In the 1970s the black artist Adrian Piper donned an Afro wig and a fake mustache and prowled the streets of various cities in the scowling, muttering guise of the Mythic Being, a performance-art version of a prevailing stereotype, the black male as a mugger, hustler, gangsta.
In the photographs that resulted, you can see what she was up to. In an era when some politicians and much of the popular press seemed to be stoking racial fear, she was turning fear into farce - but serious, and disturbing, farce, intended to punch a hole in pervasive fictions while acknowledging their power.
Recently a new kind of Mythic Being arrived on the scene, the very opposite of the one Piper introduced some 30 years ago. He doesn't mutter; he wears business suits; he smiles. He is by descent half black African, half white American. His name is Barack Obama.
On the rancorous subject of the country's racial history he isn't antagonistic; he speaks of reconciliation, of laying down arms, of moving on, of closure. He is presenting himself as a 21st-century postracial leader, with a vision of a color-blind, or color-embracing, world to come.
Campaigning politicians talk solutions; artists talk problems. Politics deals in goals and initiatives; art, or at least interesting art, in a language of doubt and nuance. This has always been true when the subject is race. And when it is, art is often ahead of the political news curve, and heading in a contrary direction.
In a recent solo debut at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in Chelsea a young artist named Rashid Johnson created a fictional secret society of black intellectuals, a cross between Mensa and the Masons. At first uplift seemed to be the theme. The installation was framed by a sculpture resembling giant cross hairs. Or was it a microscope lens, or a telescope's? The interpretive choice was yours. So was the decision to stay or run. Here was art beyond old hot-button statements, steering clear of easy condemnations and endorsements. But are artists like Johnson making "black" art? Political art? Identity art? There are no answers, or at least no unambiguous ones.
Since Piper's Mythical Being went stalking in the 1970s - a time when black militants and blaxploitation movies reveled in racial difference - artists have steadily challenged prevailing constructs about race.
As multiculturalism entered mainstream institutions in the 1980s, the black conceptualist David Hammons stayed outdoors, selling snowballs on a downtown Manhattan sidewalk. And when, in the 1990s, Robert Colescott was selected as the first black artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale, he brought paintings of figures with mismatched racial features and skin tones, political parables hard to parse.
At the turn of the present millennium, with the art market bubbling up and the vogue for identity politics on the wane, William Pope.L - the self-described "friendliest black artist in America" - belly-crawled his way up Broadway, the Great White Way, in a Superman outfit, and ate copies of the Wall Street Journal.
Today, as Obama pitches the hugely attractive prospect of a postracial society, artists have, as usual, already been there, surveyed the terrain and sent back skeptical, though hope-tinged, reports. And you can read those reports in art all around New York this spring, in retrospective surveys like Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution currently at the P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, in the up-to-the-minute sampler that is the 2008 Whitney Biennial, in gallery shows in Chelsea and beyond, and in the plethora of art fairs clinging like barnacles to the Armory Show on Pier 94 this weekend.
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