowitz’s status as a person with
AIDS.”
17
Part of what is being exorcised is the sense of hopelessness and shame
associated with AIDS due to homophobic discourses surrounding the disease, as well as
the flattened identity of the AIDS role model as a way of counteracting this shame.
Bordowitz is also challenging the way the AIDS tape has been used, creating what he
calls an “autobiographical documentary” which complicates the notion of autobiography
15. Robert Atkins, “Fast Trip, Long View: Talking to Gregg Bordowitz,” Artery: The AIDS-Arts Journal
(2000), http://www.artistswithaids.org/artery/artist/artist_index.html (accessed December 23, 2010).
16. Many hopes for preventative treatment for HIV were resting on the outcome of the Concorde Study
that was presented at the conference. The trial’s results indicated that the drug AZT (zidovudine) had little
to no effect on slowing the emergence of symptoms for asymptomatic individuals infected with HIV . For
more information on the Concorde Study and the Ninth International AIDS Conference, please see Phillip
B. Berger, MD, “Bleak News from the AIDS Front,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 149, no. 7
(October 1, 1993): 1016-1018.
17. Bill Horrigan, “One Way Street,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 1, no.3 (1994): 366.
15
through the presentation of a fragmented, performative picture of the self which also puts
pressure on the assumption of journalistic truth often associated with the documentary
genre.
Another way Bordowitz plays with the documentary form is through his use of
the text “Dense Moments,” which has the feel of a literary memoir, as a loose script for
his autobiographical documentary. The text provides the majority of spoken material for
the monologues Bordowitz performs as he performs multiple aspects of himself. All of
these overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, positions as well as the fragmented
narrative reflect a postmodern understanding of language as well as a conception of the
self that is not unified but rather made up of multiple identities shaped by external forces.
By performing words he has written, Bordowitz makes this concept concrete.
The written text itself exists as an art piece, as Bordowitz makes no distinction
between his video and writing as art practices, following the model of Conceptual artist-
writer that emerged in the 1960s as exemplified by the writing and art of Robert
Smithson. In his 1979 essay “,” Craig Owens positions Smithson’s writing and that of
other Minimalist artists as a cataclysmic “eruption of language into the field of visual
arts” that signaled the beginnings of postmodernism in the world of art.
18
Owens taught
in the Whitney Independent Study Program that Bordowitz attended in 1985 and his ideas
had a great influence on Bordowitz, especially in encouraging his prolific writing
18. Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, Scott
Bryson, et.al, ed. (1979; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 41.
16
practice. Looking back in 2003 on the formative experiences of his life, Bordowitz cites
“” as pivotal text that continues to inform his work.
19
Owens presented Smithson as an
example of an artist for whom “writing was the model for art production and he made
language itself the ground of his practice.”
20
Along with this shift from visual to the
verbal, Owens discusses the emergence of an “allegorical impulse” in art, as exemplified
through the compiling of both verbal and visual material in Smithson’s and other
Minimalist artists’ writing and sculpture.
21
In essays such as “A Sedimentation of the
Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), Smithson brings together concepts from a wide array of
disciplines and contexts alongside discussions of his own art that function as signifiers of
theoretical concepts beyond the text itself, much like the sculptural materials in his
nonsites refer to the larger whole of the art work beyond the site of display. As an
overarching allegory, Smithson equates the sedimentation layers of the earth’s crust with
the recesses of the mind, asking his readers to follow him into the fissures of his brain as
he not only explicates the concepts within his sculptural work, but makes the text a
nonsite for theoretical discussions beyond the page. Bordowitz’s writing similarly
embraces this interdisciplinary method, bringing together film theory, queer theory, and
psychoanalysis in the form of literary and art criticism, memoir, fiction, or a bit of each.
19. Gregg Bordowitz, “My Postmodernism,” in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings
1986-2003, James Meyer, ed. (2003; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 234.
20. Ibid.
21. Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” 43.
17
With “Dense Moments” as the backbone for Fast Trip, Long Drop, Bordowitz carries
these disciplines into his video through the performance of fragmented sections of a
written text.
Yvonne Rainer’s films such as Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980) and The Man
Who Envied Women (1985) provided Bordowitz with a model for combining the written
word with the moving image.
22
In conversation with Bordowitz about her shift from
dance to film, Rainer explains her move to film because the medium “was inextricably
tied up with language and dancing was not...it was through language that I was going to
address the specifics and particularities of the problems in daily life and in social
contradictions, conflicts, sexual conflicts, etc.”
23
Previously her work in dance during the
1960s had adhered to a Minimalist aesthetic, but by the 1970s she began presenting
personal narratives that reflected broader social and political concerns in her films. In
Journeys from Berlin/1971, language is predominantly added through voice-overs with
the additions of scrolling text interspersed throughout to provide some contextual
information about the state of radical politics (and their consequences) in West Germany.
However, Annette Michelson’s stream-of-consciousness performance of thoughts during
multiple sessions of psychoanalysis resonate with Bordowitz’s use of multiple
performance subjects as a way of verbally working through a crisis of identity.
22. Gregg Bordowitz and Yvonne Rainer, “Fragments of a Conversation,” in Drive: The AIDS Crisis Is
Still Beginning: a Collection of Essays, Dialogues, and Texts Surrounding Gregg Bordowitz's Films Fast
Trip, Long Drop, and Habit, and His Exhibition Drive, Held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
April 6-July 7, 2003, WhiteWalls 46 (2002): 53.
23. Ibid.
18
In Fast Trip, Long Drop Bordowitz temporarily embodies the written word in
front of the camera, performing caricatures of himself at various times in his life as well
as specified alter ego, Alter Allesman, which is Yiddish for “old everyman.” Using this
name for his alter-ego, combined with the klezmer music playing throughout the tape,
adds an additional layer of texture and an ever-present reminder of the secular Jewish
heritage that also informs Bordowitz’s various subject positions. The first paragraph of
“Dense Moments” also begins Allesman’s monologue on Thriving with AIDS, a
spoof of Living with AIDS, complete with the bad lighting and sparsely furnished set
typical of cable access programming (Figure 1). Bob Huff plays the awkward yet
patronizing activist host unused to being in front of the camera. In response to the host’s
question of how long he has been living with AIDS, Allesman ignores the question and
instead begins: “I’m sick and I don’t want a cure. I like my illness. It’s just as much a
part of me as any of my other characteristics. I identify with my illness.”
24
Allesman
continues by acknowledging a resignation to the fact that he will die. He presents a
sullen and fatalistic outlook, along with a skepticism of a younger version of Bordowitz,
as he recalls with derision, “I was twenty-three years old when I thought I had found
24. Gregg Bordowitz, “Dense Moments,” in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings
1986-2003, James Meyer, ed. (1994; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 115.
19
what I’d
been looking for all my life - a feeling of belonging.” Later in the video’s trajectory, the
enthusiastic activist Bordowitz appears, speaking at an ACT UP rally. This speech is also
excerpted in “Dense Moments,” which Bordowitz uses to illustrate the
moment when his HIV-positive and gay identities overshadowed all other aspects of
himself for the sake of the political struggle.
25

At other moments, Bordowitz addresses the camera directly, performing
monologues that invite his audience to share some of the more intimate passages of the
25. Gregg Bordowitz, “Dense Moments,” in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings
1986-2003, James Meyer, ed. (1994; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 126.
Figure 1. Still from Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993).
Screen shot from http://www.ubu.com/film/bordowitz_fast.html (accessed March 4, 2011).
20
written text. Shifts among various embodied performances of the self are signaled by
changes in appearance, with the back-and-forth between shoulder-length hair to a buzz
cut most effectively illustrating a non-linear progression of time throughout the tape. At
one point Bordowitz performs a version of himself wearing a Silence = Death t-shirt
while bed-ridden (Figure 2).
In a previous scene he had explained to his viewers that he is home from work,
hoping to avoid another opportunistic infection. This particular monologue lifted from
“Dense Moments” describes in detail a sexual encounter in which he realized too late that
his partner should have worn a condom. This particular anecdote treads the line between
confession and testimony, yet as Cynthia Chris astutely observes in her 1994 review, “his
intention is not to blame himself or his partners but to recognize the stigma and shame
Figure 2. Still from Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993).
Screen shot from http://www.ubu.com/film/bordowitz_fast.html (accessed March 4, 2011).
21
that are still associated with HIV/AIDS, and the degree to which the person with AIDS
may internalize them.”
26
Instead of remaining silent, these characters Bordowitz
portrays, returning to Horrigan’s point of exorcism, externalize personal feelings of
shame, bringing them into a public discourse rather than remaining an individual burden.
At yet another point in the film, the viewer is privy to a moment in which
Bordowitz and his family discuss the day when he came out to his mother and stepfather
in their Long Island kitchen. It is painful to watch as the family collectively remembers
how the artist’s mother reacted with tears and his stepfather claimed that it could be
worse, “you could get hit by a bus.” Later, in the same kitchen, Bordowitz’s mother
holds the camera and he elaborates on why he identifies as gay for political reasons,
despite having sexual relationships with men and women and believing that his sexuality
is actually more fluid. Such a moment points to the contradictions Bordowitz’s multiple
performances present, brought together in the form of what he describes as a run-on
sentence that asserts: “I am sick, but I am well, and I am gay, and proud, but angry, and
confused; and I’m Jewish, but secular, and I have AIDS, which is not my fault, but I feel
ashamed; I am alone, yet not entirely alone.”
27
Nothing is resolved, and instead multiple
conceptions of self simply coexist in fragmentary form.
26. Cynthia Chris, “Documents and Counter-Documents: AIDS Activist Video at the Crossroads,”
Afterimage 22, no. 4 (November 1994): 7.
27. Gregg Bordowitz, “More Operative Assumptions,” 254-255.
22
Throughout these performances, Bordowitz interjects footage of AIDS activist
public demonstrations and speeches by individuals involved in the movement. After
spending time with Allesman’s character, the power of documentaries such as Testing the
Limits: New York City to empower activists and incite more political action is somewhat
deflated, as a sense of loss also overshadows these images as they become “a record of
once-healthy now-dead friends and fellow activists.”
28
The juxtaposition of protest
footage with Bordowitz’s monologues, especially the ones in which he plays Allesman,
sets up a tension between the desires of the self and collective struggle. How does one
negotiate between the two, especially at a time when a cure seems hopeless? Allesman is
skeptical that activist efforts can end the AIDS epidemic. His ambivalence turns to anger
after the host of Thriving with AIDS informs Bordowitz’s alter-ego that he is a “powerful
model of someone living and thriving with AIDS.” At this point, Allesman requests that
the camera come closer. He breaks the code of the talk show that requires that he only
address the host, asking others living with AIDS in the audience, “aren’t you sick of this
shit?” For those who remain uninfected, Allesman confronts them with the question,
“How are you living with AIDS?”
This moment where Allesman addresses the camera and breaks the interview
format is one of the few times when Bordowitz makes it clear which publics he is
addressing in Fast Trip, Long Drop. Not only is he presenting a nuanced documentary
28. Gregg Bordowitz, reflecting upon the motivations behind making Fast Trip, Long Drop in “More
Operative Assumptions,” 249.
23
for an audience of people familiar with the AIDS tape genre, but in this scene Allesman
confronts those watching who are uninfected and unaffected by the disease. This
broadening of the discursive field to implicate people beyond those living with AIDS is
reflected in the artist’s choice to have the video transferred to 16mm film for wider
distribution.
29
The Sundance Film Festival showed Fast Trip, Long Drop in 1994, and
the video screened at New York and San Francisco lesbian and gay film festivals the
following year,
30
providing access to independent film-oriented publics as well as queer
counterpublics that intersect with AIDS activist counterpublics. In 1995 the video
opened for its first commercial release at the Cinema Village movie theater in New York
City along with Isaac Julien’s The Darker Side of Black (1994), which provided a more
mainstream venue for the video.
31
Despite this broadened distribution, in a 1995
interview with James Meyer, Bordowitz claims that this transfer to a new medium does
not change the fact that “Fast Trip...is television...There’s nothing cinematic about Fast
Trip...except that it’s sometimes viewed on a film screen.”
32
The switching from
character to character, with interruptions in the narrative caused by activist protest
footage, appropriated film and imagery, as well as performances by other actors, replicate
29. Gregg Bordowitz, “More Operative Assumptions,” 250.
30. James Meyer, “Art of Living: Interview with Gregg Bordowitz,” Artforum 33, no. 10 (Summer
1995), http://find.galegroup.com.libproxy.usc.edu/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type
=retrieve&tabID= T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A17239574&source=gale&srcprod= EAIM
&userGroupName =usocal_main&version=1.0 (accessed December 8, 2010).
31. Abby McGanney Nolan, “Double Dare,” Village Voice, Jan. 10, 1995.
32. James Meyer, “Art of Living: Interview with Gregg Bordowitz.”
24
the pacing of an impatient viewer flipping the channels at a rapid pace.
33
While Fast
Trip, Long Drop did get shown on television, at one point airing on the municipally
owned WNYC television station in 1995,
34
the video is also firmly rooted in an art
discourse, as exemplified by its inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s
1995 Biennial. Part of this connection to an art context comes from the performances of
written text Bordowitz brings together in Fast Trip, Long Drop which, as previously
argued, reflect the influence of Robert Smithson’s allegorical use of language.
Alongside these performances of the self, allegory also functions in in Fast Trip,
Long Drop through the parody of the public rhetoric of people living with AIDS as well
as the appropriation of archival footage to perpetuate the thematics of risk and drive. In
his 1980 text, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” Owens
additionally defines allegory as appropriation, which he describes as the process through
which an artist expresses his or her conceptual text through that of another artist’s text
image, video footage, or other medium, much in the way a literary allegory is an
extended metaphor that equates, or replaces, one meaning with another.
35
While
Bordowitz’s performative monologues in Fast Trip, Long Drop borrow from the artist’s
33. Gregg Bordowitz, “More Operative Assumptions,” 255. Bordowitz describes flipping the television
channels rapidly as the inspiration for the structure of Fast Trip, Long Drop, which “is designed to
approximate the experience of cycling through the channels of television in three complete revolutions
during one hour of viewing.”
34. Cynthia Chris, “Documents and Counter-Documents: AIDS Activist Video at the Crossroads,”
Afterimage 22, no. 4 (November 1994): 8n3.
35. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” in Beyond
Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture, Scott Bryson, et.al, ed. (1980; reprint, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), 52-69.
25
written text almost verbatim, the parodies of AIDS activist rhetoric performed by other
actors are exaggerations of the positions of highly visible AIDS activists and/or people
living with AIDS. These performances critique the notion that there is one experience of
AIDS and point out the problematics of adopting testimony as truth.
Andrea Fraser performs the character of Charity Hope-Tolerance (Figure 3), an
upper-middle class white woman whose monologue is based on Mary Fisher’s speech at
the 1992 Republican convention imploring her fellow political compatriots to end the
silence against AIDS. Although Fisher’s speech attempted to link her experience living
with HIV with the struggles of other HIV-positive marginalized groups, the underlying
message was that if she, a privileged, white woman could contract HIV , fighting the
epidemic was now a worthy cause. Charity Hope-Tolerance’s plea, “feel sorry for me”
resonates here as she looks forlornly into the camera, in an attempt to elicit sympathy
based on the fact that she is not a gay man, an intravenous drug user, or a person of color.
Hope-Tolerance adds, “See, I’m not so bad. And if I’m not so bad then those other
people with AIDS - you know who I mean - we can live with them, too. Can’t we?”
Joining Charity Hope-Tolerance are Bordowitz’s reinterpretations of other public
figures living with AIDS, such as the character of Hex Larson standing in for Magic
Johnson and Harry Blamer as poet Larry Kramer. Hex Larson keeps optimistically
26
affirming that he will live a long life despite being HIV-positive while Harry Blamer
angrily chastises the activist community for not making his life better. The use of
characters to represent various positions forces the viewer to examine the ways he or she
may internalize or respond to mainstream media depictions of people with AIDS. In
addition, Bordowitz is illustrating that although these individuals are considered
spokespeople for efforts to end the epidemic, their rhetoric is not universal nor is it free of
problematics.
As an additional visual and thematic allegorical layer, Bordowitz adds
appropriated footage of daredevil stunts that weave in and out of the multiple narratives
on the tape, illustrating the underlying themes of risk and loss of control while
Figure 3. Still from Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993).
Screen shot from http://www.ubu.com/film/bordowitz_fast.html (accessed March 4, 2011).
27
simultaneously reinforcing Bordowitz’s constant awareness his father’s absence.
Bordowitz’s estranged father, Leslie Hugh Harsten, was hit by a truck and a camper as he
was walking away from the jump site where Evel Knievel attempted to fly his Sky-Cycle
over the Snake River Canyon in Shoshone Falls in 1974. The video’s title comes from a
newspaper headline describing this failed attempt. Although only specified in “Dense
Moments,” Bordowitz connects the absence of his father to his desire to have erotic
relationships with men, bringing in a psychoanalytic interpretation of the construction of
identity and the subconscious, which the constant flashing of these images helps to
reinforce.
36
The images depicting driving and movement invoke the metaphor of control,
as one attempts to control the movement through life, while keeping in mind that drive is
the momentum that keeps a person alive and moving forward despite hardship. At one
point a few of Bordowitz’s friends teach him how to drive, a scene dated in the video as
1995, two years after the completion date Fast Trip, Long Drop. Although Bordowitz is
unsure as he familiarizes himself with car, the tone of the scene is light as his instructors
recite scripted kernels of wisdom and he attempts to make a left tern at an intersection
without a signal.
This need for movement, to keep going, also contradicts the fact that time is
inevitably creeping toward death, while Bordowitz consistently returns to the possibility
that he (or anyone) could die in a freak accident, or “get hit by a bus,” much in the way
36. Gregg Bordowitz, “Dense Moments,” 128-129.
28
his father went. When the character of Allesman communicates this very sentiment on
“Thriving With AIDS,” the host replies: “Well, we can only hope.” Although humorous,
this reveals some truth in the idea that an “accident” might be the easier way out than
contending with HIV or AIDS in the long term, a concept which comes full circle at the
end of the tape as the last image the viewer sees is the freeze frame of Bordowitz’s face in
melodramatic alarm before the bus hits.
Writing a fictional text “Which is More Powerful, the World or the Idea” that
shares some of the narrative qualities of Habit (2001), the sequel of Fast Trip, Long
Drop, Bordowitz finishes the story much in the same way his autobiographical
documentaries end:
There is no resolution to this story. The next line remains to be written. The
author is not yet dead. Let’s hope that with word we can conquer what for the
time being we cannot cure; and that the meanings we make in our art do not
dissipate our will to act. There are heights out of reach of words, but no level
reachable without them.
37
Through his critique of AIDS activism from insider’s position, Bordowitz does not
dismiss the importance of engaging in collective struggle, but rather uses the performance
of language to deconstruct the manifestations of these impulses in order to present
various subject positions that balance the needs of the self and those of a larger political
cause.
37. Gregg Bordowitz, "Which is More Powerful, The Word or the Idea?” in The AIDS Crisis is
Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, James Meyer, ed. (2000; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2004), 199.
29
Language is the foundation of Fast Trip, Long Drop, providing the material for
Bordowitz’s embodied performances of various subject positions as well as the basis for
the parodies of AIDS rhetoric. The artist builds upon this foundation by accumulating
appropriated footage and imagery to further fragment the narrative and demonstrate the
shaping of the self and by external narratives. As previously illustrated, Bordowitz’s
writing and video practices become interchangeable as his art practice, following the
1960s artist-writer exemplified by Robert Smithson and theorized by Craig Owens.
Yvonne Rainer’s presence is also clear in Bordowitz’s structure of personal narrative in
dialogue with a broader political discourse of AIDS activism, as well as the non-linear
progression of the story line typical of Rainer’s earlier films. Although Bordowitz and
Adrian Piper are creating these videos around the same time, they approach language
within their videos quite differently, which stems from the different Conceptual models
they employ. Because of her background as a first-generation Conceptual artist greatly
influenced by Sol LeWitt, Piper merges formal concerns with political ideas, creating a
tension between the verbal and visual elements of Cornered. Piper’s approach is unified
where Bordowitz’s is fragmented, yet like Bordowitz she is using the performance of
language to critique visual representation.

30
Chapter 2: Cornered (1988) and the Critique of Visuality
First shown at the John Weber Gallery in 1989, Adrian Piper’s Cornered (1988)
video installation critiques prevalent assumptions about race based on stereotypes of skin
color, ways of speaking, dressing or carrying oneself through the use of a spoken script to
disrupt the visual signifiers associated with these stereotypes. Borrowing from and
expanding upon the arguments contained in her text-based My Calling (Card) #1: A
Reactive Guerilla Performance for Dinners and Cocktail Parties (1986-1990), Piper
investigates the significance of identifying as black in a society that values whiteness,
while using logical reasoning to deconstruct the role visual perception plays in
perpetuating stereotypes of race. Using video for this installation allows Piper to
performatively embody her verbal arguments, while the display of her performance on
tape, which is then played on a monitor, concretizes the strategy of confronting her
audiences using her body as an art object. In this way, Piper’s utterance of language in a
visual work like Cornered becomes self-referential in relation to the art object (her
performative self) much in the way early Conceptual art used text self-referentially, yet
the piece encompasses a larger discourse of anti-racism and the individual’s role within
this discourse.
In the 1960s, Piper introduced text into her visual work as a way of drawing
attention to the concrete properties of time and space on paper. She was especially
31
influenced by the work of Sol LeWitt and his theorization of Conceptual Art in
“Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” (1967) as mentioned in the introduction, because it
freed the artist from medium specificity.
38
One of Piper’s early text-based pieces, Here
and Now (1968) shares a strong resemblance to LeWitt’s Untitled (Red Square, White
Letters) from 1962; in both works the text not only references aesthetic qualities - color
and shape in the case of Untitled and coordinates of the text in Here and Now - but they
bring to the attention of the reader/viewer the artist’s internal processes informing the
visual signifiers while simultaneously illustrating the way in which “reading” the formal
elements of a work creates a tension with the perceived visual elements. Ann Goldstein
argues that Here and Now provides “a critical link to [Piper’s] later work dealing with
objectification related to race, gender and identity,”
39
which as Cornered illustrates,
continues to put stress on the relationship between the verbal and the visual. Piper
locates the turning point in her Conceptual work toward the performative in her
Hypothesis series (1968-1970) in which she documented herself as she moved through
space and time, using photographs and notations on a graph to quantify her behaviors.
40

For the first time, Piper became an object of self-conscious scrutiny, moving her closer to
38. Adrian Piper, “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object,” in Out of Order,
Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992 (1974; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), 29-30.
39. Ann Goldstein, “Adrian Piper,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975 (catalog) (Los
Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 196.
40. Adrian Piper, “Hypothesis,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art
1968-1992 (1992; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 19.
32
her performances as an art object in Catalysis (1970) and Mythic Being (1972-1975)
series.
Unlike LeWitt, who was less interested in the analytical philosophy later
Conceptual artists embraced, Piper began studying philosophy in 1970 at the City
College of New York and later received her doctorate from Harvard University. Although
some artists such as Joseph Kosuth were concerned with art as the subject of
philosophical analysis, Piper’s art continued to move outward from the art object.
Specific events in 1970 – the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the resulting student
protests, as well as the burgeoning Women’s Movement – led Piper to performance and
the beginnings of work dealing with xenophobia. That same year Piper withdrew
Hypothesis from the Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects show at the New York
Cultural Center to protest the invasion of Cambodia, but as she explained to Peter
Kennedy in a 1973 interview, “I just felt that art had become so neutralized and so arcane
that it just had nothing to do with what was going on, and I felt so personally affected by
what was going on that I just felt it was incumbent upon me to change the work in some
way.”
41
Piper wanted to bring her art out of the gallery and into an expanded social
sphere while also using her body as an art object, which she had begun with Hypothesis.
In her Catalysis series Piper confronted strangers in public places in New York City
wearing clothing that had been soaked in vinegar, eggs, milk and cod liver oil for a week
41. Peter Kennedy, Other Than Art’ s Sake, DVD (1973).
33
or with a bath towel stuffed in her mouth until her cheeks bulged out, consciously making
her person abject to elicit a reaction from those around her. As the Mythic Being Piper
performed in drag as an African-American man, moving through public spaces while
reciting portions of her journal repeatedly as a mantra. These performances created a
tension between self and other, with Piper altering what was visually perceived by others
and simultaneously using internal language-based systems like the mantras in her Mythic
Being series to stay connected to the self underneath.
By the 1980s, Piper explicitly addressed racism and xenophobia in her art.
Although vastly different from the political moment of the 1970s, U.S. foreign
interventionism continued into the next decade, most notably in South America, and in
1986 the Iran-Contra scandal was exposed. Domestically, the Reagan administration
followed by the election of George H.W. Bush in 1988, made drastic cuts to social
services like welfare that targeted poor people of color while also attacking affirmative
action policies in a backlash against multiculturalism. In reaction to oppressive U.S.
policies of the late 1960s and 1970s, Piper had relocated her art practice away from the
gallery, but by the 1980s her work brought the subject matter of racism and xenophobia
back into the white cube. Coinciding with a move toward institutional critique in the art
world at this time, Piper’s placement of video installations like Cornered in the gallery or
34
museum illustrates a prevalent conception of the art world as a reflection of larger social
and political forces.
Encountering Cornered in a gallery or museum (Figure 4), one is confronted with
Piper’s image within a monitor. The monitor itself is backed into a corner by an
overturned table. For the entirety of the video’s single cut, the artist sits at a table with her
hands clasped, dressed in what she describes as a “bourgie, junior miss,” style,
complete with pearls.
42
On screen, Piper sits with her back to the corner of the room that
matches the corner of the room outside of the monitor. Piper has even made sure the part
42. Adrian Piper, “Cornered,” Balcon 4 (1989): 123. These descriptions are written in the style of stage
directions preceding the script.
Figure 4. Adrian Piper, Cornered (1988). Photo source: http://library.artstor.org
(accessed March 4, 2011).
35
of her hair lines up with both of these corners, reflecting a continued adherence to
formalism in conjunction with her political conceptual concerns.
43
On the walls on either
side of the video monitor are her father’s birth certificates, one labeling him as white, the
other as “octoroon.”
44
The birth certificates illustrate the way in which language has the
power to determine specific yet arbitrary racial categories that are the result of a social
construction of race, a point which Piper reemphasizes in the monologue she performs in
the video.
Piper begins with the statement, “I’m black.” After a pause she proceeds with a
discussion of how both she and viewer must deal with this “social fact” together. The
monologue continues with “Maybe you think it’s just my problem, and that I should just
deal with it myself. But it’s not just my problem. It’s our problem.”
45
Multiple people
may experience Cornered simultaneously in a museum or gallery, but piece’s strength is
the illusion that a viewer is engaging in a one-on-one interaction with the artist. This
comes mainly from Piper’s direct address to “you” that is made specific through the
varied and particular assumptions Piper makes as to the reactions or preconceived notions
of the viewer. Piper’s use of “I” also makes the situation personal, while the mere fact
that the argument is performed and embodied further solidifies this feeling despite the
43. Interview with Dale Jamieson in Adrian Piper: What Follows, DVD (Boulder, University of
Colorado, Boulder, 1989).
44. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an offensive term first seen in Vanity Fair in 1859 that
means “a person who is by descent seven-eighths white and one-eighth black.”
45. Adrian Piper, “Cornered: A Video Installation Project,” in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985,
Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, eds. (1992; reprint, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 182.
36
mediation of the video screen.
When Piper states “I’m black” on tape, she repeats the opening text printed on the
cards she use for My Calling (Card) #1: A Reactive Guerilla Performance for Dinners
and Cocktail Parties (Figure 5). These reactive guerilla performances occur when
someone makes, laughs at or agrees with a racist remark in a social situation such as a
dinner party, thinking no people of color are present. At such a point Piper hands the
individual who has made this faux pas a piece of paper the size of a business card which
reads:
Dear Friend,
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with
that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my racial
identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as
pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume
that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no
black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you
regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.
Sincerely yours,
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

As Piper explains in My Calling (Card) #1 and #2: A Metaperformance (1987), she
identifies as black but “I clearly don’t look that way.”
46
This card serves as one solution
to a dilemma that she faces in social situations when others assume she is white. Does she
46. Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #1 and #2: A Metaperformance, DVD (1987). In the
metaperformance that was filmed at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, Piper explained her individual
reactive guerilla performances for My Calling (Card) #1 and #2 and then engaged in a collaborative,
performative critique with her audience about the works.
37
announce that she is black at the beginning of the social event or have a friend casually
mention it beforehand? By handing someone My Calling (Card) #1 in person, Piper’s
presence creates what she refers to as a visual “dissonance” with the statement that she is
black, yet the polite tone of the text also creates a cognitive dissonance between the
shaming message and its delivery. Norms of etiquette are extremely important for Piper
because if anything, she believes they make life and that of others more bearable, ideally
rendering her reactive performances of handing out calling cards less of an imperative.
47

Similarly, in Cornered Piper’s tone throughout the monologue remains quiet and
measured as she addresses her viewers, yet many reviews, although primarily those in
mainstream newspapers, have specifically criticized this mode of address as patronizing.
47. Interview with Dale Jamieson in Adrian Piper: What Follows, DVD (Boulder, University of
Colorado, Boulder, 1989).
Figure 5. Adrian Piper, My Calling Card #1 (1986-1990). Photo source:
http://library.artstor.org (accessed March 4, 2011)
38
In a 1990 Art in America article Ken Johnson writes of a “calm but vaguely scolding
manner that makes you feel like a school kid who got caught misbehaving.”
48
However,
Maurice Berger has a different take, likening Piper’s politeness to Frantz Fanon’s
interpretation of Algerian women’s reclaiming of the veil as an act of resistance and
camouflage during the country’s fight for independence from France. He writes, “With
her polite and genteel manner and her ‘white‘ skin, she smuggles bombs past the
protective barricades of racism.”
49
In a way, Piper’s performance is a game of logic that
corners her viewers just as much as she is cornered by the racial conventions of this
country that insist upon the binary of black and white.
In this artwork and in her My Calling (Card) #1 performances, Piper utilizes
herself as a performing subject to provide a concrete example how how racism functions
in relation to perceived visual difference. According to Piper, “Racism is a visual
pathology, feeding on sociological characteristics and so-called racial groupings only by
interference and conceptual presupposition. Primarily it is an anxiety response to the
perceived difference of a visually unfamiliar ‘other.’”
50
In some ways this seems like an
over-simplification of the role specific histories play in the construction of meanings in
relation to visual signifiers of difference, but as Kobena Mercer makes clear in his
48. Ken Johnson, “Being and Politics,” Art in America (September 1990): 156.
49. Maurice Berger, “Black Skin, White Masks: Adrian Piper and the Politics of Viewing,” in How Art
Becomes History: Essays on Art, Society, and Culture in Post-New Deal America (New York: Icon
Editions, 1992), 107.
50. Maurice Berger, “Interview with Adrian Piper,” in Art, Activism & Oppositionality: Essays from
Afterimage, Grant Kester, ed. (1990; reprint, Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 228.
39
analysis of Cornered, Piper’s statement of identity functions less as a personal disclosure
and rather as a larger “critique of visuality” that reflects the continuing influence of early
Conceptualism in her work. He argues that “Her words undercut the assumption that the
matter of blackness can be reliably or truthfully apprehended through vision alone,”
51

hence the need for verbal argumentation.
For her argumentative strategy in Cornered, Piper brings in hypothetical
responses on the part of her audience in order to logically refute them. This style of
argumentation reflects Piper’s Kantian scholarship that insists on a rational critique of
empiricism. She describes philosophy as “a matter of discursiveness and using words
and language and logical structures,” in comparison to visual art which she sees as “more
intuitive than verbal.”
52
Yet with Cornered, Piper effectively merges the discursiveness
of argument and the intuition of visual perception in order to create a tension between the
verbally performed script and Piper’s presentation of herself as an art object.
As an example of Piper’s style of refutation, the artist proposes that some viewers
may think that she is “making an unnecessary fuss,” about her identity, to which the artist
responds, “this type of thinking presupposes the belief that it’s inherently better to be
identified as white. It bespeaks an inability to imagine or recognize the intrinsic value of
being black.”
53
Piper explains that she thinks passing for white is an expression of these
51. Kobena Mercer, “Decentering and Recentering: Adrian Piper’s Spheres of Influence,” in Adrian
Piper: A Retrospective, Maurice Berger, ed. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1999), 48.
52. Interview with Dale Jamieson, What Follows (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado, Boulder, 1989.
53. Adrian Piper, “Cornered A Video Installation Project,” 182.
40
“sick values,” and negates her family’s history. Hypotheticals like these are culled from
reactions to Piper’s previous works to provide Piper with guidance. In a 1992 interview
Piper explains that her work is collaborative in this way because “When I hear responses,
I know what I have to do next, what I have to assimilate into the work, and what then has
to be overcome in the next work.”
54
Such collaboration through the incorporation of
feedback from previous works focusing on similar subject matter functions discursively
much in the way Michael Warner describes the formation of publics through the reflexive
circulation of written texts, which allows Cornered to circulate beyond its site of display.
An example of this reflexivity can be seen in the portions of the script for
Cornered that correspond with Barbara Barr’s “Reply to Piper” submitted to Women
Artists News in 1987 in response to a paper Piper presented at the WCA Politics of
Identity panel in Boston that same year. Barr criticizes Piper for identifying as black and
compares Piper’s assertion to someone claiming Chinese ancestry because of a single
Chinese great grandfather, adding, “come off it honey, you’re as ‘white’ as I am.”
55
By
dismissing Piper’s ancestry, Barr suggests that it is preferable to pass as white rather than
grapple with what identifying as black means. Barr’s solution to “the Problem of Race in
America” is to reverse traditional conventions and simply label anyone with any amount
of white ancestry as white, making the small amount of black individuals who are left “an
54. Laura Cottingham, “Adrian Piper,” Journal of Contemporary Art 5, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 93.
55. Barbara Barr, “Reply to Piper,” Women Artists News 12, no. 2 (June 1987): 6.
41
exotic novelty, feted and adored, as they used to be in France.”
56
Of course, fetishizing
African-Americans is not an ethical solution to the problem of racism; it only replaces
one form of discrimination with another while leaving the binary of black/white intact.
Reversing Barr’s suggestion for solving the problem of race in the United States,
Piper puts forth the argument that viewers who consider themselves to be “certifiably
white” mostly likely have five to twenty percent black ancestry.
57
As Piper points out,
historically in the United States, anyone with any amount of African-American ancestry
was classified as black, and based on this logic, that would mean that most individuals in
this country who consider themselves white, are in fact, black. Once Piper has proposed
that nobody is unquestionably white, she asks her viewers about what they will do based
on this knowledge:
Are you going to research your family ancestry, to find out whether you’re among
the white “elite”? Or whether perhaps a mistake has been made, and you and your
family are, after all, among the black majority?...Or are you going to do no
research, indeed nothing at all about your black ancestry? Are you going to just
pass out of this room, after this videotape is over - or perhaps even before - and
into your socially preordained future?
58
Piper provides many more hypothetical courses of action one might take, but it is more
important that the viewer have a catalytic experience as a result of these provocations,
and that the jolt from such a confrontation first leads to altered thinking and behavior. She
56. Barbara Barr, “Reply to Piper,” Women Artists News 12, no. 2 (June 1987): 6.
57. Adrian Piper, “Cornered: A Video Installation Project,” 184.
58. Ibid., 185.
42
adds, “let’s at least be clear about one thing: This is not an empty academic exercise.
This is real. And it has everything to do with you.” As the video fades to black the words,
“WELCOME TO THE STRUGGLE,” appear.
Throughout the monologue in Cornered, Piper deconstructs the rigid racial
categories of white and black, which seems like a poststructuralist move, yet the artist
vehemently opposes post-structuralism, going so far as to call it a plot,
the perfect ideology to promote if you want to co-opt women and people of color
and deny them access to the potent tools of rationality and objectivity. Whereas
rationality and objectivity empower us to see clearly and plan strategically,
poststructuralist discourses not only deconstruct so-called authoritative texts, they
also deconstruct themselves.
59
From her position, post-structuralism renders the messages of marginalized groups
impotent when deconstruction complicates and fragments arguments to the point of
inaccessibility. Pitting deconstruction against objectivity in this way, Piper suggests that
a post-structuralist use of language undermines the possibility of universal truth, which
she argues is crucial for convincingly presenting racism as inherently wrong.
60
However,
as Maurice Berger points out in his 1990 interview with the artist, post-colonial studies
influenced by post-structuralism have been instrumental in putting critical pressure on
Eurocentric epistemologies, including post-structuralism, that have marginalized people
of color from academic discourses.
61
In contrast, it seems almost contradictory to employ
59. Maurice Berger, “Interview with Adrian Piper,” 221.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
43
Kantian philosophy to interrogate racism, especially in regard to his theorization of
aesthetics, but Piper argues that although she is not as concerned with the philosopher’s
theories of aesthetics but rather his first Critique of Pure Reason, “Kant’s attempts to
isolate for purpose of analysis certain cognitive and affective features that all human
beings have in common is not intrinsically offensive. Purity is not the same as elitism,
and universality is not the same as hegemony.”
62

Piper’s rejection of post-structuralism and embrace of Kant’s universality contrast
starkly with Bordowitz’s postmodern view of the subject, which is reflected in the
multiple personas he performs in Fast Trip, Long Drop. Piper performs in Cornered as a
single subject, yet she uses logical argumentation to deconstruct assumptions of race
based on visual perception. Despite these very different positions of the self, Fast Trip,
Long Drop and Cornered both feature performed language prominently and in their
separate ways, present critiques the visual perpetuation of stereotypes. In this way, these
video-based works by Piper and Bordowitz are linked by the struggle to change the way
in which visual language functions through the intervention of verbal language.

62. Maurice Berger, “Interview with Adrian Piper,” 226.
44
Conclusion
Benjamin Buchloh has argued that Conceptual art of the 1960s, despite its best
efforts to alter the “specular regime” of Modernism only existed as a blip on the art
historical trajectory, with a return in the 1980s to a “decade of a rather violent restoration
of traditional artistic forms and procedures of production.”
63
Although he suggests a
backlash against Conceptual strategies, the focus on language remains in video-based
works such as Gregg Bordowitz’s Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) and Adrian Piper’s
Cornered (1988). There is a reinstatement of the visual in each artist’s performative
embodiment of their written texts on video, but these performances depend on their
verbal components as their structural foundations.
For both artists the use of language in Fast Trip, Long Drop and Cornered is
about communicating ideas that move beyond the art object, yet language does not
represent a transparent system of meaning but one that complicates and confronts.
Bordowitz materializes the literary qualities of his writing through multiple performances
of the self in Fast Trip, Long Drop and Piper uses herself as a performing art object
whose spoken argument deconstructs visual pathologies of racism in Cornered. Each is
resisting essentialism by bringing the verbal into the visual realm but from very different
political and philosophical positions. Taking a postmodern approach, language constructs
63. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the
Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter, 1990): 145.
45
subjectivity and resists an underlying truth of the subject in Fast Trip, Long Drop, while
employment of language in direct argument in Cornered, although resisting racial
essentialism, suggests an objective truth of anti-racism that Piper is working to prove
through a rational process of deduction. As she performs, Piper takes on a direct,
confrontational approach despite her polite tone, which becomes overwhelming as she
corners her audience with logic. Bordowitz’s many subject positions in Fast Trip, Long
Drop are also overwhelming because of the abundance of positions that weave in and out
of the narrative at a rapid pace. These examinations of the self through performance in
relation to other images and footage interspersed throughout the video also point to the
struggle between the needs of the self in relation to a larger political goal. Piper’s
concentration on the interpersonal puts a heavy emphasis on the self in interactions with
others as the starting point for larger social change. These videos are also made with very
different publics in mind; Piper is primarily addressing members of an art public that may
not be receptive to her messages, but Bordowitz tends to be more interested in engaging
with counterpublics of people with AIDS and AIDS activists, as his video acts as a
critique of many of the strategies of representation put forth by these groups to counter
mass media representations.
What links these practices ultimately is a similar turn toward poetic world-
making, bringing the tools of language into the visual field in order to critique
problematic systems of verbal and visual representation. Looking at these practices over
46
ten years later, art that overtly questions, prods, and asks its viewers to reexamine their
own political positions in relation to the larger social and cultural sphere continues to be
relevant for disrupting hegemonic power structures within and without the art world.
Chantal Mouffe describes our current neoliberal moment as stemming from the Clinton/
Blair era of the 1990s that focused on “third way” consensus politics between left and
right political camps.
64
She argues that an emphasis on rational consensus has destroyed
the agonism that has previously been an essential aspect of liberal democracies. Most
importantly, an emphasis on rational consensus has destroyed the presence of a radical,
progressive politics and ideologies of freedom of choice carried over from earlier forms
of liberalism have morphed into a hyper-commodification of identity and lifestyle.
Although these videos are somewhat historical, the political issues each artist
raises in their works continue to be relevant today. For countries such as South Africa,
incidence of HIV and AIDS are at epidemic levels and basic drugs are priced
prohibitively for a large portion of the country’s population. Gregg Bordowitz’s most
recent autobiographical documentary, Habit (2001) grapples with the discomfort of his
privilege as a citizen of the United States and the desire to act in solidarity with activists
in South Africa. While recognizing that there is no perfect resolution to this disparity, he
still insists that “the AIDS Crisis is still beginning.”
65
Piper continues to use her art to
64. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2005).
65. Gregg Bordowitz, “My Postmodernism,” in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings
1986-2003, James Meyer, ed. (2003; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 239.
47
challenge dominant perceptions of race and deconstruct the categories we create in order
to corner others based on racist and xenophobic preconceptions. Although the use of the
term “post-racial” by certain members of the mainstream media to describe Barack
Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and subsequent election erroneously suggests that
we have moved beyond our country’s sordid history of racial oppression, racism
undoubtedly continues to permeate larger structural institutions in this country and affect
social relations on an interpersonal level. For this reason, critical art like Piper’s that
challenges the assumed complacency of a “post-racial” society continues to be relevant
over ten years later.
In his 2000 review of Cornered in Piper’s New Museum retrospective that same
year, Ken Johnson asks, “Is anyone really awakened from moral somnolence? Tweaked,
certainly; but truly and deeply changed?”
66
By looking for immediate, concrete results,
Johnson misses the point of the video installation and feeds into an overly pragmatic
desire to quantify the repercussions of a political statement, in an art context or other
discipline. Catalysis cannot be measured empirically, but is more about gradually
chipping away at interpersonal manifestations of racism and xenophobia that have the
potential to create larger structural changes in the long run. Mouffe points out that we
must not fall into the trap of naively believing that art works such as these can single-
handedly alter hegemonic structures, but she adds, “this is not a reason to proclaim that
66. Ken Johnson, “Art Review; Adrian Piper,” The New York Times (Novermber 17, 2000), http://
www.nytimes.com (accessed Decemer 22, 2010).
48
their political role has ended. They still can play an important role in the hegemonic
struggle by subverting the dominant hegemony and by contributing to the construction of
new subjectivities.”
67
By taking part in the agonistic struggle for change through written
and video-based discourse, the future has the potential to change s a result of these
artists’ critical contributions and those of artists that follow their lead.
67. Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas,
Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 5.
49
Bibliography
Atkins, Robert. “Fast Trip, Long View: Talking to Gregg Bordowitz.” Artery: The AIDS-
Arts Journal (2000), http://www.artistswithaids.org/artery/artist/artist_index.html
(accessed December 23, 2010).
Barr, Barbara, “Reply to Piper.” Women Artists News 12, no. 2 (June 1987): 6.
Berger, Maurice. “Black Skin, White Masks: Adrian Piper and the Politics of
Viewing.” In How Art Becomes History: Essays on Art, Society, and Culture
in Post-New Deal America. New York, N.Y .: Icon Editions, 1992. 93-113.
———. “Interview with Adrian Piper.” In Art, Activism & Oppositionality: Essays
from Afterimage. Grant Kester, ed. 1990. Reprint, Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998. 215-231.
Bordowitz, Gregg. “Dense Moments.” In The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other
Writings 1986-2003. James Meyer, ed. 1994. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2004. 113-140.
———. “More Operative Assumptions” In The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other
Writings 1986-2003. James Meyer, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
241-294.
———. “My Postmodernism.” In The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings
1986-2003. James Meyer, ed. 2003. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
241-294.
———. “Which is More Powerful: The World or the Idea?” In The AIDS Crisis is
Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003. James Meyer, ed. 2000. Reprint,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 241-294.
50
Bordowitz, Gregg and Yvonne Rainer. “Fragments of a Conversation.” In Drive: The
AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning: a Collection of Essays, Dialogues, and Texts
Surrounding Gregg Bordowitz's Films Fast Trip, Long Drop, and Habit, and His
Exhibition Drive, Held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, April
6-July 7, 2003. WhiteWalls 46 (2002): 52-58.
Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions.” October 55 (Winter, 1990):
105-143.
Chris, Cynthia. “Documents and Counter-Documents: AIDS Activist Video at the
Crossroads.” Afterimage 22, no. 4 (November 1994): 6-8.
Cottingham, Laura. “Adrian Piper.” Journal of Contemporary Art 5, no. 1 (Spring
1992): 88-136.
Crimp, Douglas. “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic.” October 43 AIDS:
Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Winter 1987): 237-271.
Goldstein, Ann. “Adrian Piper.” In Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975 (catalog).
Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995. 196-199.
Horrigan, Bill. “One-Way Street.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 1, no.3
(1994): 365-369.
Johnson, Ken. “Being and Politics.” Art in America (September 1990): 156.
LeWitt, Sol. “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Artforum (Summer 1967): 79-83.
Mercer, Kobena. “Decentering and Recentering: Adrian Piper’s Spheres of Influence.”
In Adrian Piper: A Retrospective. Maurice Berger, ed. New York: Distributed Art
Publishers, 1999. 46-59.
Meyer, James. “Art of Living: Interview with Filmmaker Gregg Bordowitz.” Artforum
33, no. 10 (Summer 1995) http://find.galegroup.com. libproxy.usc.edu/gtx/
infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type =retrieve&tabID=
T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A17239574&source=gale&srcprod= EAIM &user
Group Name =usocal_main&version=1.0 (accessed December 8, 2010).
51
Mouffe, Chantal. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art & Research: A Journal
of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 1-5.
———. The Democratic Paradox. New York: Verso, 2005.
Owens, Craig. “Earthwords.” In Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and
Culture. Scott Bryson, et.al, eds. 1979. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992. 40-51.
———. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” In Beyond
Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture. Scott Bryson, et.al, eds. 1980.
Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 52-69.
Piper, Adrian. “Cornered.” Balcon 4 (1989): 122-135.
———. “Cornered: A Video Installation Project.” In Theory in Contemporary Art Since
1985. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, eds. 1992. Reprint, Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2005. 182-186.
———. “Hypothesis.” In Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in
Meta-Art 1968-1992. 1992. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. 19-23.
———. “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object.” In Out of
Order, Out of Sight Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992. 1974.
Reprint , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. 3-8.
Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” In Publics and Counterpublics. New
York: Zone Books, 2005. 65-124.
Watney, Simon. Policing Desire: AIDS, Pornography, and the Media. Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1987.

Asset Metadata

Creator Barr, Zemula (author)

Core Title Embodiment of text after conceptualism: Language and video in Fast trip, long drop (1993) and Cornered (1988)

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/03/2011

Defense Date 05/13/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Adrian Piper,AIDS activism,anti-racism,conceptual art,Gregg Bordowitz,language art,OAI-PMH Harvest,performativity,video art,video installation

Language English

Advisor Decter, Joshua (committee chair), Anastas, Rhea (committee member), Kotz, Liz (committee member)

Creator Email zbarr@usc.edu,zemula.barr@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3845

Unique identifier UC1202902

Identifier etd-Barr-4544 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-456119 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3845 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Barr-4544.pdf

Dmrecord 456119

Document Type Thesis

Rights Barr, Zemula

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email uscdl@usc.edu

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Gregg Bordowitz’s Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) and Adrian Piper’s Cornered video installation from 1988. Heavily influenced by early Conceptual Art, both Piper and Bordowitz bring language into the aesthetic realm as a means of complicating visual representation and its meanings. Bordowitz employs the literary strategies of fragmented narrative and allegory to disrupt heroic depictions of people with AIDS used by the activist movement that flatten individual subjectivities for the sake of coalition. Piper deconstructs visual signifiers of race through the performance of logical argumentation, which creates a dissonant relationship between the language she speaks and her visual performance as an art object. Both artists’ use of video to embody these texts allows for the affective performance of written texts, moving the Conceptual discourse away from the art object to the self in relation to the broader social and political discourses of AIDS activism and anti-racism.