Kobena Mercer, 'Witness at the Crossroads: An Artist's Journey in Post-Colonial Space', In: Keith Piper: Relocating the Remains. Edited by David Chandler. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1997, pp. 13-19.
To enter one of Keith Piper's installations is to immerse one's eyes and ears in a rich sensorium of light, sound and space. Words cast in neon are refracted through pools of water in Long Journey (1995) to evoke the voyages which brought African ancestors into their modern geography of dispersal. Haunting soundscapes are emitted from roughly-hewn shipping crates in Trade Winds (1992), creating acoustic depth beneath the image of recurring waves on the video screens. In one of his key works, A Ship Called Jesus (1991), materials as wide-ranging as photographs from the family album and apocalyptic fragments of Biblical text are drawn into a narrative of epic historical sweep - moving from England's first slave trading voyage in 1564 to the politics of the Black Protestant Church - which carves out the contemplative space of sombre lucidity where the violence of the past can be remembered and made sense of differently.
In the light of his deeply-held interest in history as a political problem of memory and representation , Piper's view of the futural possibilities of new technologies offers an exploration of cyberspace that is critically wired by the diaspora experiences of migration and dislocation. In The Exploded City (1994) the utopian promises of virtual reality, in which access to free flows of information seem to imply an expanded realm of citizenship and social mobility, are called into question by the increasing fragmentation of the contemporary metropolis. Whether in Los Angeles or London, Piper observes a process in which:
The entrenchment of privilege and poverty [has] not only created a dangerously volatile underclass, but also a disjuncture between the language systems with which these dislocated communities conceptualise the world around them. [3]
What distinguishes Piper's use of the digital multi-media is his reflexive approach to the questions of power and knowledge intrinsic to the use of such visual technologies in surveillance and policing strategies that seek social control over the burgeoning chaos of urban space.
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Relocating the Remains invites further travels into the imaginative spaces interconnected by the 'mood of restlessness' which characterises Piper's work. Evoking this phrase in his account of an expressive and cognitive standpoint characteristic of the vernacular cultures of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy observes that it arises from a transformative capacity in which:
What was initially felt to be ... the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile ... is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical insights about the modern world become more likely. [4]
On this view, Keith Piper can be seen as a history painter of the Black Atlantic; uniquely placed at the crossroads between the postmodern and the post-colonial. He is a history painter not on account of his chosen medium - for he is happy to migrate from banner-like paintings, mobile sculptures and photographic image-text, to site-specific public art, computer-generated animation, multi-monitor video installations and the occasional essay - but on account of the insights wrought from his agile standpoint that consistently returns to representation as a site of struggle over how the past is made sense of by the present. Refusing to flinch from the vexed question of our troubled relationship to the memories, myths and narratives that constitute the collective past, Piper introduces a diasporic approach to history not as a grand narrative of progress, in which an abstract idea awaits fulfilment of its inevitable disappointment, but as an errant wandering of bodies and lives passing thorough worldly accidents and material circumstances with a view to seizing the chance to make themselves anew.
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Able to point-and-click across his oeuvre to date, one can fast-forward or rewind to discover Piper's unique artistic standpoint on politics and history, which is consistent precisely because it is neither rigid nor dogmatic but because it is in constant dialogue with the fluidity of rapid change. Tracing some of the routes that have led to his defining concerns by looking at the cut-and-mix strategies of his earliest work, we can see how Piper not only connects with the visual traditions of the Black Atlantic, but produced a hybrid form of visual métissage out of the competing versions of postmodernism in Black Art and Pop Art, and thus opened a third way under specifically black British conditions.
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[3] Keith Piper, 'Babel Revisited', In The Exploded City, exhibition catalogue (London: Centre 181 Gallery, 1994), p. 5
[4] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 111