Rohini Malik, 'Keith Piper: Relocating the Remains'
In: Keith Piper: Relocating the Remains; exhibition leaflet. Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition re-presenting the artist's work in three new interactive installations, curated and produced by the Institute of International Visual Arts, held at the Royal College of Art, London from 18 July - 13 August 1997.
Through its richly textured and highly evocative environments, Relocating the Remains offers the viewer a challenging sensory journey into the work and ideas of Keith Piper. Strongly committed to questioning and subverting dominant notions of race, nation and history and exploring the enigmas of identity and difference, Piper has, over the past fifteen years, powerfully interpreted the iniquities of black diaspora experience and has engaged with the ambiguous interplays of power and resistance.
Unlike a conventional retrospective, Relocating the Remains does not contain works which follow a linear progression. In this exhibition, earlier works are revisited as part of a living, evolving body of ideas, and selected fragments and details are relocated within these new installations. The structure of the exhibition echoes the manner in which Piper himself works: past and present are intimately related and history forms part of a present that is continually being redefined. By coming to terms with the memories, myths and narratives that make up our collective past, Piper suggests, the present can be more easily negotiated.
Resonant with echoes of submerged histories, fragmented bodies, snatches of dialogue and strains of music, the work we see here is fluid yet disruptive, like water which has been recently disturbed. Through juxtaposition, layering and cacophony of texts and voices, Piper has effectively cut, mixed and fused a variety of images and media bestowing his work with a fluidity and mobility that never allows it to become completely fixed and encourages a multiplicity of readings. The interactive nature of Piper's work facilitates a genuine dialogue with his audience, and the viewer is engaged and implicated in various questions and challenges. The image of the open palm, which Piper frequently invokes, suggests a desire to reveal, to open up and be open to, as well as a willingness to communicate.
In the installations presented here, Piper revisits a number of themes which have informed his practice during the past ten years. UnRecorded Histories examines gaps and omissions in the historical legacies of colonialism, revealing fragments of hidden narratives and exploring the relationships between personal memory and political events. UnClassified investigates the impact of new technologies on surveillance and policing in the modern city, and questions the wider implications of classification and collecting on the labelling and control of identities and on definitions of 'belonging'. Another Arena recreates the stadium and presents the spectacle of sport as a terrain where definitions of race and nation are contested. The body of the black athlete, it is suggested, may temporarily become a vehicle for national aspirations.
Using strategies of reclamation and revelation, Piper presents us with evocative points of departure; open-ended transitory moments rather than coherent solutions or prescriptive certainties, and challenges us to encounter what may previously have been unacknowledged or inaccessible.
UnRecorded Histories
The artist invites us to enter a darkened space where we encounter an antique desk standing on an ornate carpet before a network of screens. Having conjured up an illusion of authority and officialdom, Piper proceeds to subvert this by encouraging the viewer to select fragments from a number of works which deal with the gaps in 'authoritative' and 'official' histories. In this way, he offers up the possibility of a personal reclamation of the past in the face of dislocation and loss. Through the works he has relocated in this installation, Piper asks us to explore the ways in which personal identities may be liberated from the constraints imposed on them by narratives of history and tradition.
In A Ship Called Jesus (1991), materials as wide ranging as photographs taken from the family album and apocalyptic fragments of Biblical texts are juxtaposed through a narrative which explores three particular historical phases in the relationship between peoples of the African diaspora and the institution of the Christian Church, moving from England's first slave-trading voyage in 1564 to the politics of the Black Protestant Church. At certain points an attempt is made to problematise this relationship while at other moments it is celebrated, and Christianity is invoked as both an enslaving force and a source of collective resistance.
Episodes from Trade Winds (1992) may also be called up here, as further narratives are woven into the texture of the environment in which we find ourselves immersed. As submerged remnants gradually resurface, Piper explores the colonisation and commodification of the black body and acknowledges the historical relationship between imperial expansion and the development of the industrial base of the British economy. Countering the notion that history is a coherent, sequential narrative, the artist reconstructs the past as a series of overlapping and recurring visual and textual fragments which include segments of bodies, and barely decipherable hand-written inscriptions which only hint at their sinister origins as the log books of slave ships, invoices and bills for the sale of human cargo.
Evoking the resonances of lived experience in the form of a father-son conversation, Go West Young Man (1987) reconstructs the historical in terms of the personal. Through the charting of a journey, Piper investigates the contradictory ways in which personal definitions of identity are influenced by historically imposed stereotypes.
UnClassified
The shelves stacked high with numerous boxes containing various items and articles suggest the process of classification and collection, and create an atmosphere of order and control, a sense of boxing things up and then labelling them, for purposes of identification. In this installation, viewers can interact with several of Piper's works which interrogate questions of access and control, investigate the impact of new technologies on policing and surveillance and critically explore the realm of cyberspace.
Surveillances: Tagging the Other (1992) and The Exploded City (1994) challenge the notion that the city is an environment characterised by diversity, freedom and limitless possibility. Rather, Piper portrays the city as an arena of terror and confinement presided over by technologies of surveillance and control. He draws our attention to the segregating discourses of safety, civility, and the maintenance of order, and highlights the use of new technologies in perpetuating societal divisions and visually identifying those who 'do not belong'.
Piper expresses an ambivalent attitude towards digital technologies. In his own practice, he has utilised the computer as a powerful and evocative tool for manipulating and subverting dominant discourses. However, the encoding of visual information onto computer files is seen as highly problematic in other contexts. The ongoing power of the photographic image to fix and categorise, to criminalise and name as 'other' is, the artist believes, expanded upon and amplified through the integration of photography with new computer technologies, especially when operated by those in control of boundaries of exclusion. When identification becomes a form of control, as at international borders, the power of vision, of visibly identifying someone as not belonging and not being welcome, emerges as a central strategy.
Dispelling the myths which promote cyberspace as a utopian realm equally accessible to all, the artist invites the viewer to navigate a journey, answering questions and encountering raging various obstacles along the way.
While rigorously interrogating new technologies and problematising questions of access, this installation also evokes a fascination with the activities of collecting and classifying. Perhaps Piper is suggesting a link between current strategies of identification, grounded in rendering 'the other' visible, and the practices of nineteenth-century anthropologists who constructed hierarchies of difference based on the obsessive measuring, observing and filing of faces and bodies and the collection and display of empirical 'data'.
Another Arena
Entering the stadium, we become enmeshed in the spectacle, engaged in dialogues about contests of territory and definitions of national identity. Here these dialogues are interpreted through the metaphor of sport and the inscription of the body of the black athlete as a vehicle for national aspirations. Through a reworking of The Nation's Finest (1991), Piper suggests that the sports stadium is an arena of both enfranchisement and enclosure. Within this arena, acknowledgement of the black sportsperson's athletic prowess is tainted by the belief that this power lies in an innate genetic order. Speed and strength are perceived as God-given gifts rather than skills cultivated through the intense discipline of rigorous training.
The artist is suggesting that black athletes may temporarily come to symbolise the hopes and desires of the nation and may momentarily be worshipped as national heroes. However, this bestowal of acclaim is constrained by a sense of fascination with the black body, reverberating with echoes of the 'exotic', which still insist on rendering it as 'other'. As well as exploring the spectacle of race and nation as enacted within the stadium, Piper has made a number of works which present the boxing ring as an arena across which these narratives are played out. Transgressive Acts (1993) and Four Corners (1995) examine the shifting parameters within which prevailing perceptions of black masculinity have come to be defined over progressive decades. By evoking the personas of various boxing icons, Piper exposes the roped-off canvas square as a site of political struggle where identities and visibilities are contested.
In his evocation of Muhammad Ali, the artist suggests that while the boxer's brash persona and humour rendered him highly marketable, his declaration of political and cultural realignment with the Nation of Islam radically altered the public's perception of him. The 1965 fight between Muhammad Ali and Floyd Patterson became, Piper tells, a symbolic battle between the renegade and the respectable, the Muslim and the Christian, and the East and the West. Ali's public refusal to be drafted to fight in Vietnam and the subsequent stripping of his title turned him into a martyr and a symbol of opposition.
Cargo Cultures
The two bodies solemnly encased in lightboxes seem to encapsulate a number of themes explored by Keith Piper in this exhibition. They suggest the commodification of the body and the classification of identities, but also hint at the transportation and transformation of meaningful fragments.
In these installations Piper has innovatively reclaimed evocative moments and resonant fragments from earlier works. At the same time, he has created new and provocative environments in which we as viewers are actively immersed. Through encountering the works we become engaged in numerous questioning and revelatory dialogues which will resonate long after our visit to the exhibition.