Stranding the Audience

On the Performances and Installations of Mona Hatoum and Adrian Piper

By Amina Kayani

It is 1982 and you’re attending a performance at the Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth, England. It’s snowing outside. The gallery assistants of the typical white-walled space escort you to a back room where you see a crowd of thirty or so people, mostly White, some carrying cameras, others notating on clipboards, another standing next to her child. They are surrounding a tall, rectangular plastic tank at the center. You hear a thud, then groans coming from the inside of the tank. You find your way closer. The tank’s inner walls are smeared with mud and there’s a mass—a breathing, moving figure—at its base. There is something in Arabic being played over the loudspeakers. Songs, it sounds like. Patriotic songs, like a march. And then English. The radio? Talking about civil war, guerrilla fighters. The mass inside the chamber rises and more mud splatters onto the wall. The figure is pushing against the plastic, trying to stand. It’s a woman. Naked. You can see her shape more clearly now. She falls again.

Inside the tank is Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese-born, British-Palestinian artist whose work functions to disrupt her audience in a critique of the White, imperialist structures that affect her homeland. She enacts this performance, titled Under Siege, for seven hours that day while reports from the Lebanese Civil War and revolutionary songs from varied countries in the Middle East play from a tape. At this point, Hatoum had been living in London in exile for seven years,  separated from her family and homeland with almost no hope of return.

Now, this performance is interesting on a formal level. We can think about the aesthetics of pain, of the female body transformed from an object of desire into a site of trauma. We could link those aesthetics to other feminist performances of that decade or the following ones. There are multiple lenses available to us. However, this essay will focus not on the aesthetics of performance, but on its relationship to the audience. In an interview with Artpsace, Hatoum characterizes this submission of her body to a rigorous physical performance as a means of “remind[ing] people that wars were still raging in many parts of the world.”[1] Remember those thirty or so people in the crowd, the critics and curators and artists who came to watch? Their perceptions, reviews, and experiences that day will be part of a wave that will create a demand for Hatoum to continue performing throughout the 1980s and will set the stage for her renowned career. In an essay on the creative act, French artist Marcel Duchamp describes the importance of the audience: “[T]he creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications[.]” Duchamp implies that a work of art never ends with the artist; its fate and meaning are determined by the audience.

Duchamp does not explicitly consider the racial, sexual, and class ramifications of his statement or the intersections of those ramifications, but when we consider the work of an artist like Mona Hatoum who, in her words, was using performance for the purposes of “examining power structures and trying to understand why I felt so ‘out of place,’” those questions are integral to understanding how her work has been preserved and discussed over the last forty years.[2] Such questions about the role of the audience surface in Adrian Piper’s critical essay, “Ways of Averting One’s Gaze.” Considering the experience of creating work for primarily White audiences, Piper writes:

“Those of us on the cultural margin face a couple of extra challenges to give our lives drama and excitement. First, there is the challenge of getting those of you, there, near the center, in the mainstream, to acknowledge our existence, so we can peaceably obtain resources and get on with our lives in this world we share. [Who, me? Are you talking to me?!] The moment when we stop being invisible to you is a highly rewarding one. [I don’t know what you mean. I’ve always liked black people. And anyway I’m not in the mainstream either. I’m an outsider too…]”[3]

Piper’s words, written in 1988, follow her experiences in New York’s art scene, where xenophobic and racist critics found it easy to dismiss her work. (See Charles Gaines’s citation of Barbara Barr, a White critic who in 1988 called Piper’s work “about as racist as anything you can expect to hear these days.”[4]) In her essay, Piper seems to offer a satirical reflection—posed as a conversation with a White audience member—on how the work she was making and the performances she enacted were “allowed” to be called art by White gatekeepers to the art world, while being simultaneously and systematically othered by them. 

I call in Piper’s work here to consider the ways in which reflecting upon her and Hatoum’s art might help us understand how a work’s relationship to its audience defines its aesthetic impact. Both Hatoum and Piper were trained in multiple mediums, but during the early years of their respective careers, they created performance-based work in which their bodies decentered the commercial interests of the gallery and critiqued local and global sociopolitical systems. To understand this comparison, we can consider Piper’s performances from the early 1970s, such as her Catalysis series.

You’re at a Macy’s in the accessories department when you see a woman, possibly a Black woman, with long curly hair loose around her shoulders wearing a white button-down shirt and a sign that says “Wet Paint.” The shirt is coated in a fresh layer of white paint, the kind you’d use on your walls at home. She’ll buy a pair of gloves and some sunglasses.[5]

That was Catalysis III. In Catalysis IV, Piper rode “the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator” dressed “conservatively” except for the large bath towel she used to stuff her mouth till her cheeks rounded out, as she explained in an interview with Lucy Lippard. In Catalysis VII, she attended an exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, blowing bubbles with her chewing gum and allowing it to pop on her face. The gum was left in layers around her mouth, chin, and cheeks.[6]

These early performances drew on the same tradition of feminist performance that inspired Hatoum. They are works that expand into the spaces they enter, pose subtle threats to consumer goods, and intentionally estrange Piper’s body from those moving around her. Grounded as they are in the artist’s body, these works assert the power that comes from othering oneself. In Catalysis III, for example, Piper silences herself, mirroring for this writer the silencing  of Black women’s voices through a direct visualization, her cheeks filled with breaths never breathed and words never said, utterances silenced by a towel pouring out of her mouth and over her front like a gash.

These works might read as blatantly political to some, but when discussing the experience of performing in this way, Piper states, “As far as the work goes, I feel it is completely apolitical.” How then, do we account for the political nature of the reception to the Catalysis works? Maybe it’s that these actions—painting a shirt white and labelling one’s body “wet paint,” walking around muttering to oneself, blowing bubbles with one’s gum—are absurd, but relatively everyday. They play off the quotidian, grounding themselves in mundane materials and language we take for granted. About the experience she had in the performances, Piper states, “I seem to have gotten more aware of the boundaries of my personality, and how much I intrude myself upon other people's realities by introducing this kind of image, this facade.”[7] In other words, the performances make Piper’s body intrusive, an uncomfortable reality for their incidental audiences. Confronted by Piper’s strange actions, her insistent eye contact, these audiences must take stock as the performances violate decorum, the normative circumstances in which White people might pretend the absence of injustice. 

When we compare Piper’s performance to Hatoum’s, there are obvious and striking differences. Under Siege is a visceral enactment of suffering and loss. The Catalysis performances are purposefully detached, like social experiments conducted neutrally, though with some curiosity. But let’s return to our original question: How does Under Siege engage its audience, and how does Hatoum implicate it in its critique? If you are one of the twenty or thirty audience members attending the performance in the moment that the photograph is taken, what goes through your mind as you listen to the audio of the protest songs and news clips? As you watch the woman inside the tank falling, attempting to stand, falling again, smearing new mud against its walls? Do you flinch as she moans? Do you ask someone to stop the performance? The record we have says no one did. There are no notations of audience interactions. We’re left to assume what we want from the silence, and so that is what I’ll assume. The audience stood silent. They watched until they got too tired or their child tugged on their coat to say they were hungry or they took the picture they needed for the review they’d type up in a couple of days.

Their silence offers a simile, if you’ll take it. The audience, this White audience, stood silent like they did when they heard, in their homes or cars, the radio broadcasting the news about the wars happening in Palestine and Lebanon. They stood silent while protestors took to the streets to speak out against police murders of Asian and Black immigrants. They stood silent and watched as a woman trapped in a tank struggled for seven hours to stand, leaving the marks of her struggle on its walls. A work that, isolated to Hatoum’s body, seems to be about the pain of exile, becomes, when considering the role of the audience, a piece about political numbness.

Hatoum and Piper are far from the only women to utilize performance to critique the gaze of audiences on marginalized bodies. They are part of a group of artists who resisted a movement towards minimalist, philosophically “apolitical” art, to remind the art world of its conservative political leanings. In Body Art, Amelia Jones distinguishes between performance and body art: the latter presents the artist’s body as a “particularized subject”—an object “where reception and production come together.”[8] In other words, it is a mode of making that presents an artist’s body, coded as it is with all of its intersecting sociopolitical factors, as an object, and that gains meaning not only from the body itself but from the way that body and its movements are perceived by its audience.

When we understand the body in these performances as an object and the reception of that object as indicative of the audience’s disposition, we can better appreciate the evolution of these artists’ methods. By 1989, both Mona Hatoum and Adrian Piper began to steer away from the performances that defined their early careers towards installation and object-based art. Each of them began by shifting to video and installations. For Hatoum, this is marked by the release of Measures of Distance (1989), which glides through a series of close photographs Hatoum took of her mother bathing during one of her last visits to Lebanon at the beginning of the decade. Overlaid on each photograph is text from letters Hatoum’s mother sent to her over the course of their separation. The Arabic letters, winding and sinewed, appear like barbed wire against the photographs, isolating the viewer from the woman in front of the lens. In the accompanying audio, Hatoum reads the translated letters aloud, detailing the life her parents lived as Beirut was destroyed by war.

This piece, which does not foreground the body of the artist, shifts attention away from her self and her body. When discussing this work with sculptor Janine Antoni, Hatoum stated, “I felt afterward that I could get on with other kinds of work, where every work did not necessarily have to tell the whole story, where I could deal with one little aspect of my experience. That’s when I started making installation work.”[9] We hear her voice, yes, but our experience with the object is not mediated by the assumptions we bring to the artist’s body or to the subject’s. Instead, we hear and see the pain of loss and find ourselves on the other side of letters that make clear our separation.

For Piper, a similar shift is marked by Cornered (1988), a video piece in which Piper coolly explains to White viewers that because of America’s history with slavery, the majority of them will also have Black ancestry that she charges them to account for. The artist, who acknowledges her ability to pass as White, ends the video stating, “So if I choose to identify myself as Black whereas you do not, that’s not just a special, personal fact about me. It’s a fact about us. It’s our problem to solve. So, how do you propose we solve it? What are you going to do?”[10] In this piece, Piper references her experiences and her body, but the video points directly to its audience. In fact, in its installation, the artist specifies that the video be played on a TV against the corner of a room above a table laid on its side so that its legs jut out at the audience. The chairs provided for viewers are arranged in a triangle shape facing the corner. Cornered is intrinsically built with its audience in mind. Like Hatoum’s piece, it marks a critical jumping-off point in which Piper shifts the material of her work from body to video, even as its approach and ethos remain unique to Piper’s interest in conceptual and minimalist techniques.

Over the next two decades, these two artists began making installations and videos that involve the audience at different levels, but largely move away from body art. During this time, Hatoum created works like Light Sentence (1992) which evokes disorienting and entrapping environments meant to displace the audience. At the center of a room a bulb swings, casting dark, wiry shadows about the walls. It is the only light in the room. The bulb, attached to a motorized pulley, moves to and fro, up and down inside an upright, U-shaped structure composed of thirty-six small wire mesh cages stacked in rows, one atop the other.  Piper designed installations like What It’s Like, What It Is #3 (1991), which placed audiences inside a large white cube that held an auditorium of sorts. At its center, a white column with a small screen near the top of each side showed a Black man turning to face each side of the room as he “negat[es] a list of offensive racial stereotypes: ‘I’m not dirty, I’m not horny, I’m not selfish, I’m not evil…’ while in the background, The Commodores sing of flying ‘far away from here, where my mind can be fresh and clear…’”[11] These pieces foreground audience experiences and rely on materially minimal objects that create a sense of space and context. Though political in their commentary, the works place the onus on White audiences to grapple with their subjective lens on materials that exist as they are. In other words, unlike the body art that Piper and Hatoum once made, these objects cannot respond, threaten, or talk back to you. More critically, perhaps, the artist is able to distance herself from the work—to reassert that the piece is not about their individual experience of suffering, but about the audience’s complicity in it. 

In this way, the mechanisms of the performances and the installations are almost the same. To return to Duchamp’s formulation, the works create a triangle consisting of the artist’s idea, the material object (which can be either the artist’s body or the installation), and the viewer. This is an important dynamic for any artist, but an especially tenuous one for artists whose identities are often foregrounded in the analysis of their work. In her essay for The Miami Rail, “Framing or What are the Stakes: (Black Artists), (Black Audiences),” Rujeko Hockley discusses the ways in which Black art has historically been considered only in its relationship to the race of the artist, rather than on a formal level. Hockley states, “New methodologies are needed, ones that work simultaneously against critical (mis)readings of works of art by [B]lack artists informed solely by their race.”[12] Those methodologies require rigorous formal analyses of the way a work operates in relation to its material and form. The abstracted installation works that Hatoum and Piper created at the end of the 1980s demanded that analysis, too. Hatoum began invoking phenomenological principles to critique her audiences. Piper leaned into conceptual practices that raised ethical questions directed toward viewers. The works that came from that shift distance the artist’s hand from the work and directly pose questions for the audience.

In her essay, “Art as Catalysis,” Adrian Piper writes that art is “a catalytic agent, in that it promotes a change in another entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself.”[13] Piper’s work is geared to create the strongest possible change in the viewer and thus in society, regardless of form. Still, the question remains: How can we understand this shift from body-based work that she considered apolitical and verged on the absurdist towards installations and happenings within gallery spaces? I’m particularly drawn to the last six words of the quotation above: “without undergoing any permanent change itself.” It is worth considering what the artist risks by objectifying her body in the White-dominated space of the art world. How might centering oneself, one’s own body, in these performances allow viewers to vindicate themselves from their complicity in the same structures Piper critiques? Work that relies on the formal manipulation of raw material for meaning takes the artist out of the equation, safeguarding her personal trauma from spectacularization, while still drawing attention to the complicity of the audience.

Hatoum has not written about the engagement of audiences as explicitly as Piper, but in her installations it is impossible not to see the way in which her work seeks to captivate an audience before defamiliarizing their environment and displacing them within the gallery. We see this dynamic not only in the installations. Performances like Under Siege, like Piper’s Catalysis, directly disrupt the everyday expectations of the body moving through space. They visualize the grief for lost homes and families—grief that people are told, explicitly or not, to suppress on a daily basis. They visualize the silencing of Black voices. They visualize surveillance states. But in moving past the body into installations, both Hatoum and Piper refuse critique that would assign meaning to the piece based on their individual histories, uplifting instead critique that addresses a larger set of racist and imperialist structures.  

What It’s Like, What It Is #3 is thus able to consider the unique circumstances of Black manhood—a topic Piper broached earlier in her Mythic Being performances by dressing in an afro and mustache and walking through New York talking in monologue to passersby. The installation furthers the questions raised in performances like Mythic Being, leaving space for the audience to sit and spend time with the man in the video, to reflect more on what he’s saying rather than passing his simulacrum on the street. Similarly, Light Sentence becomes more than a commentary on Hatoum in exile. It evokes mass incarceration, American concentration camps, and global surveillance states, depending on what the viewer brings into the space. By considering the shift in each of these artists’ bodies of work, we can begin to consider the new methodology Rujeko Hockley says we need. We can look at the shift as a movement towards new demands on audiences. It is not enough to memorize an artist’s biography or to assume the experiences that come with their identity. Identity is not debatable. What might be debated instead are the unjust structures in place, and the feelings that those structures might engender. Exile is not a uniquely Lebanese circumstance. Exile is intrinsic to global capitalism. The intersection of racism and sexism is not a problem unique to a mixed-race woman in New York. It is a structure of knowing, a structure that has been uplifted by cultural discourse, as much as political discourse. With a new methodology, we might learn to identify the rigor of the work by the force that it enacts on its audience. What does a piece reveal? How does it introduce a new perspective between the old white walls of the gallery? How does it deny us the luxury of mere witness, suggesting instead the possibility of transformation through inspired action? The new methodology is not interested in capitalizing on the artist’s trauma or offering trauma for an audience to witness before returning to their regularly scheduled programming. Rather, it supports the artist as they critique their medium and the audiences who encounter it.

[1] “Using the Body Against the Body Politic: Mona Hatoum on How Art Can Be a Form of Resistance,” Artspace, Nov. 11, 2016, accessed online April 12, 2021. 

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Adrian Piper, “Ways of Averting One’s Gaze” (1988) in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism, 1967-1992 (The MIT Press, 1996), 128.

[4] Barbara Barr, “Reply to Piper” in Women Artists News (June 1988), 6, as cited by Charles Gaines in “Of Visuality and the Politics of White Fear,” Flash Art 319 (March-April 2018), 60.

[5] “Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1970,” Generali Foundation, accessed April 29, 2021, http://foundation.generali.at/en/collection/artist/piper-adrian/artwork/catalysis-iii.html#.YIrpNEhKiCh 

[6] Record of each of these performances was noted in Lucy Lippard’s “Catalysis: An Interview with Adrian Piper,” The Drama Review Vol 16. No. 1 (March 1972), 76.

[7] Ibid., 77.

[8] Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 14.

[9] Mona Hatoum interviewed by Janine Antoni, “Mona Hatoum,” Bomb 63 (Spring 1998).

[10] Quoted by Yaniya Lee in “Piper’s Threat,” Flash Art 319 (March-April 2018).

[11]“Adrian Piper, What It’s Like, What It Is #3” The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, theicala.org/exhibitions/62-adrian-piper-br-what-its-like-what-it-is-3.

[12] Rujeko Hockley, “Framing or What are the Stakes: (Black Artists), (Black Audiences).” Miami Rail (September 13, 2016).

[13] Adrian Piper, “Art as Catalysis” (1970) in Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume One: Selected Writing in Meta-Art, 1968-1992 (The MIT Press, 1999).

Amina Kayani is a writer and critic from Atlanta, GA. She is the Managing Editor of Sycamore Review and an MFA candidate in Fiction at Purdue University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, Kajal Magazine, and Repeller. Find her on Twitter @_am1na.