Adrian Piper: Out of Order, Out of Sight, 2 vols.

Adrian Piper's career as an artist, writer, and philosopher has spanned some of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. The last thirty years have borne witness to the breakdown of old certainties as those previously denied representation emerged, through independence struggles all over Africa and black activist movements in the West, to question values and beliefs previously held to be universal, even transcendental.

Piper has been quietly at the center of this maelstrom, not simply because she has been its witness, but because she has experienced the core of its ambivalence - what Frantz Fanon once described as the "morphological equation" and what she, as a black woman who can "pass" for white, has called the "gray experience." In the 1987 essay "Flying," she writes, "I am the racist's nightmare, the obscenity of miscegenation. lama reminder that segregation is impotent; a living embodiment of sexual desire that penetrates racial barriers and reproduces itself." Her selected writings, Out of Order, Out of Sight, are a remarkable and unique testament of an artist's struggle to map and understand the complex and shifting nature of identity over the last three decades: the first volume contains the analyses, notes, and reflections that accompanied the development of Piper's work, writings she called "meta-art"; the second provides the heterogeneity of contexts through and against which the work emerged.

"Flying" begins on an ecstatic note. It is in some ways a poetic summary of her trajectory: the lightness of being, the freedom of thought and imagination that attends youth's sense of endless possibility, gives way to the painful recognition of the constraints imposed on the black female subject by the pathologies of racism. Liberation comes through the articulation of visual and verbal forms of language: the austere aesthetic of Minimalism and Conceptual art are combined with the rigorous analytic method of Kant, applied with a passion bordering on sensuality, to form an interrogation of the systems and coordinates by which, first, the work of art is prejudged, and second, the subject is mapped as the object of an other's consciousness.

Piper translates into the domain of social relations Kant's contention that what cannot be categorized cannot be recognized. In a 1992 essay, "Two Kinds of Discrimination," Piper declares that "xenophobia is a particular example of a perfectly general disposition to defend the self against anomalous informational assaults on its internal coherence." The inadequacy of our preexisting concepts, or as Piper argues following Kant, the conflation of an "empirically limited conception of people with the transcendent concept of personhood," together with other forms of objectification, leads to stereotyping and discrimination at both a social and political level. Piper's analyses of these strategies of thought are complemented by a body of artwork that privileges a dialogic mode of address and thus is structured through the actual viewing experience: the "indexical present" sets the stage for potential transformation. Drawing in part on her own experience, Piper, in works such as the video installation Cornered, 1988, confronts viewers with the paradoxes and absurdities of racial prejudice: "all purportedly white Americans have between five and twenty percent black ancestry - hence are, according to this country's entrenched 'just once trace' convention of racial classification, black." She thus invites us to probe our intellectual and emotional responses.

If this is the "rational" reading of Piper's project that can he gathered from her writings, there is, perhaps, another more elusive one. In "Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object" (1970-73), she describes setting out to dissolve the subject/object dichotomy by exploring the relation between her own consciousness and a problematic external world, then assimilating this world to achieve a balance between the self and what she saw reflected in others. The essay's title itself indicates that her writings embody an endless dialogue between self and other - perhaps also the motivation behind The Mythic Being, 1974-76, a series of street performances and photo-and-text-based works in which she assumed the provocative persona of a young, working-class black male. Writing becomes an ecstatic inscription of the self capable of measuring the self's distance from the other even as it attempts to close the gap.

In this sense, Piper's practice is analogous to the writings of the "mystics," whose transgressive discourse was born, as Michel de Certeau maintains, out of dissent against a symbolic order that failed to represent them; through knowledge they worked to reveal the false premises masked by habitual ways of thinking. Piper's work, too, expresses faith in the force of reason and art to act as catalysts in the transformation of our definition of reality. From deep within language, her an and writing produce something extraordinary, something a lot like flying.

Jean Fisher is an artist and an editor of the London-based journal Third Text.