ABSTRACT
The last years of the 1980s saw a significant number of artists who were other, that is, members of marginalized groups, achieve considerable art-world recognition with work that referred to their culture, emerging into the mainstream. In a sense the upsurge of the marginal was a late manifestation of the counterculture, the establishment redefined as the white, heterosexual, Western male, and alleged to be the fount of racism, sexism, and imperialism. Art theoreticians soon provided a rationale for a "multicultural" art, using a deconstructionist methodology that focused, as Hal Foster suggested, on "difference and discontinuity [in order to] rightly challenge ideas of totality and continuity." The neo-Marxists in this group, increasingly unsure of the validity of the idea of the class struggle in the face of the collapse of Communism, substituted the Other for the working class. From the early 1970s on Adrian Pipers primary content was the experience of an African-American woman in white society.
