Funk Lessons and Race Relations


Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons sought to reveal the inner-feelings and tensions that divided certain cultures and ease those tensions through an integration of one culture into another culture. She used the rhythms, songs, and dances of lower class African- American funk music and taught them to middle or upper class white people in order to reveal and ease the racial tensions between the two distinctly different cultures. White culture and black culture remains two very different cultures and the exposure to these cultures to people of the other culture can sometimes cause interesting results. From tension to agitation, to anger and even outrage, the mixing of different cultures and the way in which Adrian Piper has presented these events has always produced interesting reactions. Piper’s work has involved members of both races and was geared towards confronting racial inequalities and culture and beginning to integrate parts of black culture, such as funk rhythm and music, into upper class white culture.
Adrian Piper began Funk Lessons in 1982 by inviting groups of people, sometimes as small as a single person and some as large as seven people, over to her house for dinner or cocktails, which is comfortable to most middle class people. This site and situation was chosen specifically because it was a place that most white middle class citizens can identify with and where most of those citizens can find themselves fairly comfortable. The participants involved in Funk Lessons were generally middle class citizens, either black or white and who generally didn’t have any experience with the funk culture that Piper would be introducing to them. After the participants arrived, Piper would play music from a group she termed “the Usual Gang of Idiots”, which included classical artists such as Bach and Beethoven, artists that the participants are most likely to be familiar with (Participation 133). Piper would then integrate funk into the music and gauge the participant’s reactions. She found that the participants were generally confused, or annoyed by the change, and this lead to the lessons on funk. She would introduce samples of funk music to the participants and delved deeper into the meanings and connotations associated with the different rhythms and songs. Piper also invites the participants to join in on learning various dances that go along with the music and helps the middle class participants learn the movements that go along with lower class black culture. The integration of black culture into the participant’s lives may seem simple and harmless enough but it sometimes produced negative reactions by some of the white, middle or upper class participants. Piper describes their reactions as having “elicited anxiety, anger or contempt from middle-class, college-educated whites: anxiety because its association with black, working-class culture engenders unresolved racist feelings that are then repressed or denied rather than examined” (Participation p.133). In Piper’s eyes, this reaction and other negative reactions from the educated and wealthy white social group are the product of underdeveloped interracial relations combined with white feelings of racism that are not often confronted in the every day lives of the white middle class participant. She believes that this participatory work of art can be seen as a means to alter or diminish the divide between the two cultures and make both sides more accepting of the other.
This piece fits the mold of a dialogical or participatory work of art because the reactions of the participants, or the middle class subjects learning the rhythms and motions of funk music, is what the focus of the artwork is on. Their reactions tell the different stories of white-black relations, middle or upper class and lower class relations, and educated and uneducated relations. The participant’s acceptance of the funk music, or refusal to accept the music showed Piper and the viewers of her art that interracial relations have much farther to go in our society. Piper states in an interview titled Mapping Mindsets that “American racism is frozen at the stage of denial and I don’t think American society is capable of moving beyond that stage.” (Mapping Mindsets p.). The participant’s annoyed or agitated reactions to the lessons are the stage of denial that Piper discusses in this interview. White culture still holds racist attitudes towards black culture, especially in the area of music where different rhythms, sounds, movements, or even lyrics are seen as obscene or unacceptable to mainstream white culture. Piper’s purpose for these lessons is not only to see the integration process of black culture into white culture but also primarily expose the “stage of denial” that current white culture is stuck in. She hopes that if people can surpass this stage of denial, they can take the next step of integrating different cultures into their own and developing better interracial relationships.
Piper’s work is one that seeks to engage the audience by getting them to look at their own racial attitudes and abilities to accept different cultures. She uses the idea of cultural integration between white and black culture only has a side note in her piece as the primary point of the piece is to make the viewer or participant to look at themselves and ask themselves if they would react the same way as the participants, thus questioning their own racist attitudes. This validates her piece as a true functioning piece of new genre public or dialogical art because she makes the true art form the audience as well as the actual lessons. The consequences of this work are yet to be seen, however. To say that this artwork will revolutionize race relations in the United States is vastly overreaching but it does serve the public and Piper’s purpose by bringing up the point. It makes people question themselves and take the step past the denial stage. Piper’s work will not have an immediate impact in today’s world because racism and discrimination is something ingrained in cultures across the nation, but it may have made the participants and the audience of the work change their attitudes if only slightly.