Welcome to Short Arts. This is my take on Adrian Piper's catalysis 3 from 1970. Let's start with what the work is. Well, it's part of a series of public performances Piper did in the 1970s. For catalysis 3, she went shopping at a mace, dripping in white paint, and wearing a sign that red wet paint. These are some of the photographs taken during that performance. In her catalysis series, Piper performed gestures which might be easily missed, or misread by her audience, as the audience is usually not even aware that they are witnessing her art. What at first seems to be a simple gesture on folds and exposes complex relations of race, gender and public space. The wet paint sign that Piper wears can be read in a number of ways. Firstly, wet paint sign is a do not touch sign. Piper wearing this fits into histories of feminist art practices that critiques the male gaze. Piper reveals the organisation of public space by confronting the audience with their own gaze. How we look can be a form of touch. Piper is an active subject in this exchange, making the viewer know she is aware of their looking and refusing to be a passive object of their gaze. A do not touch sign invites its transgression. We think about what it would mean to touch. A do not touch sign on wet concrete makes us want to scroll a message in it. Piper's wet presence in public produces an excess of complex desires, both for Piper and her audience, but it is foremost an insistence of her autonomy and consent to both invite and refuse at any point. She engages with these desires and reveals the shifting meanings of looking, touching and agency across and with the different people she encounters. But wet paint can mean something else too. Wet paint means not dry. And it is this meaning that elevates the work to a complex articulation of identity. Piper is insisting that she is not dry. Her identity isn't fixed, it's fluid, it's changing and she refuses to be categorised simply as a woman and artist or a person of colour. Such declarations from Piper are dangerous to her physical and mental wellbeing in public spaces, is also potentially damaging to her professionally, as the art world wants to label her as much a society does. How do you market and sell something that isn't dry yet? Finally, the work and the catalysis series as a whole questions the meaning of performance are itself, revealing performance as a necessary way of life under white hetero-patriarchy. In an interview Lucy Lippard asked Piper, don't you feel that this is kind of infinite, that you have to cut it off someplace so that it is a piece and not your life? Piper replies, there is very little that separates what I am doing from quirky personal life. I subscribe to the idea that art reflects the society to a certain extent and I feel as though a lot of the work I'm doing is being done because I'm a paradigm of what society is. Lippard is making an assumption from a place of privilege. She assumes that performance is something you can just turn on and turn off. She assumes that Piper needs a break and a space just to be herself. This misunderstands Piper's performances. She isn't doing it because it's just an art practice. Piper performs to survive in a society that requires her to always perform her identity in contradictory and often offensive ways. Piper is always either being challenged or challenging. There is no life outside the peace as there is no peace in her life. Piper's simple public gestures are art but they are also life, they are her life. She lives the politics that cannot be separated from her body. She is in her own words a paradigm of what society is. This is why Piper's performances are so radical and important and why they inspire a whole new generation of artists who refuse the foundational assumptions of their white audiences and their white publics.