Like Unmapped, Unrecorded brings together prior work and new material, again supplemented with animation and sound. Two of the three prior artworks—A Ship Called Jesus (1991) and (now garbed in a colonial tapestry interface) Go West Young Man—exemplify Piper's strategies for interiorizing contradictions in order to make them emotionally resonant as well as inescapable. By melding the complex figure of the black father with the handing-down of tradition among the enslaved and colonized, the father-son dialogue of Go West lends an indeterminate historical dimension to the failure of the black father, implicitly inviting its audience (whoever that may be) to nuance any easy conviction regarding its cause.
Likewise, by exploring the historical coupling of slavery and Christianity, A Ship Called Jesus aims to expose the correlation between the desire for certainty and the experience of trauma and, subsequently, to challenge the certainties of its spectators. Named after a slave ship, "The Jesus of Lubeck," endowed by Queen Elizabeth I to Sir John Hawkins, the work juxtaposes its historical context—including a headstone and grave, made from shards of broken mirror, and a crucifix lightbox, both commemorating the victims of the Middle Passage—with three archives of contemporary material, including quotes from Margaret Thatcher on Britain's race fears (“An English Queen"), gospel music (“A Ship"), and the ventriloquized rhetoric of commerce (“A Pirate"). In this way, A Ship Called Jesus manages to generalize the trauma of slavery (without compromising its differential referentiality) such that any position of “fundamentalist certainty"(whether black nationalism, racism, or, interestingly enough, the denial of racism) can only appear as the symptom of trauma. In consequence, loss of certainty becomes a redemptive vehicle for a new, more open-ended ethnicization that has dispensed with the constraining binary categories of race as a historical substance.xxv
Extending this dispensation, the two remaining works featured in this space serve to link the intrinsic imbrications of colonialism and ethnicization with the other two domains of Piper's aesthetic interest. Tradewinds (1992) deploys the rhetoric of the black body—now projected as moving animations onto images of shipping crates—in order to introduce a historical dimension into the interrogation of the contemporary stereotype and thus, once again, to expand its scope. Conversely, a new work made specifically for the CD-ROM, The Fictions of Science, deploys a viewfinder interface, reminiscent of a camera, as a vehicle to access various spaces where the value-neutrality of different sciences-including the now suspect “science"of craniology-finds itself under question. Here, the colonial legacy is generalized insofar as it is shown to inhabit the classifying systems responsible for the knowledge institutions of our culture.xxvi
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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