'Unmapped Body' shows chaos of disparate codes

COURTESY YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY Sonya Boyce's 'Coloured' debunks types through text alone.

The fascinating new installation at the Yale University Art Gallery, "The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists," reminds us that it is necessary to adopt stereotypes in order to rethink them. The exhibition reads like a costume party where each artist has assumed an identity assigned to him or her by a left-over imperialist culture.

The art gallery must first be congratulated on bringing this kind of art to Yale. Four well- presented rooms include eight works by artists Sutapa Biswas, Sonya Boyce, and Keith Piper. Like most contemporary art, this is difficult stuff to get a hold on--Piper's work in particular--without having some sense of the historical antecedents of the works. But here, one learns in the process of viewing.

Upon first walking into the show, the question of audience was at the forefront of my mind. Boyce has said that her art is intended primarily for black female viewers, but to say that works like "Do You Want to Touch" are targeted at only one type of viewer is to deny their potential interpretive complexity.

"Do You Want To Touch" is clearly an erotic piece, but neither Boyce's statement nor the exhibit catalog provide a sexual reading of the work. In it, Boyce has woven hair into shapes and forms clearly reminiscent of female sex organs. Read in this sexual light, the fairly unexciting fetish-like pieces become much more interesting, offering a wry commentary on the historical imperative to eroticize sublimated "others."

Boyce's "Afro Rug" is funny more than anything else. However, seen alongside the afro wig featured in the video projection "I Want to See It," it gains substance. I was bored by Boyce's large "Coloured" before I even got a full view of it--it is difficult enough to use text effectively as part of an image, but here Boyce has created an image from text alone. Ultimately, I just couldn't manage to escape the "one-liner" aspect of this piece.

Perhaps the best way to describe Boyce's work is to suggest that it always occurs on the level of surfaces. She skirts the slippery edges of bigger, hackneyed issues and themes. The overt simplicity of her pieces is almost scary. And yet, I came awfully close to believing that this shallow treatment of much more complex identity issues legitimated itself, a subtle attempt to map the body from the outside in.

If Boyce is concerned with the surfaces of black British identity, Keith Piper delves into its difficult internal topography. In a warmly colored blue room sits a worn, carved-up desk with a mousepad embedded in it, allowing viewers to navigate a CD-ROM projected on the wall.

Piper describes "Message Carrier" as a reference to the black male body as a "site encoded with a socially specified set of readings." The viewer is free to wander through the choices provided, accessing various historical events and allusions to the characteristics that white British culture has attributed to the black male. When the audio seamlessly transforms into labored breathing, the effect is corporeal--it's not unlike being inside the kind of human model you might find in a science museum.

A female speaker appears at a certain point--depending on the viewer's choices--and discusses Babel, "the chaos of disparate codes." The original "disparate codes" of Babel were, of course, only different languages, different peoples unable to communicate with each other. Piper's work thus appears as a rejection of the black identity created by non-black Brits, a defense against insults and stereotypes delivered in the language of an other. "Message Carrier" evolves into a true history of an imagined people who exist inside and outside of the identities assigned to them.

For all the artists, the physical body is the only element of identity left untainted by imperialism. By mapping the identity assigned to him by others, Piper seeks to give himself a way out--a diversion to distract the crowd as he slips out of his costume behind the curtain and runs. Boyce remakes the body, hoping for a kind of exorcism in the process. This art is about ownership and reclamation.

In the introduction to Theory of Colors, Goethe attacks diagrams because he believes that they replace the phenomena they describe, eventually separating us from the truth of what they represent. In many ways, this seems like an inadvertent allusion to the process of creating art. To create a "diagram" or world that will stand in for reality, and eventually replace it, is, in many ways, the artist's goal.

Biswas, Boyce, and Piper certainly aim to represent and critique the stereotypes that have simultaneously defined their identities and obscured their true selves. By walking us through a false map drafted through years of misconception, they provide us with a new blank body. Isn't it this nakedness that they hope will eventually replace the diagrammed identities that have replaced--and continue to replace--a true people?

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