Amber McNeila/Annotated Bibliography #7 and #8

Observation:

The image is in black and white. It features what appears to be a man. He is wearing large glasses and  has dark curly hair, which seems large in circumference. His hand is by his face. The right side of his face is left in the dark, while the left side of his face is pretty well lit. his left eye is quite visible and is either looking down or the man is zoning out through his glasses as if deep in thought. His right eye is not visible  at all. The lens reflects some sort of object or image. There is a thought bubble in the left corner that reads "I EMBODY EVERYTHING YOU MOST HATE AND FEAR". The thought bubble looks like it is sketched or drawn more than the rest of the image. The man's mouth is covered by his hand. The caption at the bottom reveals that the person in the image is Adrian Piper and the title of the work is The Mythic Being.

Inference:

The article about Adrian Piper and the Mythic Being, in itself is a reflection of Piper's perception of herself: confusing. Piper, a black female, chose to dress up as a black male with glasses and a very large black afro. She would walk around her area interacting with others and would even experiment with relationships of members of the same and opposite sex depending on her persona. Her decision to "cross-dress" which does not rightly depict her act, served to help her understand what it meant to not only be a woman, but a black female, through the eyes of a black male and the observations of white males. Her depiction, however, at times came across as awkward because she could not accurately play the appropriate masculine role while trying to tap into that part of herself. Because according to Piper, people only saw the Mythic Being "--as if people saw him as they needed to--as the embodiment of certain shared anxieties about race, class, gender and sexuality" (234) she cannot fully take on this persona. The thought bubble serves to ferment the public's fear of blackness and women's dominance when they seek job opportunities to support their families. Piper wants to fully understand why this act is emasculating anyone. By taking on the identity of another she can one day understand her own identity. 

In my last post I chose a picture with a mirror to represent society's take on beauty and how that creates identity. Piper does this in this particular image the way she first, dresses as a male trying to defer and understand stereotypes, but also by leaving half of the image in the shadows and the other in the light. This technique could represent her need to shed light on gender, but also on race. Lowery Stokes Sims asserts, "While black was beautiful for some...for most white Americans black was scary" (Acting Like a Man 234). For Piper getting to the bottom of this scary persona meant understanding another part of her. Audre Lorde said it best in her piece when she states,

I speak without concern for the accusations 

that I am too much or too little woman

that I am too black or too white

or too much myself  (Acting Like a Man 239)

In a world where your identity is compromised it is best to strip yourself of any preconceived notions of who you are and explore what it means to live in someone else's shoes and identify with their lives to best learn your own. 

Lastly, I was very drawn to Piper's use of the word "performance" because she was not performing in a dictionary-based or stereotypical way, however, her decision to act and dress as a male and female and go about life as it was, is a very political because it forces those around her to think and react to her the way they would to a character in a play. "Piper's performance of identity stages a seemingly irresolvable confrontation between social conventions and the pain they cause in order to make viewers aware of how this occurs in their own lives (Acting Like a Man 242).  I think this word plays a major role in identity and perhaps could be used in my final essay. Perhaps, Piper isn't the performer, but the realist and all of us (the viewers) are characters performing in our own acts misguided by our misunderstanding of our own identity.

Observation:

The image looks like a magazine or catalogue. The person has very dark skin. This individual is crossing his or her arms in each picture and his or her hands are not very visible because they are tucked away behind the arms just below the armpits. The person is wearing either a white sleeveless shirt or dress and it features no designs. The material has a cotton-like look. There is no head or face in this image. The head is cut off just above the neck in each image. Based in the frame of the inidividual I might assume female over male. The female is in the center of each photograph. There are five mini images within the one horizontal image. It appears like a strip of negatives. Above the images are black boxes with words in a white font. From left to right the words state the days of the week starting with Monday through Friday for each day of the work week. Below the image is five more black boxes with a white font. The words are as follows (again from left to right): misdescription, misinformation, misidentify, misdiagnose, misfunction, mistranscribe, misremember, misgauge, misconstrue, mistranslate. 

Inference: 

Simpson was inspired by film. The image is most likely a female because of Simpson's use of women as her subjects. She wanted to depict their independence, yet society's view that men took on the "rescuer role" distorted the powerful role of women such as in the case of Pierrot and Marianne. "Marianne never indicates that she needs to be saved" as stated by Hilton Als. (144). The cinema often featured white males trying to demonstrate their power and show off for other white males. In this particular image the words seems to work to identify how a woman feels with her lack of identity in the filmography world. Despite the fact that some of the words are not found in the dictionary they serve their purpose. Simpson wanted to demonstrate to her viewers that, "--the best or most arresting photographs deny instant or even considered verbalization; they shut us up, just as Pierrot shuts up in the face of Marianne's cinematic being" (Als 144). By featuring a photograph without a head, the focal point depicted in most of the photographs we have studied regarding beauty, Simpson forces us to delve deeper into our psyche to question what our beliefs are and our reasoning for our actions are  embedded deep in our subconscious due to a misogynistic culture that is unintentionally brought to the surface regarding an image. The fictitious words such as misfunction and mistranscribe create a true understanding of our lack of understanding of these words as they are commonly seen (function and transcribe). We as viewers do not know how to properly function without some sort of bias, much like the cinema portraying white boys showing off for other white boys. To transcribe is to write something down in a printed form. Simpson adapted using words in her images based on her desire to  mimic the days when captions and subtitles were used in newspapers. The word mistranscribe is ironic because the action of writing the words themselves is  misleading to the image for they are representing society's misguided perceptions. As for the placement of the image in the center, Simpson wants us to "dissect" and "desire" women in their knowable and unknowable state all at once.