Throughout the content of this essay I am going to be concentrating on Adrian Piper and Oreet Ashery who have both focused on their bodies as a means to pinpoint alternative models of representation that address gender and race. As well as this I will be discussing to what extent both artists resist the discourse of western patriarchal society.
Piper, aged 67, was born in New York on 20th September 1948 and is an American Conceptual Artist and Philosopher. She campaigned for social change and women’s equal rights justice with the influence of Immanuel Kant—a German philosopher. I will be looking closely at Piper’s influences throughout this essay (McCormick, n.d.). Her work addresses ostracism, otherness, racial ‘passing’ and racism. She began …show more content…
She creates a completely different identity and focuses all her work on constructing the way she performs and portrays that particular character. Although she focuses on nature and context, she also looks at the complexities of culture, religion, gender, and sex. One of the main characters she takes on as an identity is her ‘alter-ego’ fictional Jewish male, Marcus Fisher. She has taken Fisher on as an alternative personality meaning that she has taken on a complete gender divide; on the surface she is a woman but mostly dressing as a male. In Dancing with men—one of Ashery’s most famous and very treacherous acts—she uses her orthodox identity of Fisher, dressing in traditional black clothing, strapping up her breasts and producing a full beard to fit into a festival full of thousands of men called Lag Ba’Omer. Although this site-specific performance art was extremely dangerous, she had been preparing her identity of Fisher for five years prior to this invention, meaning she was well prepared. Ashery writes:
For the first time I choose to go to a place where ‘Marcus’ “fits” in. The feeling was tremendous; the high I felt whilst dancing and being accepted by those men was indescribable, a true connection, belonging and a sense of history and home. (Ashery, 2009,
Piper, aged 67, was born in New York on 20th September 1948 and is an American Conceptual Artist and Philosopher. She campaigned for social change and women’s equal rights justice with the influence of Immanuel Kant—a German philosopher. I will be looking closely at Piper’s influences throughout this essay (McCormick, n.d.). Her work addresses ostracism, otherness, racial ‘passing’ and racism. She began …show more content…
She creates a completely different identity and focuses all her work on constructing the way she performs and portrays that particular character. Although she focuses on nature and context, she also looks at the complexities of culture, religion, gender, and sex. One of the main characters she takes on as an identity is her ‘alter-ego’ fictional Jewish male, Marcus Fisher. She has taken Fisher on as an alternative personality meaning that she has taken on a complete gender divide; on the surface she is a woman but mostly dressing as a male. In Dancing with men—one of Ashery’s most famous and very treacherous acts—she uses her orthodox identity of Fisher, dressing in traditional black clothing, strapping up her breasts and producing a full beard to fit into a festival full of thousands of men called Lag Ba’Omer. Although this site-specific performance art was extremely dangerous, she had been preparing her identity of Fisher for five years prior to this invention, meaning she was well prepared. Ashery writes:
For the first time I choose to go to a place where ‘Marcus’ “fits” in. The feeling was tremendous; the high I felt whilst dancing and being accepted by those men was indescribable, a true connection, belonging and a sense of history and home. (Ashery, 2009,