“Ten Appearances” and “Notes on Funk”
Both these pieces speak to the act of “becoming” as the primary focus of participation. For “Ten Appearances”, the participants first head away from their center, their directed and established identity, towards the forest, the unknown, the wild. They carried a line of thread, a lifeline, a ancestral linkage to their community. Upon entering the forest and gathering up their individual lines, they found they weren’t connected any longer – to each other or their source community. They were given no further instructions, no societal influence or conventions to prod and funnel the any particular direction and then they had to determine their next course of action without guidance save their own minds’. For those that returned to their origin point they were documented in their emergent state – their “becoming – and handed a photograph of another who had traversed the same life rite cycle. At that point, they had become aware of their own becoming and transcendence of themselves, baptized by the pure, driven snow.
Adrian Piper’s piece also functions in the becoming of those ignorant to educated, from prejudiced to enlightened – of growth. Piper in sense was seeking her own becoming through the instruction and dissemination of the gospel of funk on those heathens not indoctrinated to the primal and syncopated forms of the genre. As one caught between the two worlds of white and colored herself, she sought to forge for herself an identity even as she imparted the manna of funk from on high to the acolytes entwined in the emotive and profound rhythms of the ages past brought into the post-modern world.
