1Of the many objects in Adrian Piper’s expansive and multi-media oeuvre, one of the most frequently reproduced is a silver gelatin print titled I Embody (1975). This portrait of a face of indeterminate gender or race, turned so the subject’s gaze warily meets the viewer’s, is accompanied by a speech bubble, rendered in a ghostly white that reads, “I embody everything you most hate and fear” (Piper 1996, 138). I Embody is almost completely overdrawn in oil crayon, and it is difficult to resolve whether the photographed or drawn elements predominate in the picture. Drawing together formal and identitarian ambiguities with a deictic phrase that addresses the viewer directly, I Embody gestures past the spectator, toward the very structure of signification around the fabrications of race and gender as they come into being through social relation.

2I Embody is just one instance of Piper’s many investigations into what Jörg Heiser characterizes as “fundamental questions of how perceptions, emotions, and actions are regulated and connected to the self.” It is also part of the multi-media project The Mythic Being, executed between the fall of 1973 and summer 1975, the only series in Piper’s expansive oeuvre in which Piper, through a drag persona, overtly and specifically thematizes gender (Heiser 2018). In search of a new perspective both on her own past, and on her relationship to the art world, Piper developed a male-gendered avatar through which to undertake a series of performances that resulted in a corpus of photographically-based ephemera. Of the many time-based, photographically-documented works that Piper executed in the early seventies, The Mythic Being consists of the most variegated range of media, including two sets of public performances and at least seven series of altered photographs, including a seventeen-part serial published in a local newspaper, as well as I Embody, the only non-serial altered photograph in the project.

3Piper’s regular use of deictics throughout the project resonates in a range of ways across the series from the philosophically contemplative (“the original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self…is a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances…”) to the diaristic (“no matter how much I ask my mother to stop buying crackers, cookies, and things, she does anyway…”) (Piper 1996, 110). But the images from the series most frequently displayed tend to be those that strike the most assertive tones, a selective redistribution of images that has been underway for as long as people have written about the project. In a 1976 landmark collection of essays on feminist art, Lucy Lippard reprinted a 1972 interview with Piper about her 1970 Catalysis performances, but ran the text alongside the 1975 I Embody, thus conflating two series premised on distinct sets of inquiries in a way that makes Piper’s early creative practice seem more confrontational than it is (Lippard 1976, 167-171). Another instance in which The Mythic Being is repurposed to interpretative ends that contravene the overarching themes of the series as a whole is the selective circulation of frames from I am the Locus #1-5 (1975), a five-image series of overdrawn photographs of Piper dressed as Mythic Being crossing a busy intersection. Text superimposed across the series reads, “I am the locus of consciousness / surrounded and constrained / by animate physical objects / with moist, fleshy, pulsating surfaces… / get out of my way, asshole”. Like other series in the project, I am the Locus #1-5 evokes a slightly differently ambiguous consciousness in each frame that is presented as one five-part thought of a subject of undecidable race and gender navigating their context. And yet the final frame is often circulated on its own, both as a synecdoche for this series, and for the Mythic Being project as a whole, such that this aggressive speech becomes indexed to a body taken not on its own, or through a series of nuanced and variegated utterances, but instead through this one phrase and frame.

4The sparingly selective circulation of just a few of the many images from The Mythic Being scaffold a persistent dehiscence at the core of the scholarship on The Mythic Being, in which the gender and race of Piper and the Mythic Being are disciplined in ways that support particular arguments about the work. For some, Piper is understood as a woman who takes up bad drag that fails to enable her to pass as male, but allows her to pass as either Black or white – a reading that renders The Mythic Being a “performance of her inability to inhabit norms of race or gender” (Bowles 2011, 232). For other scholars Piper does efficaciously pass through drag; the figure of the Mythic Being is read as “unavoidably black and male,” and these arguments, often staged alongside the most confrontationally-toned images from the series, assert that a robust politics can be found in The Mythic Being’s reflection of viewers’ own xenophobic investments, especially with regards to anti-Black racism (McMillan 2015, 136).

5The vast majority of scholarship argues both positions at once, asserting in the same text both significatory mobility, and an ontological fixity, or a decided lack of mobility in the nature of the Being’s being. When read as a woman, Piper is also situated as someone who passes racially for Black and for white, but such readings tend to forego a close reading of the project, focusing instead on Piper being at once herself and the Mythic Being. When read as a man, Piper as the Mythic Being is read as Black through a select few objects in ways that are also staked on a foreclosure of Piper’s ability to pass racially.

6Yet I want to suggest that such readings are inherently self-contradictory. It is no more possible to arrest Piper’s avatar’s race than it is its gender; if either is understood to come into being relationally, both must be. To read this work as definitive in the assessment of one category but mobile in that of the other constitutes a misreading that relies on contradictory understandings of the knowability and fixity of the race and gender of both Piper and of her Mythic Being avatar. It also turns both on selective selection, and on misreadings, of the constitutive objects of the project. The Mythic Being is also frequently read as an early term in the elaboration of postmodern representational strategies that join undecidability with spectatorial engagement to complete the meaning of the work, leaving the presence and specifics of a politics to the eye of the beholder; but the eye must behold the series as a whole, and when taken on the whole, The Mythic Being is far more multivalent than any single frame can contain.

7To find a politics in the series, we need not further discipline the race and gender of a body at an already fraught and over-scrutinized juncture. Cherise Smith, Uri McMillan, and Taviya Nyong’o have made visible the historically-elided indebtedness of postmodernism to a Black and feminist genealogy in the articulation of a politics in spite of long-held disciplinary reticence. In reading the Being as a Black man against indicators that trouble stable gender or racial assignation, they have also demonstrated how this concatenation of signifiers called Black masculinity, that “key site of ideological representation…upon which the nation’s crisis comes to be dramatized, demonized, and dealt with” is routinely read in ways that are both incommensurate to subjectivity, and preclude it. (Mercer 1992, 18).

8In what follows, I ask what might become visible if we deracinate the object itself from the disciplining regimes of binaries that the work seems to evade at every turn. Kobena Mercer has asserted that we do not yet have the methodological tools to effectively grapple with The Mythic Being (Mercer 2018) but, on the contrary, I want to suggest that such tools do indeed exist. In the first section, I embark on a close reading to suggest that The Mythic Being engages in social address that challenges delineations between artist, object, and spectator and that there is substantial politics at these junctures that can be found within the discipline of art history. Other disciplines offer relief as well. Taviya Nyong’o opens the door to a critical speculative approach by thinking The Mythic Being alongside Melvin Van Peebles’ Brer Soul as two “fictional individuals” who span the divide between the Black radical tradition and a contemporary LGBTQ context (Nyong’o 2019, 76). While Nyong’o is ultimately engaged in the potentialities of funk music, I strike off in a different direction, taking up Nyong’o’s citation of C. Riley Snorton’s concept of the “transversal body”, which “iterates across various avatars and instances,” as a spur to consider the fundamental fungibility of the categories of race and gender (Nyong’o 2019, 83). By understanding them not as pre-ontological – as antedating knowledge and thus immovable by it – but rather as socially constructed and historically specific, I mobilize a trans methodology to surface the political potentialities that arise if we refrain from disciplining the body in question. Ultimately, I demonstrate that The Mythic Being offers a politics not of confrontation (as is regularly asserted) but of coalition, born of the same relationality as those of the aesthetics on which this project so heavily relies.

9This is an archaeology in both the Foucauldian sense of “a methodology that uncovers how the past’s epistemic structure is shaped by rules and regulations that variously affect its discursive production,” as Jacques Khalip characterizes it, and in Khalip’s own approach to archaeology as a set of “excavations” that “break down rather than document” to discover “fragments that pulse in excess of” an image that also spur new forms of knowledge production (Khalip 2010, 11). In indexing a range of forms of passing and not passing – whether as failing on attempt, or in the absence of an attempt – I offer a way of seeing beings both mythic and real as they enter, depart, or hover in the passages of this queried space of gender and racial undecidability that has historically stymied attempts to read the bodies and objects in question. This archaeology, then, seeks to inhabit and describe ways to learn from an object whose very subject might not be a subject at all, but rather a concatenation of unsettled, undecidable, or ambivalent conditions of signification that oscillate into and out of view, depending on who is doing that looking, and when, and under what conditions.

Reading Being

10In the summer of 1973, Piper began to describe the contours of a project she was referring to as “The Persona.” From its inception, the notes that would eventually become The Mythic Being were an effort by Piper to distance herself from her personal history; perhaps consequently, the notes enunciated themes of alienation and withdrawal. At the center of her imaginary was an avatar that, by late August, included a “short auburn wig,” was keyed to gendered crossing – “I should be in DRAG, dressed as a boy” – and which could go to art world events as a “pure spectator,” passing unnoticed where Piper as herself would have been recognized (Piper 1996, 102). On each public excursion in this disguise, Piper repeated aloud phrases she called mantras culled from the text of her adolescent journals; her stated intent in doing so was to disarticulate each phrase from the affective registers of the associated memory (Piper 1996). In repeating these memories until they “scatter into myth”, as McMillan characterized the early performances in the series, Piper sought to “transcend the limits of herself” (McMillan 2015, 87).

11In one early photograph from the project, the Mythic Being occupies the bottom left corner of a frame mostly comprised by a bedsheet scrim, a white thought bubble collaged above his head. The image looks like a black and white comic strip square due both to its layout, and to the high contrast between black and white within. Piper would subsequently duplicate this image, inscribing the thought bubble with a different mantra each time, and publish each image in a seventeen-run serial in the galleries section of the Village Voice classified ads between October 1973 and February 1975. The text in each catalogs a different intellectual or affective register; the viewer who would have encountered the frame while looking to see what was on in the art world was not privy to details about who this figure was, or whence their consciousness.

12While Piper’s initial outing as the Mythic Being to art world events seems to be undocumented, she captures him several subsequent times in a range of contexts, whether indoors, doing things like dancing and yoga, or in public, in one instance performing a fake mugging of a white male counterpart, or simply sitting on low steps in another. Yet within a few months of beginning the project, haunting gallery openings and classified ads alike, Piper grew concerned that her drag persona had become familiar to those others who regularly circulated through the art world, and so curtailed her public outings as him until after she relocated to Cambridge to begin doctoral work in philosophy at Harvard.

13Piper understands the Mythic Being as gendered drag from early on, and though early attempts to describe her disguise include lipstick and low heels, the attire she eventually gathers together to become him is markedly more masculine. To be dressed in drag seems to offer her a permission structure through which to explore masculine stereotypes that she herself holds, and she describes with surprised delight feeling more sexual and aggressive (Piper 1996). Piper’s remarks on this subject have been cited by John P. Bowles as grounds for reading The Mythic Being through a language of sexual deviation, as though because the drag is bad, Piper is never not female-gendered, and so the desire she expresses for women must be queer desire (Bowles 2011). Yet Piper’s notes across her early journals describe an unquestioned and unwavering heterosexuality that is nowhere more articulately enforced than in the context of the Mythic Being. Her exploration of sexual desire through him is not, I want to suggest, a vehicle through which she can explore queer desire. Rather, her masculine becoming is born alongside a heightened sexual attunement toward women, while she describes a change in her feelings towards men in well-worn terms that are familiar tropes predicated on a borderline phobic absence of queer desire (Piper 1996). In other words, because the Mythic Being is male, his objects of desire follow logically to Piper as female. This indexing of heteronormative desire to a binary gender crossing is perhaps the only stable identification that Piper maintains.

14While the social construction of race is often discussed as a key motivation for developing The Mythic Being, any understanding of this series as trafficking in a clear, stable, and singular understanding of the racialized body are belied by two interviews of Piper by Lippard that bookend the project. In the first, from 1972, Lippard asks Piper directly about whether her explorations of power in her work are related to being a woman or being Black, and while Piper responds with concerted attention to the topic of gender, she is decidedly silent in response to Lippard’s direct prompting about race (Lippard 1976). In the second interview – which is undated, but refers to The Mythic Being in the past tense – Piper says the project gave her a heightened sense of her subject position as “a nonwhite (but not obviously black) member of society” (Lippard, undated). This transition in Piper’s thinking on the relationship between her work and race over the course of the multi-year execution of The Mythic Being is also evidenced in I/You (Her) (1974), a ten photograph-long series and part of The Mythic Being project in which Piper turns gradually into the Mythic Being through overdrawing on photographic prints. It thus becomes not only possible, but necessary, to see The Mythic Being – the only work in her oeuvre to expressly take up gendered passing – as both presenting and performing the contingent nature of subjectivity and signification, and the perpetual becoming, that persist for Piper at the very core of being and knowing.

Myth Reading

15Like other time-based projects in the sixties and early seventies made outside of the traditional gallery system, the audience for The Mythic Being was not yet there, making it an object without the spectator to confirm or complete its meaning (Nyong’o 2019). The art critical establishment was also not yet there for work like this; the late sixties and early seventies is marked by a nascent but still inchoate shift toward postmodernism. Piper’s artistic practice cannot be disarticulated from her philosophical career, throughout which Piper has primarily focused on the work of Immanuel Kant. The Kantian formulation for thinking the entrance of an object into the episteme, das Ding-an-sich, supposes a pre-ontological category that is separate from, but opaque to, the knowledge production that is a function of how the object appears to a subject. In this account of objecthood, das Ding precedes – and, therefore, exceeds – our ability to grasp it. As myriad critiques of analytic philosophy have demonstrated, trouble quickly arises in any attempt to distinguish between an object and its perception, and yet such delineation has regularly enabled the reification of systems of knowledge that categorize bodies as a way of explaining not only the order of things in a given culture, but also the immutability of that order or those categories.

16As the art historical conversation around Piper has evolved, scholars have taken greater interest in the bearing of her scholarly practice on her art, which often investigated Kantian ethics. It is perhaps from what seems like a fundamental tension between her philosophical work (which takes Kantian ethics seriously) and her art (which seems at times to take as its very subject the contravention of Kantian aesthetics) that the inclination to fix the Mythic Being’s legibility through the terms of Black masculinity may have first arisen as a pre-ontological surface upon which to argue for the presence of a politics. The assumptions that undergird Robert Storr’s troubling assertion that Piper in The Mythic Being “impersonated a hip black man with afro and attitude” (Storr 1996, xx) are the same assumptions that enable Maurice Berger’s statement that Piper “provokes the white viewer into confronting and analyzing personal and mostly unselfconscious attitudes about race and difference” (Berger 1999, 15). While Storr’s comments are as insupportable today as they were when he made them, the same logic of racial fixity that spurs something in the viewer undergirding both Storr’s and Berger’s work has been broadly perpetuated in Piper scholarship; as recently at 2018, Darby English has argued that Piper seeks to “alter other people’s behavior by challenging their reflexive biases” by presenting a legibly Black body to them (Williams 2018).

17The aforementioned series I/You (Her) (1974) is a study in the contravention of any settled racialization in The Mythic Being. I/You (Her) consists of ten prints of the same photograph of Piper and a friend, accompanied by a thought bubble whose text gives an exacting account of Piper’s affective reaction to an ostensible betrayal by the other figure in the frame. Over the course of the series, Piper gradually overdraws on her image in gouache and tempera until her visage has become the Mythic Being’s: her facial contours have gradually become more shadowed over the course of the series, and a moustache, cigarette, and sunglasses appear, transforming Piper’s face into that of the Being and his costumed accoutrements, his tightly curled, short hair partially obscuring the face of the other subject. These overdrawn elements enable a reading of the figure as having a darker complexion than that of Piper when the series begins; taken as a single, excised term, the final frame makes it proportionately more plausible to read the Being as Black. Yet even taken alone, the particular racialized contours of this body are profoundly ambivalent; the final frame invites nuanced and slippery understanding of the relationship between form and content in the series, with the racialized terms and tones just one among a set of contingent and debatable identifications. This same argument can be made for I am the Locus #1-5, a five-images series whose final frame, which reads “get out of my way, asshole” is regularly circulated to support a reading related to the mechanics of gendered racism that is not available – is even perhaps undermined by – a focus on any other single term from the series, and the series as a whole.

18While arguments made along these lines necessarily avoid a close reading, they also echo one of the closest readings of the project, offered by Cherise Smith and concerning Cruising White Women (1975). In this three-image series of nearly identical photos, the Mythic Being sits on low steps smoking a cigarette, a second subject seated to his left, on the obverse side of the camera, the only variations across the frames the cast of passers-by and slight changes in the orientation of the Mythic Being’s face. The Mythic Being’s self-presentation is, as in other unaltered photographs, ambiguously raced and gendered to the uninitiated, including students and colleagues and conference-goers in both the US and Europe to whom I have shown this work repeatedly over several years. Taken from Piper’s right, the Mythic Being’s face is shown in profile accentuated by the presence of a second figure seated to the left.

19Smith secures Piper’s gender as authentically female by reading the Mythic Being as incorrectly or insufficiently male to situate Piper in a genealogy of predominately women-identified artists who used performance to negotiate the terms through which their subject positions were freighted or constrained. Smith begins her reading by locating traces of masculinity on the body of the Mythic Being, then turns to the second subject, on whose form, though partially obscured, she finds comparatively more evidence thereof. She then leverages this to debunk by comparison the masculinity of the Mythic Being, who is revealed, through detailed analysis of “small feet”, “light manner”, and other signals of purportedly natural femininity, to be “not a man at all” (Smith 2011, 27). Later in the same essay, Smith turns to other parts of the project to argue that The Mythic Being constitutes a performative intervention into stereotypical representations of Black masculinity by making viewers “responsible for retrieving and activating the stereotype.” These two readings of this project stake out the concurrent arguments regularly made about The Mythic Being that rely on different constellations of gendered markers that fundamentally contravene one another, undermining both arguments and yet demonstrating the incredible stakes of this work: made in the early seventies, as certain elements within US culture were awakening to the rich interrelations and contingencies of raced and gendered identification, The Mythic Being was and remains a crucial and early term through which to find a politics of racialized and gendered difference in US visual culture; it also, however, continues to teach us how far we still have to go in being able to think the terms of identification and perception in ways commensurate to how they work both for and against the lived experiences of being marginalized, and multiply so.

20The politics of Black hair figure considerably into conversations about a racialized politics of minoritization, and also surface in the critical discourse around The Mythic Being. Piper first refers to her avatar’s hair as an Afro in 1974. But her first note on the Mythic Being’s race does not come until a year later, in 1975, when she indexes him not to Blackness, but to a “third-world, working-class, overtly hostile” masculinity (Piper 1996, 147). As Smith, Bowles, and others have noted, by the 1970s the Afro’s historically specific denotation of a Black Power politics had become more broadly connotative of affiliation with a leftist, third-world politics that drew anti-imperial, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist positions together with labor solidarity across the various subject positions that comprise people of the global racial majority. Early in her career, Piper’s political affiliations were primarily with the Art Worker’s Coalition, a group grounded in labor solidarity and greater inclusion of non-white and male artists in the museum and gallery system, while she makes clear in interviews, including the aforementioned with Lippard, that she is thinking through a feminist critique of politics. It seems possible that Piper’s initial alignment of the project with a third-world politics tracks the evolution of Piper’s own thinking about race alongside the shifting stakes of left progressive politics in the US at the close of the twentieth century. Following this logic, her subsequent articulation of the work as aligned with a racialized politics of Blackness also places her in ongoing solidarity with the theory and praxis of sustaining of Black life in spite of white dominant efforts to regulate and extinguish it that now predominates over transnational solidarities. It is also entirely plausible, however, that gradual realignment is less political than it is a condition of what Williams characterizes as Piper’s “cynical” relationship to race, which Darby English suggests Piper takes up, like so many other signifying regimes in her practice, as “fully an art move” (Williams 2018).

21In suggesting that some of the fraught and political themes in Piper’s work be understood as “art moves,” English gestures towards the ways in which the art of social address enables a relational grappling perhaps not possible in politics qua politics. Yet in other ways those same structures are reproduced critically – if for effect – in hyper-sexualized readings of the Being’s form. McMillan’s, for example, reads like a race-baiting, true-crime thriller about a flasher terrorizing Manhattan and Cambridge: “you may have seen him. … cruising for white women. You may have gazed at his various acouterments [sic] – and, hardest to avoid, his protruding genitalia. Your immediate reaction may have been intrigue, or attraction, or revulsion. … Perhaps you desired to flee…” (McMillan 2015, 85). The phrase “protruding genitalia” is particularly striking to someone familiar with The Mythic Being, where there are few reading indicators of a decidedly binary gender, and even fewer indications of what genitalia might be present to expose.

22McMillan’s comment derives from Piper’s own notes on the series in which she articulates a change in her physical carriage when in drag, including sitting with legs spread to accommodate “protruding genitalia,” a projected shift in her self-conception that she imagines her avatar would have (Piper 1996, 118). To read the work as though this is a material change perceptible to viewers, however, conditions the politics of The Mythic Being on the work as unambivalently indexed to Black masculinity, and the myriad and ongoing ways in which Black bodies have been disciplined physically, epistemologically, and ontologically as foils against which to secure the continued elaboration of white-dominant culture. Thelma Golden describes the stakes of the visual politics of this cultural condition in her essay “My Brother”, written on the occasion of her groundbreaking exhibition Black Male at the Whitney in 1994, in which she argues that “‘postmodernism’s deep and ambivalent fascination’ with the bodies of black men” is nowhere more in evidence than in the work of Mapplethorpe, whose Black Book and its subsequent reception is held up by Golden as illustrative of “the fear of black masculinity and more specifically of the lust and loathing of the big, black dick” (Golden 1994, 31). Joining a hyper-scrutinized, racialized narrative of spectation with the deictic “you,” McMillan performs this paradox to interpellate the reader as complicit in the reification of racist spectatorial regimes that continue to secure whiteness through the domination of Black masculinity.

23Yet to turn from McMillan’s description to The Mythic Being itself is to see a work almost unrecognizable through the terms McMillan sets forth. There is no protruding genitalia; when the Mythic Being lingers in Harvard Square he looks small and ambivalent, and in certain frames he is also distinctly Piper herself, as in a documentary by Peter Kennedy that includes footage of Piper getting into drag and traversing the streets of New York repeating one of her diaristic mantras. Though in this instance the presence of a camera following the Being clearly marked the performance out as a spectacle, on his own he appeared unremarkable, possibly even unremarked upon. Rather, in this case, it was the mantra, which was evident nonsense, that marked out the body through audible, public illogicality, while performing no significatory labor with regards to the settling of the Being’s resolutely unsettled race or gender.

Reading Relation

24The Mythic Being is a key early term in a genealogy of art that explores the social construction of difference, and queries the often specious divide between art and politics. Yet the broadly fungible and postmodern terms undergirding The Mythic Being conflict with readings that rely on a fixed understanding of the Mythic Being’s race and gender. To interpret the figure of the Mythic Being as infinitely or permanently undecidable in race or gender risks sacrificing a coherent politics. Yet to index the politics of the work to a fixity of meaning – a claim that there is a concrete, singular race or gender for the figure – is also a troubled claim here, requiring a selective reading of the series rather than a fulsome consideration of the series in its entirety.

25The Mythic Being works a juncture between fixity and fungibility whose relationship to politics is productively understood through the framework of social address, which has a long-standing relationship to the politics of identity in the visual culture of the US. Stephanie Sparling Williams traces social address to nineteenth century “strategies for survival and self-determination” deployed by formerly enslaved Americans of African descent by “speaking out of turn” to expose and disrupt the operations of power (Sparling Williams 2021). A near correlate in Black resistive strategies is articulated by C. Riley Snorton, who works at the intersection of Blackness and transness to demonstrate that “gender indefiniteness” has been “a critical modality of political and cultural maneuvering” as evidenced by “the frequency with which narratives of fugitivity included cross-gendered modes of escape. Spillers named this process “ungendering,” the not-accidental coincident of “fungible” in the twilight of formal slavery – also described as the transition from slavery to freedom or from slaving economies to the free market” (Snorton 2017, 56). Distinctly, Jonathan D. Katz demonstrates how art of the AIDS crisis explicitly involved the viewer in the completion of the work’s meaning as part of a vast array of different projects that packaged a queer virality in a postmodern aesthetic that non-queer artists would carry forward.

26While in many cases (especially those that circulated during and after the AIDS crisis) social address took the form of participatory work that included instruction for how exhibitors and viewers were to aid in completing the work (Felix Gonzalez-Torres) or text-based works that frequently deployed deictics (Barbara Kruger), Piper’s social address is more in keeping with Black and feminist artists of that same period who metabolized both promises and failures of the Civil Rights movement by placing their bodies within the frame to make the work about the relationship between subject and object, artist and spectator. The politics in such a strategy are in the relationship between the work – which is also a subject – and its spectator; in a recognition of difference that avoids differential valuation of the constitutive parts. For Piper, ungendering and gender indefiniteness are not an undecidable condition of being that makes racism less visible. They are fungible, fugitive modes of survival that enable a subject to persist in relation to another – in relation to others – from which position one might choose or need to pass at one point or speak out of turn at another, and also to be heard by others who might do the same. The Mythic Being, then, instantiates a multi-dimensional set of ever-shifting relations between the object and work, thus offering in their multiple relationalities a more dimensional, complex set of politics that hews more closely to a lived or real politics of relation than any fixity of identification within the work does.

27One challenge of locating a politics in social address – inherently coalitional given its relational nature, and not only accommodating but indeed presuming difference – might be explained in part by its condition as a genealogy that cuts across different forms of difference. Katz sheds light on one possible genesis of this lacuna in the scholarship when he argues that our ability to understand the deep personal investments of art of the AIDS crisis was profoundly impoverished when gay artists working in a postmodern vernacular died of AIDS: “once so many authors had died their double deaths, figurative and literal, few remained to punctuate that expedient silence” (Katz 2016, 37). The gap identified by Katz is just one of many historical gaps we are only just beginning to fill in which the political valences of social address in art only become visible through historical, speculative, or radical archival practices that both take minoritized lives seriously, and make space for forms of representation that cannot be fixed through, or affixed to, a singularity.

28In The Mythic Being, Piper is in search of a way to circulate in ways that evade detection; the work thus demands an interpretative practice that can respond to the contingent opacities and visibilities therein. It bears repeating that Piper begins this project to disperse formative memories and experiences so that she might move on from or without them, and to transcend the various boundaries that arise between herself and the social. Dispersion is one strategy for negotiating boundaries; drag is another way of thinking not only among genders (or beyond gender), but also between and across communities, national citizenship, and other forms of belonging (Manalansan 2003). Drag operates through an aesthetics of relation, its texture coming alive through performance that circulates through the absurdities of campy failure. Smith emphasizes that drag is not about passing, but serves instead to “highlight the simulacral, relish overstatement, and draw attention to the performative attributes of identity” (Smith 2011, 14). Nyong’o also points to the failure at the heart of drag to argue that The Mythic Being is a “disjunctive synthesis in which a virtual male body would be birthed and split off from her actual female body” such that “masculinity becomes a kind of vocation or career” (Nyong’o 2019, 91). The Mythic Being is, then, an enactment of a failure to achieve coherence as male or female, Black or white. In performatively failing to cohere or assimilate to the social expectation of those binary terms, the project instead gestures, frame by frame, toward the overdetermined nature, and radical contingency, of these critical categories.

Undisciplined Being

29A myth is “a traditional story” that “embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something” (OED). Myth both tells and foretells; it is a narrative drawn from the past that, in its persistence, informs the future, as in the biblical telling of wars that give rise to rumors that give rise to more wars. The myth of the US, as scholars including Jennifer Morgan, Saidiya Hartmann, Christina Sharpe and others have demonstrated powerfully, is fundamentally rooted in stories we have told ourselves about race and gender to justify the ongoing domination of white masculinity over all other ways of being, and at particular expense to Black lives. Piper takes up a mythic form in pursuit of freedom from the constraints of these foundational national myths, but the failure inherent in drag and the nonsensical utterances that accompany her performances are themselves a performance of the mythic or unattainable nature of the wish at the heart of the project. An unattainable myth also lies at the heart of the critical aspiration to make a realpolitik of the project; Piper’s work does not have the capacity to, for example, “alter other people’s behavior by challenging their reflexive biases” (Williams 2018); but it makes some of us want for that to be possible; for it to be that simple. We who are interpellated by this work find ourselves in that position because we are in on and conversant in its conceit.

30The Mythic Being functions neither through overt confrontation, nor covertly through some pre-ontological understanding of the infinitely mobile structure of signification, but rather through coalition politics that gathers those who already understand its racialized implications together with those who already understand its gendered tones, while soliciting the comprehension of those who are primed to do so. These images address the viewer who may occupy any nexus of subject positions, who is looking for something that speaks to them, offering them a perspective they can also step into and, in this particular cultural context, gives them a sense that they understand something about the way that race and gender both are structured and function in their culture, however they define it.

31To see these politics as coalition means we need not discipline this body to understand the political potentiality in this work. If Piper can be at once herself and the Mythic Being, gendered female and male, Black and white, the ordering systems used to distinguish between and among these designations are undermined from the start, not only exposing but indeed performing the false dichotomies that structure the social, and exposing both the absurdity and fungibility of where lines are drawn, and the absurdity and the danger of how they are made to mean. The Mythic Being is neither a performance of an overtly political anti-racism, nor a demonstration of the futility of such efforts but, in the tradition of Black feminist performance art of direct address, ultimately proffers a politics of relationality between two terms: the artist/object, and the viewing subject.

32Piper’s evolving racial designations for the Mythic Being evidence this assertion. Her initial notes on the piece track a broader disenchantment of the left with public protest as a means to effect change, and situate the piece in relation to other cutting-edge performance work in art by others. Piper specifically names Vito Acconci, who was also putting his body to work in his art to investigate the political potentiality of relational aesthetics, and discussing his work as an attempt to challenge the operations of power by testing in a range of ways the finitude of his own white male body (Piper 1996). Piper’s subsequent racialization of the Mythic Being as “third-world” pointed toward a broadly anti-imperial, post-colonial politics in the seventies. Yet as a consequence of the shifting terms of what Gary Y. Okihiro, following Michael Omi and Howard Winant, calls racial formation – the ways in which the racial categorization of bodies and sociopolitical conditions are mutually constituted and therefore historically specific – Piper would, by the nineties, come to assign Blackness to the Mythic Being to maintain an alignment of the historical project with terms that were relevant to a contemporary politics of liberation (Okihiro 2016).

33Fred Moten has proposed that, for Piper, “it’s not about overcoming xenophobia; it’s about living with it” (Moten 2018, 122-123). Piper’s investigation into how to live with xenophobia concomitantly proposes that this phobic impulse is not born of the consciously social – is learned and therefore can be unlearned – but is born with the notion of the subject as though inexorably intertwined with the hyphen that separates das Ding from an sich while simultaneously spanning and connecting them. Moten tacitly acknowledges the culpability of analytic philosophy in a way that leaves room for a much more expansive critique of other lines of ontological inquiry when he asks, “what if the problem is the very idea of the self, its separateness, where the xenophobic comes inexorably online?” (Moten 2018, 122).

34The Mythic Being stymies the forms of knowledge production that facilitate the xenophobic by presenting a body that is multiply ambivalent but ineluctably present, public, and available for a range of interpretation. That accounts of Piper as both herself and the Being insist on settling into these disciplining regimes both point to, and expose the mechanics of, their operations. The myth that consequently becomes scattered is neither precisely or exclusively that of Piper’s personal history, nor of the formations that are superimposed onto her body as a consequence of gendered racism, but also – perhaps instead – that of these systems of knowledge production, which produce new knowledge at all.

35We know from archival and literary accounts of raced and gendered passing that it can be strategy for survival or persistence, or – or and simultaneously – one to gain access to what one might not otherwise have. Piper variably passes for white and passes for Black; in creating work made in part to pass by institutional constraints, she passes and fails to pass in gendered ways as the Mythic Being. Meanwhile he certainly passes in complex and raced ways that exceed any binary determination, and critics and scholars tend to pass by segments of the project in support of different kinds of passing and not passing that contravene one another. Passing often comes at a cost; while there are important differences between, histories of, and implications for racial and gendered passing, both presume a binary that Piper, both as a subject on her own and in relation to the Mythic Being, cannot readily be mapped through, and to which neither she nor the Mythic Being seem to willingly accede. These are the terms of this archaeology of passage, which makes it less rather than more possible to see a coherent subject in either figure represented in The Mythic Being, insofar as a distinction between Piper and the Being can even be made. In undisciplining that body, it becomes proportionately more possible to see how meaning is made relationally, and to find in that production a new politics for this art. By the time Piper is finished being Being, he remains only as a trace in the material precipitates that are the residue of the performance, while she turns more fully toward engaging racialization to a degree previously unforeseen in her practice.

36Yet another definition of myth stages it as “that imaginative ordering of experience which helps … the person giving it assent to enjoy or endure life and to accept death” (OED). In recent years, Piper has written two obituaries, for Okwui Enwezor in 2019, and Maurice Berger in 2020, both key figures in her personal history who were also key terms in the elaboration of contemporary art. Treatises to individuals who were keenly insightful about the subtleties of her work and the often-violent conditions with which racial and gender difference from white masculinity are constituted and perpetuated, both obituaries could be minorly altered to be about the Mythic Being, a male-gendered figure who was an insider’s outsider; an operator in a highly policed realm who passed under (if not entirely un-) noticed and saw from this peculiarly privileged position the usually invisible striations of power and difference.

37We might think of the particular flavor of liminality embodied by the Mythic Being as form of mythic being, all lower case, that is once a condition of minoritization and, at the same time, a strategy for survival and, at still other times, both at once. Piper’s contemporaneous accounts of The Mythic Being first described the work as an exercise in seeking a way to work through her affective relationship to her own history as constituted through formative interpersonal relationships. In such a context, “what to do about” xenophobia becomes an individual working through, pushing against, or surfacing of the texture of the social construction of subjectivity that is both individual and relational, where narrative and form gain traction as politics only as a consequence of spectation. We might also take a note from a more recent series of augmented photographs by Piper in which the faces of others are smeared or crossed out, leaving behind a blank in the pictorial surface across which the phrase “everything will be taken away” is written in roughly typed face, offering a coda on the mutability and contingent legibility of race and gendered bodies that Piper opens up at the start of her career in The Mythic Being. How we become ourselves is also how we become, in Judith Butler’s words, undone by others (Butler 2004). But these doings and undoings come into being only after – and, therefore, only as a condition of – acquired knowledge, and thus can also, always, be taken away.