Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment [Illustrated] 0822348969, 9780822348962

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Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper race, gender, and embodiment

John P. Bowles

Duke University Press Durham and London 2011

© 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges support from the Small Grant program of the University Research Council, administered by the office of the vice chancellor of research and economic development, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

introduction Adrian Piper’s Performance of Race and the Moral Question of Racism Section 1 1965 –1970

1

the paradox of the black woman conceptual artist

1. Contingent and Universal: Adrian Piper and the Minimalist Ideal

33

2. Hypothesis: Modernism and the Woman Artist’s Studio

69

Section 2 1970 –1975

personal politics and performance art

3. May 1970: Art and Activism

125

4. Catalysis: Feminist Art and Experience

162

5. Food for the Spirit: Transcendence and Desire

205

6. “Acting Like a Man”: The Mythic Being and Black Feminism

229

conclusion The Mythic Being and the Aesthetics of Direct Address

257

Notes

263

Bibliography

299

Index

319

​Illustrations

Plates 1. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 1, 1974. 2. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women #1, 1975. 3. Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady, 1995. 4.1. Adrian Piper, Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1, 1968. 4.2. Adrian Piper, Utah-Manhattan Transfer #2, 1968. 5. Adrian Piper, Untitled Map/Circle (detail), 1969. 6. Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine Abstract Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (detail), 1969. 7. Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine Abstract Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (detail), 1969. 8. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #6 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. 9. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #11 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. 10. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #15 (detail), conceived 1969, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. 11.1. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968. 11.2. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968. 11.3. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968. 11.4. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968. 11.5. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968. 11.6. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968.

11.7. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968. 11.8. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968. 11.9. Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (detail), 1968. 12. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #9 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. 13. Eleanor Antin, “Portraits of Eight New York Women,” 1970. 14. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #14, conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. 15. Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit (detail), 1971. 16. Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit (detail), 1971. Figures 1. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 5, 1974.

3

2. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 8, 1974.

4

3. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 10, 1974.

5

4. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I Embody, 1975.

6

5. Adrian Piper, Cornered, 1988.

9

6. Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features, 1981.

17

7. Adrian Piper, Political Self-Portrait #2 (Race), 1978–80.

18

8. Adrian Piper, untitled project for 0 to 9, January 1969.

22

9. Adrian Piper, Drawings about Paper and Writings about Words #33, 1967.

41

10.1. Adrian Piper, Untitled Constructions, 1967.

43

10.2. Adrian Piper, Untitled Constructions, 1967.

43

11. Adrian Piper, Nine-Part Floating Square, 1967.

44

12. Sol LeWitt, 46 3-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967.

45

13. Adrian Piper, Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (detail), 1968.

45

14. Adrian Piper, Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds (detail), 1968.

54

15.1. Adrian Piper, Three Untitled Projects (detail), 1969.

60

15.2. Adrian Piper, Three Untitled Projects (detail), 1969.

61

16. Adrian Piper, Untitled Map/Circle (detail), 1969.

62

17.1. Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine Abstract Space-TimeInfinity Pieces (detail), 1969.

63

17.2. Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine Abstract Space-TimeInfinity Pieces (detail), 1969.

63

viii   Illustrations

17.3. Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine Abstract Space-TimeInfinity Pieces (detail), 1969.

64

17.4. Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine Abstract Space-TimeInfinity Pieces (detail), 1969.

64

18. Adrian Piper, preliminary draft for her untitled statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects,” 1970.

67

19. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #6 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

71

20.1. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #5 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

79

20.2. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #5 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

80

21. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #11 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

83

22. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #15 (detail), conceived 1969, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

85

23.1. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #4 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

87

23.2. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #4 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

88

24. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #9 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

97

25.1. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #10 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

99

25.2. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #10 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

100

26. Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen, from Bringing the War Back Home: House Beautiful, 1967–72, printed early 1990s.

101

27. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #5 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

103

28.1. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #7 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

104

28.2. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #7 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

105

29. Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #14 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

109

30. Adrian Piper, Area Relocation #2, 1969.

129

31. Adrian Piper, Untitled (detail), 0 to 9 (July 1969).

131 Illustrations  ix

32. Adrian Piper, Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, 1970.

134

33. Adrian Piper, Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, 1970.

136

34. Adrian Piper, Context #8: Written Information Voluntarily Supplied to Me during the Period of April 30 to May 30, 1970 (detail), 1970.

142

35.1. Adrian Piper, Context #9: Written Information Elicited from Me during the Period of May 15 to June 15, 1970 (detail), 1970.

148

35.2. Adrian Piper, Context #9: Written Information Elicited from Me during the Period of May 15 to June 15, 1970 (detail), 1970.

149

36. Adrian Piper, Context #7 (detail), 1970.

155

37. Adrian Piper, Context #7, 1970.

156

38. Adrian Piper, Context #7 (detail), 1970.

158

39. Adrian Piper, Context #7 (detail), 1970.

160

40. Adrian Piper, untitled text, 1971.

166

41.1. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1971.

173

41.2. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1971.

173

41.3. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1971.

174

41.4. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1971.

174

41.5. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1971.

175

42.1. Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1971.

184

42.2. Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1971.

184

42.3. Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1971.

185

43. Günter Brus, Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna Walk), 1965.

202

44. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Getting Back #2, 1975.

236

45. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, Cycle I: 9/21/61, 1973.

246

46.1. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #1, 1975.

247

46.2. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #2, 1975.

247

46.3. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #3, 1975.

248

46.4. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #4, 1975.

248

46.5. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #5, 1975.

249

46.6. Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #6, 1975.

249

47. Adrian Piper, It Doesn’t Matter #1–3, 1975.

250

48. Adrian Piper, unpublished Village Voice newspaper advertisement from the Mythic Being series, 1974.

254

x   Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A single question lies at the heart of this book: how do we accept responsibility for the world in which we live? I believe this is the fundamental question posed by Adrian Piper’s work. My interest in her work is academic, but I have undertaken my project specifically because it presents an important challenge to assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and class in the United States. I take this challenge personally. When I began researching Piper’s work, my intention was to study her among a group of artists. As I delved deeper, I felt an urgency to apply the singularly compelling moral and intellectual questions at the heart of her work to myself. How am I responsible for racism in the United States? What is my role as a citizen, an art historian, and a parent? I cannot tell readers how to answer such questions, except to point out the importance of asking them. Over and over again. Constantly. As a historian, I apply the question of responsibility to my work, my discipline, and the object of my study. For example, I question what it means to study Piper’s work as that of an African American artist. This does not preclude such an approach, but an implication of Piper’s artwork is that we need new strategies. I am fortunate to have come to know Adrian as a person, not simply as the author of a body of work. Working with Adrian over the past decade has been a formative process. She has been open to sincere and informed discussions of her art and experiences. We have developed a working relationship that allows for agreement as well as disagreement, which I hope is evident to readers. I am sincerely grateful to Adrian for conversations, correspondence, visits, and, most of all, encouragement.

I am indebted to Cécile Whiting for years of support and advice; she has been an unwaveringly generous and thoughtful mentor. My project began at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has benefited from many conversations with Steven Nelson, Donald Preziosi, Tony Vidler, Sam Weber, and Peter Wollen. I am also a beneficiary of the Whitney Independent Study Program, where I had the invaluable opportunity to discuss my work with Ron Clark, Mary Kelly, Laura Mulvey, Yvonne Rainer, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, and many others. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I draw heavily upon the encouragement of my colleagues. I am grateful for the welcome and support given me by the Department of Art. In particular, I thank Mary Sheriff, Daniel Sherman, Mary Sturgeon, Pika Ghosh, Dorothy Verkerk, Mary Pardo, Lyneise Williams, Roxana Perez-Mendez, Glaire Anderson, Eduardo Douglas, Cary Levine, Wei-Cheng Lin, Carol McGee, Paroma Chatterjee, Ross Barrett, Juan Logan, Susan Page, Beth Grabowski, Jim Hirschfield, and Jeff Whetstone. The reproductions in this book are supported in part by funds from the Small Grant Program of the University Research Council, administered by the office of Tony Waldrop, vice chancellor of research and economic development, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I am fortunate to have so many friends and colleagues with whom I can share work and thoughtful conversation. I wish to thank Richard Meyer, Steven Nelson, Rick Powell, James Smalls, Darby Eng­lish, Rachel DeLue, Amy Mooney, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Cynthia Mills, Carrie Lambert, Mario Ontiveros, John Ott, Joanna Roche, Craig Smith, Matt Bakkom, Peg Brand, Patty Mannix, Ellen Fernandez-Sacco, Stacy Kamehiro, Esther Gabara, Kira Lynn Harris, Karin Higa, Ruth Iskin, Susan Kelly, and Karen Stevenson for ideas and guidance at various stages in the process of realizing this book. I am especially thankful for my editor, Ken Wissoker, who has guided my project with wisdom, encouragement, and a smile. At Indiana University, through participation in the American Studies Program and the Variations on Blackness faculty seminar, I had the opportunity to share work with colleagues across the humanities engaged in the study of black art and culture. I developed several sustaining relationships there and am particularly grateful for the support of Matt

xii   Acknowledgments

Guterl, Vivian Halloran, George Hutchinson, Margo Crawford, Marvin Sterling, and John McCluskey Jr. For helping me focus on questions of art, I thank James Nakagawa, Althea Murphy-Price, Tim Kennedy, Malcolm Mobutu Smith, Ed Bernstein, Leslie Sharpe, Margaret Dolinsky, and Arthur Liou. For research assistance, I thank Eileen Julien of the Project on African Expressive Traditions; Andrea Ciccarelli of the College Arts and Humanities Institute; Michael McRobbie, Indiana University president; and P. Sarita Soni, vice provost for research. I also wish to thank the librarians and archivists who have assisted my research at the Sloan Art Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the Indiana University Fine Arts Library; University of California, Los Angeles; the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities; the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution; the New York Public Library (including the Schomburg Center for Black Culture, the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, and Donnell Library); the Museum of Modern Art Archives and Library; Special Collections, the University of Washington Libraries; Fairleigh Dickinson University Library; the Poetry Collection, University Libraries, University at Buffalo of the State University of New York; the Generali Foundation Library, Reference Room and Text Archives; and Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego. I thank Lu Harper, director of library services at the University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery; Jessica Hough, assistant curator, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art; Yukie Kamiya and Ozkan Canguven of the New Museum; and Fiona Dejardin at the Yager Museum, Hartwick College, for providing me with materials from the archives of their respective institutions. For access to the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin, assistance with images, information and logistics, I am grateful to Adrian Piper, Susanne Maertens, Jeremy Higginbotham, and Robert Del Principe. I also thank Thomas Erben, Paula Cooper, Elizabeth Dee, and Tim Saltarelli for their assistance. My parents and sister have been supportive and encouraging of my work from the start. Mom and Dad provided academic role models and have always pushed me to work harder. Susy and Ed have cheered me on and I appreciate their patience when I bring work along on “vacation” visits.

Acknowledgments  xiii

I could not have completed this book without the support of my wife, Emily. She has always had a faith in my work that I find inspiring. Her love has sustained me in ways I strive to match each day. My son, Elias, keeps me creative and happy. It is partly for him and his generation that I wrote this book.

xiv   Acknowledgments

Introduction

Adrian Piper’s Performance of Race and the Moral Question of Racism

Adrian Piper once rebuked an art critic who declared, “it is crucial to know that . . . Piper is a black artist who can easily ‘pass’ for white,” by responding, “ ‘black’ and ‘white’ are among the terms my work critiques.”1 This would seem to preclude Piper’s art from being easily categorized as African American, yet that is exactly how most of it has been studied, largely because Piper has used herself and her own experiences with racism as the raw material for much of her art. For example, in her video installation Cornered, which she first presented in 1988, viewers watch as Piper tells them, “I’m black.”2 Over the course of the video, however, the decision to call one’s self black becomes a moral issue rather than a simple matter of genetics or parentage. In the process, Piper casts the possibility of racial identity into doubt. Why don’t most art critics notice? Since before 1972, when she first confronted matters of race directly in her Mythic Being series, Piper has always marked the distinction between herself and the role she performs as artist, theatricalizing it. While she uses personal content—her experiences—in some of her work, these anecdotes are carefully chosen and presented tools used to make ideas concrete rather than to make her personal life and emotions the subject of her art. Nevertheless, art historians and critics frequently characterize Piper as an angry black woman whose work blames view-

ers for the lifetime of racist and sexist discrimination she has endured. Such accounts typically imply that Piper’s work is divisive because black viewers will sympathize with the artist but white viewers will experience only guilt or outrage. Some of Piper’s critics respond by diagnosing her as the distraught victim, lashing out unfairly at liberal museum-goers who might otherwise take her side. Even writers favorable to Piper’s project interpret her work as autobiography. In the 1970s, for example, feminist art critics Lucy Lippard and Cindy Nemser both explained Piper’s Mythic Being as the manifestation of the artist’s “male ego,” despite formal aspects of the work that cast it as a critical and self-conscious performance of race, gender, sexuality, and class. In The Mythic Being: I/You (Her) (1974) (plate 1), for example, Piper transforms her appearance over a series of ten photographs of herself, taken in junior high school, beside another young woman—a classmate and friend of hers. As with most of the Mythic Being photographs, in the I/You (Her) sequence Piper has added comic-strip–style thought bubbles by drawing, painting, and writing directly on the photographs’ surfaces. In this sequence, Piper’s face is slowly darkened while her companion’s remains unchanged (fig. 1). Piper’s features are altered and exaggerated and she wears sunglasses (fig. 2); she acquires a mustache; her hair grows into what she characterized as an Afro and a cigar appears in the corner of her mouth (fig. 3). In the final photograph, Piper has completed her transformation into a caricature of herself as seen by her companion— she has become the Mythic Being, a powerful 1970s stereotype of the African American male.3 In mid-transformation, Piper/the Mythic Being blames her changing appearance on her companion’s presumptions, charging, “I insist that from the fact of my appearance you jumped to the wrong conclusion, as you always do. You instinctively perceive me as the enemy, and nothing I say or do is sufficient to change that. You punish me for how I look, when that is both irrelevant and out of my control.” Nevertheless, the drawing and painting that creates Piper’s transformation is clearly the result of the artist’s own handiwork. Piper is complicit in her own disfigurement and makes herself resemble the stereotype in whose image she believes the second young woman sees her. This self-deprecating gesture signals the power of racist ideology: it seems that Piper must see herself in relationship to the image that she knows others have of her, and so she turns it against them. But Piper also implicates the viewer of her art2   Introduction

1  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 5, 1974. One of ten black-and-white

photographs with ink and tempera and felt-tip pen, 5 × 7 in. Collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1999.

2  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 8, 1974. One of ten black-and-white

photographs with ink and tempera and felt-tip pen, 5 × 7 in. Collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1999.

3  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 10, 1974. One of ten black-and-white

photographs with ink and tempera and felt-tip pen, 5 × 7 in. Collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1999.

4  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I Embody, 1975. Oil crayon drawing on 8 × 10 in. black-and-

white photograph. Collection of Thomas Erben, New York.

work. Piper/the Mythic Being looks not at her companion but out at the person the text addresses: “you,” the viewer. Piper did not create the Mythic Being. Rather, she appropriated him from the popular imagination. The Mythic Being embodies, as he tells viewers of one of the posters Piper made in 1975, “everything you most hate and fear” (fig. 4). As stereotype, the Mythic Being is the figure whites feared meeting and whom middle-class blacks did not want to be compared with—the naturalized justification for an unspoken racist ideology that casts blackness as masculine, heterosexual, and menial. He is, for the white viewer, the figure against whom all blacks are judged and, as fantasy, he establishes a racialized norm for blackness in the American imagination. When he appears in a 1975 photograph, The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women, he figures the fears and fantasies that define the myth of American whiteness, which locates miscegenation as the founding crisis for race consciousness (plate 2). For Piper, he also becomes a figure of liberation. Disguised as a man, she can act in ways that, as a black woman, she ordinarily would not: “My behavior changes,” she 6   Introduction

writes, “I swagger, stride, lope, lower my eyebrows, raise my shoulders, sit with my legs wide apart on the subway, so as to accommodate my protruding genitalia.”4 This passage reads as both feminist parody of a rambunctious working-class masculinity and as an attempt to inhabit the liberatory pose of the Black Power movement and Soul style. Popular film, the mainstream press, urban revolutionaries, and the New Left in the early 1970s represented black men and women as angry and macho. Whether in the image of the Black Panther women or the violent blaxploitation film superheroes portrayed by Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson, black women were commonly characterized as emasculating black matriarchs. Piper addressed these images when she gave masculine form to her “anger and resentment” in The Mythic Being: I/You (Her). The femininity she shares with her young female companion no longer provides camaraderie because, according to the handwritten text, her companion has stolen her boyfriend. Thought bubbles quote what reads as a bitter breakup letter, rife with feelings of betrayal. Piper says she has “found solace in friendships with men” and out of contempt for the young woman threatens her with sexual exploitation: “I might indulge with pleasure in lovemaking fantasies about you. But you will never elicit an emotional commitment from me.” Piper expressed the desire for sexualized revenge in the stereotyped guise of the black lesbian, as I discuss in chapter 6, and of black male heterosexuality, as popularly represented. By the time she had begun her Mythic Being work, the debate over black masculinity focused on its representation in blaxploitation film.5 Huey Newton, for example, advised readers of the Black Panther newspaper to see Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song because the film’s director and star, Melvin Van Peebles, had for the first time in film captured the liberatory potential of black male sexuality.6 Blaxploitation’s critics, on the other hand, warned that this image reiterated the stereotype of predatory, violent, and hypersexual black men. Whites and middle-class blacks, in particular, worried that poor black youths would emulate the sexualized violence they saw on screen, victimizing both black and white women. Piper’s performance of black machismo condemns it and also explores the liberation it promised. In The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), the text in the thought bubbles begins, “It is only because of defects in my personality that I can finally say this to you. I am protected and strengthened by my inadequacy. I am secure, smugly secure, for my personal flaws will constitute a more than Piper’s Performance of Race  7

adequate defense against whatever your response might be to what I have to say.” Piper self-consciously acknowledges shame at her anger but admits that it makes for a powerful defense mechanism.7 The Mythic Being, in his manliness, is constrained by how Piper imagines he will behave, but, more to the point, the Mythic Being manifests the “anger and resentment” that Piper’s white friends expect black people to express toward them, and so cannot help but see in Piper’s every action. Racist stereotypes are effective because they supplant every other possible public and private image of either blackness or whiteness. As Manthia Diawara has claimed, the stereotype “by deforming the body, silences it and leaves room only for white supremacy to speak through it.”8 What I want to suggest, therefore, is that Piper’s selfdeprecating imagery does not simply record or express the artist’s personal experiences. Instead, it theatricalizes the effects of racism. Piper’s self-consciousness, evident in her work’s content and formal qualities, signals that the Mythic Being is a deliberate display. This provokes the viewer to question how popularly held stereotypes affect perception. In other words, Piper dressed as the Mythic Being and walked the streets of New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts; posed for photographs “cruising white women” and mugging one of her friends; and transformed herself to narrate her transformation into the Mythic Being in order to reveal to the people around her—including viewers of her work—that it was they who saw in Piper the threatening figure of the Mythic Being and that Piper knows this is how they see her. As evidence of this, in such autobiographical essays as “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” Piper provides firsthand accounts of the remarks white people make to her when they learn that, though they think she looks white, she identifies herself as black. For example, she recalls that when she arrived at the reception for new doctoral students at Harvard’s philosophy department in the fall of 1974, one professor—Piper calls him “the most famous and highly respected member of the faculty”— a man who knew she had identified herself as African American on her application, said to her, “Miss Piper, you’re about as black as I am.” Her appearance did not match his image of what a black woman looks like, so he doubted—or ridiculed—her honesty. Piper has described such comments as a warning from people who consider themselves white. The message, she explains, is that

8   Introduction

5  Adrian Piper, Cornered, 1988. Single-channel video installation with monitor, overturned

table, ten chairs, and framed photocopies of two birth certificates for Piper’s father. Collection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Bernice and Kenneth Newberger Fund. Photo © Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

[you] fail in your actions to reinforce their positive image of themselves. Their ridicule and accusations . . . function to both disown and degrade you from their status, to mark you not as having done wrong but as being wrong. This turns you into something bogus relative to their criterion of worth, and false relative to their criterion of authenticity.9 The Mythic Being represents the specter of a debased blackness—a figment of the white imagination, where Piper can exist only in comparison to the Mythic Being. To make this apparent, much of Piper’s artwork appears not as autobiography but as the self-conscious performance of stereotypes the artist has been compared to. This leaves the viewer aware of his or her own responsibility for coming to terms with the issues Piper raises. In Piper’s video installation, Cornered (1988) (fig. 5), to take an example from her

Piper’s Performance of Race  9

later work, the woman in the videotape (who happens to be the artist) tells viewers, “I’m black. Now let’s deal with this social fact and the fact of my stating it together. . . . It’s not just my problem, it’s our problem.” Throughout the rest of the video, she recounts personal experiences with racism and enumerates the choices she must make as a lightskinned woman who looks white to those she encounters. Significantly, Piper couches her experiences in a way that assigns responsibility for her choices—if not also for the racism she faces—to the viewer. Gradually, she turns the issue of passing for white on those viewers who do not consider themselves black by raising the historical and genetic probability that most Americans have at least some black ancestry. Citing the unspoken “one drop” rule of racialized identity, Piper challenges the viewer: “You are probably black. . . . What are you going to do?” Interrupting her monologue with questions that point to the viewer’s culpability, Piper stages herself as an object for inspection, but in a way that ultimately reveals less about the artist than about the viewer’s own attitudes toward race.10 The artist’s recollections of her personal experiences offer testimony in the form of direct address, assuring viewers on an intimate and personal level that racism continues to be a problem. As she has explained: “The personal plays the role of the concrete, immediate, and specific. . . . I use my own experience—my own selfhood—when it seems strategically the best way to make concrete those thoughts, sentiments, or beliefs that might be dismissed as being too theoretical or abstract.”11 Piper deploys her memories to make the effects of racism clear. She explains, “the atomic, interpersonal level of individual transactions is the most elemental, personal level at which blacks learn from whites that they are unwelcome in mainstream society, so this is the level on which I try to attack racism. Although most of my work is not autobiographical, it is, in this sense, very personal.”12 Piper’s autobiographical writings serve as testimony to support the claims she makes in her artworks about discrimination’s pervasiveness. When Piper offers herself as witness, she lays claim to the broader authority of African Americans’ collective memory and accounts of discrimination.13 At the same time, the formal qualities that alienate Piper from her work mark an attempt to universalize her experiences—they cannot be dismissed as symptoms of the artist’s victim complex, but instead address the viewer directly with evidence of his or her own racism. This is a risky strategy for Piper; the 10   Introduction

results of confronting viewers with the responsibility for racism and its effects can include violence. In the installation of Cornered, Piper makes it clear that she anticipates that viewers might react angrily—she addresses viewers at a distance, removed by video’s technology of time delay and transportability, her wariness figured by the arrangement of a video monitor displayed in the corner of the gallery or museum, atop a table turned defensively on its side; viewers watch Piper’s monologue while seated in chairs that have been arranged in a triangular military formation, as if preparing to mount an assault against the artist. In this way, Piper puts both her performance and her audience on display. In a reversal, Piper refuses to appear as the stereotype of the angry black. Instead, she sets the stage for her audience to expose their own insecurities and rage. Each viewer responds to the video with the knowledge that others may be watching, scrutinizing him or her for visual indications of blackness, racism, outrage, or embarrassment. Piper puts the visual markers of race into question and, as a result, racism becomes more visible than race. Peggy Phelan argues that Cornered challenges our dependence upon vision for ensuring what is commonly taken to be the genetic reality of race, supplanting it with the insecurity our faith in vision conceals. The result is self-consciousness and the viewer must recognize how vision is disciplined: what we think we see obscures what we cannot imagine seeing.14 For this reason, Piper asserts racism is “a visual pathology” and has maintained that the viewer who sees her work as accusatory must already feel guilty of racism—that if viewers feel attacked or confronted, then it is because they have reason to be ashamed.15 As she told one interviewer, “there are too many people for whom my work is a source of reproach, as if there was a finger on the wall wagging at them and blaming them. When people have a bad conscience, they get oversensitive that way and don’t want to be reminded of their moral turpitude. . . . If they feel bitten, if they feel they are the target of my work, then they must be right!”16 Piper’s video gives no one the benefit of the doubt—no one is white who cannot irrefutably prove it.17 Piper even casts the veracity of official documentation into doubt by displaying framed photocopies of her father’s two birth certificates as part of the installation; one declares him “White,” the other “Octoroon,” a term used at the time of his birth to identify fair-skinned African Americans and one that might imply skin privilege among blacks (art critics and historians who simplify the terms on the birth certificates Piper’s Performance of Race  11

to “White” and “Black,” as they almost always do, repress this matter). Piper has explained that when her father was born, the doctor provided the document certifying the newborn baby’s whiteness. Piper’s grandmother returned to the hospital, explained the doctor’s mistake and asked for a new birth certificate.18 This anecdote illustrates for viewers of Cornered that to offer proof of whiteness is to publicly acknowledge claims to racial difference and, by implication, superiority. As a result, the viewer is made aware of how he or she benefits from race privilege within American society, but also of the insecure construction and maintenance of racialized identity. My Whiteness

I am white. The fact of my interest in Piper’s work leads people to ask me about my commitment to my project. Does my whiteness matter? When I began researching Piper’s work I knew that it did but I was not sure how. Since then, friends, colleagues, and students keep asking me why I study “race.” What I find most difficult about this question is the widespread assumption, especially among people who identify as white, that when a “black” artist makes work about race, it matters to blacks but not whites. This is the implicit message behind another assumption, that only black people have the authority to interpret the work of black artists. The speciousness of this attitude is apparent both when white scholars complain of feeling uncomfortable interpreting the work of black artists or, more perniciously though no less unwittingly, when they protest being made by blacks to feel uninformed. It is no surprise that blacks might feel uneasy when a white scholar takes the podium to lecture about black art, but white scholars must recognize that this is too often their own fault for failing to take responsibility for their interpretations and choosing instead to hide behind institutional authority and a tone of objectivity. What solution can I offer? Is it to proclaim my whiteness and try to renounce it, along with all the privileges it implies? Scholars tried this strategy in the 1980s and early 1990s, beginning each lecture with a disclaimer along the lines of, “I may be a straight white male but I really get what this artist is saying.” Responses to this approach typically ranged from empathy (other straight white males consoled themselves with, “I know how you feel . . .”) to hostility and dismissal: simply proclaiming one’s whiteness cannot resolve racial inequality; to claim whiteness 12   Introduction

for oneself unproblematically is to make a statement of value reiterating established hierarchies of race privilege. When Audre Lorde used to enumerate the facets of her identity—stating, for example, “I stand before you now—Black, lesbian, mother, feminist, poet, warrior”—she was engaged in a project of revealing and refusing the silence of propriety and self-censorship symptomatic of pressures on black women to assimilate into the academy.19 In contrast, when the “straight white male” announces his presence, he too often misapprehends the authority of his position as if it is a burden when it is more likely a crucial factor in his success. The difference between Lorde and the “straight white male” is a matter of privilege. I am faced with a paradox, therefore: to identify as “white” is to risk declaring who I think I am and who I am certain I am not. As Piper argues in Cornered, to claim whiteness is to claim privilege by insisting upon and naturalizing a racialized distinction, whether or not there are any other racialized categories to which I might lay moral claim. However, it is also clear that to refuse to acknowledge whiteness is tantamount to claiming it, as if I believe I have somehow transcended race (unlike the racialized subjects I study). For example, does not owning up to my whiteness mean asserting my right to objectivity, the same paternalistic birthright claimed by Piper’s “upper-middle-class het WASP male, the pampered only son of doting parents?”20 If so, this is something I hope to explore and contest through engaging with critical theories of feminism and race. I find myself unmoored but not adrift. I am responsible for my course but must admit that the way forward is not entirely clear. What seems most important is to call into question the workings of discourse and recognize its imbrication in concepts of race. Toni Morrison has argued that we do not typically do this because we have been raised not to call attention to race: “every well-bred instinct argues against noticing,” foreclosing critique.21 This is to say that to proclaim one’s whiteness is impertinent and therefore has some potential to disrupt the rules of civil discourse, unsettling conceptions of race in the process; but it is not enough. Rather, we must acknowledge the specters of race that haunt our writing and our reading, too. When you want to know how my whiteness matters, you must also consider why you want to know and what you think it means to understand me as “white.” When Frantz Fanon acknowledged that “to speak is to exist absolutely for the other,”22 he laid bare the fact that by speaking, we borrow conventions Piper’s Performance of Race  13

of language that render us intelligible to listeners but on their terms. The same can be said for writing. When Michel Foucault asked, “What is an author?” his compelling answer was that the author is whoever we believe him or her to be.23 This is not to say that the answer is always either arbitrary or a foregone conclusion. Rather, I raise the possibility simply to make the point that we fabricate my whiteness together, you and me, and that what I write here can only initiate a process of mutual self-reflection. Adrian Piper as African American Artist

Piper makes a distinction between autobiography and personal content in her artwork—the former would take the artist for its subject whereas the latter provides Piper with the means to address viewers and make them realize their own responsibility for the perpetuation of racism. In Cornered, Piper dramatizes this by broaching as possibilities both her whiteness and her blackness. When she declares, “I’m black,” she anticipates that the viewer assumes she is not; by describing, a few sentences later, the opportunity to “pass for white,” she expresses the possibility of her blackness in the form of a dilemma. Furthermore, she includes copies of her father’s two birth certificates in the installation of Cornered, displayed on the wall. These offer proof that passing is not out of the question. In fact, Piper has said her father did pass for white, when he enlisted in the army during the Second World War in order to serve in a combat unit; this was at a time when the American military was segregated by race and black troops were largely relegated to menial support roles. This example is important because it demonstrates what is at stake in passing. After all, Piper’s father risked his life in combat, and, had his deception been uncovered, he faced the possibility of jail time. Piper has asserted that her father deliberately chose not to pass for most of his life, even as other members of his family made the opposite choice.24 This contrast emphasizes the dilemma her father faced: his decision to pass in the service of his country can only be seen as honorable, made more so by the conditions of racism under which he lived every day. Piper’s self-transformation thus figures the fears and fantasies that define the myth of American whiteness. She identifies miscegenation and folkloric accounts of passing as the founding crisis for a pseudoscientific race consciousness in order to challenge Americans to take responsibility for the history of racism in the United States. 14   Introduction

Piper must distinguish her work from autobiography because when her art is interpreted simply as the expression of her personal experiences, it can be easily dismissed as quirky or bizarre.25 Several art critics, for example, seem to have been distracted from the questions that Piper’s work raises by the urge to psychoanalyze the artist on the basis of what they take to be the autobiographical bent of her work. In the case I quoted earlier, Elizabeth Hess stated in a positive review of Piper’s 1987 retrospective exhibition, “it is crucial to know that Piper is a black artist who can easily ‘pass’ for white.” Hess continues, interpreting freely from Piper’s work that, “for the most part this has been a biological burden; Piper feels that she was born wearing a disguise.”26 In response, Piper wrote a letter to the editor—one that I quoted at the beginning of this chapter—that concluded by explaining why it is perilous for her to be identified so closely with what Hess called the “biological burden” of race: By analyzing my work solely in terms of my racial identity, and evaluating it in terms of its shock value, [Hess] portrays me as the racist stereotype much of my work targets: the aggressive, alienating, sexualized black (artist). Hess generously hopes my retrospective will “secure Piper her proper place.” But her well-meant discussion reads instead like an attempt to put me in it.27 In order to avoid typecasting, Piper must be understood as transforming what she has experienced first-hand into paradigmatic situations or knowledge that is in some way accessible and valuable for any viewer. For this reason, Piper performs her role as artist in order to alienate herself from her work. By relating personal experiences through art that clearly stages and theatricalizes the viewing experience, Piper encourages the viewer to become self-conscious about his or her role in completing the work. Piper has also staged what she has specifically identified as the dilemma of “Colored Women Artists”: to make art that treats issues of race and gender is to risk being marginalized as making autobiographical art that is without universal validity, but to make art that is so abstract that it cannot be understood as referencing race or gender reifies the association of anonymity with whiteness.28 To make viewers aware of the responsibility that they bear for this situation, Piper has continued to cast her self-transformations as if they are figures of the viewer’s fantasy. In Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady Piper’s Performance of Race  15

(1995) (plate 3), the viewer sees an altered photograph of Piper. The background has been colored an alarming red and “WHUT CHOO LOOKIN AT, MOFO” appears in a thought balloon over Piper’s head—a formal strategy recognizable from some of the Mythic Being photographs. The alterations ask viewers, “Is this how you see me once you know that I am black?” or, more profoundly, “Is this how you see me, despite your best intentions?” Piper’s altered self-portrait demonstrates how being identified too closely with artwork that takes racism for its subject matter can overdetermine viewers’ images of the artist. She has countered by describing the sense of entitlement expressed by artists who believe that matters of race, gender, sexuality, and social class matter little in the creation or reception of art as that of “the upper-middle-class het WASP male, the pampered only son of doting parents” (this is an attitude she says she shared at the beginning of her career as an artist).29 In pointed contrast, Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady presents Piper’s art as made by an artist whose work is only ever understood as that of a black woman. Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady revises Piper’s earlier Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981) (fig. 6) and both works illustrate the consequences of interpreting Piper’s art as autobiography. In the earlier drawing, the artist has given herself facial features assumed in America to be typically “black” but has written the work’s title across the bottom of the page to insistently mark this as an imaginary self-transformation. Were the artist to depict herself more accurately, this seems to imply, we would nevertheless see her as she appears here. Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features addresses an audience of blacks and whites. Piper first presented this work in the catalogue for the New Museum’s 1981 exhibition, “Events: Artists Invite Artists,” for which Howardena Pindell had selected Piper’s three Political Self-Portraits (all 1978–80).30 In Political Self-Portrait #2 (Race) (fig. 7), Piper superimposes a black-and-white self-portrait, split into positive and negative halves, over a text describing examples of the racist treatment she had earlier received from both blacks and whites. This included black kids in her Harlem neighborhood calling her “Paleface” because she looked too white, and a fifth-grade teacher who thought she was “too fresh and uppity for a little colored girl.” What these examples have in common is that the people addressing Piper know that she is black—or not black enough—even as Piper says that she is herself uncertain; she explains that identifying herself as black made her feel as though she were “coopt16   Introduction

6  Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features, 1981. Pencil on paper, 8 × 10 in.

Collection of Eileen Harris Norton.

7  Adrian Piper, Political

Self-Portrait #2 (Race), 1978–80. Photostat, 24 × 40 in. Collection of Richard Sandor.

ing something, i.e., the Black Experience, which I haven’t had,” while at the same time not wanting to “deny a part of myself that I’m proud of.”31 Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features articulates this dilemma. In the New Museum catalogue, Piper included a statement entitled “Five Other Features that Are a Dead Giveaway.” Piper’s text enumerates examples of how various people—black and white—had tried to discern in her looks and behavior what they regarded as signs of her blackness. Some of these statements were made half in jest: “I dance ‘black.’ Once I was with white friends at a predominantly black discotheque and was dancing the Bugaloo. A black man watched me all evening and finally muttered to me as I was leaving, ‘You can’t be white and 18   Introduction

dance like that. What you doing with them people?’ ” Other comments are criticisms offered behind Piper’s back: “I’m aggressive. In art school, Rosemary Mayer once related to me the following remarks made to her by our (youngish, white male, sensitive, liberal) art history teacher: ‘Adrian is always talking in class. Is she black? She’s so aggressive . . .’ ”32 Piper’s drawing seems to offer proof of the cumulative effect such comments might have had on her. Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features is a sort of inverse Portrait of Dorian Gray—other people’s misbehaviors and transgressions have accumulated to compose Piper’s fanciful self-portrait, one that resembles a face that some people will consider disfigured but that others might find improved. Either response exposes American insecurities about race. Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features thus serves to ask each viewer whether he or she bears responsibility for Piper’s drawing. It may be easier for some viewers to ascribe the uneasiness Piper’s work makes them feel to what they take for the artist’s aggressiveness or antagonistic attitude. In a racist society, the victim is made responsible for fulfilling the racist’s insulting fantasies or finding a way to disprove them. This is, finally, why Piper’s self-transformations are so provocative and also why she must protect herself by rendering the procedure of her transformations obvious. To attribute what we see in Piper’s work to her personality or her psyche—and specifically, to uncritically cling to the idea that she is a black woman who can pass for white—is to refuse to apply the moral concerns that her work broaches to ourselves. To describe Piper’s art as African American art is therefore to confront a moral dilemma: how we interpret Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady depends on knowing that art critics already tend to see Piper primarily as “a black artist who can easily ‘pass’ for white.” In the process, we must ask ourselves, what are we looking at and how does it matter? Do we see only what we desire to see? Adrian Piper and the History of Art

In this book, I place Piper’s conceptual and performative art at the nexus of Minimal, Conceptual, and Feminist art and in relationship to the work various African American artists made at the time. One important aspect of Piper’s work is the way it bridges these histories, which have so far been studied as distinct from one another. I address the reception of Piper’s work to ask the question of how race and gender prejudice made Piper’s Performance of Race  19

it difficult for many artists, critics, curators, and dealers to engage respectfully with her work. More importantly, I am an interested in how Piper’s unique position in the art world made it imperative for her to engage various aesthetic camps as if they were interrelated. The Conceptual and performance art Piper produced during the period 1966–75 allowed her to explore her experience of space and time, always inflected by issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class. After becoming exposed to Conceptual art and the possibilities for making artworks that direct viewers to reflect upon themselves and their perceptions rather than the artist, Piper began an aesthetic investigation of social relationships. According to Piper, attitudes toward her work changed as viewers began to see her, first as a woman, and, later, as black. Their reactions to her work changed and, concomitantly, Piper began to anticipate how viewers might see her and her work. She increasingly incorporated her body into her art—not to avoid confrontation but to provoke it strategically. By 1970, she developed a practice of art-making that forced viewers to become aware of their biases and desires by presenting herself transformed into surprising human anomalies—wearing clothes covered in wet paint, publicly performing entire dance routines without music, or appearing in costume as a stereotype of black men. In art exhibitions, Piper presented her performances only through written explanations that describe them as opportunities for self-reflection and individual liberation—her own and viewers’. Around 1969, Piper’s project became motivated by an ideal: the end of racism and sexism, achieved by rational means. Minimalism and Conceptualism promised to make viewers realize the contingency of experience and irrelevance of the artist. Universalism, therefore, was achieved by concealing the artist who, it was presumed, did not invest his or her artwork with any recognizably personal meaning. The result would be an experience from which any viewer might benefit. Piper made work that attempted this but the racialized and gendered responses from viewers who knew she was black and/or a woman demonstrate the contingency of universalism itself. For this reason, Piper’s Minimalist artwork presents a historical paradox: can her artwork from the period 1966–69 be understood as African American art if the artist has effaced herself and if it demonstrates the Minimalist artwork’s ability to refer to itself as the unique object of the viewer’s

20   Introduction

perception? Henry Louis Gates describes one approach to what he calls “Signifyin(g)” in African American literature that offers critical possibilities, but also poses problems for understanding work such as Piper’s. Gates writes of considering “the several ways in which a discrete black text interacts with and against its critical context. I use the word context . . . to refer to the textual world that a black text echoes, mirrors, repeats, revises, or responds to in various formal ways.”33 Gates can demonstrate the intertextual amalgamation of “black” and “white” literary canons with his technique but must rely on identifying some recognizably black content or viewpoint in the work he considers. Piper’s early Minimalist art evinces none. To insist on labeling it African American art risks marking a distinction between Piper’s “black” Minimalism and the unmarked “white” sculptures of her contemporaries. It flirts with reifying the assumption that black art is derivative and threatens to answer Gates’s rhetorical question—“How can the black subject posit a full and sufficient self in a language in which blackness is a sign of absence?”— with a resounding “she cannot.”34 Kobena Mercer argues, “Piper’s art has been fiercely antioptical from the start,” “purely ideational,” and engaged in Conceptual art’s “critique of visuality.”35 Mercer refers to the way that, beginning in 1968, Piper’s work drew its viewer’s attention to the material aspects of looking. One of the first artworks she showed publicly, for example, was an untitled page in the January 1969 issue of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s poetry magazine, 0 to 9 (fig. 8), onto which Piper had typed a text that appropriated the act of reading: If you are a slow reader, it will take you approximately five seconds to read this sentence. If, on the other hand, you are a fast reader, it will very likely take you the same amount of time to read this sentence, since it has more words in it, in addition to a few subordinate clauses. If you are an average reader, you must set up a ratio of the number of words in the first sentence over the time it takes a slow reader to read it (five seconds) to the number of words in the first sentence over the time it would take a fast reader to read them (unknown quantity X), solve the ratio, add the two times, divide the sum by two, divide the dividend (the average of time obtained) into the same

Piper’s Performance of Race  21

8  Adrian Piper, untitled project for 0 to 9, January 1969. Pagework, 8.5 × 11 in. Collection of the

Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

original number of words, multiply the new dividend by the total number of words in this sentence, and you will then know how long it has taken you to read this sentence.36 At issue is not how long it takes to read any of these sentences. Rather, they draw attention to the act of reading and the material circumstances of the magazine page as experienced in space and time and as an idea. The artwork depends on opticality but only as a means of capturing the reader’s attention and diverting it elsewhere. Piper alienates herself from her art, sometimes effacing her so that it cannot “posit a . . . self” on her behalf. As opposed to presenting itself to all viewers as an internally coherent statement established by the artist at the moment it was made, each of Piper’s Minimalist artworks provokes viewers to consider themselves as agents in time and space, realizing and recognizing themselves in the relationships they create with the artwork. Piper has made art based on her personal experiences throughout her career but almost always attempts to establish a noticeable distance between herself and her work. The problem of how critics and curators she met subsequently understood her work remains a historical problem, nevertheless. As a movement, Minimalism has always been defined vaguely. Even the artists commonly associated with it have never agreed on what the term means or whose work it describes. Various exhibitions have tried to establish a place for women in the movement. However, the fact remains that because contemporaneous debates about what constitutes Minimalism were determined, to a great extent, by the published writings of such men as Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson, it has consistently been understood as intractably macho and white. This problem is exemplified by James Meyer’s recent reappraisal of the movement: he endeavors to think critically about the various artworks, exhibitions, and essays that define Minimalism, but his narrow attention to the Minimalist canon established by 1967 leads him to re-inscribe certain race and gender biases; his approach is incapable of answering—let alone asking—the question, As a black woman, how could Adrian Piper consider herself a Minimalist?37 Anna Chave’s approach to the problem of why art critics and curators selected certain artists for praise and not others is perhaps more promising because it has the capacity to expose various personal

Piper’s Performance of Race  23

biases in operation at the time.38 For this reason, I believe Hal Foster is wrong to argue that Minimalism should not be critiqued for its failure to interrogate the universalist bodies it assumed. Instead, it is important to acknowledge how the insistent anonymity of both artist and viewer hid the ways in which prejudices regarding race and gender determined who could be a Minimalist. Such a critique is not anachronistic; some of the “critical followers” Foster credits with subsequently testing “the historical and ideological limits of minimalism” were not the disciples or latecomers he suggests but contemporaneous participants.39 Chave’s emphasis on biography has its limits, too, however. Biographical study relies on discerning intentions and personal tastes, not to mention relationships of love, commerce, politics, and convenience. Piper’s Minimalism calls for a different approach. Piper’s artwork has a place in Minimalism, but until recently, it was relegated to a position of absence. Every Minimalist made an effort to establish him- or herself as an absence in his or her work; the artist necessarily became the markedly irretrievable point of the artwork’s creation in order to privilege each viewer’s experience of the art object. It is equally clear, however, that some art critics and historians have tried to recover that lost origin. If the artist is to be sought, then the fact that Piper might or might not have been included in various exhibitions and publications on the basis of race or gender must be considered; there is a difference between Piper removing herself from her artwork and being disinvited from an exhibition because she is a black woman. Beginning in 1969, Piper began to address the visual regime of racism. Piper performed an inscrutable or anomalous presence in ways that undermine the premise that a stranger’s identity can be ascertained by recognizing various communally determined clues.40 She did this first in her Conceptualist Hypothesis artworks by attempting to embody the ideal viewer of Minimalism. She did not express an obviously racialized or gendered relationship to her surroundings nor did she execute this work to express her ability to accomplish her work’s stated goal. Rather, in Hypothesis, Piper articulates a distinction between the idea behind the artwork and the viewer’s subjective comprehension of it. This is how Conceptualism enabled Piper and others to make art of their bodies that was not autobiographical.41 Piper could claim the anonymity that Minimalism and Conceptualism promised the artist and thereby share the

24   Introduction

museum with those she calls “upper-middle-class het WASP males, the pampered only sons of doting parents.”42 Piper’s art of the late 1960s and early 1970s must also be considered in relationship to histories of feminist and African American art. Lippard included Piper’s work in two of the earliest exhibitions that attempted to discern whether there was such a thing as a woman’s sensibility, “26 Contemporary Women Artists” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut (1971), and “c. 7,500” at the California Institute of the Arts (1973). Piper had begun a series of work, Hypothesis (1969–70), in which she explored tasks and behaviors conventionally assigned women, like grocery shopping and maintaining a home. Piper’s work theatricalized the effects of such gender roles, by making use of Conceptual art’s pose of objectivity—conventionally identified at the time with men—to offer a pointed critique of essentialism. Her Catalysis series (1970–73)— preconceived actions performed unannounced on the streets of New York City—further explored conventional representations of femininity. Piper exhibited her actions in the form of written accounts, removing references to race or gender that might have been apparent in performance. She later reintroduced such information when interviewed by a woman art student taking a class called “Women in the Arts,” offering a new image of Catalysis that raises questions about how opportunities for women to exhibit overtly feminist artwork had changed from the early to the mid-1970s.43 The relationship of Piper’s Minimal, Conceptual, and performance art to that of other African American artists is more problematic, partly because of concurrent debates about what it meant to make specifically African American art. For Piper, who was often the only black artist included in the exhibits she participated in, the stakes must have been high. With the rise of the Black Arts Movement, an artist whose work did not clearly address matters of race might be publicly denounced. On the other hand, recent reconsiderations of Black Arts provide evidence that several black artists made work that addressed race, gender, sexuality, and class critically in ways sympathetic to Piper’s own project.44 Piper’s approach to Conceptual art is also similar to Romare Bearden’s arguments for understanding his own work as American art. Since 1987, Piper has presented her early work as foreshadowing the work of her later career, work that clearly takes race and racism as its

Piper’s Performance of Race  25

subjects. In essays, statements, interviews, and four retrospective exhibitions, Piper has recast her early work so it cannot be understood without reference to the discrimination she feared and experienced. For example, in 1987, Piper asked how she could have made work that ignored racism and sexism in the art world. The answer, she says, is that Minimalism and Conceptualism offered a means for both “flying” and “flight”—twinned possibilities for escaping discrimination by imagining its end as well as denying it.45 The same abstraction that allowed her to imagine change also blinded her: it enabled her to believe friends and acquaintances already engaged in a critique of social norms would oppose prejudice in all its forms. Piper, like her friends, believed Conceptual art encouraged viewers to become self-critical and, as a result, recognize their responsibility for changing the status quo. Artists took it for granted that their work did not need to address specific issues because they assumed that once viewers became self-conscious about the conventions of viewing art they would actively initiate a broad critique of social norms, including discrimination. When Piper realized the limitations of Conceptual art as practiced at the end of the 1960s—that intellectually abstract work might not provoke viewers to question racism, for example, and that it might be important to make work that would do this—she began to experiment with new approaches to art-making that were only possible because of the sorts of questions Conceptualism helped her to ask. How did Piper’s early Minimalist and Conceptual art structure her later work and what, in turn, can her work reveal to us about Minimalist and Conceptual art? In chapter 1, I explore how Piper places her artwork within a history of Conceptual art that begins with Minimalism’s obdurate and selfreferential objects and results in art as catalyst, provoking viewers to investigate specific political issues. Piper describes Minimalism’s emphasis on creating an object that refers directly to the material conditions of its construction and exhibition as a repudiation of the formalist art criticism prevalent in the 1960s.46 Such an object had the capacity to focus the viewer’s attention on his or her encounter with it as a changing experience in time and space. For Piper as for others, Minimalism demonstrated that an artwork’s final form was dependent upon the viewer, not the artist.47 Conceptual art built upon this, introducing information into the Minimalist artwork and harnessing the contingency of the self-

26   Introduction

reflexive encounter to direct viewers’ attentions beyond the artwork. When the idea, or information, seemed to take precedence over the object in what Lucy Lippard and John Chandler notoriously described as “The Dematerialization of Art,” obviously political content became possible again.48 Art that prioritized the viewer’s experience over the artist’s meant repudiating the Modernist emphasis on autobiographical expressiveness. As Piper explains in retrospect, the self-effacement that was a part of both Minimalist and Conceptualist practice required her to suppress the particularities of her experiences as a black woman. In chapter 2, I consider the consequences. In order for Piper’s work to be understood simply as art—not as women’s art—Piper had to repress any indication that her work was made by a woman. Likewise, African American artists had, by the time Piper began art school, expressed frustration with art critics and curators who dismissed their work. Piper did not participate in the organizations, demonstrations, or exhibitions black artists organized in the late 1960s or early 1970s, nor did she make any overt references to race or black culture in her artwork before 1972. She explains the absence of any recognizable references to race or racism as, partly, an unconscious effort to avoid becoming a target of racism.49 I take Piper’s work from this period to articulate the crisis of invisibility with which black and women artists struggled. Thus, because Piper’s blackness had no place in Minimalism or Conceptualism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is primarily by discussing its omission that Piper has made a place for it. The particularity of Piper’s experience demonstrates how the supposedly pristine art gallery was a space already permeated with the ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality before her artwork entered it. In chapter 3, I discuss how Piper made a number of artworks in 1970 that theatricalize her increasing awareness of how others saw her. Piper presents her flight into abstraction as having unwittingly set up a situation in which viewers would reveal their racist and sexist assumptions about her. She appears disillusioned about abstraction’s potential for overcoming sexism and she blames herself for getting carried away. She has misled not viewers but herself: The political upheavals of 1970—Kent State, Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, the student revolts, the women’s movement, and others’ responses to my perceived social, political, and gender identity braked

Piper’s Performance of Race  27

my flight a bit, reflecting back onto me, enclosing me in my subjectivity, shocking me back into my skin . . . I struggled to transcend both . . . It didn’t work. I plummeted back to earth, where I landed with a jolt.50 According to her account, Piper has not “passed” for a white man but failed to notice the sexism and racism of her fellow Americans. Confronted by the immoral behavior of others—whether directed at her, personally, or at blacks, women, or the people of Southeast Asia, more generally—she made artworks that respond to shock and fear with an attempt to achieve objectivity, as if to make sense of newfound responsibilities. In Context #8: Written Information Voluntarily Supplied to Me during the Period of April 30 to May 30, 1970, Piper collected and gathered into notebooks the flyers, mail, announcements, and other things people gave her to read. The contents record who people thought she was: Was she sympathetic with a certain political cause or interested in a particular kind of art? Each handbill or announcement for a political rally insists she take a stand on a given issue. It is as if her person—the principal around whom this and other Context notebooks are organized—becomes an opportunity for others to announce their own moral, political, or artistic beliefs and lay claim to her attentions, if only momentarily. Piper exhibits these materials in a way that puts the expectations of others on display, making them available for critique and provoking viewers to self-reflection. In chapter 4, I discuss how Piper developed her concerns about how the judgments of others might affect her self-image in Catalysis, a range of unannounced actions on the streets of New York and Cambridge. In these performances, Piper, disguised and disfigured, explored the capacity for an anomalous human presence to provoke unsuspecting viewers into reconsidering their assumptions about normal appearance and behavior. On the one hand, Catalysis provided Piper with a model for investigating socially determined boundaries of acceptable behavior and, more importantly, for making the viewers of her work aware of their own expectations and prejudices—a model she has used ever since. On the other hand, she also investigated her own ability to ignore the reactions of her viewers, attempting in each performance to remain inured to their scorn. Piper subsequently developed these interests in two directions. In chapter 5, I consider Piper’s 1971 project, Food for the Spirit, as a

28   Introduction

feminist’s exploration of what it means to be always aware of the judgment of others. While studying Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Piper took snapshots of herself in the mirror to stake her claim to Kant’s universalist philosophy of intellectual transcendence—one traditionally assumed to apply only to white males—while also focusing on the conditions of her own embodiment. In the process, she salvages her individuality from the scrutiny of others as well as from the influence of Kant. Food for the Spirit is both a realization of Kant’s philosophy and a refutation of it. Her desire to recognize herself in the universal figure Kant describes exposes the paradox of narcissism inherent in Kant’s own exposition. Piper reveals this by enacting the very tensions that structure Kant’s text. For example, she impulsively breaks out in sweat while reading Kant as if to defend her particularity against his universalist metaphysics. She also objectifies herself deliberately in photographs and audio recordings that capture her attempts to sustain her individuality. Efforts to record the body’s physicality interrupt her experience of transcendence, but in the end, the photographic index proves inadequate for securing her presence. Subjectivity requires awareness of others. In chapter 6, I ask how Piper’s subsequent performances in the guise of the person she imagines her viewers most fear turn the scrutiny of others against them, as if to insist that each viewer take responsibility for prejudice. Beginning in 1973, Piper began periodically dressing as a persona she called the Mythic Being, striding the streets of New York in mustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth. In posed and retouched photographs, Piper’s slight, fair-skinned figure blurs distinctions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Suspended between difference and identification, the Mythic Being becomes a paradoxical figure of liberation. Disguised, Piper says she found sympathy for certain aspects of black manhood as popularly figured. In the process, she also performed her inability to identify with the roles allotted black women. Piper’s approach—to confront viewers and force them to reconsider assumptions about the social construction of identity—is singular among the work of her peers. I situate her work at the junction between the various artistic practices developed by black and white artists, as well as by feminists. Piper was the only African American woman associated with the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and one of only a few African Americans to participate in exhibitions of the

Piper’s Performance of Race  29

nascent feminist art movement in the early 1970s. To reveal assumptions about whose art was considered Minimalist or Conceptualist—and whose could not be—it is important to consider how questions of race and gender manifest themselves in Piper’s work and the critical response to it, as well as implications for studying the 1960s and 1970s today.

30   Introduction

Section 1 19 65 –1970

The Paradox of the Black Woman Concep tual Artist

​1

​C ontingent and Universal Adrian Piper and the Minimalist Ideal

In the late 1960s, Adrian Piper began an investigation of the politics of representation that culminated, between September 1969 and March 1970, in her Hypothesis series, an exploration of her ability to inhabit the universalist role of viewer that Modernism promised. In autobiographical essays, interviews, and statements published since 1987, the artist has presented the Hypothesis series as a response to her realization during 1969– 70 of art’s political imperative, a sudden but seemingly natural development of her interest in the critical potential for Minimal and Conceptual art to engage the politicized realm of social interaction. In Piper’s accounts, the violent suppression of dissent in America that by the spring of 1970 had precipitated mass action in the art world forced her to recognize how she had previously resisted and even consciously avoided recognizing art’s potential to effect change in the viewer. When she subsequently withdrew her work from an exhibition of Conceptual art to protest the killings of civil rights protesters in the South and student antiwar protesters at Kent State and Jackson State universities, her statement of withdrawal declared abstract forms and ideas unsuitable for a moment scarred by violence and moral corruption. However, the Hypothesis series marks a change in Piper’s work. She describes her initial experiments with Minimal and Conceptual art while a student at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 1966 and 1967 as an attempt to escape the

realities of racism and sexism by indulging in the pursuit of an apolitical aesthetics. The Minimalism of Donald Judd and Robert Morris and the Conceptualism of Sol LeWitt would eventually provide Piper with tools for investigating the perpetual conditions of racism and sexism in America, but, according to the artist, they first provided her with the means for avoiding them, something she says she only became aware of afterward. In order to establish the historical significance of Piper’s investigations into the moral and political implications of the particularity of the viewer’s experience, I offer a critical approach to the autobiographical narrative found in Piper’s writings that explain her early artworks of 1965–70. Abstraction

Since the 1980s, Piper has demonstrated a distinctly ambiguous attitude toward abstraction, a term she uses to describe her art of the 1960s. By abstraction, Piper means conceptual abstraction. She uses the word to suggest an intellectually creative method for understanding the world in its component parts, which she could define for herself, investigate rationally, and then reconfigure. As a consequence, she explains, abstraction enables her to imagine a future free from racism and sexism: “Abstraction is freedom from the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; freedom to violate in imagination the constraints of public practice, to play with conventions, or to indulge them. Abstraction is a solitary journey through the conceptual universe, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to.”1 In the mid to late 1960s, however, Piper says the appearance of intellectual freedom also enabled her to delude herself for a time, and to think that she could avoid addressing issues of discrimination and oppression directly. She explains, “abstraction is flying,” but it is also “flight.” It allowed her to deny the same realities she used it to overcome. Piper finds potential in abstraction’s capacity to transcend the particularities of the moment, but she also sees treachery in it. Piper marks this distinction most clearly in two essays that pit Clement Greenberg against Minimalism and Conceptualism. In one, she writes that “the ideology of Greenbergian formalism undergirded the threat of McCarthyism” by replacing the European avant-garde’s important legacy of radical social and political content with the culture of conformity in the United States. Clouded in parochial literary sophistication, 34   Chapter 1

formalism bore the appearance but not the substance of a progressive concern for aesthetic and moral value, she charges. The result was an art that claimed to exist beyond politics. Piper derides this as a theory of “unselfconscious social ineffectuality under the guise of an extracted essence of critically sophisticated formal appropriation.” American artists first contested this, she concludes, through Minimalism’s emphasis on the viewer’s self-conscious experience of the artwork as an object embedded within the social and political confines of its exhibition.2 In the second essay, Piper cites LeWitt’s call to set the artistic idea against the art object that results from it, calling this “the end of formalism, the end of art for art’s sake as an autonomous realm independent of the world, because to mine this intellectual content we needed to draw on all those fields and areas that previously had been considered off limits: the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, even the other arts.”3 While formalist artists and critics feigned ignorance of such supposedly extra-aesthetic information, Conceptual artists, in their artwork, acknowledged their interest in them. This eventually made possible a number of Conceptual strategies, including Piper’s, for making art that would provoke both artist and viewer to engage in politicized selfreflection. Piper offers the work of the Australian artist Ian Burn as an example: What I want to suggest is that if Ian was really committed to Conceptual art . . . he should have done pretty much exactly as he did. Conceptual art should have led him to political reflection on his own status as an artist in the international scene, as a white male and as an Australian. It should have led him to consequent political action which was guided by that reflection, and was dedicated to effective social change.4 By the end of the 1960s, Conceptualism’s emphasis on the contingent and the return of information as content made art politically relevant again.5 Her own work developed differently. She says, “[it developed] from my body as a conceptually and spatio-temporally immediate object to my person as a gendered and ethnically stereotyped art commodity.”6 Piper’s analysis refuses the common perception that formalism enables the art critic to see an artwork on its own terms, undistracted by external irrelevancies. Piper’s use of her body in her art introduces an element replete with extra-artistic value, as if to insistently demonstrate that she Contingent and Universal  35

regards formalism as an attempt to conceal art’s role in politics and economics and that forecloses dissent. Given Piper’s vehement condemnation of formalism, it is important to examine her self-conscious critique of her own early experiments in abstraction. Piper begins “Flying,” the essay she wrote in 1987 in which she presents her first and most extensive discussion of her earliest work, by recounting her “two most treasured recurrent dreams.” In each dream, the artist sees herself flying over and away from people who watch her, become enraged at her abilities, and try to harm her; she escapes by flying away. In the essay, the dreams represent both Piper’s fears about the judgment of others and her own efforts to repress her insecurities in order to imagine living in a world where she is empowered to evade those who would judge her unkindly. The second dream ends with Piper escaping her pursuers, in part, by becoming “invisible, disembodied, pure sexual desire, [in] the night [that] holds no fears for [her].”7 In light of her dreams, abstraction seems to have offered Piper a degree of anonymity, allowing her to indulge herself, safely removed from the scrutiny of others. Since then, in artwork, writings, and statements that treat her childhood and adolescence, Piper has offered examples of the sort of judgment she might have feared at SVA while making such abstract art: racist and sexist taunting and ridicule that provoked her to doubt herself and mistrust others. Art promised something better. Personal Expression and Transcendence

Piper places her artwork within a history that begins with Minimalism’s obdurate and self-referential objects and develops into situational artworks that provoke viewers to investigate specific issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class.8 The anonymity promised by abstraction depends upon understanding an artwork according to the viewer’s perception of it rather than the artist’s intentions. Minimalism and Conceptualism both created conditions necessary for the viewer to recognize the contingency of experience. As Annette Michelson argued in 1969, the premise of Minimalism is that the artwork stands on its own, to be assessed by the viewer on its own terms. The Minimalist artist does not make a statement with his or her artwork, but establishes the conditions for the viewer’s experience.9 I would argue that Conceptual artists embraced this lesson, as well. An artwork achieved universal value by concealing the particularities of the artist who, it was presumed, did not invest his 36   Chapter 1

or her artwork with recognizably personal meaning. This is what Carrie Lambert calls the “internal duality” of Minimalism, which addressed everyday life and personal experience but in such a way that “personal identity, embedded in gesture, had to be minimized to make the work.”10 Lambert points specifically to the work of the dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, who recalls that “emotional life comprised the unseen . . . underbelly of high Minimalism.”11 Just as the Minimalist artist suppressed evidence of his or her hand in making the artwork, the artist attempted to render anything that might be regarded as content abstract. This is what Piper did in the Minimal and Conceptual artworks she made between 1967 and the spring of 1970.12 Piper has exhibited paintings she made in the mid-1960s that demonstrate she first sought a means to personal expression and transcendence in the combination of aesthetics and hallucinatory drugs. She made paintings in which she strove to capture the intellectual and bodily transcendence she attempted while still in high school through yoga, vegetarianism, Beat poetry, and LSD.13 For paintings such as LSD Bloodstream (1965) and LSD Self-Portrait from the Inside Out (1966), she adopted the fluid, patterned forms of psychedelic rock posters with a flatness that recalls Pop art reproductions of advertisements, an association that suggests her artistic aspirations. The references to an illicit drug culture address an audience of Piper’s friends and perhaps promise a full experience only to viewers who, like the artist, have dropped acid. In LSD Steven Shomstein (1966), for example, Piper painted a portrait of her boyfriend intended to convey something of the way she saw him while tripping on acid. To suggest her subject’s moral and spiritual purity, she has broken the entire composition into irregularly fluid panes of color reminiscent of stained-glass windows, with a yin-and-yang sun in the sky.14 These paintings aligned Piper with a mid-sixties counterculture that sought personal affirmation through spiritual transcendence achieved partly through the explicit rejection of a consumerist social order and the concomitant embrace of the hand- (and home-) made. By exhibiting her early paintings, Piper makes a case for the importance of personal experience in the art she has made throughout her career. She clearly marked the LSD works as having been painted by a woman: for example, in LSD Self-Portrait from the Inside Out she has represented herself with a woman’s body, signing it and the other works in the series, “Adrianne.” Piper had taken to spelling her name “Adrianne” while a teen model Contingent and Universal  37

in high school, when faced with adolescent insecurities about appearing properly feminine. For example, she tired of receiving mail from people she did not know that was addressed to “Master Adrian Piper,” and so appended the effeminate suffix to her name. At SVA, she stopped using the name Adrianne. Piper says she became interested in formal experimentation and, during her first two years there, made no artwork with overtly personal or social content, and so, in what she calls a gesture of self-confidence, she returned instead to spelling it “Adrian,” the way her parents had named her. At SVA, she either did not sign her artwork or signed it with the gender-neutral spelling of her first name, “Adrian,” that she has used ever since.15 Anna Chave argues that only male artists were allowed the anonymity that Minimalism required of the artist; women were treated as overly involved in their work, regardless of their efforts to maintain the same distance from their work as the male Minimalists. Women whose names could be mistaken for men’s fared better than those who did not. As Chave concludes, anonymity was considered a masculine attribute, not a genderless one.16 This is an idea with which Piper agrees, remarking recently, “Heaven only knows where I would have ended up had my name been Shirley or Belinda.”17 Whether or not Piper was conscious of this in 1966 and 1967, she recalls that when she began exhibiting, people who did not know her assumed that the artist, “Adrian Piper,” who made formally or conceptually abstract art, was a white man. When people supportive of her work discovered otherwise, many abandoned her.18 As she wrote in a poem from 1992, “My Slave Name,” she gradually became aware of the ways in which her name confirmed expectations that a Minimalist or Conceptual artist would be a white man. The name she had been given at birth “became a pseudonym” without her having realized it. Too late, she recognized that “Adrian” was. . . .   useful for cloaking my gender,   useful for enhancing the credibility of my work,    work inconceivable from the hand of a cute young thing like me. But I was too young and stupid to decline loft visits,   an opportunity to make new friends, as I saw it. They found out the truth, one of the truths, soon enough.19 In a telling example, Piper recalls in the poem one first-time visitor to her loft complaining in German (thinking Piper would not understand), 38   Chapter 1

“Aber sie ist doch nur ein Mädchen!” (But she is just a girl!).20 Piper’s wariness about conceptual abstraction articulates the paradox of her early career as an artist. She achieved astonishing success at a young age, participating in several of the international group exhibitions that defined Conceptualism as well as assisting and collaborating with LeWitt and publishing magazine projects that characterized what was a community effort of international scope. Piper began to publish her work in January 1969, when two of her projects were included in 0 to 9, a little magazine of Conceptual art and poetry edited by the poets Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer. During the spring and summer, she sent projects through the mail and made other artworks to circulate among the gallery advertisements in the Village Voice. On the basis of these, she was invited to participate in several important exhibitions in 1969 and 1970, including “Number 7” at the Paula Cooper Gallery, “Language III” and “Language IV” at the Dwan Gallery, “Konzpetion/Conception” in West Germany, “Art after Plans” in Switzerland, “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” at the New York Cultural Center, “Art in the Mind” (an exhibition that took the form of a catalogue), and “Information” at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as three exhibitions curated by Lucy Lippard: “Groups” at the School of Visual Art, “557,087” at the Seattle Art Museum, and “955,000” at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Joseph Kosuth mentioned Piper in his influential essay on Conceptual art, “Art after Philosophy,” and her work was reviewed in the Village Voice, received notice in Artforum, and was reproduced in Studio International. Piper also participated in various performance events in New York. Piper’s success appears in retrospect to have presented her with a problem she was slow to recognize: because so many early participants in Conceptual art knew each other through correspondence, Piper says she had the experience of meeting critics, curators, and collectors who liked her work when they received it in the mail but who turned their backs on her when they met her and discovered that she was a young black woman—not the white man they had assumed.21 Given Piper’s apparent success as a Conceptual artist, the discrimination she describes raises important questions about Conceptualism’s promised universalism. Significantly, she marks the distinction between choosing to remove her presence from her artwork in order to privilege the viewer’s experience of it and being prevented from showing her work because of exhibition Contingent and Universal  39

organizers’ prejudice. In her own accounts, Piper becomes a doubled absence in the history of Conceptual art. In chapter 3, I discuss how Piper later changed her artwork to utilize the reactions her gendered appearance provoked in viewers. Until then, however, she sought to avoid self-representation in her artwork. Was this because she anticipated the largely adverse reaction to her being a woman? That is a possibility, but her decision to revert to the original spelling of her name, coincident with her interest in Conceptualism, also suggests that the anonymity and invisibility of Minimalism expressed self-confidence. An art alienated and abstracted from the artist’s body and desires, universalized to be accessible to all viewers, offered hope— wittingly or not—for a future when particularities of the artist’s gender would not matter. Sensory Experience and Self-Reflection

Retrospectively, Piper’s turn to abstraction and Minimalism at SVA seems to be an effort to remove autobiographical information from her art even as she begins to refer conceptually to the relationship between artist and artwork. Piper stopped signing her work with a name that was clearly a woman’s, and in 1967 she also “abandon[ed] specific subject matter,” she says, including anything that might be construed as referring to her personally. Instead, she began making art she considers Minimalist in its self-referentiality. First, for a time at SVA, she made paintings that borrowed from the Pop art of Jasper Johns and Tom Wesselmann, adding an object into each composition where its painted representation should be.22 In other paintings, she made her formal decisions evident by inserting small canvases into larger compositions. She offers her painting Michael Sternschein (1967) as an example of her efforts “to distinguish subject matter from formal concerns, and to explore the latter,” but without abandoning figurative representation.23 She has painted the boy’s shorts, left hand, and head on individual canvases and inserted these into a painting of his body that looks too small for the enlarged appendages, emphasizing artistic conventions by violating them. Later in 1967, Piper made a number of abstract drawings in pencil on assorted 8.5 × 11 in. sheets of paper. She juxtaposed rectangular forms drawn in varying shades against blank areas on the familiar and insistently lined surface of notebook paper or graph paper, recalling the doodles a student might make in school. The illusion of spatial depth and 40   Chapter 1

9  Adrian Piper,

Drawings about Paper and Writings about Words #33, 1967. Pencil on paper, 8.5 × 11 in. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

the relationships of representational forms in space clash with the material realities of the viewer’s relationship to the drawing on line paper. Piper titles the series of untitled artworks Drawings about Paper and Writings about Words (fig. 9);24 even at their most representational or abstract, the drawings never transcend their material form—they do not cease to appear as pencil on paper. The drawings are “very strictly minimalist,” the beginning of what Piper calls her “exploration of perspectival spatiotemporality.” The work is still somewhat figurative because the abstract forms represent the relationships between objects as she saw them, not yet fully alienated from the artist who has rendered her own particular “exploration of perspectival spatiotemporality” on paper.25 Some of Piper’s other works from this time are about the viewer’s experience, including a number of shaped paintings she called Untitled Constructions (1967), all of which she destroyed; they exist only in photographs.26 The series consists of what look like conventional paintContingent and Universal  41

ings that are constructed from wood and masonite, then painted either all white or in black and white. Each work creates a visual pun that toys with two of the major concerns of Modernist painting—illusionism and representation. For example, two of the paintings (fig. 10.1 and fig. 10.2) resemble each other at first glance: each looks like a pair of rectangles painted with black borders. Upon examination, the paintings differ significantly: one consists of a large black rectangle onto which Piper has affixed two boards painted white, while the other comprises two small, rectangular white monochromes mounted into a single black frame with two openings. Piper’s Untitled Constructions resemble the paintings that Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt made between 1959 and 1963, announcing themselves as objects rather than as the flat support for Modernist painting. They are made not to be seen but encountered, so that the viewer’s perceptions in time and space contradict the illusory appearance of resemblance and flatness.27 Piper used more conventional materials to accomplish a similar effect—setting painting’s conventions of representation in tension with its materials and, more fundamentally, its materiality—in NinePart Floating Square (1967) (fig. 11). The work is composed of nine unprimed canvases, each three square feet, hung together in the shape of a single larger square. Piper penciled a grid of one-inch squares over the individual canvases and painted a single larger square approximately six feet tall over the smaller canvases in a thin gesso wash. Like the work of Agnes Martin, to whom Piper’s materials and grids refer, painting, drawing, and support each represent a standard geometric form but also draw attention to the material conditions of the viewer’s experience.28 It is important, therefore, that when Piper chose to discard her paintings, she documented them as Minimalist artworks: she made installation photographs rather than close-ups, choosing not to crop out clues to their physical presence. Seen in retrospect, Piper’s photographs and the constructions they record announce her interest in Minimalism’s insistence on making the viewer self-reflexive about sensory experience and its bearing on knowledge. Conceptual Art and Self-Reflection: The Critique of Modernist Criticism

In February 1968, Piper experienced her “awakening” to Conceptual art when she saw LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of 42   Chapter 1

10.1  Adrian Piper, Untitled Constructions, 1967. Wood sculpture. Collection of the Adrian Piper

Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

10.2  Adrian Piper, Untitled Constructions, 1967. Wood sculpture. Collection of the Adrian Piper

Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

11  Adrian Piper, Nine-Part Floating Square, 1967. Nine unprimed canvases each

measuring 18 × 18 in., pencil and water-thinned gesso, hung against a grid drawn on the wall behind it. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Cubes (1968) (fig. 12) at the Dwan Gallery.29 Afterward, she reread LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” and, in two of her earliest attempts to respond to her experience of his work, Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (1968) (fig. 13) and Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds (1968) (fig. 14), she pursued two related ideas: First, that by pitting perceptual chaos against an appearance of order and logic, an artwork might provoke the viewer to self-reflexively reconsider how rational consciousness depends upon vision. Secondly, that the particular encounter with another person or object provokes the subject to organize perceptions according to categories of information that necessarily diminish and misrepresent the infinite characteristics making the situation unique. In her writings from the time and in interviews and essays since, Piper explains that her experience of LeWitt’s artwork confirmed her belief in the capacity for an artwork to provoke 44   Chapter 1

12  Sol LeWitt, 46 3-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967. Baked enamel on aluminum, each

unit 45 × 15 × 15 in., Dwan Gallery installation, February 3–28, 1968. Photography courtesy the Estate of Sol LeWitt and Pace Wildenstein, New York.

13  Adrian Piper, Sixteen

Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (detail), 1968. Photostat on paper with wood and cardboard model, 32.25 × 21.5 in. and 8 × 10.5 × 10 in. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

rational and objective self-reflection. For example, in 1968, she wrote with a mixture of modesty and conviction: “I find that [LeWitt’s] ideas generally tend to corroborate and strengthen many of my own scarcely formed attitudes.”30 Piper expressed faith that Conceptual art provided not just a new method but also a revitalized ethics of art-making. These have proven central to Piper’s work ever since, particularly in her attempts to theatricalize racism’s effects. Reflecting on her new interest in 1968, she acknowledged what was “really most important” for her was that, “the choices [she had] inadvertently begun to make concerning means of expression are closely related to the maintenance of critical objectivity, breadth of appreciation, analytical thinking, and, above all, clarity of expression—not only in art, but also in life.”31 LeWitt’s artwork demonstrated for Piper a compelling method for creating an encounter in space and time that would confound viewers’ expectations about an object that only appeared logical and systemic. The resulting experience would help viewers recognize each art object less according to rules and conventions than for its uniqueness—a lesson that could be extrapolated and applied to individual people encountered in everyday life. Piper valued what art critics described as the chaos and mystery of LeWitt’s work that caused them to reflect upon their experience of it. Piper hoped that this paradoxical experience might provoke rational self-reflection in viewers, the result of a new awareness of the process by which empirical knowledge is rationally derived from the disorder of sensory experience. She explains that the viewer would learn to simply stand silently, perceiving and experiencing at the deepest level the singularity of the object or person, knowing in advance that any attempt at intellectualization is going to be invalid, and so allowing their concrete experience to quiet the intellect before it starts poisoning that experience. At that point we can start considering the transformative powers of art and the possibilities of spiritual regeneration.32 Drawing implications for her own artwork from LeWitt’s structuralist critique of Minimalism, she writes: one of the major drives of Minimal Art is the idea of repudiating abstract aesthetic theory and focusing attention on the individual, specific, unique object; reducing that object to a set of properties that

46   Chapter 1

reveal it simply as what it is: as an object in space and time, and not something that is full of external associations, suppositions and preconceptions. If you think that xenophobia can be overcome by focussing on the specific, unique, concrete qualities of individuals, then it would make sense to think of Minimal Art decision-making as a kind of aesthetic strategy for drawing attention to the concrete, specific, unique qualities of individuals; and this is what my work does.33 Given the importance Piper grants the lessons she learned from LeWitt and from her initial efforts to make Conceptual art, and because it was for the resulting artworks that she first gained international recognition, it is important to understand how Piper derives such fundamentally provocative philosophical lessons from as quirky and obtuse an artwork as Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (1968). Piper’s Sixteen Permutations comprises a framed Photostat enlargement, in negative, of handwritten text and diagrams documenting her attempts to understand a square in terms of sixteen arrangements of imagined three-dimensional forms. This accompanies a small model of one arrangement that Piper proposed constructing in larger scale.34 The text offers an analysis of a square that develops into “frontal” and “receding” planes by following what seems a logical procedure rationally described. However, the text is self-referential because it is based on a unique mathematical problem that reads like an absurd puzzle. In a change from her Drawings about Paper and Writing about Words, the perspective from which each project is comprehensible is no longer only that of the artist who has obsessively developed five drafts of the problem (noted in the Photostat) but the viewer’s, as well. The addition of a constructed model, despite its small size, draws the artwork into the realm of the viewer like a Minimalist object. Paired with the Photostat, however, it defines a form that the viewer experiences differently in concept than in space and time and it is recognition of this contradiction that provokes the viewer to a self-reflexively rational consciousness. Piper considered LeWitt’s theory of Conceptual art provocative for the paradoxical way it employed objectivity. She was aware, for example, that some regarded this as a threat and in 1968, she remarked on “the thorniness (at this late date!) of using words like ‘detached’ or ‘objective’ in relation to an artist’s work or attitude about his work.”35 Piper refers to those defenders of expressionistic painting who condemned LeWitt’s

Contingent and Universal  47

work for being overly intellectualized, as when Gordon Brown lamented LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations as proof that “the day of the intuitive, sensitive connoisseur, who can appreciate all art, has apparently vanished.”36 LeWitt also claimed to embrace intuition, but Brown uses the term to describe an unconscious sensibility developed over years of study and observation, a process that naturalizes judgment as innate. LeWitt strove instead to become self-conscious about process. He outlined a three-step method by which the artist first intuits an idea or concept, and then executes it automatically and dispassionately, “as a clerk cataloging the results of his premise,”37 so that subjective tastes and desires are allowed to enter into the process as little as possible. Finally, the artist judges the concept against the result. As a consequence, the artist will achieve a measure of detachment and self-reflection. LeWitt captured this as a paradox with which the artist could work: “The physicality of a three-dimensional object . . . becomes a contradiction to its non-emotive intent. . . . The conceptual artist would want to ameliorate this emphasis on materiality as much as possible or to use it in a paradoxical way. (To convert it into an idea.)”38 LeWitt warned that neither the instructions nor the constructed object would ever realize the concept perfectly. Instead, his work created an experience in space and time that draws attention to the contingent and historical circumstances of art-making and viewing. Although another artist, Lawrence Weiner, famously claimed that a Conceptual artwork exists whether or not the object it describes is ever built, LeWitt made a point of exhibiting each Conceptual work in multiple forms: as an idea in the form of written instructions, as an object resulting from their execution, and, sometimes, with notes made while executing the instructions. The artist will perhaps find evidence of chance or a bad concept or, most usefully, ways in which subjective thinking has interfered with the process. This is why he insisted on showing the steps taken to realize a concept. Revealing the artist’s decisions lays socialization and artistic conventions bare. The intuition that LeWitt wanted to make accessible was, in Brown’s approach, overlain and obscured by ideology. The degree to which Brown’s method appeared to render objective self-analysis unnecessary indicated the extent to which it depended upon convention. LeWitt had not discovered a way to escape ideology, but he strove to make it apparent and available for critique. Piper recognized the value of LeWitt’s methods at the time. “Only the intuitive is truly unlimited,” she wrote, and then, siding with 48   Chapter 1

LeWitt, concluded, “within this context, I think ‘conceptual art’ is the most adequate way of liberating the creative process so that the artist may approach and realize his work—or himself—on the purest possible level.”39 If the conditions of materiality are philosophy’s necessary and constitutive outside—the figure of an irretrievable origin from which Modernist criticism appears always to have extricated itself, then Conceptual art challenged Modernist formalism by pitting the art concept against its realization in physical form. Conceptual art draws attention to judgment’s involvement in those sensory perceptions that rational consciousness defines as beyond the realm of objectivity. Modernist criticism acknowledged perception but distrusted it. Sensory experience promised truth but remained inextricably mired in history and discourse. Rosalind Krauss recognized the threat in her review of LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations. She complained that LeWitt had offered a clear concept but that by giving his idea physical form, he polluted the conceptual purity of his artwork with “the actual experience of viewing the sculpture.”40 Given Krauss’s investment in Minimalism, the problem cannot be that she objected to her encounter with LeWitt’s constructions. Rather, what Krauss did not like was that LeWitt refused to allow his idea—what both she and the artist considered the work’s content— to stand on its own. She admonished LeWitt for his attempt to realize his idea in what she considered a supplementary physical form, complicating the work by pandering to viewers’ sensibilities, concluding, “there is really only one question that is finally relevant and that is: what does this cumbrous, mechanical joining or filling of content with form have to do with the enterprise of art?”41 Her criticism is akin to Michael Fried’s condemnation of Minimalism for mixing art with theater.42 According to Krauss, LeWitt’s work is “irrelevant” to Modernist sculpture because it does not participate in the formalist motion toward refinement of the medium.43 For the same reason that 46 Three-Part Variations alarmed Krauss, it inspired Piper’s awakening to Conceptual art.44 In fact, Piper introduced herself to LeWitt after reading Krauss’s attack: angry at what she took for unjust criticism, Piper wrote the artist a letter of encouragement.45 What Krauss objects to in LeWitt’s work is precisely what Piper found useful: that by executing a seemingly simple concept in a form that provided evidence of the artist’s process, the artist creates a paradoxical Contingent and Universal  49

situation—one that presents itself as a critique of the Modernist critic’s pose of objectivity and claim to completely comprehend the artwork. Piper proposed an alternative means to objectivity—a process rather than a condition. If the rational subject constitutes itself by repeated instances of self-consciousness, then to achieve objectivity is to catch a glimpse of oneself as if from the perspective of another. As Samuel Weber argues, this is the promise of metaphysical philosophy. The goal of objectivity (the object of metaphysics) is not objectivity itself but a process of objectification—that is, the negotiation of a continuous and “complex relationship to” subjectivity that enables the subject to regard itself as an object as if subject and subject-as-object are separable.46 When Piper wrote in 1968, “I think that a greater total involvement in one’s work is possible when one attempts to be objective than when one does not,”47 the distinction between her project and that of Modernist criticism was implicit: Krauss claimed to unselfconsciously judge art according to certain criteria she believed essential to art. Piper sought instead to discern between her self and the artistic conventions in which she, like Krauss, had become invested. Piper has since described a second, related lesson she learned from LeWitt’s work. It is that any object encountered, including an individual person, is defined by an infinite and unique set of characteristics that necessarily exceed our ability to categorize them. Sixteen Permutations constitutes one attempt to develop this idea and Piper explains it as a direct response to LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations.48 In 46 Three-Part Variations, LeWitt’s concept was simple. He attempted to figure every possible arrangement for stacking three cube forms—a closed cube, a cube with one side removed and a cube with two opposite sides removed. He exhibited sketches and notes made while solving the puzzle, a scale polystyrene model of his solution, and, in the main room, forty-six aluminum structures, each forty-five inches tall, mounted in rows on aluminum strips. John Perreault experienced the paradox of a simple formula given physical form: “as illustrations for the variety possible within a limited format ‘46 Variations’ would be of little interest. Fortunately the results, by some mysterious process, end up being quite remarkable and faintly mysterious. The sensation of infinite multiplicity is quasisurrealistic.”49 LeWitt’s project was not one of mathematics.50 Rather, it seemed to prove his observation that “some ideas are logical in concep-

50   Chapter 1

tion and illogical perceptually,” offering a critique of vision that renders perception an impediment to categorical knowledge.51 When Piper experienced her awakening to Conceptual art, LeWitt and others had already initiated Conceptual art’s structuralist critique of Minimalist phenomenology. For example, at the Dwan Gallery in 1968, LeWitt exhibited latticework structures lit to cast stark shadows that emphasized the viewer’s experience. Mel Bochner wrote of these in language that emulated the matter-of-fact simplicity of the work’s ineffable materiality: “Their presence prevails over description. . . . The accumulation of facts collapses perception. The indicated sum of these simple series is irreducible complexity. And impenetrable chaos. They astound.”52 Bochner recognized how LeWitt exploited the desire to find order in experience, making his work’s viewers self-conscious of both the situation and their experiences of it. Robert Smithson also admired LeWitt’s paradoxical use of language and form, describing his encounter with LeWitt’s work as “getting words caught in your eyes.” Perception intrudes upon the concept, Smithson suggests, revealing logic to be a matter of appearance: “Everything LeWitt thinks, writes, or has made is inconsistent and contradictory. . . . Nothing is where it seems to be.”53 Other critics recognized this, too. Lippard wrote that she comprehended the structure and order of LeWitt’s constructions but that they also were “subject to drastic change” as she walked around them: “The shadows that transform LeWitt’s structures and the perceptual distortions involved in looking at his work bring to it an element of disorder that neutralizes the fundamental order apparently governing its conception, a disorder that occurs when the object is not just conceived and diagrammed, but made, seen, and experienced.”54 Jeanne Siegel considered 46 Three-Part Variations a critique of “the visible”: LeWitt’s constructions “question what is seen, what can be seen . . . They intimate that what starts out as clear may end up in chaos or, conversely, that which is hidden may become revealed.”55 In the self-reflexive tension between perception and rational knowledge—what art critics found ineffably “mysterious” and “moving” about LeWitt’s work56—Piper encountered a critically productive conflict. LeWitt’s structures set the ideal rational subject of Modernism against the embodied subject who feels suddenly engaged and put on display. Krauss experienced LeWitt’s work similarly but appears not to have en-

Contingent and Universal  51

joyed it. Ideas presented by the texts and diagrams and accompanied by constructions became mired in experiences she considered extraneous to the situation of viewing art. For some Conceptual artists, including Piper, this was the point. Piper argues for the importance of comparing LeWitt’s structures with his descriptions of them. The result is the failure of perception, an example of what Piper identifies as Conceptualism’s “self-reflective investigation of concepts and language.”57 Piper explains how LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations does this: By embedding [each cube] in this conceptual system, you draw further attention to the qualities of that object itself and of course, what you see when you see something like this worked out . . . is that any object has infinite qualities that can be used as a basis for constructing permutations and variations in relation to other qualities. So, it is a very interesting way, in my view, of drawing attention to what is specific and unique about individual objects.58 Similarly, Piper’s Sixteen Permutations bore its own logic internally. Such work was what artists referred to at the time as a tautology. That is, the artwork refers only to itself, as a specific and unique object. According to Bochner, whom Piper met through LeWitt, tautology is manifest in Frank Stella’s famous statement, “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. . . . What you see is what you see.”59 Such work threatens Modernist criticism because it resists categorization according to either medium or formal qualities. Rather, it presents the viewer with a question: is an ambiguous work of art made or does it exist simply to be experienced? More important than the answer is the self-reflexive process it precipitates. The viewer must come to terms with tautology, characterized by “the clarity of the attitude and the materiality of the result.”60 Piper would later employ this lesson for making artworks that point to the authority that stereotypical characterizations of skin color and other physiognomic features hold over us when we categorize people by race, gender, sexuality, and class.61 This capacity was not yet apparent to Piper in the spring of 1968. Sixteen Permutations performs a critique of vision and judgment, but in the terms of Modernist criticism. This does not mean that Piper believed her art bore no relation to the world outside the gallery. Piper wrote that Conceptual art resulted in conscien52   Chapter 1

tious self-reflection and clarity of thought applicable to any situation. Many of her artworks treat maps, newspapers, and other forms of mass communication in ways that encourage viewers to become self-conscious about them. In this sense, Piper developed LeWitt’s structuralist critique of artistic and linguistic convention to address a broader range of materials and greater variety of experiences. Conceptual Art and Objectivity: Toward a Self-Reflexive Cartography

Piper embraced one of Conceptual art’s challenges to artists: the repudiation of taste. In 1968, for example, she demonstrated little tolerance for “the inevitable inconsistencies and fluctuations of the only-human artistic mind.”62 The withering tone of Piper’s statement suggests she struggles with this—a point she makes unequivocally: I have found that the limitations imposed by decisions based on my personal “tastes” are absolutely stifling. Choices made through the criteria of subjective likes and dislikes are to me nothing more than a kind of therapeutic ego-titillation that only inhibit further the possibility of sharing an artistic vision (as if it weren’t difficult enough a thing to do as it is). Besides, I really believe that truly good art is always made of broader stuff than the personality of the artist. Think of all the hangups Cézanne had that he managed to transcend in his work! . . . The new terminology—“cool,” “rational,” “reductive” art—simply corroborates my opinion that the necessity for this transcendence of subjectivity has been recognized, and that attempts are being made to facilitate the process.63 Associating her own work with that of Minimalism and Conceptualism, both of which were described as “ ‘cool,’ ‘rational,’ [and] ‘reductive,’ ” Piper found that overcoming her “hangups” had less to do with formal issues than “representational subject matter.”64 Piper realized that by abandoning representation, she addressed her viewer directly with a created situation that dealt with day-to-day realities.65 The difficulty is most evident in Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds (1968) (fig. 14), one of Piper’s first attempts to incorporate her experience of LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations into her work while also addressing current events, such as the war in Vietnam. On Contingent and Universal  53

14  Adrian Piper, Parallel Grid

Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds (detail), 1968. Thirty pages, vintage original and Photostat maps, acetate page protectors overdrawn with red architectural tape, India ink diagrams, typescript texts on 8.5 × 11 in. bond paper. Collection of Beth Rudin de Woody.

March 13, 1968, in the Utah desert some ninety miles southwest of Salt Lake City, the army conducted a routine aerial test of VX nerve gas at the top-secret Dugway Proving Ground. Some of the gas was accidentally released at high altitude and within days, newspapers reported, it had killed 6,400 sheep on nearby ranches.66 In the press, the army denied responsibility but Utah politicians and state agriculture and public health officials publicized the military’s secret admissions of culpability and demanded further investigation.67 As a result, the dispute was widely reported for weeks, always accompanied by implications that the next accident might take human lives.68 Parallel Grid Proposal is Piper’s response. She proposed to build an enormous Minimalist installation above the base town of Dugway, where the Proving Ground’s staff lived with their families.69 Had Piper’s structure been built, it would have served as a solar clock in the shape of the test grid, reproducing the town’s proximity to the test site as a moral dilemma, reminding Dugway’s residents of the pos54   Chapter 1

sibility that the chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons tested on the base could at any time drift their way. She proposed a rectangle of steel beams three miles long atop beams a quarter-mile high. She separated the rectangle into thirds, with mile-long lengths of telephone cable dividing the middle square into twelve sections. As the title suggests, the sectioned rectangle lay parallel to the ground below. It also replicated the form of the test site—creating an equivalent grid that would loom over Dugway’s residents throughout the course of their daily lives.70 Piper stipulated that as the structure’s shadow moved gradually across town—passing over houses, hospital, and schools—residents should be informed and updated by hourly telephone calls, loudspeaker announcements, and changing roadside message boards. The steel beams and telephone cables constituted a didactic, if terrifying, structure for raising questions to which the army, in all its denials, seemed impervious. At a time when Minimalist and Conceptual artists still opposed such direct reference to politics, Piper’s Dugway proposal is remarkable for the way it addressed current events, particularly the militarization of the American landscape. In addition to Dugway’s residents, the work addressed Americans’ concerns about the arms race and the use of chemical weapons, herbicides, and defoliants in Vietnam—already topics of national debate before the incident at Dugway. It also joined the burgeoning ecology movement’s warnings about the long-term effects of such weapons and concerned scientists’ public denunciations of the arms race. By proposing a structure that would encourage Dugway’s residents to self-consciously ponder their place in the desert, Piper combined Minimalist phenomenology with Conceptualism’s structuralist critique of the subject. In all of her work from this period, Piper created artworks with maps, written texts, newspaper advertisements, and other forms of documentation to encourage viewers to reflect self-consciously on the role of what Benjamin Buchloh has called the “aesthetic of administration”—the naturalized language of government and corporate culture that administers and sustains late capitalism.71 It might seem surprising, therefore, that Piper has referred to most of her artworks of this period, including Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1 and #2 (1968) (plate 4), a companion piece to Parallel Grid Proposal, as the epitome of abstraction. They were “expressive of the possible and the abstract, rather than the actual and concrete,” she writes, made when she was “drunk on intellectual construction, theory, abstract sculpture; Contingent and Universal  55

swooping and swerving crazily through uncharted sky.”72 The fact that Piper’s projects were impractical was not the problem—Piper acknowledged in her proposal that for technical reasons alone it was unlikely to be built. Conceptualism allowed artists to imagine impractical artworks in a way that Minimalism’s pragmatic empiricism had not, and Piper has explained that this approach allowed her to stop constructing the artworks she conceived. This was partly practical, she says, because “constructing three-dimensional objects cost a lot of money, took a lot of energy, and progressed too slowly relative to my thought processes about them.”73 Additionally, the freedom that Lippard and John Chandler found in the “dematerialization of the art object” promised to release artists from the stiff competition for sales and patronage—Piper acknowledges that this critique of the art market was, for her, a fundamental aspect of Conceptual art.74 Instead, the problem was that the project she imagined was situational but her proposal, the only part of the work that anyone would ever see, was not. Piper had employed the gridded form of the test site critically and self-consciously but had done nothing to question and denaturalize the various forms of documentation she used to explain it. For example, she employed a U.S. Geological Survey map exactly as the mapmakers had intended, as if it to convey irrefutable facts transparently. Piper’s mistake was to allow the map to speak for her, announcing itself as an expression of the artist’s intentions, which inadvertently became identical to the government cartographers’. This is not a question of the map’s accuracy but of the way Piper used it: Parallel Grid Proposal left the viewer no role but to understand a predetermined message about the military testing of nerve gas (and because the work focused so narrowly on circumstances in the Utah desert, it might not raise moral dilemmas for viewers in New York, where Piper made it). Furthermore, Parallel Grid Proposal ’s content could be understood as the structure she imagined building and not the maps she used in her proposal. This is why the architect James Wines, one of Piper’s instructors at SVA, complained that he would not consider her proposal art until she constructed a model of it.75 Piper quit constructing three-dimensional objects primarily as a means to streamline “‘mediumistic’ translation.”76 In other words, Piper sought the most direct method for expressing a concept so that viewers would understand her work as she did. She recognized at the time that she was more concerned than LeWitt with finding “that form which most clearly 56   Chapter 1

realizes the original idea.”77 In fact, she noted that LeWitt seemed dismissive of the matter altogether, having stated, “what the work of art looks like isn’t too important.”78 Piper initially regarded realization of the concept as an opportunity for clarification, as when she wrote, “in DECREASING order of VAGUENESS and INCREASING order of TANGIBILITY, I see intuition → idea → method/system (not necessarily logical) → actualized piece.”79 Piper’s subsequent work, including Sixteen Permutations, would be different, marking a change in emphasis from conceptualism as a rigorous tool for self-expression to a paradoxical method for undermining the artist’s authority. Piper learned that pitting a concept against its verbal and material forms questioned each. In order to use maps paradoxically, therefore, Piper would have to dissociate them both from the places they represented and their conventional use. Piper attempted to resolve this with Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1 and #2, which she made by exchanging a one-inch square from a cropped map of Dugway Proving Ground with a one-inch square of a cropped Manhattan subway map. The collaged maps localized a question that came up in nearly every news account of the dead sheep: could a similar accident occur somewhere more populous, like a city? For example, Colorado activists expressed fears about nerve gas stored at the army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal, just ten miles from downtown Denver.80 Earl Jones, an artist in Utah, placed a billboard in Denver that depicted a dead sheep with the text, “An unfortunate error . . . they were saving it for PEOPLE.”81 Jones used an image ubiquitous in news stories about Dugway to hypothetically relocate the accident somewhere with graver consequences, addressing viewers with proof that they might also become victims of the nation’s weapons policies. His billboard was compelling for the immediacy with which it addressed local residents but was unlikely to raise questions about the appropriated image. Piper’s UtahManhattan Transfer #1 and #2 might be understood similarly, as asking New Yorkers whether a catastrophe like the one at Dugway could occur in their city. Instead of using press photos as evidence, however, Piper’s work also asked fundamental questions about mapping and representation. On the one hand, the work inquires into the capacity for a map to make a place look remote and unimportant, perhaps as a means for distracting attention from military secrets by hiding them in plain sight. Did such maps encourage New Yorkers to believe the western desert was far away and inconsequential? Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1 and #2 emContingent and Universal  57

ployed maps self-reflexively, addressing viewers directly and theatrically to provoke reflection on the subject of chemical and biological weapons. What is at stake in Piper’s self-reflexive cartography is nothing less than the social construction of the self, but would this have been apparent to her work’s viewers? Piper has cropped the Utah map in UtahManhattan Transfer #1 and #2 so that only the most attentive viewer and assiduous reader of the news could have identified it as part of the Dugway Proving Ground. The place name, Dugway, appears nowhere on the map; only the fragment, “OVING GROUND,” remains, stretched sideways across the page. Even the artwork’s title only hints at the location represented. When Piper complains that her work became too abstract—too far removed from both knowledge and mundane experience—she suggests the difficulty a viewer might have had drawing lessons from a work like Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1 and #2. This becomes clear in two more map projects that Piper mailed to a list of 160 recipients in March 1969 as part of her Three Untitled Projects (published by 0 to 9).82 The first documents an absurdly exhaustive reading of another map of Manhattan. This time, Piper gives the reader instructions for enlarging and reducing one square block of midtown. The piece employs roughly the same process that Robert Smithson used to make his Untitled (Map on Mirror—Passaic, New Jersey), (1967), a stack of progressive enlargements of a section of a map mounted on mirror panes. However, the viewer must understand Piper’s work differently from Smithson’s because instead of executing a seriated enlargement of a map section and displaying it in an apparently meaningful form, Piper gives viewers a single photocopy of a map and instructions for reducing and enlarging a section of it on their own. To successfully read a map requires more than simply learning to see according to the mapmaker’s rules. Piper’s work drew attention to the way conventions that make a map useful rarely make themselves obvious, but it was confusing—“I just can’t figure it out,” complained John Perreault, the Village Voice art critic.83 Piper’s instructions employed the mapmaker’s rules as an impediment so that the viewer has to become obsessed with the rules set by the artist that overtake the map’s conventional use, and this proved difficult. Another of the Three Untitled Projects that Perreault considered “quite good” records the places marked at the intersections of the folds of pocket maps of New York City’s five boroughs (fig. 15.1 and fig. 15.2).84 58   Chapter 1

These are the places on the map most likely to be erased by wear as the map is unfolded and refolded with use. Presumably, the mapmaker chose them because they seemed less important than neighboring sites. Piper reverses the mapmaker’s logic, recording them with commemorative precision. One map of Manhattan includes folds at a Bronx street corner, “500’ into Harlem River north-northeast of Manhattan,” at the Stephen Foster Housing Project playground, and “500’ into Central Park Reservoir.” Does the map’s design mark these sites as equivalent? Manhattan is the only borough covered by two maps, divided near the northern end of Central Park, removing Harlem from the rest of the borough. Perhaps Piper’s map project quietly raises questions about the map user’s unwitting complicity with the mapmaker, the city planner, and various other government and business interests, borne out of an ability to use the conventions of mapping to read a map and inhabit it without recognizing what one is doing. In early 1969, Piper made two artworks using maps that demonstrate both the promise and the perils of Conceptual art’s abstraction. In the first, Untitled Map/Circle (January–May 1969) (plate 5 and fig. 16), a work Piper exhibited in “Language III” at the Dwan Gallery, she used maps as if the places they represented had become irrelevant.85 She drew a circular diagram over four photocopies of a page from a Manhattan map book and linked the circles with radiating spokes. Despite the diagram’s unintended resemblance to the cross-hairs of a gun sight centered over a corner of Union Square—a pattern replicated by certain test sites at Dugway—the artwork makes no reference to anything but the time it took Piper to walk two blocks, from Broadway to Sixth Avenue.86 From this sample, Piper extrapolated how long it would take to walk each of the diagrams’ spokes. Even when the spokes are drawn through city blocks, Piper still made her calculations as if walking across “an unobstructed two dimensional area,” with no buildings, traffic, or topography to get in her way. At a time when Robert Moses was redrawing the map of New York through the process of slum clearing, when many of the city’s older ethnic neighborhoods were being uprooted and displaced, Piper’s project seems to perform the perverse logic of urban renewal that allowed developers to see the city as a clean slate—a dehumanized abstraction of matter and form to be cleared or manipulated.87 Rather than critiquing such a process, however, Piper’s project seems inured to it. The work’s conceptual abstraction fails to account for the city’s changContingent and Universal  59

15.1  Adrian Piper, Three Untitled Projects (detail), 1969. Published by 0 to 9 Books, New York. 8.5 × 11 in.

Collection of the Museum Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

15.2  Adrian Piper, Three Untitled Projects (detail), 1969. Published by 0 to 9 Books, New York. 8.5 × 11 in.

Collection of the Museum Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

16  Adrian Piper, Untitled Map/Circle (detail), 1969. Ten-page pagework stored in notebook, vintage

Photostat maps of Lower Manhattan overdrawn with red and black pen, two typescript texts on bond paper. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

17.1  Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine

17.2  Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine

Abstract Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (detail),

Abstract Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (detail),

1969. Twenty-nine pages of pageworks stored in

1969. Twenty-nine pages of pageworks stored in

notebook with ink on maps and typewritten text.

notebook with ink on maps and typewritten text.

Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

ing demographics and residents’ lives already altered by Moses’s plans. It raises few questions about the maps she draws upon, using them instead simply as the starting point for a rarified and idiosyncratic mathematics. In a second, contrasting project, from her Nine Abstract Space-TimeInfinity Pieces (January–May 1969) (plates 6 and 7 and figs. 17.1–17.4), Piper documents the process of reading various maps in an attempt to become self-reflexive. In this untitled project from the series, Piper “cancelled” any indications of landscape on four Manhattan maps—a street map, a bus map, a subway map, and a two-part zip code map. In

Contingent and Universal  63

17.3  Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work

17.4  Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine

from Nine Abstract Space-Time-Infinity

Abstract Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (detail), 1969.

Pieces (detail), 1969. Twenty-nine pages

Twenty-nine pages of pageworks stored in notebook

of pageworks stored in notebook with ink

with ink on maps and typewritten text. Generali

on maps and typewritten text. Generali

Foundation Collection, Vienna.

Foundation Collection, Vienna.

a one-page explanation written in the objective voice of a bureaucrat, Piper called the representations she cancelled “areas representing various types of systematic obstructions in above-ground three dimensional space.” She reads the street map as a representation of city blocks, not streets, as if the streets represented only the inadvertent spaces left unused when cartographers outlined each block. She crossed out the blocks in red, resulting in a blank and featureless map marked only with her cancellations and the names of absent streets. Piper has deliberately read the maps incorrectly, denaturalizing them and demonstrating how 64   Chapter 1

maps dominate the landscape by representing streets, zip codes, and bus and subway routes within a nondescript landscape—a blank plane. Finally, Piper drew eighteen identifiable spaces on a fifth, blank map of Manhattan by compiling the annotated maps, thereby creating a picture of the only spaces not cancelled on any of the other maps (plate 7). Each of these marks represented a gap in the systematic representation of mapping—a piece of Manhattan that appears unaccounted for, providing evidence of the city’s symbolic functionality.88 In Parallel Grid Proposal, concept and form define one another reciprocally, as if the artwork is its own origin. Structurally, such a practice risked tautology—that the artwork would simply declare itself to viewers without making reference to anything else, as Sixteen Permutations did. Piper employed tautology paradoxically in Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1 and #2 and other works by using maps with a logic that seems nonsensical. The artworks make reference to themselves and beyond, drawing upon viewers’ experiences with maps, the news, the Utah desert, and the New York subway. On the one hand, Piper’s altered maps assume that any project was conceivable and demonstrable, even if transporting a square of Manhattan real estate, subways and all, to the Utah desert was also impractical. The artist who could comprehend collaging a square from a Manhattan subway map to a topographic map of Utah could also imagine inhabiting a world in which anything was possible and meaningful: “Reality could be rearranged, relocated, varied, shot through with metaphysics.”89 On the other hand, Piper came to recognize how imagination is grounded in day-to-day experience. She wrote in 1987 that she came to recognize how even the plan for an artwork had the same selfreferential properties as it did when she constructed the object it described: Marks on paper or sound [on] tape could also refer: concretely to themselves, or to the surface they existed on, or to the conditions under which they were perceived; abstractly to absent objects, events, or locations; to nonperceptual objects, such as space, time, and numbers; to general concepts expressive of the possible and the abstract, rather than the actual and concrete.90 This was the paradox of representation that Piper would exploit: a map could refer not only to an idea, but also to itself and to the social context in which it was viewed, spurring critical reflection in the viewer. Contingent and Universal  65

Conclusion

Piper has expressed mixed feelings about the “abstraction” of her artworks from the 1960s. In one sense, Conceptual art was a utopian project. The idea suggested an intellectually creative method for understanding the world in its most basic forms, which Piper found she could define for herself and reconfigure.91 In contrast to Greenberg’s evolutionary and reductivist model of Modernism in which each medium becomes ever more inwardly focused on its formalist essence (a model still important to critics like Krauss at the end of the 1960s), Conceptualism claimed to engage with the real conditions of everyday life; it was “involved with opening up rather than narrowing down,” as Lippard and Chandler claimed.92 Piper has written that this allowed her to imagine an art—and a future—free from the sexism and racism so familiar to her as a black woman. In 1970, for example, she explained that freedom meant the right to make art without engaging the politics of representation, as an artist rather than as a black woman. However, she also acknowledged the circumstances that prevented her from realizing this ideal: “a national environment poisoned by war, racism, repression, hypocrisy, [and] murder” (fig. 18).93 Piper has since explained that abstraction enabled her to fool herself into thinking she could avoid addressing issues of discrimination and oppression directly. As she wrote in 1987, “abstraction is flying” but it is also “flight”—it allowed her to deny the same realities it also helped her imagine she had overcome. Fundamentally, she concluded, “abstraction is freedom from the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; freedom to violate in imagination the constraints of public practice, to play with conventions, or to indulge them,” but it is also “a solitary journey through the conceptual universe, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to.”94 She rejects an amoral pretense grounded in the conviction that art can concern itself wholly with artistic convention. In lieu of conviction, which enabled Fried to believe that art that aspired to transcend mundane experience necessarily accomplished its goal, Piper and other Conceptual artists embraced not only critical self-reflection but doubt.95 The danger was that the decision to make work that did not address rational consciousness diverted attention away from pressing social

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18  Adrian Piper, preliminary draft for her untitled statement of withdrawal

from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” at the New York Cultural Center, May 1970. Contained in Context #9: Written Information Elicited from Me during the Period of May 15 to June 15, 1970 (detail), 1970. Notebook. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

issues. Matters of race, gender, sexuality, and class became deceptively abstract in the process, as if they occurred beyond judgment. In 1987, Piper chastised herself for imagining the abstract “conceptual framework” she constructed around some of her artwork supplanted the conditions in which her viewers encountered both her work and herself. Such conceptually abstract work as Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1 and #2 led her to forget the social realities of life in New York:

Contingent and Universal  67

I was drunk on intellectual construction, theory, abstract sculpture; swooping and swerving crazily though uncharted sky. From that distance, all three-dimensional objects, found or constructed, sentient or inanimate, myself or others, were noumena: enigmatic entities assigned meaning by the encompassing conceptual framework within which they are embedded.96 Piper’s experience with Conceptualism seems exhilarating but also perilously seductive, causing her to deny reality for the “conceptual frameworks” she contrived. People risked becoming, in her mind, nothing more than neutral “noumena,” Immanuel Kant’s term for objects and ideas that have no physical properties. This is a fundamental principle of Kant’s categorical imperative: that the meanings and relationships of objects and ideas are predetermined and fixed; they are neither perceived nor historically contingent but are known objectively and a priori. Piper here challenges Kant.97 The problem, Piper has explained, is that conceptually abstract work allowed her to refuse to take responsibility for any problem that appeared extraneous to art. Artists were not helpless to affect such conditions as racism and sexism, but Modernist conviction compelled artists not to recognize them to begin with. In Minimalism, object and viewer negotiate an experience of time and space; they share a situation defined only by such formalized elements as those Robert Morris enumerated in 1966: “object, light, space, body.”98 The problem some artists began to recognize by the late 1960s was that Minimalism treated “body” as just one more expressionless material to manipulate, as if it existed, as Hal Foster argues, “before or outside history, language, sexuality, and power.”99 By 1969, Piper had begun to attempt a solution. She re-inscribes the viewer’s experience within the conditions of history by presenting information as content in such a way as to perform her role as an artist—and perhaps as a black woman—paradoxically.

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​2

​H ypothesis ​M odernism and the Woman Artist’s Studio

In the fall of 1968, Adrian Piper began a series of work, Hypothesis, that would document her perspective on the objects, places, and people around her. Piper has written that Minimalism, for her, had established the precedent of an art that provokes viewers to investigate the material conditions of perception. Conceptual art, in her opinion, drew on this and enabled artists to make art of any material, including ideas and social, political, and economic systems.1 Before making Hypothesis, Piper’s Conceptual artworks had addressed the structures governing communication and the dissemination of information. These engaged the viewer, implicating him or her in the artworks’ completion. Hypothesis, which Piper made between October 1968 and April 1970, differs from her earlier Conceptual work because Piper appears to have addressed it to herself as an investigation of her ability to fulfill the role of Minimalist viewer. Instead of looking at artworks, however, she studied the immediate world around her (this included artworks by herself and by Sol LeWitt that she was storing in her loft, but she treated these no differently from the other objects she saw).2 She completed twenty works in the series, Meat into Meat (1968) and nineteen Situations, each of which is comprised of graphs, photographs, textual explanations, and inventories of objects seen and encountered, mostly in the artist’s loft.3 Piper represents herself in the resulting artworks as a conceptual figure she identifies as “Adrian Piper,” but

who remains otherwise anonymous. What Piper puts on display are instead her efforts to come to terms with the relationship between bodily experience and rational knowledge. The resulting artworks offer proof of the artist’s ability to achieve rational consciousness through the exploration, documentation, and analysis of sensory perceptions, although Piper articulates her claim self-reflexively, in the form of a question. Piper’s Hypothesis series can also be interpreted as a feminist critique of Minimalism’s universalist ideal. She calls nineteen of the works Situations, representing her attempts to find universal value in the details of daily life. In some, Piper seems might seem to have purposefully chosen to document such stereotypically feminine activities as secretarial work or watching a soap opera. Minimalists called for artists to create neutral artworks that any viewer might experience in rationally abstract terms. In practice, however, artists and art critics tended to dismiss or ignore women artists who attempted this. If women could not achieve recognition for artworks made to be experienced and comprehended intellectually, did this mean that universal value was reserved for the experience of men? Conversely, were men capable of finding universal value in a woman artist’s account of her trip to the grocery store, something Piper documented in Hypothesis: Situation #6 (plate 8 and fig. 19)? Details of Piper’s life can be extrapolated from the events she documents in her Hypothesis series because the particular circumstances of her activities are discernible in the photographs and textual components specific to each Situation. The works create a portrait of the artist’s home life, except that particular details, such as the conceptual artworks and worn furnishings and Piper’s methodical arrangement of the photographs distinguish her artistic and intellectual activities from housework. Collectively, therefore, the works present the artist’s refusal to play the stereotypical role of the “woman artist” as dilettante and homemaker.4 The artist, by means of her own creative and intellectual methods of extrapolating universal experiences from mundane situations, inhabits such sexist imagery in order to demonstrate her refusal to be confined by it. Furthermore, by staking her claim to the universalist realm of philosophy, moral value, and intellectual rigor from a position clearly embedded at least partly within conventional representations of women, Piper questions both the gendered bias of metaphysics and the desirability of inhabiting it. By the time Piper began her Hypothesis series, the personal politics 70   Chapter 2

19  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #6 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

of the women’s and Black Power movements had already raised questions about how women and African Americans were represented and by whom. This was most apparent in two interrelated debates that were commonly considered separate at the time: those among African American artists about the possibilities and pitfalls of pursuing a specifically African American art, and those among women artists over their institutionalized and internalized marginalization within the art world. Piper was aware of such debates. Though she did not participate when artists picketed for various issues outside MOMA, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan museums, some of her friends did and the protests were thoroughly reported and debated in the New York press. Piper also attended meetings of the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) in 1969, when discriminatory museum and gallery practices were discussed. The AWC debated and adopted the general exclusion of African American and women artists from New York’s museums and art galleries as important issues, in part due to the vocal insistence of other artists’ groups, including the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), and Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL).5 Piper knew Lucy Lippard, an organizer of the Ad Hoc Committee. WSABAL was co-founded by Faith Ringgold and her daughter, Michele Wallace, who had attended the same private high school as Piper (Wallace graduated three years after Piper).6 Piper’s reluctance to participate in organized protests was not unusual for the time. African American artists debated what it meant to make specifically African American art or identify themselves as black artists. For Piper, who was often the only black artist included in the exhibits she participated in, the stakes must have been especially high. With the rise of the Black Arts Movement, an artist like Barbara ChaseRiboud, whose large sculptures of bronze and silk made reference to African and Polynesian masks but also employed the abstract forms of European and American Modernism, could be criticized by Amiri Baraka for making “white art” that did “not actually exist in the black world at all”;7 likewise, Tom Lloyd called Richard Hunt “oblivious” for refusing to identify his sculptures as black art.8 Piper’s choice to make Conceptual art that addressed issues of race among other things is more like that of Romare Bearden, an old family friend and one of the most outspoken African American artists at the time, who argued in the 1960s for understanding his own work as American art.9 72   Chapter 2

Women artists could be put off by the sometimes-tense relations between different women artists’ groups and male artists’ antagonism toward their demands.10 Nevertheless, Piper would have been familiar with debates among women artists: were they always to be regarded as either students or dilettantes, or did they simply need to work harder than their male peers to prove their seriousness, as some artists of an older generation argued? One early WAR handbill appealed to women artists on a personal level, in the form of shared frustrations: It is said . . . that about 65% of the art students are women but only 3% of the artists shown by New York City galleries are women. And how many women artists are accepted by the Museums? . . . You should not have to struggle alone against the attitude that says, “a woman will get married and have children, she won’t be able to do anything serious” or, “the female artist must renounce the usual social roles of a woman to prove her seriousness.” You know that you can do both if given the incentives.11 Such arguments were sometimes met with hostility from other women: Emily Genauer, an art critic, dismissed feminists as “silly.”12 Grace Hartigan, an abstract expressionist, opined, “discrimination is only brought up by inferior talents to excuse their own inadequacy as artists.”13 On the other hand, Lee Krasner, a fellow abstract expressionist, expressed the opposite attitude: “Any woman artist who says there is no discrimination against women in the art world should have her face slapped.”14 Many women active in the Ad Hoc Committee, WAR, and WSABAL continued to make work that had little to do with their activism—the sort of artwork that Genauer could praise even as she dismissed the politics of its makers. Piper has described 1969–70 as years when she became aware of the influence matters of race and gender had on the art world, and she admits the formative impact the AWC’s debates had on her. Every artist she knew talked about politics constantly, she says, and she participated actively in these conversations.15 Yet, like the artwork of most of the artists Piper knew at the time, her own work does not make obvious reference to her political views. Piper’s procedures of objectivity—designed to find universal value in a particular experience—enabled her to conceive of herself within a utopian realm of her own design, one that remains grounded in the historical particularity of her experiences. Piper might also seem to have Hypothesis  73

avoided becoming involved in feminist politics with her Hypothesis series, transforming her studio into a site of exaggeratedly intellectual work as a means to preclude viewers from labeling her a “woman artist” or “feminist,” terms some considered epithets. But I argue that Hypothesis was a feminist project and it is significant that Piper had formed a women’s consciousness-raising group with a handful of artists and filmmakers by the time she began the series.16 As defined by Redstockings and other radical New York feminists, consciousness raising provided a process for women to achieve self-awareness as a means to social and political awareness.17 Piper’s focus on her own experiences in Hypothesis enabled her to explore them as paradigmatic in the sense that they were somehow typical of other women’s experiences. As Anne Wagner argues, one important lesson from women artists’ self-reflexive participation in Modernism is that “these moments in which the self apprehends and claims its difference from and similitude with other selves, should be thought of as profoundly typical.”18 Piper’s work can be understood as an early example of a feminist approach to the problematic relation between public and private experience—a distinction maintained by Modernist art and criticism. What appears to be paradoxical about Piper’s Conceptual art—overt attempts to objectify private experience, for example, simultaneous with efforts to ground metaphysical philosophy and Modernist discourse in sensory consciousness—is evidence of a self-reflexive approach to participating in Modernism, one that can be characterized as feminist. This is precisely what Mary Kelly has proposed: a self-reflexively feminist approach to gender positions that renders them simultaneously coherent and contradictory, “a result of foregrounding the question of representation.”19 Helen Molesworth questions the exclusion of women artists from mainstream accounts of Conceptual art, which she explains as the result of a “fundamental misrecognition of the terms and strategies [feminists] employed” in artwork that revealed how domestic and maintenance work were rendered invisible in the public sphere, and in the museum, in particular.20 She calls instead for an examination of feminist approaches to the issue of labor, including artistic labor.21 Piper’s work participates in this project, as does the work of such contemporaries as Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, Christine Kozlov, and Hannah Weiner. Piper, by methodically documenting the circumstances of the live/work space where she undertook her experiments with rational con74   Chapter 2

sciousness, performs her refusal to inhabit the stereotype of feminine irrationality. Metaphysical philosophy, like Modernist criticism, has traditionally characterized women and blacks as beholden to sensations they cannot control. Narcissism, for example, has conventionally been regarded as a feminine affliction, evident in what Kant, Freud, and others characterize as the excessive pleasure a woman takes in her bodily appearance and experiences. As if to counter such stereotypes, Piper’s Hypothesis series self-consciously reflected on this method by revealing circumstances of the artist’s life that the generalities of Modernist criticism required her to repress. All at once, Piper demonstrates her ability to participate in Modernism and the circumstances that preclude others from recognizing that she does. This raises the question of how to understand Piper’s Conceptual art. Piper’s artwork has typically been interpreted as that of an African American woman. This is partly because, some forty years after Piper made her Hypothesis series, in writings, interviews, and artworks, she has identified herself as a black woman and described her lifelong experiences with racism and sexism. This is complicated, however, by Piper’s recollection that some viewers of her early work assumed she was a white woman or a man. If Piper’s work was not seen as that of a black woman at the time, should it be now? Lippard, a friend of Piper’s since 1968, recalls, “Most of us had no idea Adrian was black . . . She didn’t hide it. But I don’t think I realized it until I met her parents at [her] loft on Hester Street.”22 If the Hypothesis series represents the artist’s daily life, including her loft where friends got to know her and met her parents, might the artwork be said to explore the question of whether a black woman can assume the universalist role of viewer that Minimalism ­proposes? Complicating any discussion of Piper’s work is her statement that her early work and writings express her “white male’s sense of entitlement unself-consciously.”23 What does she mean by this, or when she describes her attitude during her years in art school and after as that of “upper-middle-class het WASP males, the pampered only sons of doting parents?”24 When I discussed this with her, Piper said that she did not think of herself either as a man or as white but assumed that her perspective on the world was the best one possible and that she consequently had the right—even the responsibility—to correct and criticize others for their shortcomings and imperfect grasp of reality. She ascribes Hypothesis  75

this self-confidence to being raised in an extended family of four adults who never talked down to her for being a woman or a child. Instead, Piper says she simply had faith in herself, and she characterizes her unconscious attitude of the late 1960s, in a racist and sexist United States, as that of a privileged white male. This self-confidence began, she says, about the time she started art school. She felt comfortable with herself as a woman and changed the spelling of her name back from Adrianne, the spelling she had adopted in high school, to Adrian not because she wanted to pass for a man but because she no longer felt the need to appear excessively feminine.25 She had been a member of her high school chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee since its founding in 1961 or 1962, took part in civil rights demonstrations, and attended the March on Washington in 1963, but, after graduating high school in 1966, she also stopped participating in any form of organized group activism, and would only be an observer.26 Yet, her interest in intellectual abstraction, manifest in her art from the period 1966–69, can only retrospectively be described as a “flight” from the racialized and gendered realities of the sixties; it was not a conscious effort on her part at the time. Rather, her “white male’s sense of entitlement” was characterized by privilege born of a certain ignorance—an inability to recognize that racism and sexism had anything to do with her, when she believed herself free from prejudice and unaffected by discrimination. Her experience was not one of alienation, she says. She simply strove to assume the “detached perspective” of objectivity.27 Piper’s attitude was similar to that of women artists like Yvonne Rainer who have since acknowledged they were slow to join feminist artists’ organizations because they recognized that sexism was a problem but did not readily see that it was problem for them, personally.28 Piper was aware that racism and sexism pervaded daily life in the United States but confidently believed that she could succeed as an artist without having to confront it in the art world.29 She did not immediately recognize the impact that racism and sexism would have on her career, even when she began to experience it. She now regards these problems as systemic but says she did not at the time: When actual upper-middle-class het WASP males, the pampered only sons of doting parents, talk in [the objective] voice, we listen— warily—because often they certainly seem to know what they are

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talking about . . . But when a young colored woman talks in this voice, she is apt to get put in her place, very quickly and very rudely. How long it takes her to learn her place is a different story. That depends on the strength and tenacity of her sense of entitlement . . . I have come to realize that my sense of entitlement and allegiance to the objective voice has been tenacious indeed.30 Thus, explaining why her early work does not seem politically engaged, she has written, “I didn’t realize I was being marginalized. . . . When you are drunk on abstract conceptual metaphysics . . . sociopolitical transactions of power simply do not exist.”31 Piper’s work of the late 1960s may seem demur or even silent about sexism, racism, and civil rights. Nevertheless, I believe that, in light of Piper’s recollections, it raises important questions about the visibility of women and African American artists in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Piper has recently presented her early conceptual work within the context of her experiences in the civil rights movement and of being confronted by sexism and racism. In retrospect, Piper came to a realization about that time: I was being systematically marginalized: by one major art magazine editor who disinvited an article (by Scott Burton) upon learning that its subject was a woman and a student; by another who disinvited an essay by me upon learning that its author was a woman and a student; by critics and curators who stopped promoting my work when they discovered I was a woman . . . and colored; and by dealers and promoters who thought my true destiny was to be an outstandingly creative gallery receptionist.32 Piper’s apparently conflicting assessments—that she did not intend her work to be political but that it reflects the racism and sexism she faced— present a problem for the art historian. To insist that her work offered a challenge to the dominant ideology is, on the one hand, to fall into what Howardena Pindell identifies as a white liberal trap—to discuss the work of an African American woman artist only if a case can be made that it is political.33 On the other hand, art cannot exist outside of politics, just as it cannot emerge uninflected by racism and sexism. Furthermore, Piper describes all of her early work as politically engaged, even when it is not obviously so.34

Hypothesis  77

Piper’s Hypothesis series, as an experiment in realizing the particularities of her perspective on the world around her, represents an effort to become politically self-conscious about the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and class are not private but matters of social negotiation. To ask how Hypothesis addresses this requires asking whose perspective the works represent and what relationship they record between the objects photographed and the artist who took their pictures. To answer these questions, I will ask two further questions about Piper’s investigation of the particularities of universal experience: If Hypothesis offers a critique of Minimalism, Conceptualism, Modernist criticism, and their investments in metaphysical philosophy, in what ways can it be regarded as a feminist critique? Can it also be regarded as an African American ­critique? Metaphysical Philosophy and Universalist Perspective

With Hypothesis, Piper stakes a claim to the metaphysical tradition in philosophy and the idealized role of embodied Minimalist viewer. She also establishes a process for performing attempts to inhabit these positions in ways that make them available for critique. In the essay Piper wrote in September 1969 to accompany each work in the series, “Hypothesis” (fig. 20.1 and fig. 20.2), she establishes a set of universal conditions of time and space. Each Hypothesis work represents a particular “span of consciousness,” she explains, during which she experienced a situation described in the work. The photographs represent “connected instants” in which the viewer sees what the photographer saw when she took the pictures. The collected information purports to record the artist’s “sensory consciousness,” but Piper has represented herself as physically absent from the completed works, present only as a past she has documented and analyzed. Even when her work appears to have resulted from intellectual activity, the artist in whom the artwork originated is, paradoxically, at an irremediable remove from the viewer’s encounter with it. In the “Hypothesis” essay, for example, Piper writes, Sensory consciousness is of essentially undifferentiated sensory information. The primary ordering of sensory information is into space and time continuums. The secondary ordering further differentiates it into segments along the continuums: specific space and time conditions . . . The resulting consciousness is of an indeterminate number of points or instants at which the space and time continuums inter-

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20.1  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #5 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

20.2  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #5 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

sect. Any combination of space and time conditions on the continuums may intersect to form one or more points or instants.35 Piper’s presence is implied throughout the series as the individual whose abstracted point of view the works represent. However, even as extensive documentation offers proof of the artist’s rational consciousness, Piper remains invisible. Piper is the author of the Hypothesis works, but when her name appears in their texts and graphs, it represents nothing more than a disembodied point possessing neither volume nor mass. This would not necessarily have struck viewers of her work as odd or unusual. In 1972, Krauss could still conclude from Minimalism that the individual’s experience of a given artwork was his or her own, but she won’t acknowledge how this might be inflected by such lived circumstances as race, gender, sexuality, or class. She explains: “What I must acknowledge is not some idea of the world’s perspective but simply my own point of view . . . One’s own perspective, like one’s own age, is the only orientation one will ever have.”36 However, Krauss never speaks to the precise ways in which age or any other circumstances affect experience. Her writing lacks a self-conscious critique of its inscription within discourse. Like many art critics at the time, Krauss was unable to recognize how the perspective from which the viewer sees—from which he or she sees—is affected not only by age and experience but is also always gendered, sexualized, and racialized. Piper’s Hypothesis works might appear to deny such conditions, as well. If her photographs conceal the very artist whose bodily experiences they record, then Piper’s anonymity gives form to her belief that any viewer of a Hypothesis work is capable of occupying the perspective from which the photographs have been taken. Elizabeth Grosz argues that knowledge has conventionally been considered “perspectiveless,” with the assumption that, “if it represents a particular point of view, this point of view is accessible to anybody, insofar as they are suitably trained”—an argument both Krauss and Fried made for Modernist criticism.37 Within Modernist discourse, knowledge is presumed to be the product of rational consciousness, a Kantian order of learned rules for systematizing empirical sensations. The objective method Piper developed for making her Hypothesis works enabled her to demonstrate her own ability to analyze bodily desires, emotions, and social conditioning by abstracting them.

Hypothesis  81

Piper’s photographs and other documents cast her as a universally accessible figure of the viewer’s cognition and imagination, whose body remains invisible and immaterial. This is important because bodily excess, in the Western philosophical tradition, is considered characteristically feminine and black. Within the form/matter dichotomy that orders existence in metaphysical philosophy, form represents the apprehension of knowledge and the intellectual mastery necessary to analyze experience. The capacity to overcome irrepressibly self-indulgent sensuality is supposedly what distinguishes men from women. Matter is that which aspires to form but with a potential that can never be fulfilled. This is not to say that bodily experience is unimportant, but that masculinity articulates itself as the capacity to offer a rational analysis of it as empirical knowledge. When Krauss claimed to write from what she called her “own point of view,” therefore, she made a two-fold claim to the rational mastery of perception: she distinguished herself intellectually from both her perceptions and their object—a naturalized dissociation from conventional representations of femininity that enables the autonomous position from which she writes.38 Piper made a similar claim by rationally examining her own “sensory consciousness” in terms familiar from the metaphysical philosophy of Kant, part of whose Critique of Pure Reason she read while composing her “Hypothesis” essay at the recommendation of a friend, who saw parallels between her work and Kant’s; she read Kant, and “immediately became obsessed.”39 According to this model, the subject can only be certain of its coherence and existence through rational analysis of empirical sensations—a project Piper attempts in each Hypothesis work. In Hypothesis: Situation #11 (plate 9 and fig. 21), for example, four blackand-white photographs of a chair document the loft where she lived and worked, clearly apparent as the place where she made the photographs. The photographs are mounted in a narrative sequence like movie stills on a graph marked to indicate precisely when each was taken: between 7:20 and 7:50 a.m. on “Wednesday/ November 5, 1969/ A.D.” Piper also provides the address where she took the photographs, locating her loft, for those familiar with New York, on the city’s working-class, immigrant Lower East Side (a low-rent neighborhood that was also home to several Minimalists and Conceptualists).40 The walls of Piper’s loft are close and the mismatched furnishings look cheap. This, and details like the old potbellied stove and the cluttered and dirty rooms, lend her project a dis82   Chapter 2

21  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #11 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

tinctly bohemian atmosphere. Yet, the factual precision with which Piper identifies the location—“4th floor loft/ 117 Hester St./ N.Y.C. 10002/ U.S.A.”—contrasts pointedly with the romanticized image of the struggling artist’s studio. Instead, Piper documents her loft, the conventional locus for the artistic sublime, with exaggerated precision and objectivity, as the site of a particularly mundane life.41 For example, Hypothesis: Situation #11 contrasts strikingly with the prints and watercolors Raphael Soyer made of the same neighborhood at the time—paintings for which Piper and her friend, Rosemary Mayer, sometimes posed.42 Soyer romanticized the East Village and Lower East Side as a youthful, multicultural bohemia populated by “those models who typify contemporary urban life”: “most of them happen to be young dancers, actors, artists,” and often in Soyer’s paintings the women appear nude.43 Piper appears to contest this representation in her own Hypothesis works, suspended in tension between photographs of the romantic artist’s garret, the exaggerated scientificity of the graph, her position within the work as an invisible conceptual point from which the photographs were made, and the universalizing tendencies of the “Hypothesis” essay. In Piper’s work, the artist is figured as a hypothesis, whose presence is neither certain nor assured. Instead, Piper appears to seek reassurance of her existence in the sequence of photographed moments. Each series of photographs—and the Hypothesis series as a whole—implies the artist’s intellectual and bodily coherence. In her “Hypothesis” essay, however, Piper explains how identity is contingent. Each work represents a singular “sensory consciousness situation.” This implies that the subject must always attempt to re-establish his- or herself. For example, Hypothesis: Situation #15 (plate 10 and fig. 22) documents the artist’s experience of “two co-existing space conditions”: her apartment, which contains her spatial experience for the duration of the experiment (9:30–10:02 p.m. on December 15, 1969), and the furnishings, or “conglomerate masses.” The graph includes a typed list of the objects seen in the photographs, charting the artist’s movement by the addition and removal of objects on the list:

A. mahogany straight-backed chair B. mahogany rocking chair C. blue easy chair D. woven straw chair, mahogany straight-backed chair

84   Chapter 2

22  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #15 (detail), conceived 1969, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.



E. wrought iron stool F. first white kitchen chair, woven straw chair, blue easy chair, mahogany straight-backed chair G. second white kitchen chair, woven straw chair, wrought iron chair

Piper has recorded how the objects vary from one photograph to the next, depending on where she was looking at the instant she took each photograph. Significantly, the serialized information identifies the subject matter as the photographer, not what she photographed. Piper fixed her spatial relationship to the objects around her when she snapped the camera’s shutter, and the overall impression is of her slow scan of the room, suggesting her presence by the reversal of her perspective. When the viewer tries to recreate the artist’s motions by triangulating the snapshots on the graph, the figure that results is the origin of a perspective on the world—the conceptual figure of Piper’s embodied consciousness. She would seem to have achieved, therefore, a kind of intellectual transcendence. This is a result of her artistic practice rather than a consequence of the particular objects or activities documented. It is as effective when she photographs chairs as when, in Hypothesis: Situation #4 (fig. 23.1 and fig. 23.2), she meditates while gazing out her window. Likewise, the procedure works when, in Hypothesis: Situation #6, she shops for groceries and, according to the graph, experiences something rare among the Situations: she achieves an “expansion of sensory consciousness,” charted as an experience “when the space condition varies while the time condition remains constant.”44 In the work, Piper has arranged five photographs she took on a trip to the grocery store. The photographs document an urban space traversed in pursuit of a woman’s stereotypical errands. Piper’s journey begins in the stairwell of her building on Hester Street and ends outside, on Forsythe Street, as noted on the graph, but she has changed the order of the photographs.45 By rearranging the photographs, Piper sets the project in relation to such works as her own Area Relocation series and Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1 and #2, in which she conceptually transported the places her works document as if to speculate about her ability to understand objects and spaces according to her perception of them. This becomes more explicit in Hypothesis: Situation #16 and Hypothesis: Situation #17, both of which include two “phases” of the photographs: in the first phase of each work,

86   Chapter 2

23.1  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #4 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

23.2  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #4 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage

the photographs are arranged in the order specified by the graph; the second phase is “a random disarrangement.”46 Piper exercises the artist’s prerogative to alter reality in its representation, raising questions about the objectivity of her observations and their authority over her. In Hypothesis: Situation #6, Piper seems bound by the mundane realities of her errands, but she is able to imagine and experience an alternative precisely because of her avocation. She shops for groceries but explores her rational consciousness and spiritual transcendence, too. However, each Hypothesis artwork presents the artist as an embodied subject who can claim continuity and coherence only momentarily, as the result of rational deduction. The confidence with which Piper executes her work appears as small compensation for self-doubt, a crisis feminists identified as common among women artists denied access to Modernism and its institutions. Artists and Dilettantes: The Woman Artist in Her Studio

The particular circumstances of Piper’s experiences and her presentation of them constitute a feminist critique of both the Modernist project and the metaphysical tradition of philosophy, even as her work also participates in them. Hypothesis documents Piper’s movements through her loft, identifying her home and studio as a site transformed by the creative and intellectual work she did there. Piper made most of her Hypothesis work between the fall of 1969 and the spring of 1970, at the same moment the woman artist’s studio became a site of contention in debates about women’s roles in the art world. Women artists protested their exclusion from museum and gallery exhibitions and college-level teaching jobs. Divided over goals and tactics and faced with animosity from many of the men in the AWC, they created three new groups: the Ad Hoc Committee, WAR, and WSABAL. Lippard would argue that the denigration of women artists began at home where they were expected to become homemakers, encourage the careers of husbands and lovers, and work outside jobs to support the household—a problem exacerbated by dealers who assumed that a visit to a woman artist’s studio implied an invitation to sex.47 The studio was not a figure for women artists’ invisibility or absence. Rather, it was a place of isolation, where femininity emerges within Modernist discourse as what Judith Butler calls “incoherence, disruption, [and] a threat”—a representation of something beHypothesis  89

yond representation that serves to sexualize and marginalize what it cannot describe.48 In 1968 and 1969, women began to reappropriate their studios as places to meet, share experiences through consciousness raising, and organize an assault against claims that Modernism was blind to matters of gender. A handbill jointly distributed by the Ad Hoc Committee, WAR, and WSABAL in the spring of 1970, just as Piper exhibited one of her Hypothesis works for the first time, proclaimed this rising awareness: “Suddenly there are a whole lot of women artists who never existed before. From nowhere! To the rescue!! Came these women artists!!!”49 If the women artists’ studios could not be recognized as studios, then they stood to be reclaimed as lack—a powerful plenitude that threatened Modernism’s claim to mastery and coherence. The Hypothesis series does not resolve the paradox of a personal experience represented by means of a universalizing objectivity but theatricalizes it instead as a conflict between two kinds of content: Piper’s experiences and her methods for documenting them. This is most apparent in Piper’s story about making Meat into Meat, an artwork she considers the first work in the Hypothesis series.50 On October 13, 1968, Piper cooked four hamburgers for her boyfriend, David Rosner, with the intention of documenting the episode in an artwork. The result, Five Unrelated Timepieces, presents an objective record of how the five separate objects—Piper’s boyfriend and the four hamburger patties—became one. However, Piper also made a subsequent version of the work, Meat into Meat (plate 11), which she called a “found private confrontational performance.”51 In the later version, Piper included not just her boyfriend and the pound of hamburger but herself, as well. She says that when she began to make Five Unrelated Timepieces, she intended to document the process using methods subsequently developed in the rest of Hypothesis. However, as she photographed Rosner, they began to argue and, as Piper explains it, this transformed her understanding of the work. “[Rosner’s] participation was accompanied by a series of derogatory remarks on many topics on which we took issue,” she writes, including, “my incipient feminism, as well as my interests in yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, and the kind of spiritual morality described at great length in the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.”52 Piper says she “retaliated” against her boyfriend’s criticisms “by delivering an improvised running commentary on the immorality of eating meat.”53 Rosner has said that 90   Chapter 2

he was completely surprised when Piper made him the hamburgers, a food she knew he enjoyed but that, because of her vegetarianism, she did not allow him to eat in the apartment they shared.54 According to Piper’s documentation, it took only ten minutes for Rosner to eat the hamburgers and for her to take the pictures, by the end of which, Rosner—“defiantly continuing to stuff himself with the meat past the point of satiation”—had become “increasingly antagonistic,” something Piper has told me she can see in the expression on his face in the last photograph of the series.55 Piper explains that as a result of the argument, she abandoned her role as dispassionate observer. In Five Unrelated Timepieces, she had transformed her boyfriend “into an art object of [her] informed art consciousness.” In Meat into Meat, however, she also put her “informed art consciousness” on display. She says, “[Rosner] had occasionally participated in works that I had done but was generally dismissive and contemptuous of them as ‘art.’ ” She also notes that he “disliked being objectified by being photographed as part of an artwork, even though his participation was voluntary.” In an aside that interprets her boyfriend’s discomfort in terms of the sexual dynamics of their relationship, she adds, “he felt differently about nude portrait drawings of him I had done.”56 Did Rosner disparage Piper’s art because she was a woman, and did Piper create the work as an antagonistic response to her boyfriend’s perceived chauvinism? By renaming the work Meat into Meat, a title that suggests the artist’s spiritual beliefs more than the tenets of conceptual art, the artwork casts her efforts to objectify her boyfriend and their argument as intertwined within a broader moral and spiritual dilemma. Piper’s story about Meat into Meat raises moral questions about a structure for making art that dehumanizes its participants—something she could only recognize when her methods strained her relationship with her boyfriend. Such questions become the work’s content, and, because Piper identifies Meat into Meat as the first of her Hypothesis works, provide a model for understanding the entire series as the theatricalized paradox of personal experience universalized. Piper explains that her art is the result of her own exploration of a problem rather than the expression of a particular, premeditated message.57 This is consistent not only with the feminist tenet that the personal is political but also with Minimalism’s emphasis on producing situations that will make the viewer self-conscious about the conditions Hypothesis  91

that determine perception. In order to suggest that the viewer accept responsibility for his or her personal experience of an artwork, some Minimalists made a point of distinguishing their work from Fried’s idea that a Modernist painting’s “presentness” should dictate the viewer’s experience.58 What Fried regards as divine the Minimalists declare totalitarian, and they extend this criticism to Fried’s methods as an art critic (Donald Judd once complained of “little league fascism,” lashing out at Fried, Krauss, and Greenberg).59 Piper thus takes responsibility for her own experiences in each Hypothesis work, seeming to play the role of the ideal Minimalist viewer. Personal Responsibility and the Universalist Ideal

Piper’s idea was to find the universal value in the particular encounter, and she realized that she could use any object anywhere and at any time to do this.60 The result is a personal application of Minimalism’s universalist ideology; she finds the particular experience in the universal approach. By combining the essay, photographs, graphed space-time continuum, and textual description of a specific situation in each Hypothesis work, Piper establishes a set of universal conditions (laid out in an accompanying essay) that she can then experience in a particular way and at a given moment. In her Hypothesis work, Piper played roles of artist and viewer to investigate the implications of Minimalism’s emphasis on the viewer’s participation. With women challenging clearly gendered assumptions about the studio, it is striking that when Piper made work about her loft, she did so by means of a process of objectivity that concealed her from viewers in the process. She would seem to have reaffirmed Modernism’s incapacity to recognize gender, let alone sexuality or race, in order to stake a self-reflexively critical claim to the rational consciousness promised by both metaphysical philosophy and Modernist criticism. The evident contrast in Piper’s Hypothesis work between the artist’s personal life and the insistent objectivity she claimed for documenting it draws attention not simply to her inability to extricate art from life but, more importantly, to the fact that this was something that as a woman, she was not supposed to do. If the Modernist subject, according to critics like Krauss and Fried, achieved universalist truths (“conviction,” Fried called it),61 then mastery meant establishing a point of view that not only surpassed individual particularities, such as taste, but made a 92   Chapter 2

show of overcoming them. Lippard announced that she recognized this in 1971, admitting to her “own previous reluctance to take women’s work as seriously as men’s, the result of a common conditioning from which we all suffer.” Her solution at the time was to acknowledge her “personal tastes”—the sort of self-consciousness toward which both feminism and Conceptualism strove.62 Krauss noted a change in her own attitude in 1972. No point of view can ever be “innocent”; the objectivity she had previously claimed was manifest in a “language [that] was also something [she] could hide behind.”63 Nevertheless, Krauss, unlike Lippard, continued to write in a tone of universalizing objectivity, denying the particularities of what she admitted was an embodied experience. On one level, Piper appears to take a position similar to Krauss’s, as if she considered embodied experience in only a generalized way. Hal Foster argues that the Modernist viewing subject was believed capable of recognizing the particularities of a given situation—those qualities of space and time that made the viewer’s experience unique and unrepeatable—as if they existed “before or outside history, language, sexuality, and power.”64 What gave experience universal value were the conditions that supposedly removed it from discourse. This is precisely the process Piper says Hypothesis was meant to demonstrate. Each work in the series figures an attempt by the artist to claim and inhabit the metaphysical tradition in philosophy, and Piper says she made Hypothesis with the assumption that she could use any object, in any place, at any time to do this.65 Hypothesis: Situation #15, for example, can represent an experiment with looking at the ordinary things Piper found in her loft and on the street as if they were Minimalist sculptures. The result is a personal application of a universalist ideology. However, the same aspects of Piper’s work that universalize her experiences also conceal her identity. The artist’s apparently personal choice of which objects to contemplate and photograph contrasts with the way these become so generalized that the work can be understood as representing not only her experiences but also how little the absent artist has revealed about herself. If Piper adopted a pose of objectivity in order to extricate herself from the activities her work documents, then this also provided a means to encourage critical self-reflexion in the works’ viewers. Piper’s Hypothesis works can therefore be understood as the artist’s attempt to demonstrate her repeated efforts to overcome metaphysical philosophy’s marginalization of the incommensurate feminine—a funHypothesis  93

damental assumption of discourse Butler calls “the unspeakable condition of figuration, as that which, in fact, can never be figured within the terms of philosophy proper, but whose exclusion from that propriety is its enabling condition.”66 Within the terms of philosophy’s form/matter dichotomy, Butler argues, what form extricates matter from is this state of unknowable “materiality”—a condition created by its exclusion, as prohibition.67 This applies to any attempt at objectivity, regardless of who initiates it. If Modernist criticism gives verbal form to the critic’s perceptions, therefore, then the “hidden meanings” and “interiority” that Krauss acknowledges but cannot articulate—those attachments that make any art critic’s understanding his or her own, despite efforts to displace them by writing as if from the perspective of an unidentified “viewer”—represent the materiality of gender, sexuality, and race that has no place within discourse. This fantasy could disqualify women artists from consideration, as demonstrated by the case of the “male dealer” who, according to Lippard, told her why he had not visited a woman artist’s studio: “sure, her work looked terrific, but she’s such a good-looking chick if I went to her studio I wouldn’t know if I like the work or her . . . so I never went.”68 The dealer displaced judgment of the artist’s work onto a fantasized encounter in the woman’s studio—a place where judgment and passion become indistinguishable and so fall beyond the proper concerns of Modernist criticism. This interrelatedness of passion and judgment was precisely what Krauss disapproved of when she described her experience of LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes; it is also crucial to what Piper found so useful about LeWitt’s work. LeWitt set the concept for his work and its documentation against the viewer’s phenomenological experience of its installation. The point was to risk chaos and paradox—to question both logic and judgment. LeWitt’s method is not “philosophically naïve,” as Krauss charged. Rather, it attempts to demonstrate how Modernism oversimplifies metaphysical philosophy in order to explain why sensory consciousness can only appear autonomous and objective after the fact and as a result of omitting certain details of experience. Piper embraced those aspects of LeWitt’s work Krauss rejected precisely because they precluded logical analysis, rendering subjective desires available for critical self-reflection. LeWitt noted that “logic may be used to camouflage the real intent of the artist.”69 Perhaps it did the same for the Modernist critic, too, serving to conceal the subjective na94   Chapter 2

ture of judgment. The contrast evident in Piper’s Hypothesis work between the artist’s personal life and the insistent objectivity she claimed for documenting it drew attention to her inability to extricate art from life. More fundamentally, Piper puts objectivity on display in a performance of the fact that she would not be allowed to distinguish between the two, no matter how hard she tried. Furthermore, the certainty with which she documented her experiences betrayed uncertainties about identity and her ability to know herself, let alone be judged by others. As a feminist critique, however, simply staking a claim to reason and knowledge fails because such a claim can only reify the gendered terms of metaphysical philosophy. A further step is required, which Piper’s invisibility makes possible: if, as Benjamin Buchloh argues, Conceptual artwork makes viewers aware of the conditions of its production and existence, then Piper does this by making work that displays the circumstances faced by women artists.70 In other words, her works do not ignore gender but expose the compulsion to deny it. For example, several of Piper’s Hypothesis works document activities considered properly feminine at the time: when not studying the furnishings of her home, she cooks dinner for her boyfriend, watches a television soap opera, shops for groceries, and visits the coat room at work with a female coworker. The objects Piper documented in Hypothesis are neither Morris’s “neutral” forms nor LeWitt’s “uninteresting” cubes but the details of her personal life, photographed where she found them, primarily at home and in her neighborhood, as if to ask viewers whether they can overcome their prejudices and find universal value in the objective account of a woman’s life.71 Consumerism and the Role of Women in the Art World: A Critical Approach

Hypothesis distinguishes Piper from women’s conventional roles as homemakers and shoppers, but it also demonstrates a particular dilemma for women artists: the inadequacy of claiming access to Modernism without also critiquing both Modernism and one’s claim to it. At the time, a woman who claimed to make art that did not reveal her gender risked being taken to mean that her art was as good as a man’s. In other words, she might be accused of making art that was derivative (it was not necessary to say whose artwork it was believed to mimic) while also reifying interconnected hierarchies of gender and quality. For this Hypothesis  95

reason, feminists rejected the question of quality. They found it intransigent. For example, Therese Schwartz reported in 1970 that when women asked the AWC to endorse a proposal that Whitney Museum Annuals include an equal number of women artists as men, one man responded, “ ‘why don’t we press for an open Whitney show’ (meaning, if you’re going to let women in you might as well let everyone in).”72 The problem persisted in 1973, when Lippard explained her exhibition of conceptual art by women, “c. 7,500,” as “an exasperated reply . . . to those who say ‘there are no women making conceptual art.’ ”73 Reviewers understood Lippard’s argument as one of quantity rather than quality; of tokenism, not equality.74 In the spring of 1971, Linda Nochlin published an article whose titles asks, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In response, she argued against staking a claim to Modernism on the basis of quality because the concept was already gendered masculine. Rather, women artists should make work that presented their contradictory relationship to Modernism. She concluded that, by using as a vantage point their situation as underdogs in the realm of grandeur, and outsider in that of ideology, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general, and, at the same time that they destroy false consciousness, take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought—and true greatness—are challenges open to anyone, man or woman, courageous enough to take the necessary risk, the leap into the unknown.75 Nochlin’s two-fold solution was necessarily paradoxical: she called for women to critique the very conventions and institutions they inhabited in order to demonstrate the seeming impossibility of their position, making space for themselves as a question within Modernism. Piper stages her claim to the universalist realm of aesthetics, moral value, and intellectual rigor in artworks that present evidence of how she can simultaneously do all the other things she ordinarily would during the course of her daily life. She performs her refusal to inhabit sexist imagery but does not deny that she shops for groceries. She also documents activities not typically associated with housewives. In Hypothesis: Situation #9 (plate 12 and fig. 24), she reads the New York Review of Books. Through six photographs documenting pages read in the course of an hour, Piper places herself in relationship to women intellectuals like Hannah Arendt and Jessica Mitford, reviews of whose recent books 96   Chapter 2

24  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #9 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

she photographs (and implicitly reads).76 Piper’s efforts to find universal value in her encounters with the objects around her present a fundamental challenge to widespread assumptions about who was or was not capable of intellectual and metaphysical activity. However, to argue that reading the New York Review of Books proves intellectual ability is to risk dismissal for exceptionalism or attempting to overreach. In either case, the artist could be seen as trying to prove that she can act like a man, inadvertently reifying gender norms. Rather, Piper’s Hypothesis series enacts an effective critique of Modernist gender conventions because she puts her claims to intellectual mastery and rational consciousness on display, performing them self-consciously in such a way that they articulate her dilemma as a woman artist working within Modernism. What is significant about Piper’s Hypothesis series is that she grounded her exploration within bodily perceptions objectified, as if to demonstrate that a woman’s experiences did not exclude her from pursuit of the universal but that such a pursuit demanded particular gestures of self-alienation and self-deprecation from women artists. For example, the tone of affected scientificity with which Piper presented herself calls attention in some Hypothesis artworks to her ability to observe and critique her consumerist desires—a project that signals a feminist consciousness critical of ways in which women find themselves addressed and portrayed in the mass media and in the art world. For example, Hypothesis: Situation #10 documents a television advertisement in which a woman treats her headache with aspirin (fig. 25.1 and fig. 25.2). Piper paired a sequence of five photographs of a television screen on which a woman grimaces from a headache and takes Bufferin with transcribed excerpts from the advertisement’s narration. The actress’s performance is directed at women viewers. An emotive response would imply identification with the actress’s apparent desire for Bufferin, but Piper’s objectivity is alienating. Instead, her study of how Madison Avenue represents and addresses women becomes a metaphor for the art world. Piper’s attention to matters of consumerism aligns her project with those women artists who explored the question of how to enter the museum or gallery when only permitted to do so in terms of consumer culture. Consumerism served as a metaphor for art-world expectations for several early feminist artists. In 1970, Eleanor Antin presented a series of portraits of New York women, including artists Rainer, Weiner, and 98   Chapter 2

25.1  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #10 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

25.2  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #10 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

Carolee Schneemann (plate 13), with “brand-new . . . consumer goods”: “expensive, shiny, glamorous objects.” She wrote, “I chose bright colors, reds and pinks. And as much chrome as possible.”77 As if to reveal the limits on how the women she portrayed could enter the gallery—as already so imbricated in consumer culture as to be indistinguishable from it—Antin added that she selected the New York women’s items “deliberately,” so as to be alienating: “I didn’t want the viewer to come too close. Women have had enough love.”78 The consumer products establish a protective distance between the viewer and the women portrayed. Antin explained her admiration for these women, each of whom had established a distinct personality by “having chosen life styles independent of men’s,” which Antin represented as a critical relationship to the chosen consumer products.79 Antin further alienates viewers by representing each woman with a collection of objects that requires a missing narrative to make sense. Similarly, Piper disassociates herself from both consumerism and the viewer of Hypothesis: Situation #10 by fragmenting the Bufferin advertisement, which indicates that she does not identify with the actress’s consumerist desires but studies them, instead. She resists the admonition to shop and thereby distances herself from consumer100   Chapter 2

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

26  Martha Rosler, Red

Stripe Kitchen, from Bringing the War Back Home: House Beautiful, 1967–72, printed early 1990s. Chromogenic print. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 2002 (2002.393). Copy Photograph © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ism generally; at the same time, the artwork that provides the means for her analysis also provides proof of her capacity for rational thought. Martha Rosler articulated a similar relationship to consumerism differently, in a series of collages, Bringing the War Home (1967–72), that juxtaposed pictures of immaculate domestic interiors clipped from home decorating magazines with Life magazine pictures of the war in Vietnam.80 In Red Stripe Kitchen (fig. 26), soldiers reconnoiter a fashionably decorated home, their backs turned, oblivious to being watched by the viewer; the whole scene appears startlingly still, as if to capture a moment of shocking displacement. By making these collages, Rosler identifies herself as a critical reader of popular magazines. Likewise, Piper’s calculated presentation of her loft marks a similarly critical distance from the home decorating magazines marketed to women in the 1960s. Piper’s dark, furnished loft is clearly not one of the suburban homes photographed for House Beautiful, a point further emphasized by Piper’s use of sometimes confusing layouts. Hypothesis  101

When Piper documents her lifestyle, she presents it as an alternative to the middle-class consumerism Rosler finds complicit with the war and gender norms. In Hypothesis: Situation #5 (fig. 27), ten photographs document Piper’s two-room loft. The small, dark space is the residence of an intellectual, crowded with bookshelves, a typewriter, a desk, and artwork by both Piper and LeWitt, her downstairs neighbor. The work’s layout, which appears simple, is difficult to comprehend. The photographs have not been taken from a single vantage point; rather, they offer fragmentary glimpses made as Piper moved around the two rooms of her loft. The photographer’s obscure path—a route with no clear rationale— and the regularizing and serial arrangement of the photographs borrow not from the layout of a home decorating magazine but from the conventions of exhibition-installation photographs in art-magazine articles about Minimalism. Piper says this was not an intentional reference.81 Nevertheless, each photograph offers the viewer an eye-witness perspective on objects seen by the photographer, just as the readers of Artforum, for example, could imagine visiting an exhibition of LeWitt’s work based on the installation photographs that illustrated reviews of his exhibitions (that LeWitt’s work is evident in Piper’s photographs only enhances this). As in Piper’s Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square, the organizational logic for Hypothesis: Situation #5 is rational but quirky. Based on a structure outlined within the work, Piper occupies paired roles of artist and audience. Similarly, the photographic layout offers viewers a graphic tour of Piper’s loft-as-artwork in the form of what is itself an artwork. Piper’s shot-by-shot analysis of the Bufferin advertisement removes it from television’s imaginary space in the living room and, by the combination of hermetic documentation and excision, disrupts and denaturalizes the advertisement’s narrative. Piper accomplishes something similar in Hypothesis: Situation #7 (fig. 28.1 and fig. 28.2), which documents eleven moments from an episode of Peyton Place, a popular primetime television soap opera. The work reduces melodrama to a concise record of the people seen conversing in each photograph and identified in captions. Piper reports the time when she took each photograph but does not explain the narrative she has fragmented. The unrecorded conversations function like the details of the argument Piper had with her boyfriend while making Meat into Meat: it is the narrative that Piper does not provide that represents the level on which the objects and people 102   Chapter 2

27  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #5 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage

mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

28.1  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #7 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

28.2  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #7 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage

photographed are meaningful to her, as if only the absence of such personal information can provide evidence of rational consciousness. It is the information that Piper does not provide, evident as a critically circumspect approach to meaning and representation—in short, as a refusal—that makes Piper’s work feminist. Women Conceptual Artists and the Question of Women’s Work

Piper recently lampooned the fraternity of Conceptual artists as “a white macho enclave, a fun-house refraction of the Euroethnic equation of intellect with masculinity.”82 Her indictment raises the question of whether the art that she, Antin, Rosler, Weiner, Kozlov, and other women Conceptual artists made at the time differed from the work of their male counterparts. Answering this question in the affirmative is fraught with peril: I do not wish to essentialize any of the women Conceptualists by suggesting that because of gender, their art is inherently different from that made by men. Furthermore, I do not wish to support anyone who would understand a difference of project as a distinction in quality that justifies the women’s continued marginalization. Each Hypothesis situation implicitly documents the process of making art, and in this respect they are no different from most examples of conceptual art. Like LeWitt and others, Piper made work that put conventional means of making and exhibiting art on display. Because some of her Hypothesis works document activities traditionally associated with women, they are also like the work of other women Conceptual artists for the way they critique the sexual division of labor. Kozlov, a friend of Piper’s, drew attention to the mundane activities to which women typically found themselves confined by making artworks that challenge the presumed manliness of Conceptual art’s grandiose intellectualism. This process enabled her to make space for her work within Conceptualism even as she critiqued it. Piper recently charged that she and Kozlov were “the only women admitted” into Conceptual art—and then, only “as mascots.”83 At the time, Kozlov parodied the heroic gestures underlying the gender politics of Action Painting and Conceptualism in work composed of such routine gestures as mailing “xeroxed calendar strips systematically canceled” to a list of recipients.84 The artist On Kawara had asserted his existence similarly by

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making a series of monochrome paintings, one per day since 1966 (with the occasional lapse), each of which bore its date of creation. Kawara makes high art of marking time, and his paintings participate in the tradition of history painting, as Jeff Wall has demonstrated. In an explicitly avant-garde act of auto-critique, Kawara adopts the trascendent conventions of Modernist painting.85 Kozlov, on the other hand, methodically executes a simple task, crossing out squares on a calendar. Her succinct gestures transform an office furnishing into a Modernist picture with all-over pattern, making reference to the same conventions as Kawara’s monochromes but refusing the cultural ascendance to which his paintings aspire.86 The following year, Kozlov presented a work entitled 271 BLANK SHEETS CORRESPONDING TO 271 DAYS OF CONCEPTS REJECTED. FEBRUARY, 1968–OCTOBER, 1968. Robert Rauschenberg had erased a drawing by the quintessentially macho Action painter Willem de Kooning, leaving the marks of his eraser visible on the page in a play of manly bravado and intellectual prowess. By contrast, Kozlov, like a diarist suffering writer’s block, gathered a stack of 271 blank sheets of paper to represent as many days of rejected ideas. Kozlov pursued rationality by claiming to bureaucratically reject subjective judgments, using xeroxing—a photomechanical means of producing low-quality, utilitarian office copies—to engage in what Buchloh calls the “aesthetics of administration.”87 By its modesty, Kozlov’s clerical task exposes both the bureaucratic regulation of everyday life—associated at the time with male managers and female clerical workers—and the Modernist bravura she refuses. Kozlov’s work, like Piper’s, critiques the rationalist ideal in terms of women’s experiences. In 271 BLANK SHEETS, she does not function “merely as a clerk cataloging the results of the premise,” as LeWitt famously called for Conceptual artists to do.88 LeWitt explained that the artist should adopt an idea for making art and then execute it without concern for matters of taste or legibility—the artist can judge the work best after its completion. What Kozlov has done instead is second-guess herself, as if anticipating the inadequacy of her ideas before she can realize them. Critical self-reflection becomes self-deprecation in a performance of rejection anticipated and internalized. Kozlov, an early and central participant in Conceptual art—she showed at Seth Siegelaub’s gallery and was a cofounder of Museum—was familiar with the Struc-

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turalist critique of knowledge and the social determination of meaning. If, as Buchloh argues, conceptual art “succeeded in purging itself entirely of imaginary and bodily experience, of physical substance and the space of memory, to the same extent that it effaced all residues of representation and style, of individuality and skill,” then Kozlov’s work, like Piper’s, presents the viewer with evidence that for women artists, such erasure was already encouraged and coerced, not a matter of choice.89 Piper recalls that art dealers she knew “thought [her] true destiny was to be an outstandingly creative gallery receptionist,” not an artist.90 For example, she worked as a “receptionist and administrative assistant” for Siegelaub, but he never exhibited her work.91 Can the one Hypothesis situation that documents a woman working in an office be understood as Piper’s response to a perceived snub? On December 9, 1969, Piper photographed her friend, Sandra Livingston, at work (Livingston was the receptionist at the Cameo Employment Agency, where Piper worked as the bookkeeper).92 Piper charted the results in Hypothesis: Situation #14 (plate 14 and fig. 29) as a study of “two co-existing space conditions”: the “office” and “Sandy.” Livingston appears in each photograph with fragments of the office visible around her. On the graph, Piper explains the photographs as “a random disarrangement” of the office space, seen only in relation to Livingston’s movements through it. She privileges the woman’s activities—her labor—over the presumed but also unproven productivity of her unidentified and unseen employer. Hypothesis: Situation #14 might be understood as Piper’s attempt to demonstrate that her own work as an artist is more important than the secretarial work she analyzes, but if Piper wanted to make such snobbish art, she could have documented one of her own jobs. Alternately, Piper might instead have effaced herself and her judgment to make Livingston the focus of attention, assuming the very pose of objectivity she had critiqued when she remade Five Unrelated Timepieces as Meat into Meat. Instead, Piper universalizes the working woman’s situation, but not without also acknowledging the particularity of Livingston’s situation and her own relationship to it (she dedicates the work to “Sandy”). Four of the eight photographs represent Livingston seated at her desk in what Piper identifies as the “front room”; she is seen from the front, answering the phone and greeting a job applicant. The other four photographs are taken in the “coat room,” where Sandy is observed from behind, at close range, “loosening [and] combing” her hair. Piper documents the 108   Chapter 2

29  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #14 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969.

Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of Margaret and Daniel Loeb.

interrelatedness of public and private activities in Sandy’s life, simultaneously violating conventional distinctions between the two to demonstrate how Sandy prepares herself in the coat room to be seen in the front room. Piper’s proximity to Sandy, conveyed through a deliberate foregrounding of compositional convention, suggests friendship or even solidarity between the two women—they seem complicit as Piper makes art instead of attending to her employer’s books. The work indicates Piper’s awareness of the roles to which women find themselves allotted and how distinctions between public and private behavior naturalize them. Piper presents the artist’s self-effacement, characteristic of Minimal and Conceptual art, as a particular dilemma for women artists who already participate in the art world as figures of impossibility and exclusion. The woman Minimalist or Conceptualist inhabits a doubled absence. First, because, like other Minimalists and Conceptualists, she makes an effort to establish herself as an absence in her work in order to privilege the viewer’s experience of the completed object. It is equally clear, however, that some art critics tried to recover that lost origin or, as in Lippard’s example of the conflicted dealer, refused to accept the possibility of a woman artist’s alienation from her work. If the artist is to be sought, then it is possible Piper might not have been included in particular exhibitions or publications because of how critics, curators, and other artists regarded her (as a woman or as black). There is a distinction to be made between Piper figuratively removing herself from her artwork and a curator disinviting her from an exhibition because he has learned she is a black woman. Alienated from her artwork and excluded from exhibitions and publications on the basis of race or gender, Piper has until recently been a doubled absence in the history of Minimal and Conceptual art. If some people regarded Piper as nothing more than an “outstandingly creative gallery receptionist,” her predicament was not unique. Lippard considered such experiences evidence of a double standard. Unlike men, women artists who worked a second job to support their careers as artists risked confirming expectations that they were not serious about art: “if a single female artist supports herself by teaching or working as a ‘gallery girl’ or whatever, she is called a dilettante.”93 Elsewhere, Lippard explained the double standard as a problem specific to Modernism:

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The woman artist has tended to be seen as another artist’s wife, or girl, or as a dilettante . . . contrary to popular opinion, women are not any more “part-time artists” than anyone else. Very few artists if any in America do not work at something other than their art to earn a living, though it’s true that women often have three jobs instead of two: their art, work for pay, and the traditional unpaid “work that’s never done.” The infamous Queens housewife who tries to crack the gallery circuit is working against odds no Queens housepainter (Frank Stella was one) has had to contend with.94 Frank Stella provided Lippard with a topical example of Modernism’s claim to masculine mastery. He validated his ambiguous relationship to painting in terms of his theory of the “housepainter’s technique,” an anti-intellectual source for artwork some considered overly conceptual.95 In 1971, the “Queens housepainter” had been heroized anew in a pair of monographs highlighting the importance of Stella’s theory.96 Lippard’s point is that Stella’s tales of painting houses provided not only an effective and direct technique for applying paint to canvas but a legitimacy impossible for women, no matter what their second (or third) job. One member of WAR phrased the dilemma in reverse to reveal its ridiculousness: “nobody classifies male artists as husbands and fathers.”97 As Piper attests, one risk for women artists was to become known for the jobs that supported them to the preclusion of their artistic careers. If Piper could demonstrate her ability to achieve the Minimalist ideal anywhere, then her loft—the figurative site of feminine excess, passion, and incoherence—was the most highly charged space in which to attempt it. Piper asks whether Modernist criticism provided a means for transcending empirical or sensory consciousness and, by implication, overcoming prejudice. If it did, then how should feminism address the problem that dealers, critics, and curators had been “discriminatory, usually under the guise of being discriminating,” as Lippard put it?98 Piper’s two-fold solution, in Hypothesis, was to set her claim to metaphysical philosophy into tension with conditions faced by women artists. This meant not simply displaying the private realm of her live/work space but also the impulse to conceal it. Piper was not the only woman artist who recognized how male artists abandoned the studio in order to lay claim to a newer, more manly and intellectualized sublime. Weiner, whom Piper knew (less well than she

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knew Kozlov), also chose to confront viewers with their expectations of women artists’ studios. In 1969, stating that “self respect is a job if you need it,” Weiner made performances of opening her two workplaces to visitors. First, she presented Hannah Weiner at Her Job at a manufacturer of women’s underwear where she held a part-time design position. Sponsored by Gain Ground, an art gallery, Weiner put herself and what the press release called her “studio” on display, with the explanation: “My life is my art. I am my object, a product of the process of self-awareness.” As a declaration of autonomy and self-determination, Weiner’s statement redeems her second job as an underwear designer by making art not just of the “bikini underpants” she sold during her performances but of her labor itself. The announcement promised her boss would be present, and examples of the inexpensive underwear she made were offered for sale.99 Weiner’s statement acknowledges that, put on display and objectified, she presents the circumstances of her participation in the art world for viewers’ analysis and judgment. Her position in the needle trades, like Piper’s job as a gallery receptionist, might in the art world be considered women’s work and the objects she sold were clearly marketed to women (although, significantly, calling them art made them available to men, too). Weiner presented viewers with what they expected from the woman-artist-asdilettante, framed to question the limits of Modernist discourse. Weiner asked such questions directly the second time she opened her workplace. For “Street Works IV,” she arranged to “open the lofts and apartments of participating poets and artists to the public,” asking, “Where do we go when we leave the street? Where, and with whom do we live? How have our heads, turned inside out, fashioned places for our bodies? . . . Do we have art on our walls? What do we do with our garbage? Doesn’t everybody like to snoop? It’s too late for secrets.”100 Weiner panders to the prurient interests of her audience, but also asks what the artist’s studio—a space charged with sublime creation and workaday sexism—might reveal to visitors about their expectations. Her questions address art-world gossip and intrigue, something judgment is supposed to transcend. As Irit Rogoff argues, feminists might employ gossip as an “unruly” discourse to “shift the field from historical subjects to contemporary desiring subjects,” allowing fantasy to seep into judgment and, more importantly, revealing those places it already has.101 In 1973, Lippard explained that the women’s movement forced her to confront similar questions: “I continued to go to men’s studios and either disregard 112   Chapter 2

or patronize the woman artist who worked in a corner of her husband’s space, or in the bedroom or kitchen. I was, I think, unconsciously responding to her sense of inferiority and insecurity as well as my own.”102 Lippard’s confession acknowledges how she responded to the ways in which women artists sometimes occupied studio space differently from men, as self-effacing expression of their feelings of inadequacy. Could Weiner, Kozlov, and Piper have acknowledged and challenged something similar in their work? African American Artists and the Elusive Universal

If Piper’s Minimalist and Conceptualist artwork can be discussed in terms of the feminism, how does it relate to concurrent debates about African American art?103 Piper acknowledges a relationship but insists her work not be interpreted in such a way that it becomes overdetermined. I have briefly discussed this with her and she explains that she does not want her work understood primarily as African American art to the exclusion of the other issues it addresses—a common attitude among black feminists. She acknowledges, instead, that her work is a product of the historical moment in which it was made and so must inevitably reflect her conscious and unconscious awareness of her experiences as a black woman, which include both the terrors of racism and the movement politics of civil rights and Black Power activism.104 She has never been more specific than this about the racial implications of any work she made before beginning her Mythic Being series in 1973. Piper’s reluctance to identify her work as black or African American art was not unique at the time. Many African Americans debated whether their art could be characterized by anything but aesthetic criteria. For example, Spiral, a group of African American artists working in New York, met to discuss the very possibility of “the Negro Image.”105 In an Art News article from 1966, the members question whether artists draw upon universally accessible experiences, forms, and imagery or personally expressive ones. Norman Lewis describes the Negro Image as impossible because American culture has appropriated and obscured African Americans’ inherently African tendencies.106 On the other hand, Romare Bearden counters, “you can’t speak as a Negro if you haven’t had the experience.”107 Whether or not the members of Spiral could recuperate an obscured common culture, they agree that, as Bearden charges, “the Negro artist is unknown to America.”108 Spiral identified a crisis of Hypothesis  113

invisibility, manifest as skepticism about institutional neglect and the representation of repressed but inherently Negro culture. Furthermore, for an art student like Piper, there were few available role models to suggest how to pursue a career as a black artist. This was not only because artists like Bearden resisted such labels but also because museums did not typically show their work. Younger black artists expressed a desire to learn from more experienced colleagues but found little information available.109 Furthermore, Ringgold, who made representational paintings about racial violence in her American People series of 1966–67, recalls feeling bitterness toward older black artists who criticized her work as too political. Yet she acknowledges the practicality of their decision to make abstract art: “They were cautious, half-stepping, as they said in the Sixties. Trying to get by in the art world. Trying not to have their difference noticed. However, they knew something I did not know. That there was no support of art or artists in the black community. And there was not much to be gained by losing possible friends and contacts in the white world.”110 To encourage support for African American artists among both black and white audiences, Bearden and others, with the support of organizations like the Harlem Cultural Council and New York Urban League, began in 1966 to mount a series of exhibitions in New York that argued for the place of African American artists in the history of American art.111 When no black artists were included in the Whitney Museum’s 1968 exhibition “The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America,” Harlem’s newly formed Studio Museum countered with the exhibition “Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 1930s” as a reminder of the role African American artists played in defining American Modernism.112 “Invisible Americans” marked the bitterness of historical erasure by including artists still alive and working in New York and elsewhere, including Bearden, Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, and Elizabeth Catlett. What these exhibitions claimed, fundamentally, was an inalienable and reciprocal relationship between African American artists and the history of American art. The artistic process Piper developed to erase her individuality poses the same problem of invisibility confronting all African American artists. Most viewers who knew Piper was black seemed incapable of understanding her art as anything but black art (especially those who abandoned her). As Piper’s experiences with art-world racism attest, this 114   Chapter 2

fixation upon race was tantamount to invisibility. By the late 1960s, African Americans were clearly aware of the issue, articulated variously in the rhetoric of the civil rights movement and writings of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison (whose books Piper read in high school).113 African Americans knew whites saw them differently than they saw themselves, leading to a fundamental misrecognition. Not long before Piper began Hypothesis, for example, questions of African American artists’ ability to represent themselves came to a head when Bearden and Benny Andrews organized the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) to protest the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition “Harlem on My Mind.” The exhibition presented a history of black life and culture in twentieth-century Harlem through documentary photographs displayed as part of a multimedia experience. Few people raised objections about the photographs exhibited, which included work by both black and white photographers. Instead, as early as the spring of 1967, Bearden and other African American artists complained that the museum’s first exhibition to take African American culture as its subject would not include art by African Americans, despite the fact that, as Hale Woodruff pointed out, the museum collection already included work by Lawrence, Charles Alson, and Aaron Douglas.114 In addition, the show was organized by a curator who was not African American and who had mostly excluded African Americans from the planning. For many black artists in New York the central question was who had the authority to represent African American art and culture.115 The Metropolitan Museum’s policy toward black culture seemed to be one of separate and unequal treatment, as one BECC protest flyer put it at the time: “THE MET HAS GIVEN UP ART FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE. No! You will not see art works by Accomplished Black Artists, both past and present—young and old, who lived and worked within the Harlem community. . . . If art represents the very soul of a people, then this rejection of the Black painter and sculptor is the most insidious segregation of all.”116 To fully understand the implications of this dispute, it is important to consider why some black artists felt excluded from the museums and called them “white”—something Piper did not do at the time.117 The obvious reason is the simple fact that work by black artists was, for the most part, neither included in exhibitions nor purchased for museum collections. The more complicated explanation is that while Modernist art promised a universally perceptible “presence,” white critics and curators, Hypothesis  115

when they addressed work by black artists, consistently claimed it expressed an essential blackness that made it suitable primarily for black audiences. This is not to say museums had explicit policies excluding black artists (or visitors). Rather, when the Black Arts Movement began to define the work of black artists as relevant to African American audiences, this suited some museum curators uninterested in black artists. Tensions were exacerbated when MOMA presented a benefit exhibition for the Southern Christian Leadership Foundation following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and hung black artists’ works separately from white artists’ works.118 In a gesture that both countered and drew attention to segregation in the museum, the AWC and an organization calling itself the Black and Puerto Rican Students and Artists for a Black Wing in Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led by Ringgold and Lloyd, demanded on the first anniversary of King’s assassination that MOMA create “the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.–Pedro Albizu Canpos Study Center for Black and Puerto Rican Culture” and “a black wing” for exhibiting work by African American and Puerto Rican artists.119 The fundamental issue raised by the black demonstrators marching outside New York’s museums was the question of whether any museum could exclude or isolate the work of African American artists and still claim universality. The answer can be stated concisely from the museum’s perspective: there is no such thing as white art. This was also the assumption of Minimalism and Conceptualism that, in theory, made no distinctions of race or gender. Artists whose work MOMA exhibited during the 1960s were those considered to have overcome desires and investments of the flesh. For example, Jackson Pollock, the post-war painter whose work is most closely associated with embodied aggressivity, has always been presented by MOMA as a methodical draftsman rather than an Action painter. Furthermore, as Ann Gibson demonstrates, the two predominant models of art criticism in the early 1960s—Greenberg’s formalism and Harold Rosenberg’s Action Painting—called artists to make work of universal value. Greenberg assumed that the artist erased him- or herself in painting, making an image loosed from the material and historical particularities of its creation, providing the critic with a moral defense for reviewing and supporting only white artists.120 Whereas art museums and critics associated blackness with the conditions of a particular people and moment, whiteness was generally valued as freedom from historical particularity.121 116   Chapter 2

Hypothesis and the Racialized Situation

Hypothesis tested Piper’s ability to create abstract art from bodily sensations. The works cast her as a figure of the viewer’s intellect and imagination, converting feelings into ideas. Distancing herself from her perceptions has the effect of displacing her body—locus of experiences overdetermined within the Western philosophical tradition as gendered and racialized—from her work. As a result, she remains remote from the work’s viewers. Piper makes a cognitively abstract Conceptual artwork from her attempt to communicate bodily sensations systematically, rationally, and intellectually; the artwork presents her struggle to come to terms with being raced and gendered, but also with her attempt to escape what some considered confining categories. The exaggerated objectivity of Piper’s Hypothesis series can be regarded as striving for a degree of abstraction and anonymity that Bearden refused. The artistic practice Bearden developed during the 1960s to establish his own relationship to the history of art serves as a useful model for considering how Piper’s Hypothesis series can be understood as the work of an African American woman. In 1964, Bearden began Projections, a series of collages representing the culture and history of the African American South and migration north using compositions that recall Renaissance painting. Lee Stephens Glazer argues that Bearden’s Projections “constituted an exemplary moment of African American identity formation” because they rework the tradition of Western art history in which Bearden believed he participated according to the “specific social-historical conditions” of the struggle for civil rights.122 Bearden reconfigures Old Master compositions with imagery from the world’s art traditions to find new meanings in them, and, in the process, he imagines a utopian future.123 Nevertheless, Bearden’s Projections were understood primarily as an African American’s response to the struggle for civil rights.124 Perhaps Bearden’s audience overlooked universalist aspects of his practice because of the representational aspects of the collaged photographs.125 Piper used photography differently than Bearden. Bearden selected fragments of photographs to represent recognizably African American or African subject matter, among other things. Piper, however, does not present her work’s viewers with recognizably “black” imagery. Instead, she photographed her Lower East Side neighborhood—one more closely Hypothesis  117

associated with Jacob Riis’s catalogue of poor European immigrants than with Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s documentation of African American poverty.126 However, in contrast to Piper’s success among the dealers and critics who assumed she was a white man, most people who saw Piper’s work as that of a black woman considered it irrelevant to the project of Conceptual art. Paradoxically, this raises the question of whether Piper was able to exhibit her work because it obscured her— so long as viewers remained unaware that she considered herself black. Given the prevalence of racism and sexism in the art world, was Piper able to exhibit her work because she made art that promised presence but also guaranteed anonymity? Piper aimed to find the universal in the particular. Procedures of objectivity enabled her to conceive of herself within a utopian realm of her own creation while remaining grounded in the historical particularity of her experiences. The philosophical rhetoric of her Hypothesis essay, the scientificity of the graphed instants of perception, and the photographs taken by—but not depicting—the artist obscure her subjectivity by design. Typical of Minimal and Conceptual art, Hypothesis conceals the artist whose experiences it records in order to ensure that any viewer can find universal value in it. However, by realizing this model of the ideal viewer in the specific terms of her own experience, Piper renders it historical. Perhaps inadvertently, the reception of her work reveals what Minimalism required the viewer (and artist) to deny: the particularities that lend perceptions value. One potential problem with my argument is that I may appear to have placed the burden on Piper by asking, in essence, if she was passing for white. If an African American woman develops processes of art-making that promise the artist objectivity and anonymity, does this mean she is necessarily trying to prevent the viewers of her work from learning her gender or race? Furthermore, by raising issues of race and gender in relation to Piper’s Minimal and Conceptual art, am I obscuring the artist’s project in well-meaning but misguided tokenism? No one asks whether Morris, Judd, or LeWitt was passing. It is assumed they strove for universalist objectivity by making work accessible to anyone who gives it the attention required to achieve an intellectually transcendent and politically contingent experience. Regardless of Piper’s intent, her work identified her to many of its viewers as a Minimal or Conceptual artist, which is to say, a white male artist. 118   Chapter 2

Is a universalist approach to art-making possible? Piper recounts experiences of racism and sexism that demand we ask this question. Ultimately, her work as an artist, writer, and philosopher points to a universalist project that embraces contingency. For example, she considers racism a form of xenophobia. Kant’s theory of the categorical imperative states that we understand our perceptions according to conceptual categories, matching what we see with what we anticipate seeing. “Xenophobia,” therefore, “is fear, not of strangers generally, but rather of a certain kind of stranger, namely those who do not conform to one’s preconceptions about how persons ought to look or behave.”127 To argue that our preconceptions are innate is to accept that they are immutable and cannot be changed. But if they are socially determined, then we are capable of overcoming our racism, at least in theory, by learning to rationally reconfigure the categories by which we comprehend perceptions. As a result, we can learn to anticipate and accept anomalous appearances.128 Piper calls for us to refuse to allow our “life experience” to become so “overwhelmingly vicious and brutal” that we reject the possibility that Kant’s moral theory might provide the means to an ideal society.129 Some feminists have taken Piper to task for embracing Kant, a philosopher whose claims to objectivity seem to preclude the feminist critique of reason. However, Piper’s approach to Kant is sympathetic with this complaint. She envisions utopian universalism, encouraging open-mindedness.130 Applied to Minimal and Conceptual art, Piper’s theory is insistently contingent. For Kant, a universal philosophy personally applied is not a paradox. He argued, for example, that each of us develops a moral law of behavior autonomously, but that in formulating such a law, we must also consider our relationship to our neighbors.131 Piper describes her art of the 1960s as “very personal,” therefore, because “it concerns the immediate relationship of the indexical present—that is the present of the here and now—between the art object and the viewer as a kind of medium for social relations.” She continues, one of the major drives of Minimal art is the idea of repudiating abstract aesthetic theory and focussing attention on the individual, specific, unique object; reducing that object to a set of properties that reveal it simply as what it is: as an object in space and time, and not something that is full of external associations, suppositions and pre-

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conceptions. If you think that xenophobia can be overcome by focus­ sing on the specific, unique, concrete qualities of individuals, then it would make sense to think of Minimal Art decision-making as a kind of aesthetic strategy for drawing attention to the concrete, specific, unique qualities of individuals; and that is what my work does.132 In Hypothesis, Piper renders the universal personal. In the process, she demonstrates the ability of a black woman to occupy the position of Minimalism’s and Conceptualism’s ideal viewer. In effect, she repudiates Kant’s assumption that blacks and women are unable to comprehend their perceptions by presenting her subjectivity as a problem for Modernism.133 The implication of Piper’s critical embrace of the sort of abstraction she identifies as both “flying” and “flight” is that all artists and viewers will gain access to the privileges traditionally reserved for “upper-middle-class het WASP males the pampered only sons of doting parents.”134 Is Hypothesis the beginning of Piper’s realization that her attempts at aesthetic isolation fail because of the intrusion of the outside world? Black Power and feminism both called for dismantling the sort of “detached perspective,” Piper claimed. I want to argue that Piper’s Hypothesis series represents an attempt to realize the particularities of her perspective on the world around her in an effort to become morally and politically self-conscious. In 1973, Piper explained she had achieved politicized self-consciousness as the result of participating in political activism as its witness. As a student at City College, she writes, “I had a lot of contact . . . with political rallies, speakers, discussions of what the students ought to do, posters, handouts, etc.”135 When artists organized the New York Artists’ Strike in May 1970, she attended meetings that provoked her to reconsider her role as an artist. Piper’s political gesture was to accept responsibility: “I did a lot of thinking about my position as an artist, a woman, and a black; and about the many ways in which I had managed to avoid all the natural disadvantages of those attributes.”136 Her self-reflection was only possible, she concludes, because of changes she underwent as a consequence of feeling she had to engage with events taking place around her. Crucially, Piper assumes the role of witness: I see now that the crisis and solution was the result of the invasion by the “outside world” of my aesthetic isolation. Although I will never 120   Chapter 2

be a really political person, I now feel that in a sense I don’t need to worry about that. Those forces have managed to infiltrate my awareness, and thereby determine me and my work in ways which confront me with the politics of my position whether I want to know them or not: I have become self-conscious.137 Significantly, Piper’s artwork is not a means for communicating a conscious attitude but an effort at self-discovery and self-fulfillment. Thus, she concludes, “It remains for me to continually define and articulate my concerns by reflecting on the works I produce (not the other way around).”138 By understanding her perspective on the world as more than a relationship in time and space, she comes to realize it as more than an aesthetic relationship: it is a moral and political responsibility. This process is first evident in the Hypothesis series.

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Section 2 1970 –1975

Personal Politics and Performance Art

3

​M ay 1970 Art and Activism

Piper explains her artwork of the early 1970s as the result of her sudden political awareness, made as she became increasingly disillusioned with the possibilities of practicing art or philosophy removed from the social realities that confronted her on a daily basis. Reflecting on this moment in January 1973, she wrote, “In the spring of 1970 a number of events occurred that changed everything for me: (1) the invasion of Cambodia; (2) The Women’s Movement; (3) Kent State and Jackson State; (4) The closing of CCNY [City College of New York], where I was in my first term as a philosophy major, during the student rebellion.”1 Elsewhere, the precise chronology of Piper’s dawning political awareness is more vague than this. For example, Piper dates her interest in yoga to 1967 and her feminism and vegetarianism to 1968.2 She began attending meetings of the AWC in 1969 and helped Sol LeWitt execute his first wall drawing for an AWC benefit exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in May of that year.3 She had also begun to associate her study of philosophy with her practice as an artist by early 1970, as she told Kynaston McShine, a curator at MOMA.4 She took classes part-time at City College, where her mother worked in the admissions office, and so witnessed the 1969 student strikes over open admissions. She was a full-time student a year later when students went on strike because President Nixon expanded the war in Vietnam by invading Cambodia.5 Nevertheless, Piper describes the spring of

1970 and her experience with activism among artists and at City College as the turning point, when she began to think about her “position as an artist, a woman, and a black.”6 In Piper’s phrase, these terms appear interrelated and yet distinct, as if to ask how her work in art and philosophy determined her self-conception and how an increasingly urgent need to respond to current events required that she imagine herself anew. The spring of 1970 is also the moment when Piper began to incorporate her body into her artwork specifically as a means to engage with other people’s perceptions of her. Writing of her earliest Catalysis performances, begun during the summer, she describes confronting unsuspecting passersby while conspicuously adorned with smelly clothes, wet paint, or other repulsive accoutrements. She justifies interrupting the daily lives of unsuspecting viewers by drawing parallels with the way current events intruded upon her own life. She also describes how this caused her to recognize that silence and inaction were a choice, just like activism, and that the former could be taken to imply assent for the status quo. In retrospect, she offers an example of this from her experiences at City College, when the physical presence of protesting black students interrupted her philosophy courses in ways she replicates in her artworks, forcing her to stop studying for what she calls the selfreflexive “‘reality check’ in the mirror.”7 She says, “What most affected me was the struggle for open admissions at City College . . . Black students were shutting down the campus. I was physically in this situation where I was trying to take notes in my philosophy classes and people would stride in and say, ‘This class is over. We’re having a rally. Now!’ ”8 She continues, “I was being confronted by urgent political struggles, and I was doing very rarefied and elitist work. I was feeling impatient to get past that scrim of obfuscation between me and the external world.”9 She made artwork of her body to initiate a process for investigating how people saw and reacted to her and to, in turn, provoke her audience to self-reflection. Bodily Absence and the Rarefied Subject

Prior to 1970, Piper’s Conceptual art had only occasionally included or referred to her body. For example, she presented herself as nothing more than the hypothetical origin for the perspective represented in her Hypothesis works, a situation of time and space that was physically absent and invisible. Piper is named as author of her work, but her name serves 126   Chapter 3

no other purpose than to figure her absence as part of the work’s past. Her presence is a hypothesis, neither certain nor assured. The viewer, on the other hand, finds him- or herself addressed and incorporated into each of Piper’s works in concrete terms. In contrast to other artists’ works that promise direct access to the artist’s psyche (and never deliver it)—Action Painting, for example, was frequently presented as an example of this by artists and critics during the 1960s—Piper’s works alienate themselves from their creator and thus viewer from artist. This established a situation that encouraged the viewer to take responsibility for his or her own point of view on the artwork. In 1968 and 1969, Piper made a series of books, magazine projects, and mailed artworks that referred directly to the contingency of the viewer’s relationship to the art object and, in some cases, to the artist. For example, her book project from 1968, Here and Now, is a highly stylized and systematized representation of place (“Here”) and time (“Now”) transported from the artist’s studio to the recipient.10 It draws the reader’s attention to the spatio-temporal circumstances of reading—here and now, elsewhere and again. On each of the unbound book’s gridded pages, a brief text typed inside one of sixty-four squares describes its place on the page: “HERE: the square area in 3rd row from bottom, 3rd from right side”; the viewer is left to deduce the “Now.” Here and Now establishes the conditions for an experience that might replicate the conditions of the artist’s relationship to it but that it never achieves. Piper’s objectivity removes her from the work, rendering the experience of reading Here and Now transmissible to anyone. In 1969, Piper’s book projects became more assertive. She addressed readers directly by inserting components into the Village Voice and sending others in the mail. In March, for example, she mailed a book project to a list of 162 people and art galleries identified as “exhibit locations,” including the list with each set. She then appropriated recipients’ homes and galleries by placing advertisements among the gallery notices in the Village Voice that announced, “ADRIAN PIPER/ from March on.”11 This project playfully mimicked the system of exhibitions, promotion, and collecting that shaped artists’ careers, inviting recipients to selfconsciously consider their roles in Piper’s. The Village Voice art critic John Perreault reviewed the work like any other gallery show, and Piper included his review (her first) in her professional biography.12 McShine filed his copy in MOMA’s archives. In a later project, Area Relocation #2 May 1970  127

(fig. 30), Piper employed the commercial and design aspects of the Village Voice itself, running her own advertisement among the gallery advertisements: The area described by the periphery of this ad has been relocated from Sheridan Square New York, N.Y. to (your address). —area relocation #2    A. Piper13 Sheridan Square is where the offices of the Village Voice are located, where the daily business of selling and laying out ad space is conducted. Piper’s ad asked readers to consider their relationship to the business of a weekly newspaper that served the local counterculture and artists, collectors, and galleries as an information clearinghouse, and she did so in phenomenological terms. The text articulates an ethics of reading, calling on the reader to take responsibility for determining the newspaper’s effect: only once the Voice has been read can it be converted into commerce or political action. On the other hand, her advertisements also informed readers of the gallery pages in the Village Voice that something was going on about which they knew little or nothing, a gesture that put the circulation of knowledge among art-world taste makers on display, if not available for critique. Piper’s advertisements also appropriated the Conceptual art dealer Seth Siegelaub’s concurrent exhibition “One Month.” Siegelaub invited thirty-one artists, including some of Piper’s friends, to create one artwork each that corresponded with an assigned day in March. As mentioned in chapter 2, at the time, Piper was working as a receptionist in Siegelaub’s gallery, although he never exhibited her work. Did her Three Untitled Projects make use of forms Siegelaub pioneered—Conceptual art exhibitions that exist only as catalogues, advertisements, and mailed announcements—to establish a venue for her work while offering a simultaneous critique of her exclusion from his gallery except as “gallery girl,” a position feminists protested?14 Piper’s work establishes the conditions for this interpretation. However, Piper’s project is, in the

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30  Adrian Piper, Area Relocation #2, advertisement in the Village Voice (May 29, 1969). Generali

Foundation Collection, Vienna.

strictest sense, Conceptual art. It does not deliver a message but establishes conditions for the viewer’s experience of specific information. The work offers no obvious criticism of Siegelaub, and Piper has never denounced him outright (neither has she listed him among the male friends who encouraged her career in art).15 Rather, Piper’s Three Untitled Projects—one copy of which she sent Siegelaub—provides an invitation in lieu of those she never received, to take active part in her career. Piper made Three Untitled Projects and the corresponding advertisement, Area Relocation #2, as her contribution to “Number 7,” an exhibition Lucy Lippard curated for the Paula Cooper Gallery.16 Piper documented her advertisement in a notebook exhibited in the gallery, where it served as a conceptual device for provoking the viewer’s awareness of the material, political, economic, and moral conditions for reading the newspaper. Piper made the artwork in the spring of 1969 during the City College strike over open admissions, an event that provoked her to begin reading the newspaper and attend political meetings—the moment she later refers to as the dawn of her political self-awareness.17 In July 1969, for another work in the Area Relocation series, Piper sent postcards to 170 readers of the magazine 0 to 9, directing them to her untitled grid project in the July issue (fig. 31) and designating the blank side of each card as an enlargement of one rectangle on the grid “relocated to” the recipient’s address.18 The text draws the reader’s attention to the project’s material conditions as representation, setting up a conflict between the projects’ stated conditions and their realization. Reading the postcard or the magazine project creates an event in time and space that depends as much upon its reception in the “here and now” as on the moment when the artist made it. In light of Piper’s use of the Village Voice, her postcard asks readers of 0 to 9 to consider the political implications of art and poetry, but also of her own highly abstracted magazine project. As much as this project indicates Piper’s faith in provoking her work’s recipients to self-consciousness, it also exemplifies the work that gained her entry into the art world—work Piper describes as “rarefied and elitist.”19 0 to 9 was a small but important magazine of Conceptual art and poetry edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer. Piper’s work had first appeared in the same issue in which LeWitt published his essay “Sentences on Conceptual Art.”20 Why and in what ways would Piper come to see this forum as inadequate in 1970?

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31  Adrian Piper, Untitled (detail), 0 to 9 (July 1969). One of three pages, each 8.5 × 11 in. Collection of

the Museum Library, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Objectivity and Objecthood

Piper’s various accounts of being “kicked out” of the art world for the first time, “in 1970 when it became generally known that [she] was a woman,” demonstrate what was at stake in being taken for a woman artist.21 Piper wrote in 1990: “My personal experience is of having been included in ‘definitive’ major museum shows of conceptual art in the late ’60s, until the art world contacts I made then met me face-to-face, found out I was a woman, and disappeared from my life.”22 Anna Chave argues that art critics and historians have allowed male artists associated with Minimalism to incorporate their bodies into their work—explicitly or implicitly—while maintaining a clear separation between art and artist. Women artists, on the other hand, have been allowed no such concession.23 Chave’s analysis can be usefully extended to Conceptual and performance art. She notes that some of the women artists whom critics and historians have associated with Minimalism were reluctant to appear in association with their work, partly to avoid distracting viewers from the work’s formal qualities.24 Piper responded differently. She came to anticipate viewers’ reactions, incorporating her body into her work specifically to test their perceptions and make them self-conscious. Her early inability to imagine the discrimination she would face in the art world becomes proof not simply of naïveté but of her faith in Conceptual art and metaphysical philosophy—in short, in a universalist model of rationality as the clearest path to moral thought and action. Piper’s first performance is also the first recorded example of a viewer responding to her work as that of a woman. For “Street Works II,” a onehour-long exhibition presented on April 18, 1969, on the streets around the four sides of a designated block in Manhattan, she executed her first public performance according to her own preconceived instructions. According to her proposal, the untitled project involved two parts, first recording sounds as she walked a city block and then playing them back: 1. On Friday, April 11 from 4:30 to 6:30 PM, walk around the outer sidewalk boundaries across the street from designated block. Record 1200 ft. of tape at 17/8 IPS (two hours) of undifferentiated noise. 2. On Friday, April 18 from 5 to 6 PM, walk around inner sidewalk boundaries on designated block. 132   Chapter 3

Play back previously-recorded undifferentiated noise at 33/4 IPS (one hour).25 During the performance, Piper carried her tape recorder along a prescribed route, transporting two hours of recorded sound from April 11 to the hour-long exhibit held a week later and across the street. John Perreault briefly described the work of several participants in his review for the Village Voice. His discussion of Piper’s work glossed over the formal issues of Piper’s contribution, noting only that “Adrianne Piper carried sounds recorded in one area all away around the block at full volume.”26 Perreault’s description is noteworthy for his misspelling of the artist’s name, a mistake that indicates the critic’s inability to watch Piper without seeing her as a woman.27 Perreault’s brief review demonstrates viewers’ inability to see Piper’s body as only the formal conditions for an objectively executed artwork. By allowing an audience to watch her work, Piper’s performance for “Street Works II” inadvertently enabled a confusion of artist and artwork that her magazine and map projects had avoided. It is possible to read Perreault’s review as indicating that the most remarkable aspect of Piper’s contribution was that it was made by a woman. His review therefore supports Piper’s assertion that her experiments with recorded sound are “the kind of work many art critics can’t comprehend being made by a black woman.”28 Piper seems not to have anticipated the difficulty viewers had recognizing purely formal issues in a woman’s body. Like several of her previous works, her project for “Street Works II” drew viewers’ attention to the circumstances of its exhibition by declaring itself to be something it was not—in this case, a moment from the past transported to the present. The recording itself would have become nearly unintelligible when played back at double speed, drawing attention to its documentary claims by failing to fulfill them.29 Viewers must have wondered about the artist who carried the tape recorder: is she a representation of someone who walked the block a week earlier or is she the same person? The ambiguous nature of Piper’s activity rendered her body subject to analysis, formal and otherwise. The absence of her body from previous works allowed viewers to either ignore it or unwittingly jump to conclusions about who she was. By inferring from Perreault’s reaction, it is clear the body unremarked on was a man’s, and a woman artist’s presence was considered anomalous.30

May 1970   133

32  Adrian Piper, Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, performance, Max’s

Kansas City, New York, 1970. Black-and-white photograph by Rosemary Mayer, 16 × 16 in. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

On May 2, 1970, in her second public performance, Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, Piper walked about the bar at Max’s Kansas City wearing street clothes, long gloves, a blindfold, and nose- and earplugs. Piper explains that in this performance for “The Saturday Afternoon Show,” an hour-long exhibition organized by Hannah Weiner, she made an object of herself with the intention of defending her autonomy from the imposing presence of those around her.31 Sealed off from sensory perceptions, she would present herself as insular and individualistic. Impervious to the influence of others, she disrupted expectations of how a woman behaves in a bar. In one of the photographs her friend, the artist Rosemary Mayer, took of her action (fig. 32), Piper walks past men seated at the bar, their backs turned toward her as if her performance makes her inaccessible and uninteresting.32 Afterward, however, Piper expressed disappointment with the result. Mayer described the action in 134   Chapter 3

a postcard to her sister, the poet Bernadette Mayer, as if Piper had meant to be more disruptive than she was: “Adrian was blindfolded, nose & ear stoppered. But she wasn’t happy bcs. she thought she didn’t bump into enough people.”33 When asked about this, Piper explained, “I didn’t like the idea that most everyone seemed to have been sitting down watching the performance instead of milling around at Max’s as they usually do. I remember feeling a bit frustrated that I’d designed a piece for a bar but unbeknownst to me the bar had turned into a stage.”34 Instead of functioning as a disturbance or obstacle in a bar popular with the well-known artists whose work was displayed on the walls (Warhol, Flavin, Judd, Chamberlain, Stella, Noland, LeWitt, and others),35 on this particular afternoon, she could only be seen within the context of an exhibition of performance art. Piper thus appeared as the image of someone incapable of sensory experience. This is how the work looks in another of Mayer’s photographs of Piper’s action (fig. 33). Piper walks toward the camera, watched by a table of women, one of whom gestures toward her and speaks, presumably about the sensory-deprived figure they watch. Piper’s objectification is completed by Perreault’s description of her action, published afterward in the Village Voice, which suggests that Piper was helpless to prevent her fellow artists from appropriating her for their own amusement. While the artist Ira Joel Haber played the Rolling Stones’ single “Let’s Spend the Night Together” over and over on the juke box, Perreault writes, Adrian Piper plugged up her ears and nose and shielded her eyes and wandered around the place for an hour, bumping into people, being bumped into, and creating a startling image. (I thought that a good piece would be not to tell her when three o’clock finally arrived . . . Haber announced that he had turned . . . Piper into an illustration because at one point when she was stumbling around—quite beautifully—the sound to her sight, via juke box, was the Who’s “Touch Me” from “Tommy.”)36 Piper could not help being seen as anything other than an “image” at Max’s, a place where, one critic later recalled, art-world celebrities went “to see and be seen, combining voyeurism with exhibitionism and foreshadowing performance art.”37 Max’s clientele co-opted Piper’s actions before her performance began. May 1970   135

33  Adrian Piper, Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, performance, Max’s

Kansas City, New York, 1970. Black-and-white photograph by Rosemary Mayer, 16 × 16 in. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

Piper later explained that she anticipated the possibilities of being imposed upon or misunderstood during her Max’s Kansas City performance and that the gloves, blindfold, and nose- and earplugs offered admittedly flimsy protection against the awaiting artists. Faced with the situation that “Max’s was an Art Environment, replete with Art Consciousness and Self-Consciousness about Art Consciousness” so that “to even walk into Max’s was to be absorbed into the collective Art Self-Conscious Consciousness, either as object or as collaborator,” Piper says she tried to become the former. Asserting her individuality, she attempted to close herself off from the influence of her peers and exist for viewers as nothing more than a specific and obdurate object, “silent, secret, passive, seemingly ready to be absorbed into their consciousness.”38 Mayer’s photographs and Perreault’s description suggest she succeeded, to a point. She was unable to avoid becoming the object of scrutiny, gossip, and specula136   Chapter 3

tion, partly “because [her] voluntary objectlike passivity implied aggressive activity and choice, an independent presence confronting the Art Conscious environment with its autonomy. [Her] objecthood became [her] subjecthood.”39 Piper had accidentally demonstrated the impossibility of Minimalism’s hermeticism—of Robert Morris’s proposal for artists to make nondescript “neutral” objects, for example, that might activate a situation without drawing attention to themselves.40 In the process, she discovered how presenting her self as an object provoked viewers to respond to her as they always did, subjectively. On the other hand, Judith Wilson argues that Piper “discovered that such voluntary self-objectification functioned as its opposite—i.e., became a radical assertion of ‘subjecthood.’ ”41 Piper had to admit not only that she was replete with what she calls Art Consciousness and Self-Conscious about Art Consciousness but that she appeared to be so, at least in performance. Her role as “collaborator” defined her selfhood as well as her objecthood. Piper concluded from the reception of her performance that she could not appear to others as a neutral object. In other words, she recognized that viewers would always interpret her presence as meaningful. In two works begun concurrently with Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, Piper would ask whether this was something she could control and how much the expectations and perceptions of her viewers controlled her. The Documentation of Activism as Activism: The New York Art Strike and the Politics of Personal Responsibility

On May 18, 1970, to protest President Nixon’s announcement at the end of April that he had expanded the war in Vietnam by invading Cambodia and as a response to the deadly violence with which subsequent antiwar demonstrations were suppressed, between one and two thousand members of the art world met at New York University to organize the New York Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War.42 Such large-scale, organized opposition to the war in Vietnam was unprecedented among New York’s artists, many of whom expressed the opinion that art existed in a realm unrelated to organized politics. Participants called on art museums and galleries to close for a day in recognition that art could not remain unaffected by state-sponsored violence. Piper withdrew her work, Hypothesis: Situation #18, from the exhibition “ConMay 1970   137

ceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” at the New York Cultural Center.43 She also began new works, Context #8: Written Information Voluntarily Supplied to Me during the Period of April 30 to May 30, 1970 and Context #9: Written Information Elicited from Me during the Period of May 15 to June 15, 1970, that were unique for the ways in which they reflected the ambiguous attitude prevalent among her peers about art’s relationship to activism. Piper had attended meetings of the AWC—one of the organizations involved in the New York Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War (more commonly referred to as the Art Strike)—and may have attended at least two of the Art Strike’s planning meetings. Like most people who attended the meetings, she did not join the five hundred artists who protested outside the Met and the MOMA when those institutions refused to close on May 22.44 Instead, Piper began to make work that privileged personal responsibility over collective action while also recognizing the potential of organized protest. As a black woman, this strategy allowed her to articulate sympathy for the sometimescompeting objectives of feminist, civil rights, and antiwar activists. With Context #8 and Context #9, therefore, Piper explores the events of May 1970 as a participant, but the work is not strictly about her. Instead, it provides her with the means to explore how artists, activists, and others perceive her while simultaneously reversing the question to ask her work’s viewers how they understand their own responsibility for the documented events. Piper’s Context #8, Context #9, and her withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” articulate a call to personal responsibility characteristic of the Art Strike. Artists organized the strike to express grief and outrage as well as to make the point that art should no longer offer distraction from the atrocities occurring at home and in Southeast Asia and to demonstrate awareness that this was how their art was being used by museums and their supporters and trustees. For example, the Guerilla Art Action Group had claimed in the fall of 1969 that Nelson and David Rockefeller used their relationship with MOMA “as a disguise, a cover for their brutal involvement in all spheres of the war machine.”45 Also, for a demonstration outside the museum on October 20, 1970, a coalition of artists’ organizations—including the Art Strike and the AWC—made posters identifying the Met’s trustees as representatives of the “financial Oligarchy.” One typical poster charged the trustee C. Douglas Dillon, former secretary of the treasury, with serving 138   Chapter 3

the interests of the “Superich” and profiting from apartheid in South Africa. For most of the artists who participated in the Art Strike and other activist organizations, such trustees were symptomatic of a fundamental disparity between the interests of those who ran the museums and the proper role of museums in a democracy. Art Strike participants argued that closing the museums and galleries would demonstrate the impossibility of continuing U.S. policies unaltered. The artists who met at NYU on May 18 chose to withdraw their work from view, if only for a day, on May 22. They demanded that museums and galleries close in solidarity in memory of “those slain in Orangeburg, S.C., Kent State, Jackson State and Augusta, as an expression of shame and outrage at our government’s policies of racism, war and repression.”46 The city’s museums demonstrated a range of opinions about the Art Strike and art’s social and political role. It was estimated that 90 percent of New York City’s galleries closed for the day, but the city’s museums responded less enthusiastically.47 The Whitney and Jewish museums did close.48 To coincide with the Art Strike, the New York Cultural Center kept open an exhibit of photographs documenting the destruction caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and closed the rest of its galleries, including “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects.”49 The Met, the Guggenheim, and MOMA remained open, ostensibly in sympathy with the strike, while thwarted artists demonstrated outside. The Met announced that it would extend its hours and presented this as an apolitical gesture of humanity, badly needed at a time of international crisis.50 Joseph Noble, the Met’s vice director for administration, told protesters staying open was “a positive act,” whereas protesting outside was “negative.”51 The Guggenheim remained open but removed the art from its walls the day before. This was a provocative response to the Art Strike; the museum announced it had acted to ensure that demonstrators would not damage the art. Director Thomas Messer turned the Art Strike’s demands against it, declaring, “the museum’s empty walls are in themselves a sobering comment on violence and coercion of every kind.”52 MOMA presented a special “pro-youth” exhibit of press photos of recent antiwar demonstrations and a program of antiwar films.53 Its new director, John Hightower, antagonized the few artists who demonstrated outside by criticizing the strike in incendiary language: “The irony of conducting a strike against art institutions,” he May 1970   139

said, “is that it puts you in the same position of Hitler in the 30s and 40s, Stalin in the 50s and more recently the Soviet repression of free expression in Czechoslovakia.”54 What the artists regarded as a collective act of personal responsibility the leadership of the city’s three most prominent art museums recast as authoritarian. Several months later, Carl Andre, an early member of the AWC and one of the artists most closely identified with the “art workers” and the Art Strike retorted, “the artists made it clear to Mr. Hightower that they were not politicizing the art but themselves.”55 Andre had earlier argued that pressuring and protesting museums was not the professional concern of artists. Instead, political action was an individual choice “in the same nature as artists who wish to join Vietnam demonstrations or rent demonstrations—those who are interested in such things, do it.”56 Andre’s attitude that artists should organize politically but not make protest art is surprisingly close to that of the Met, the Guggenheim, and MOMA. Even Hilton Kramer, the New York Times’s most conservative art critic and a vocal opponent of all artists’ activism, seems cynically to have agreed. In one of a series of articles attacking the artists’ earlier protests, he reported that they had resulted in nothing new because art, not politics, was artists’ proper concern. He wrote, “the general assumption among painters, sculptors, and artists working in related visual media has been that, so far as explicit political involvement goes, the work of art must remain inviolate.” He also disagreed with Andre, arguing that as activists, the artists were no better than “amateur journalists,” making their proposals “incoherently, and with that mixture of naivete, violent rhetoric, and irrationality we have more or less come to expect from such protests.”57 Kramer clearly distinguishes between “art” and a world alien to it, arguing that artists had better work without reference to politics. The faint differences on this point among Kramer, the Art Strike, and the museum directors reveal how elusive the distinction between art and politics was in 1970. Exploring the moral ramifications of this debate is the central concern of the artwork Piper made that spring and summer. Her response reflected the disparity between those who argued that a presumably apolitical art had no place in an atmosphere of violent repression and those who defended art’s inherently humanitarian and universally redemptive potential. The relationship between the artists’ political views and their artwork remained a matter of debate. Most artists who participated in 140   Chapter 3

the Art Strike made art that was unambiguous, either because it conveyed a clear activist message or because it seemed removed from the realm of politics. In contrast, Piper’s work from this period self-consciously documents artists’ increasing activism, marking a liminal moment when many of her peers adopted an activist attitude that only slowly affected the art they exhibited. Furthermore, her attempts to formulate a response, exhibited as art, also demonstrate that artists disagreed about how to take responsibility for the conditions they ­protested. Art as Interruption

When, three years after the Art Strike, Piper wrote, “in the spring of 1970 a number of events occurred that changed everything for me,”58 she attributed the impact these events had on her to having participated in “situations which were themselves deeply affected.” As examples, she enumerated: “1. The art world united in a really remarkable way, the repercussions of which are still being felt [and] 2. I had a lot of contact at CCNY with political rallies, speakers, discussions of what the students ought to do, posters, handouts, etc.”59 Events interrupted Piper’s life and as a result, she says, “I did a lot of thinking about my position as an artist, a woman, and a black.”60 Piper made these statements to explain the dramatic change in her work that began during the spring of 1970: she intended fewer and fewer of her artworks to be exhibited in art galleries or museums and instead, by August, had begun her unannounced actions, Catalysis, on the streets of New York. When the immediacy with which the events of May 1970 intruded on everyday life demanded a response, Piper gathered the handbills with which activists confronted her throughout the month of May 1970 and exhibited them in June, in a binder, without commentary, under the title Context #8: Written Information Voluntarily Supplied to Me during the Period of April 30 to May 30, 1970 (fig. 34). The work is one of a series of at least nine planned experiments with gathering written information from her work’s viewers and her daily activities (she completed only four, Context #6–9).61 Context #8 provided Piper an opportunity to explore the artist’s role in establishing situations for aesthetic and political experience. She began to gather the materials, perhaps retrospectively, on April 30, the day President Nixon announced that he had escalated the war in Vietnam by secretly ordering military raids into neighboring Cambodia. Antiwar protests erupted nationwide in response. Artists May 1970  141

34  Adrian Piper, Context #8: Written Information Voluntarily Supplied to Me during the Period of April 30 to

May 30, 1970 (detail), 1970. Notebook. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

first publicly protested the situation by withdrawing their work from museum exhibitions. On May 13, for example, LeWitt and the other artists in the Jewish Museum’s “Using Walls” exhibition demanded that their exhibition be closed early, on May 18, in advance of the strike. On May 15, Morris, another of the “Using Walls” artists, asked the Whitney Museum to close his solo exhibition on May 18. In a statement, Morris distinguished this decision to participate in activism from his art, explaining that he acted “to underscore the need I and others feel to shift priorities at this time from art making and viewing to unified action within the art community against the intensifying conditions of repression, war and racism in this country.”62 Piper responded similarly, also on May 15, by withdrawing her work from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects.” Piper asked that her work be replaced with a statement warning that the changing political climate threatened to overwhelm and alter the meaning of her work. Her statement read in full: 142   Chapter 3

The work originally intended for this space has been withdrawn. The decision to withdraw has been taken as a protective measure against the increasingly pervasive conditions of fear. Rather than submit the work to the deadly and poisoning influence of these conditions, I submit its absence as evidence of the inability of art expression to have meaningful existence under conditions other than those of peace, equality, truth, trust and freedom.63 Piper does not know whether the statement was posted in the galleries but it seems likely it was given that, to emphasize her work’s absence, Cultural Center staff closed off the empty space in the gallery with “a black band and a notice,” and “at the direction of the artists, . . . draped black foam rubber bands over the [remaining] conceptual art displays.”64 The obvious absence of Piper’s work indicated that she took responsibility for it and did not want its presence in the Cultural Center’s galleries interpreted as condoning the current political climate. Her explanation also acknowledged that the work originally exhibited did not appear sufficiently engaged in the unfolding events that motivated her increasing activism. Perhaps it can be regarded as typical of the work that Piper would later describe as “rarified and elitist.”65 She had explained her original contribution to the exhibition with a statement in the catalogue that defined human consciousness simply as a unified and coherent sequence of “specific space and time conditions.” In contrast, her statement of withdrawal acknowledged a new perspective: that understanding this chain of “instants” in conceptually abstract terms was inadequate.66 Each of Piper’s Context projects claims to provide historical “context” for the artist’s actions, not as a situation in which the artist found herself but as a negotiation between her and the people she encountered and corresponded with. The materials gathered into each binder are arranged chronologically. Context #8 begins with announcements for art exhibitions and performances from early May—William Anastasi at Dwan Gallery, Steve Reich’s concert at the Guggenheim, Vito Acconci’s latest performance at his apartment on Christopher Street. After only a few pages, these are outnumbered by fliers collected over the first two weeks of May announcing demonstrations and calls for a general strike from such varied groups as the New York Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, the CCNY Workers League and Striking Students, Interna-

May 1970   143

tional Socialists, and the Committee to Defend the Panther 21. Each of the unsolicited fliers with which activists confronted Piper represents an interruption in the artist’s daily life—an effort to persuade her to join a cause by making the status quo untenable, challenging what Piper calls her “apolitical philosophy nerd” lifestyle.67 Several address the reader directly, such as an announcement for a protest on May 6 “sponsored by Bella Abzug for Congress” that pleads, “Join us. . . . The economy is in Danger . . . Your sons and daughters are in danger . . . Your country is in danger.” Another announcement, for daily discussions about the war and resistance organized by the City College Philosophy Department, promises, “your attendance will be effective in bringing about an end to the turmoil in America.” Each handbill called on the artist to take a stand on specific, pressing, and sometimes very personal issues. Other materials might do this, too, in different ways. Piper included in Context #8 a set of postcards On Kawara sent her that documented the time he got up each morning, and the objective style of his work must have taken on a feeling of persistence in the face of the events documented on the pages interspersed throughout it in Context #8.68 Context #8 suggests Piper’s awareness of herself as a citizen faced with imposing rational order on her moral responsibilities, stimulated by the drama of activism. Context #8 articulates an attempt to make art at a moment when New York’s artists debated their role in a society they regarded as increasingly repressive, as the name of the “Artists’ Mass Meeting . . . Against War, Racism, [and] Repression” held May 18 announces. Piper includes in her notebook the announcement for the meeting and the agenda for a subsequent meeting, suggesting the possibility of her participation. However, by identifying the materials collected in Context #8 as “written information voluntarily supplied to me during the period of April 30 to May 30, 1970,” Piper signaled that she had developed a system for creating work that effaced her opinions and political views. Piper’s method—combined with the sheer difficulty of attending every demonstration, exhibition opening, and concert she was invited to—offered slight protection from the possibility that viewers would interpret her presentation of the materials as wholeheartedly supporting the causes represented. Rather, the proliferation of fliers asks questions about which positions to support, if any, and how. Piper has told me that she did not take part in any of the artists’ demonstrations. Why not? The incidents the Art Strike protested include: 144   Chapter 3

—February 8, 1968: Police kill three black students—one of them a high school student—and injure twenty-seven others protesting a segregated bowling alley at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. Accounts of the Kent State shootings sometimes referred to this event to demonstrate that Kent State was not anomalous— that violent government suppression of student protest had a history of which Kent State was a part. —May 4, 1970: National Guardsmen shoot and kill four white students and injure nine others during an antiwar protest at Kent State University, Ohio. —May 12, 1970: Police kill six black men and injure seventy-five more during what some newspaper accounts call rioting in Augusta, Georgia, following a protest against the beating death of a black youth in the Richmond County Jail. —May 14, 1970: Police shoot and kill two black students—one a high school student—and injure twelve others protesting the war in Vietnam at Jackson State University, Mississippi. The Art Strike’s name and the events it memorialized resulted from the uneasy coalition politics typical of the New Left at the time. Some artists called for a strike to focus attention only on the war in Vietnam. Others argued that the war had to be seen as one example of more broadly repressive government policies. Sexism was added to the group’s agenda but “as an afterthought,” according to some.69 When a group of artists arrived at the protest on May 22 outside the Met with a wreath commemorating only the students killed at Kent State, who were all white, they had to be reminded the Art Strike also memorialized blacks killed at Augusta, Jackson, and Orangeburg.70 Piper’s statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects,” written before any of the Art Strike planning meetings, condemned more generally “pervasive conditions of fear”—fear, perhaps, not only of government repression but of the intensifying violence of Weather Underground and Black Panther revolutionaries, as well as of infighting among artists and activists. The first draft of Piper’s statement pointed specifically to “pervasive conditions of repression, racism, hypocrisy, and murder” (fig. 35.2 and fig. 18). This phrase remains the same throughout most drafts of Piper’s statement, although she did once include the word war and she changed racism to hatred; but she finally re-

May 1970   145

placed all of the conditions with a single word: fear.71 Piper might be accused of loss of nerve for consolidating her complaints into a single word suggesting helplessness, but more constructively, her decision seems a gesture toward universality, consistent with her philosopher’s approach to what she now calls xenophobia. Piper employed the word fear to characterize a situation that Art Strike participants debated for months afterward and that the AWC and other organizations had already protested for over a year. Certainly, antagonism between artists over whether and how to address racism, sexism, and other issues provided an incentive to universalize in order to avoid jeopardizing friendships and relationships. According to accounts from the time, some artists complained that protesting anything more than Nixon’s escalation of the war resulted in the “dilution” of the Art Strike’s statement.72 Morris, for example, later complained that the planning process was “divisive” because, even though artists united over opposition to the war, “there were too many splinter groups that had their own interests.”73 On the other hand, Morris, who did not usually participate in organized activism, was accused of grandstanding by those who did. This caused lingering resentment. Faith Ringgold remembers the strike’s purpose was “to give superstar white male artists a platform for their protests against the war in Cambodia.” In response, she says, she founded Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation with her daughter Michele Wallace, specifically to counter the racism and sexism she experienced as a participant in the Art Strike.74 Ringgold also joined the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists but, as Lisa Farrington argues, she found it difficult to participate in both the Black Power and women’s movements simultaneously and soon felt ostracized from the New York art world, as well.75 Other women artists disputed the selection of a man, Robert Morris, to lead the Art Strike. Poppy Johnson was elected co-chairperson as the result of a brief but raucous protest by women at the meeting on May 18. Johnson, like Morris, would later complain of the “factionalism” that resulted, she says, from “these little questions, like if the Black and Puerto Rican group was going to cooperate in the next action or not.”76 At City College, Piper would have encountered the same antagonisms: various groups might connect Kent State with Orangeburg, the war in Vietnam with the suppression of the Black Panthers or the Nazi genocide, or the plight of students with that

146   Chapter 3

of the working poor, but the women’s movement receives almost no mention in any of the materials Piper collected for Context #8. How might a black woman who was both a student and an artist explain the complexity and interrelatedness of her situation to a diverse and fractured audience predisposed to ignore her, especially if she wanted to make a positive gesture? One solution was to document the moments when she found herself confronted by activists. Her practice replicated their disruptive potential, emulating an experience she and others have described as an interruption in the status quo. As Marcia Tucker told one interviewer about the Art Strike, feminists called for a woman among the leadership and elected Johnson not simply to ensure equal representation, but also to give notice that women’s concerns could not be overlooked. Women elected Johnson specifically to interrupt the patriarchal status quo: “They elected Bob Morris until some of the women started yelling, ‘hold on.’ ”77 Piper’s Context #8 did not profess her position on the events or protests taking place around her but located the artist as a target for political action. Like Tucker’s story, Context #8 provided evidence of how activism interrupted daily life and demanded a response. Piper presented the fliers unaltered to redirect the political action she experienced to address the viewer. Gathered into a cohesive artwork and exhibited in an art gallery, these materials drew attention to the immediate political context that determined the work’s final form and that influenced the viewer’s understanding of it. The reciprocity of this situation was emphasized by the inclusion in the binder of the announcement for “Language IV,” the Dwan Gallery exhibition where Piper first showed the work, only three days after its completion, challenging apolitical pretensions to art making and exhibiting.78 Piper’s statement of withdrawal identified the distinction between art and politics as an ideal that could be achieved only “under conditions . . . of peace, equality, truth, trust and freedom.” To demonstrate the impact politics had on art, she gathered the materials related to her withdrawal into another artwork, a binder entitled Context #9: Written Information Elicited from Me during the Period of May 15 to June 15, 1970 (fig. 35.1 and fig. 35.2).79 Piper never exhibited Context #9, but its creation suggests the artist’s awareness (or imagination) that, as an exhibiting artist engaged in political protest, she was being watched.80 The binder

May 1970   147

35.1  Adrian Piper, Context #9: Written Information Elicited from Me during the Period of May 15 to June 15,

1970 (detail), 1970. Notebook. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

35.2  Adrian Piper, Context #9: Written Information Elicited from Me during the Period of May 15 to June 15,

1970 (detail), 1970. Notebook. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

includes—among Piper’s grocery lists, notes made in preparation for a final exam in astronomy, and other materials—seven preliminary drafts for her statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects.” From the first, the artist proclaims “the absence of the work” she has removed. Irving Sandler has called Piper’s statement a “political gloss” on Morris’s Document (1963), in which the artist claimed to have withdrawn “all esthetic quality and content” from another of his artworks, Litanies, which Philip Johnson had purchased from him but never paid for.81 Piper’s statement is different, however, because she does not claim to alter the artwork she removed. Instead, she declares that it is the circumstances of its exhibition and reception that have changed, and in such a way that the work no longer seems viable. Furthermore, she implies that the work’s conceptual abstraction left it vulnerable to co-optation. Her approach is more like Pablo Picasso’s strategy of lending Guernica to MOMA on the stipulation that it be returned to Spain only when fascism ended there. For example, the first draft of Piper’s statement declared that her work “will be returned to this space when the U.S. government has submitted an environment [The sentence ends and this fragment is crossed out].” The freedom to make work that did not engage directly with politics comes to represent the democratic ideal in Piper’s statement. This was freedom from what she calls “the increasingly pervasive conditions of fear,” which she had blamed in the first draft on “war, racism, repression, hypocrisy, [and] murder.” The self-consciousness of Piper’s critique implies that democracy was, like “peace, equality, truth, trust and freedom,” an ideal worth striving for. Performative Identity and the Question of Coherence

Piper’s approach to Context #8 and Context #9 is not prescriptive. She does not tell her work’s viewers what to protest or how to act. Instead, she presents the changing “context” in which she participated as a moral dilemma. She does this by performing her experiences, documenting them to denaturalize them. Each flier appears as evidence of an exchange between Piper and an activist who perceived her presence as an invitation, a sign of what the activist took for Piper’s participation or potential support. Consciously or not, each time Piper set foot onto the City College campus or anywhere else she instantiated herself within the ephemeral cultural and historical field that is discourse. Any given flier in the notebook is an index of one such instance, a physical trace of the context 150   Chapter 3

that reciprocally defined and resulted from Piper’s momentary negotiation with an activist. Collectively, therefore, the fliers demonstrate that there is no absolute context. There are only contexts. Each flier might possibly initiate countless contexts as it passes from one hand to another and is placed in Piper’s notebook for later viewing. Likewise, as Piper walked through New York and onto the City College campus, she instantiated an infinite number of contiguous contexts that only seem continuous. Paradoxically, the fliers reveal themselves to have been presented by Piper as if from the perspective of a singular and coherent subject. Does Context #8 document Piper’s attempts to provide herself with a reassuringly consistent self-image in contrast to the chaos of a moment when “everything changed”? Is the subject as unstable as the context, always in flux? If the conditions under which the subject comprehends his or her self undergo constant change, then so must the point of view from which he or she perceives them. In Context #8, it is not that Piper documents her progress from one point of view to another, but that there is ultimately no tenable perspective for her to occupy. This situation compels the subject to attempt repeatedly to arrive at a singular perspective to call his or her own, but with a process that only records the perspective of another. Jacques Derrida describes this condition as the crisis of elusion, when the subject emerges within discourse and recognizes his or her self as a mirage that cannot be dispelled. The subject must acknowledge that he or she can only speak for others, and always say more than intended.82 When the slippage and excess of language seem inadequate to reassure the subject of autonomy and coherence then the subject takes refuge in something more concrete: the index. As Rosalind Krauss argues, the subject embraces the index as physical and apparently incontrovertible proof of existence.83 Context #8 gives form to an argument about Piper’s seeming coherence as a subject: as if, over the period of a month, all the activists who gave her fliers saw the same person—an individual identical with the artist who brought those fliers home to the same Lower East Side loft each evening and then deliberately assembled them into Context #8. As a collection, therefore, Context #8 implies the artist’s constancy. It seems to offer proof that she was where she remembers being, that her experiences are her own and, most importantly, that she can present these to herself and others for rational analysis and judgment. May 1970  151

This scenario implies that with Context #8, Piper performs a certain deception of her self as well as of the viewer. Formally, Piper’s methods emulate those of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose novels she read at the time.84 For example, the bewildered protagonist of The Voyeur recognizes each of his own actions in the present moment as if they occur without motivation, even when those actions seem emotionally charged.85 Robbe-Grillet’s novels are existentialist mysteries that question whether the protagonist is the same person at every moment in the narrative and, more fundamentally, whether the subject can ever feel certain of knowing him- or herself. The alternative is madness and, tellingly, the grasp each of Robbe-Grillet’s protagonists holds on sanity is always provisional. In Piper’s Context #8, each flier functions as a distinct moment in what appears to be one artist’s life. Gathered together as autobiography, they give her life a narrative coherence that remains frustratingly incomplete. It is the apparent gaps between fliers that articulate the possibility of Piper’s incoherence—her inevitable inability to collect her self that drives her to collect something else in its stead. Exhibited as part of an artwork, however, each flier retains its formal structure as a cohesive and transmissible object defined largely by a mode of direct address that redirects the question of the subject’s coherence from artist to viewer. This is due to Context #8’s formal qualities as a collection or archive. For example, Piper presents the fliers as evidence of a moment that is already past; she did not exhibit the work until three days after she had completed it, as the title page announced. Despite this retrospective quality, Context #8 conveys a sense of urgency that results, first, from the language of crisis and uncertainty her work appropriates from the activists who made the fliers, an immediate and ephemeral medium: “SOCIETY IN CRISIS,” “America is beginning to come apart at the seams,” “EMERGENCY,” “Don’t wait for other people to do it. You DO IT!!”86 Paradoxically, in the museum or gallery, despite the obvious fact that the fliers announce events that have already taken place, their urgency is enhanced by their appearance—they weren’t made to be collected as art. Furthermore, Context #8 represents a particular period of time as if to provide evidence of its passing. Assembled in retrospect, it stands in for a coherent past, lending order to conditions of instability and uncertainty—the persistent conditions of the present—by making them comprehensible. Context #8 does not conceal that it does this. It makes 152   Chapter 3

itself apparent as a part that stands indexically for a particular moment (April 30 to May 30, 1970). Piper has set formal limitations—such as collecting only “written information voluntarily supplied” to her—that refuse to conceal the fact that the work is itself comprised of fragments that resist cohering into a seamless whole. Donald Preziosi has described the methods by which art historians recreate the oeuvre of an artist so that the coherent body of work stands in for the absent artist, creating a discursive figure he calls “the-man-as/and-his-work.”87 This is precisely what Piper’s Context #8 does but in such a way as to reveal that the work does this, as a critique of the mastery that the masculine pronoun implies within Modernism. Context #8 does not record everything Piper did—not even when collated with the contents of Context #9. The lacunae mark as a refusal the artist’s inability to exhaustively represent herself to viewers, or even to her self. She presents only her relationship to the objects as a collection in such a way as to make this apparent to her work’s viewers. Writing of photographic archives, Allan Sekula has described how the objects in a collection, “in themselves, are fragmentary and incomplete utterances. Meaning is always directed by layout, captions, text and site and mode of presentation.”88 Piper’s minimal presentation seems deliberately mute about the materials she collected in Context #8, as if to draw attention to itself. Her chronological organization of the fliers is clear, but their meaning—and especially their relationship to the person who collected them and to whom the artwork insistently points—remains a question. Context #8 presents a record of the artist’s perspective on the events of May 1970 that addresses each viewer personally. One risk Piper assumes in making documentary works that appear autobiographical is that viewers will assume that they are about only her. Alternately, historians might attempt to make use of the fliers or exhibition announcements without reference to their presentation within a work of art. Piper cannot prevent these things from happening, but presenting each of her artworks as a coherent collection minimizes their possibility. Walter Benjamin, in his autobiographical essay “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” demonstrates how a collector becomes so intertwined with his collection that the two become indistinguishable. As he describes removing books from their packing cases to fit them onto the shelves of his library, he tells stories about their acquisition. The collector arranges his memories to establish such an order among his May 1970   153

books that they seem to have been destined for his collection and acquire value only within it. Paradoxically, the collector’s identity also seems to be determined by his collection. He describes it as possessing its own self-sufficient identity, despite the fact that he has assembled it, so that “the most distinguished trait of a collection will always be its transmissibility.”89 The collection, as a unified whole, depends reciprocally upon the collector for its consistency, so the collector is known through his collection: “it is he who lives in [the collection].”90 What is transmissible about Piper’s Context #8 is not the collection of materials but the question of its organization, which is to say, its relationship to the collector or reader. Every individual will have a unique perspective on the materials Piper collected, but once these exist as an archive or collection, the viewer’s relationship to the collection will become structurally the same as the collector’s.91 The artist’s self-consciousness provokes the viewer’s. Conclusion

Piper had already begun to reassess the relationship of her art to the political circumstances of its production and exhibition before May 1970. She did this in ways that made viewers aware of their participation in the work’s context as one that articulated parameters for experiencing it. In Context #7 (fig. 36), a work Piper began planning in March 1970, she drew attention to the political implications of the museum exhibition. She invited the visitors to MOMA’s exhibition of conceptual art, “Information,” to draw or write in a blank notebook. The notebook was exhibited with a pen, on a pedestal (fig. 37). A typed statement posted on the wall invited visitors to provide each other with information: You (the viewer) are requested to write, draw, or otherwise indicate any response suggested by this situation (this statement, the blank notebook and pen, the museum context, your immediate state of mind, etc.) in the pages of the notebook beneath this sign. The information entered in the notebook will not be altered or utilized in any way.92 Distinguishing between the artist and “the viewer,” whom she instructs, Piper’s work raised the question of whether the artwork and the museum “situation” present the viewer with inherent meaning, or, alternately, whether and to what degree the work requires the viewer’s participation. This was to raise the question of Modernist criticism and the 154   Chapter 3

36  Adrian Piper, Context #7 (detail), 1970. One of seven notebooks, each 11.75 × 9.5 in. Collection of

the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

37  Adrian Piper, Context #7, installation in “Information” exhibition, Museum of Modern

Art, New York, 1970. Blank three-ring notebook, 11.75 × 9.5 in., filled with 8.5 × 11 in. pages; wall-mounted instruction sign. Context #7 is the notebook displayed on the second pedestal from the left.

artwork’s autonomy as Michael Fried and others described them. With Context #7, Piper transformed a museum pedestal into the proverbial soapbox, creating a forum for public debate by relinquishing some of the control that both she and the museum wielded over her work. Piper’s work thereby creates an experience of the museum that draws attention not only to itself, but also to the circumstances of its presentation and, through the written sentiments of the museum’s visitors, to the world beyond MOMA’s galleries. Piper’s work may be understood as an attempt to democratize the exhibition experience. “Information” opened in July 1970, shortly after the AWC had demanded that museums and galleries provide a place where anyone interested could post news and announcements of political actions. The Whitney Museum seems to be the only museum that complied,93 so Piper’s Context #7 might conceivably have served a similar purpose at MOMA. Certainly, Piper’s work inspired museum visitors to prolific creativity: they filled seven binders with drawings and written messages. Piper’s statement makes no direct reference to artists’ demonstrations against the museum and its policies, but the inference would 156   Chapter 3

not have been difficult to make at the time. In this way, Piper’s Context #7 functioned similarly to Hans Haacke’s Visitor’s Poll, which very specifically asked “Information” visitors to vote with cards marked “yes” or “no” in answer to the question of whether MOMA trustee and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s support for the war in Vietnam would affect their support for his coming reelection. The AWC’s actions had gained widespread support in the art world, but many politically active artists and critics believed that politics had no place in art, and some reactions to Haacke’s work reflected this. One critic facetiously denounced Haacke’s work as proof that “protest art is one of the real disasters of war.”94 Haacke gave his political concerns the form of art in order to critique the idea that the museum provided a realm of pure aesthetics, putting the lie to MOMA’s claim that it was an apolitical institution. Piper, in a more understated gesture, made her artwork available for any number of uses, political and otherwise, partly because she did not stipulate what sort of response or information viewers should provide. Her work enabled the contingencies of the museum exhibition to expose themselves on paper for the exhibit’s duration, allowing visitors to set the terms for debate but only to a point. For example, several comments in the notebooks refer to artworks immediately adjacent to Context #7 or elsewhere in the exhibit (“On Kawara is still alive!”),95 or to visitors’ sensory experience of the museum (“My feet hurt,” “I get hungry in museums,” “I have to urinate,” “Require everyone to take a shower on the way in!”).96 Did viewers become more aware of the institutional effects on their experience in terms of what was considered legitimate and what was not? More comments refer to events beyond the museum’s control, including statements in support of the Black Panthers, the Yippies, the Gay Activists Alliance (“Free the Rockefeller 5”), the Women’s Strike for Equality, Off our Backs, and the Weathermen,97 and slogans familiar from the counterculture (“Stop War Have Peace,” “Free all political prisoners” [fig. 38], “All power to the people,” “Fuck in the streets!” “Up gay lib.,” “Women’s Liberation Now”).98 Several visitors attacked the museum in terms familiar at the time from artists’ protests (“WILL YOU EVER TRANSCEND SEXISM IN ART??” “This is a male chauvanist show/Anti-human/Anti-Thinking/PRO WAR!!” “Stop MOMA before they kill again,” “Nelson Rockefeller is a fuck”),99 as well as from the counterculture, in general (“Liberate MOMA!” “Peace in the Museums”).100 Still others related political expression specifically to their experience of ConMay 1970   157

38  Adrian Piper, Context #7 (detail), 1970. One of seven notebooks, each 11.75 × 9.5 in. Collection of

the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

text #7, particularly as a forum for communication (“Communication = peace!” “Finally . . . Legal Graffitti!” “I just got busted for doing this on a wooden sculpture”).101 Piper’s ostensibly apolitical artwork appeared, in short, to dispel the museum’s claims to exist outside politics. One other important response to Context #7 acknowledged ways in which the artwork compelled the viewer to action within certain parameters. This kind of response includes seemingly innocuous complaints about the pen Piper provided (one visitor commented, “chaining the pen to the book is a turn-off . . .” and another responded, “the pen doesn’t work anyway so who cares?”).102 It might also include one of the more personal notations that asked, “Adrian—What ever happened to lyricism and poetry? You used to possess a great deal of both,” an expression of loss that interprets the artist’s invitation to participation as an apparent silence.103 More frequently, however, viewers acknowledged the limitations set by Context #7 by observing that their own silence was impossible within the terms of the situation (“I would have liked to have left it blank but then someone else would have written and my contribution lost”),104 or that the burden was greater than they could bear (“I feel rather put upon,” “If no one was looking over my shoulder I might write what is really on my mind,” “I cannot be spontaneous. It is an impossibility,” and “I am paralyzed in the face of the desire to perform”) (for a similar example, see fig. 39).105 These last examples proclaim viewers’ awareness not simply of the material limitations on expression but of the social and perhaps ideological limitations, as well. What contexts are possible within the museum? One final example draws out the paradoxical implications of Piper’s having put mastery on display with Context #7: “Dear Adrian—You know, not very many people would put a notebook full of Blank paper in a museum—. . . Good idea, bueno—but it seems funny how all the loudmouths have nothing to say when given a chance to be heard in silence—. . . if you can dig it. Just want to say that I can get into solid ideas like Context #7.”106 The self-assurance of this comment’s author, expressed even as he or she denounced “the loudmouths” in countercultural vernacular, demonstrates the self-righteousness Piper has more recently called the attitude of “upper-middle-class het WASP males, the pampered only sons of doting parents.”107 Piper describes this as her own attitude in the late 1960s, when she began making Minimal and Conceptual art. It is an attitude her work had begun to make available for criMay 1970   159

39  Adrian Piper, Context #7 (detail), 1970. One of seven notebooks, each 11.75 × 9.5 in. Collection of

the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

tique by 1970 and specifically, in Context #7, by creating a forum where museum visitors might unwittingly put it on display. Piper’s Context #7 acknowledges an awareness of how the museum, like the rest of the art world, is wholly involved in the historical situation she would later call “the indexical present,” in which the individual momentarily realizes him- or herself as a subject who necessarily exists only in collaboration with other people, objects, and events. Piper responded with another artwork, Making Space (c. 1970), in which she attempted to establish her autonomy by means of a private, undocumented dance performance. She mapped her two-room loft onto two 8.5 × 11–inch sheets of graph paper, then traced dance steps onto the paper and performed them. She describes the work as a structure for marking, systematizing, and claiming territory in response to the political pressure to take a position on various issues.108 Making Space demonstrates the impossibility of ignoring the imposition of politics and activism on daily life. The tension between individualism and the social construction of the self became the central concern of Piper’s work that followed, as if to inquire about the role of personal responsibility as a precondition for establishing “conditions . . . of peace, equality, truth, trust and freedom.”

May 1970   161

​4

Catalysis Feminist Art and Experience

Beginning in August 1970, Adrian Piper executed a series of unannounced actions in the streets of New York she called Catalysis. According to her own descriptions, she confronted unsuspecting passersby while conspicuously adorned with smelly clothes, wet paint, or other repulsive accoutrements. Aggressively provoking discomfort in her unwitting audience, Piper proposed to jolt them from the security of their mundane expectations of the world. For example, in the fall of 1970, Piper visited the Met uninvited to execute Catalysis VII: “I went to the ‘Before Cortes’ show while chewing wads of bubble gum, blowing large bubbles, and allowing the gum to adhere to my face and clothes.” Piper explained the action as a confrontational intrusion into the most traditional of museums in an attempt to render it an “alternate context” for her art. By committing Catalysis VII inside the Met, Piper explained, she would reveal the unspoken rules of passive viewership by temporarily breaking them, dispelling the museum’s authority.1 In writings published contemporaneously with her actions, she argued that she would force viewers to rethink their relationships to their environment by entering it as an unfamiliar and confrontational object. She hoped this would cause each viewer to experience a momentary de-centering of identity, leading to anxiety and conscious self-reflection. Piper did not initially attribute a specific political aim to her project, though she has told me political

critique was implicit in making art that could not be sold in a gallery or collected by a museum.2 Piper also later discussed her actions as feminist investigations of how perceptions of race, gender, sexuality, and class determine public behavior, and, more profoundly, how consciousness of the judgment of those around her might or might not govern her self-image. The change is evident in her descriptions of Catalysis VII. She first documented her action retrospectively with a single sentence in a page-long text that appeared as an artwork in the catalogue for “26 Contemporary Women Artists.” Lucy Lippard had organized the exhibition to prove the existence of women artists who had been unfairly excluded from exhibiting in New York’s museums and galleries. In this context, Piper’s work was understood as feminist protest despite the ways in which her text resisted such a specific interpretation (she made no reference to gender or sexuality, for example). Rather, all of her Catalysis texts are written in the analytic voice favored by Minimalists and Conceptualists. Three years later, however, Piper offered striking new details about Catalysis VII that suggest a feminist project. Asked whether she had ever “dress[ed] up very, very super-femininely,” Piper told an interviewer, “Yes . . . [for the Met] I teased my hair up all the way and I wore a tight skirt and high heels.”3 Piper now described the action as “aggressive”: “I could choose whether or not to blow a bubble in someone’s face,” she said, adding, “I remember I turned around to ask someone the time, and he scurried away.”4 In this later account, Piper explained that her project was concerned with ways in which the museum sustained conventions of gender and sexuality—as a matter of basic respect: “What makes a human being a human being,” she asked, “and at what point in their deformity can you just consider them at all [or] think of them as some kind of objects to be ignored?”5 In Piper’s first explanation, Catalysis VII offers a critique of the passive viewership required by the Modernist museum. In the second, particularities of her appearance articulate a black feminist’s critique of the partnership between Modernism and norms of race, gender, and sexuality. Catalysis VII, I argue, can also be understood as a black woman’s theatricalization of her place in the museum, where she appears anomalous as either artist or visitor. Piper’s intervention into the museum’s rarefied atmosphere coincided with artists’ increasing activism. She has not said on what day she performed Catalysis VII, but “Before Cortés: Sculpture of Middle America” was on exhibit when WAR; the AWC; the New York Catalysis  163

Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression and War; and other activist groups gathered at the Met for an “open hearing” to discuss “the meaning of culture today, the role and rights of the artist in society, the responsibilities of the museum, and the direct and indirect support by museums of Racism, Sexism, Repression and War.”6 Consequently, Piper can be understood as inserting herself into the museum as both protest and artwork, temporarily accomplishing something WAR and the AWC demanded of New York’s museums: exhibit the work of “contemporary black women artists.”7 The Met might have seemed an apt institution for her action because it was the first site the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition picketed to demand greater representation of African American artists, on the occasion of “Harlem on My Mind” in 1969.8 Piper says she did not intend Catalysis VII to be understood in terms of artists’ protests.9 Nevertheless, her work refused to pass quietly into the museum. Instead, it stood out as anomalous, disruptive, and situational, as if to flaunt the museum’s fundamental incapacity to accommodate the work of black women artists. Catalysis and the Phenomenological Text

Piper first described her Catalysis actions in texts presented as if they were artworks. Piper denies that she intended her texts to be understood as art, but I believe it is difficult not to see them this way.10 Piper’s texts cannot be considered transparent documentation (as they typically have been). Instead, they call for a self-reflexive reader who comes to understand them as Minimalist objects. Each text establishes a situation that encourages awareness of how the viewer’s perspective on the text results from experiencing it as an object. For example, her use of language as both object and discourse might call viewers’ attention to the phenomenology of reading while simultaneously enabling the artist to determine what people knew about her actions. Any analysis of Piper’s Catalysis actions that omits the related texts ignores a substantial part of the work, including implications for understanding how Piper’s actions functioned as art while raising specific questions about race, gender, sexuality, and class. Language can never fully or adequately contain the body. As Judith Butler argues, it is the inability of language to master the body that marks materiality as “a kind of absence or loss, that which language does not capture, but, instead, that which impels language repeatedly to attempt that capture, that circumscription—and to fail.”11 164   Chapter 4

Agency is manifest in the attempt and results not in presence but failure. This is not a confusion of matter and language but an articulation of their interdependence as mutually sustaining interface between psyche and perception. The relationship is also a site of conflict. The physicality of the text marks the tectonic rift where two plates meet, body and language impelled toward each other but never merging. Piper’s body and her texts, her actions and their description in language, remain insolubly adversarial even as they collapse upon one another. Piper’s cursory descriptions of her actions, set within lengthy discussions of their motivations and implications, articulate this fault line. Piper first exhibited her collected Catalysis texts as a book in January 1973 under the title Talking to Myself: The Autobiography of an Art Object (she added one more essay in March).12 Since 1968, Piper had experimented with texts that provoked self-consciousness about reading. Increasingly, these directed readers to assume responsibility not only for their interpretations of the texts but also for such conditions as the economics of publishing and commercialization of art. Talking to Myself consisted of a series of essays arranged in chronological order (dated in the December 1974 edition) with a new “Autobiographical Preface.” Parts of these essays had been published previously in exhibition catalogues and art magazines and most differ in substantive ways from each other. Talking to Myself is organized in three parts: hypothesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Piper’s earliest essays (August 1970–January 1971) outline experiments with altering her appearance to become an “art object.” She also observes viewers’ efforts to come to terms with encountering her as an anomalous impediment to their daily lives.13 This section concerns actions entitled Catalysis; the two subsequent sections describe untitled actions that can also be understood as a continuation or development of the Catalysis series. In the second section, “A Transition into Solipsism” (October 1971), Piper presents a crisis and her attempts to resolve it: how can she distinguish between her impact on the world and how she imagines she affects it?14 The final section consists of three essays and the book’s “Autobiographical Preface” (September 1972–March 1973). Piper explains her self-consciousness about both her “sense of self” and herself “as performing object,” a condition that results from her experiments.15 When Piper first published a fragment from her Catalysis texts in the catalogue for “26 Contemporary Women Artists,” it addressed its reader Catalysis  165

40  Adrian Piper, untitled text published in the catalogue for “26 Contemporary Women Artists,”

curated by Lucy Lippard for the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Conn., 1971. Collection of John P. Bowles. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

directly as an object experienced in space and time (fig. 40). The text forms a square on the page, formatted so that words are broken without hyphenation at the ends of some lines. The final sentence is cut off midway, as if torn from an original. Even as its fragmentary qualities make reference to unpublished portions of Piper’s manuscript, the text assumes properties of an autonomous artwork. The format of her text includes her name, biographical details, and information about works she planned for the exhibition, setting her page apart from others in the catalogue. Her prose shares the forced and intellectualized tone that the 166   Chapter 4

Minimalists and Conceptualists adopted to question the authority of the text and prevent readers from forgetting themselves, setting phenomenological experience in contrast to the rational reflection it provokes. The absurdity of the actions Piper describes only heightens the reader’s alienation. The result is an uncomfortable and self-reflexive practice of reading that situates reader and text within a shared continuum of time and space, emphasizing the contingent experience of the artwork. Catalysis as Feminist Protest

Piper’s text for “26 Contemporary Women Artists” critiques the disembodied universal subject Modernist criticism assumes, addressing the museum’s role in sustaining gender norms. Piper describes various actions for which she modified her appearance but nowhere identifies herself as a woman; readers would have inferred this because Piper’s work appeared in an exhibition of women artists. One of Lippard’s stated intentions for organizing “26 Contemporary Women Artists” was to raise the question of “women’s sensibilities,” implicitly challenging the universalist ideals of Modernism and what Lippard derided as “the so-called avant-garde, which for better or worse has been largely white and maledominated.”16 Lippard’s exhibition therefore enjoined a nascent feminist debate characterized by a range of perspectives, from essentialism and separatism to ideas about the social construction and interrelatedness of race, gender, sexuality, and class.17 Nevertheless, Lippard seems uncertain about the possibility of “women’s sensibilities.” When she laments, “the spectacle of so many women torn between so-called femininity and their work (a choice that will, hopefully, soon be outdated),” her statement can be read two ways: that the path must be opened for women to be both artists and feminine or that women should no longer have to embrace “femininity” in order to be successful artists. Lippard rejects “the inane clichés of ‘feminine’ art based on superficial characteristics such as delicacy, prettiness, paleness, sweetness, and lack of structure,” but also writes, “I am convinced that there is a latent difference in sensibility” between men and women artists—one she cannot describe.18 As discussed in chapter 2, two months earlier, the art historian Linda Nochlin published “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In response to the article’s title, Nochlin concluded that differences between men and women artists had to be understood historically, as the result of institutional bias.19 Lippard agreed but only in part. Whereas Catalysis  167

Nochlin assumed that women artists began with the same potential as their male peers, Lippard tentatively described an essential difference that women artists learned to repress. She wrote of experiencing a strong personal identification with work by women. . . . but until a great many women artists surface who have been taught by women, turned on by women’s art as much as all artists have been turned on by the widely exposed art of men, until women artists have become aware and unashamed of the particularities of their own sensibilities—until then, I don’t think anything definitive can be said on the subject.20 Lippard later acknowledged that visiting “26 Contemporary Women Artists” with Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro convinced her of “the high incidence of central-core imagery, of boxes, ovals, spheres, and ‘empty’ centers in women’s art.”21 Clearly, these terms do not describe Piper’s work, but what is crucial for how Piper’s project was understood is that in March 1971, the strength of the debate over “women’s sensibilities” lay in its critique of the universalist claims of Modernist art criticism and the museum. Framed by Lippard’s questions about the museum’s resistance to women artists, Piper’s text in the “26 Contemporary Women Artists” catalogue encourages the reader to understand it from the self-reflective standpoint of an embodied and therefore gendered individual. Piper appropriates the Modernist discourse of disembodied objectivity in order to refute it. Set within the feminist critique of Modernism, Piper’s text and actions bring the circumstances of viewing and understanding art to the viewer’s attention without arguing for a woman’s sensibility. Significantly, Piper adopts the language and tone of metaphysical philosophy, favored by Modernist critics and Minimalist and Conceptual artists alike, which has historically excluded women and blacks from the transcendence it promises. Piper’s text performs the critical work that Nochlin called on women artists to perform: “using as a vantage point their situation as underdogs in the realm of grandeur, and outsiders in that of ideology, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general, and . . . destroy false consciousness.”22 Nochlin argued that women artists should not claim “greatness” because this quality was a sustaining convention of patriarchy.23 Rather, women artists should make work that reflects on their positions in society, and in the art 168   Chapter 4

world, in particular. This is similar to Mary Kelly’s later warning that women not seek to refute patriarchy with essentialism. Instead, Kelly argues, feminists must explore “the crisis of positionality” that allows women no equivalent position to the phallic authority claimed by and for male artists.24 Piper’s self-reflective testimonial articulates precisely this conundrum, refusing to allow viewers and readers the patriarchal perspective of certainty from which to resolve it. In this way, she exploits the collective failure of vision, representation, and discourse to capture what Modernism claims to contain. Critical Response to “26 Contemporary Women Artists”: The Limits of Self-Reflection

The reception of Piper’s work in “26 Contemporary Women Artists,” and of the exhibition as a whole, demonstrates the limitations of her approach. Lippard organized the exhibit to prove the claims of the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists that the Whitney and other museums ignored the work of women artists on the basis of gender, not quality, as the institutions claimed. Art critics ridiculed the curator and her premise. In the New York Times, Grace Glueck took the work seriously but lampooned the show and dismissed Lippard for “carrying on publicly” (her review’s title, “The Ladies Flex Their Brushes,” hints at what is to come). Glueck also recorded the opinion of Larry Aldrich, president of the museum’s Board of Trustees, who invited Lippard to organize the exhibition: the show had not “made its point” because “he didn’t see anything in it he wanted to acquire. (He also reports a first-time incidence of money-back requests from the public.)”25 Aldrich’s judgment had been questioned a day earlier in the Times, in a review of an exhibition of paintings he donated to the Whitney, yet Glueck clearly agrees with his dim view of “26 Contemporary Women Artists.”26 In the Village Voice, John Perreault reminded readers of the Ad Hoc Committee’s protests against the 1970 Whitney Annual and demands equal representation for women. Not without sympathy for Lippard’s position, he jokes that her premise seems as capricious as “The White Male Whitney Annual” and so unworthy of his own “whimsical threat to picket [Lippard’s] show, demanding 50 per cent male representation.”27 This sets the tone for his interpretation of Piper’s work in the exhibition. Perreault argued against the possibility of a woman’s sensibility, writing that there could be no “woman’s art,” only either “art” or “feminist proCatalysis  169

paganda art.” He describes Piper’s work for “26 Contemporary Women Artists” as the latter: Piper’s second piece consisted of herself and two other people wandering around at the opening with tiny harmonicas (mouth organs?) in their mouths, occasionally sounding them. Upstairs, too, there was a faint tape of someone whistling. From what I know of Piper’s works so far, it’s sensational and tough. She has been known to wait in movie lines along [T]hird Avenue wearing vampire fangs, to appear in various bookstores smeared with smelly grease, and to sit in libraries with a concealed tape recording of constant burping. I’m sure any man with male chauvinist pig designs on her would be repulsed as soon as he came within striking distance. Inside the bizarre outer appearance and the conceptual inner workings of these works do I detect some elements of direct protest?28 Despite Perreault’s characterization of her work, Piper’s action for the Aldrich Museum seems understated if not subtle. Piper described Catalysis IX, the action she performed at the opening, differently: “I covered my face, neck and arms with feathers and attended the opening of the ‘Women Artists’ show as an otherwise conservatively dressed spectator, and accompanied by a number of other people similarly altered.”29 In the context of what Perreault considers Piper’s more repulsive actions, the action becomes “sensational and tough.” Despite Piper’s explanation that Catalysis IX is an example of the kind of work that “temporarily replaces or supercedes those characteristics which define me as a private individual,” Perreault assumes that her action is directed at heterosexual men and that because Piper appears simultaneously sexy and repulsive, men will perceive her as antagonizing them with her apparent self-denigration, as if inviting them to degrade her further.30 Following “26 Contemporary Women Artists,” Piper reconsiders the interdependence of public and private experience. By 1972, she begins to explain her work as a feminist and autobiographical project, blurring the distinction between herself and her art. In January 1973, she exhibited her collected Catalysis texts for the first time under the title “Talking to Myself.” In the new “Autobiographical Preface,” she describes her development as an artist in terms of three “impasses,” after which she begins Catalysis: as an art student, she becomes aware of the concerns of contemporary art, particularly Minimalism and Color Field painting; 170   Chapter 4

she turns to conceptualism; and she becomes self-consciously political, when she begins “thinking about [her] position as an artist, a woman, and a black.”31 The latter impasse, she writes, resulted from “the invasion by the ‘outside world’ on [her] aesthetic isolation,” with the result that she has become “self-conscious.”32 Her texts represent efforts to consider her work reflexively, defining it instead of allowing it to define her: “It remains for me to continually define and articulate my concerns by reflecting on the works I produce (not the other way around).”33 In this way, she attempts to achieve objective distance from her actions and writings even as she reasserts her claims to them. Writing the “Autobiographical Preface” might suggest that Piper regards her work as a reflection of her life, but she is also clear that she provides not an autobiography of her self but of herself as an art object. With the exception of the brief new “Autobiographical Introduction,” her texts offer an analysis of her work, not her self. In a contemporaneous article, Piper’s friend Rosemary Mayer explained Piper’s performances—and those of Mayer’s husband, Vito Acconci, and others—in terms of “personalities, life experiences, and life style.”34 Mayer participated in a women artists’ consciousness-raising group with Piper, so it is not surprising that she offers the first lengthy biographical analysis of Piper’s work.35 Her revealing study of Piper’s work is sympathetic to the artist’s stated project but also blurs distinctions Piper’s texts maintained between artist and artwork and between public and private experience—distinctions crucial for sustaining the appearance of self-control. For example, Mayer described Piper’s art in terms of the artist’s reclusiveness: Piper’s work could be related to her life style as well as her experiences. Piper leads an almost solitary life. She goes to school and has a job but seldom sees friends or socializes. She lives alone without even animals in a large loft. She is very involved with her journal which she has kept since the age of eleven. She refers to it as her secret life. “I narrate my life and thoughts to an imaginary listener. Myself as the star of an unfolding epic.” Piper’s work has been private for years.36 Mayer offers Piper’s performance at Max’s Kansas City as an example of how the artist seems almost delusional, objectifying her one more time.37 The reader can only agree with Mayer: Piper’s art and life seem odd. Exposed in this way, art offers no protection from prying eyes. Catalysis  171

Mayer’s tell-all approach is very different from Piper’s tone of objectivity. Quoting lavishly from their correspondence, Mayer presents the artist’s actions as consciously autobiographical, stating, “[her] work often deals with the artist-performer as object.” Mayer interprets this as the natural development of life experiences. For example, she cites Piper’s previous jobs as fashion model and professional discotheque dancer and pairs a posed photograph she took of Piper performing Catalysis IV (figs. 41.1–41.5) with one of Piper’s modeling pictures.38 Piper may not have anticipated the intimacy of Mayer’s analysis. The personal is political, but, on display, it can become a liability as well. The way Mayer exposes Piper to readers’ more base and gossipy tendencies may explain why the artist did not publish a photograph of her Catalysis actions again for fifteen years. (Mayer photographed two Catalysis performances to illustrate an article Scott Burton was writing about Piper for Art in America that the editor “disinvited . . . upon learning that its subject was a woman and a student.” Mayer does not mention this but it must have confirmed the relationship she saw between Piper’s work and experiences as a young woman.)39 Mayer is sympathetic to Piper’s project, but by ignoring the frontier between artist and artwork, she risks objectifying Piper in a way that her work rejects. Nevertheless, Mayer’s anecdotal explanations lend Piper’s work feminist value as a response to expectations about how women look and behave. For example, she discusses Piper’s Aretha Franklin Piece as an outgrowth of the artist’s job dancing for tips: She danced in a glass cage suspended above the dance floor . . . [Piper says,] “I once really got involved in the music to the point where I forgot where I was. In the middle of dancing this guy gave me five dollars because he liked [my] dancing. I was so involved that for a moment I didn’t understand what he was doing.” Piper has performed her Aretha Franklin Piece several times this past year. The piece began with Piper memorizing “Respect” until she could hear the entire song in her mind at will. The piece itself involves her listening to the song in her mind and simultaneously dancing to it. . . . Piper performed the piece unannounced, while waiting in line at the bank, at a bus stop, and in a public library.40 To demonstrate how Piper resists playing the role of sex object for heterosexual men, Mayer pairs Piper’s story about forgetting that she 172   Chapter 4

41.1  Adrian Piper,

Catalysis IV, 1971. Photography by Rosemary Mayer. Five 16 × 16 in. black-and-white photographs. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

41.2  Adrian Piper,

Catalysis IV, 1971. Photography by Rosemary Mayer. Five 16 × 16 in. black-and-white photographs. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

41.3  Adrian Piper,

Catalysis IV, 1971. Photography by Rosemary Mayer. Five 16 × 16 in. black-and-white photographs. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

41.4  Adrian Piper,

Catalysis IV, 1971. Photography by Rosemary Mayer. Five 16 × 16 in. black-and-white photographs. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

41.5  Adrian Piper,

Catalysis IV, 1971. Photography by Rosemary Mayer. Five 16 × 16 in. black-and-white photographs. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

dances for an audience with a performance in which Piper attempts to recapture the experience, dancing to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”—a hit song when it was released in 1968 that was widely interpreted as both a call for civil rights and a claim for women’s equality. Mayer’s interpretation is compelling but overlooks distinctions between two different versions of the Aretha Franklin Piece, which Piper described as representing two distinct steps toward self-consciousness. First, Piper described executing her action in the locations Mayer depicted: “The piece consisted of my listening to the song in my mind and simultaneously dancing to it. I did a mixture of the Bugaloo, the Jerk, the Lindy, the Charleston, and the Twist, with a high degree of improvisation.”41 In Piper’s essay, the action establishes a “dissonant” relationship between the artist and an audience that understands her as insane or incomprehensible. Later, Piper said men reacted by applauding or pinching her. She was perfectly legible as a woman who put herself on public display despite behaving oddly.42 By attempting to dismiss her audience’s judgment, however, Piper reassures herself of self-control, allowing her to believe she is not who she appears to be; she addresses this perspective critically in Talking to Myself. Catalysis  175

The second version of Piper’s Aretha Franklin Piece was the same as the first but executed in private, “in [her] loft, in complete solitude.”43 Piper’s explanation puts her understanding of the first version to question. Incorporating an awareness of how others see her into her selfimage represents the path toward self-consciousness she calls a “double vision” of herself.44 In the second version, “because of the complete lack of outside interference, the performances became increasingly polished and successful.”45 This was not simply a matter of remembering the song better or memorizing dance steps more accurately (it involved improvisation, after all). Instead, fewer distractions meant Piper “was able to mentally construct the imagined situations to which [she] was outwardly responding with increasing vividness and self-involvement.”46 Piper achieved confidence in her ability to take control of her self-image based upon her perception of how others see her. As she put it, “I have increasingly come to substitute my own self-consciousness of me as object for that same reflective consciousness formerly supplied by the audience. I have assimilated an ‘other’ into my sense of self . . . I perform, and simultaneously perceive myself as performing object.”47 Piper’s consciousness is not divided but negotiated. The anecdote about dancing for tips no longer applies: Piper has recognized that she cannot forget that she is being watched and will always take this into account. Piper’s proposal for the 1971 Biennale de Paris invites others to attempt similar actions, suggesting that the work is less about Piper than all women’s experiences with objectification: Alterations (designed for thin individuals): 1) Stuff as much cloth as possible into cheeks, until full and bulbous. 2) Tie large pillows around hips, stomach, thighs, calves under street clothes. Twelve unrelated individual volunteers should make the above alterations in their physical appearance for the duration of the Biennale. They should, while thus altered, continue to perform the normal events and functions of their daily life uninterruptedly, dealing with the repercussions of their new appearances as they occur.48 Piper proposes a list of modifications to the performers’ bodies that address gender conventions and the concerns of women who watch their 176   Chapter 4

figures or find themselves silenced and objectified. Piper had earlier described stuffing her own cheeks with a towel and letting what did not fit hang from her mouth, for Catalysis IV.49 Resituated in Paris, the city Americans considered the capital of high fashion, and proposed for several performers, Piper’s work for the Biennale must be understood as a feminist critique of the conventions of beauty and femininity, even if her explanations refuse to make such connections explicit. Did Piper’s performances inadvertently invite the sort of objectification her texts resist? In an interview conducted by Effie Serlis, a student in Joyce Kozloff’s School of Visual Arts “Women and the Arts” class, Piper broaches this possibility and explores its radically feminist implications. Her discussion with Serlis differs strikingly from her earlier Catalysis texts. The work becomes most valuable as a lesson in the ways men react to a woman’s outward appearance by objectifying her. Piper had previously mentioned viewers’ responses to her actions only rarely. Now, she describes each work in terms of the gendered and sexualized reactions she faced as a woman displayed for an audience of men. For example, she originally called Catalysis VI, in which she rode the subway at rush hour with Mickey Mouse balloons bulging from her clothing and floating above her head, a breakthrough performance because she made what seemed like normal (not gender-determined) contact with “someone” she asked the time of.50 By contrast, she subsequently describes her Catalysis VI experience as one of complete alienation from her audience: One piece I did was to get these very large bulky clothes and these Mickey Mouse balloons[;] . . . I stuffed them all in various places and I waddled around, and it wasn’t that I looked obese because I wasn’t smooth enough. I would just bulge out in these strange places, like I had breasts coming out of my knees, and I went on the subway during the rush hour, and at first, people were very circumspect about even approaching me. They would avoid me by making this wide berth about five feet around me if they were going from car to car, but as it got more crowded, people would start to press in, and they’d realize that whatever I had on was very resilient and kept going in and out when they pressed, and then the balloons started breaking. I thought that people would get upset because they thought there were firecrackers in the subway or people would be really surprised because my physiology was so strange. Everyone was really hostile! I was making a

Catalysis  177

nuisance of myself just by being the way I was; I wasn’t doing anything weird . . . I was just reading the paper on the subway like anybody else. They would say things like, “People like you don’t belong on the subways.” I was very pained; I was observing it, but I also felt as though it was a personal affront, like he had really attacked me. . . . I realized that what was going on was the difference between what my intents were and what other people’s responses were from the ordinary context, like I have the art background . . . So I realized there was this complete disparity between my own ideas . . . and what was going on in the minds of the people who saw me. Generally, the interpretation was that I was either crazy or that I was seriously malformed. “Why didn’t somebody call a policeman?” I was making a public disturbance, that kind of thing.51 Piper behaves the same as the men—she stands, reading the newspaper—but finds herself the object of anger and hostile comments. Consequently, she describes herself as she assumes the men saw her: as a young woman with “breasts coming out of [her] knees.” There is no longer any breakthrough interaction in Piper’s description. Furthermore, while Piper is certain she knows that she makes art, her unwitting audience has no familiarity with the kinds of art that art critics referred to in their interpretations of her work. Instead, Piper is incomprehensible to her audience except as a misbehaving woman, an object to be denigrated who appears to have denigrated herself already. Significantly, Piper recalls the reactions of male viewers but has never described how women responded (with one exception). Interviewed by Serlis, Piper explains Catalysis I in terms of domination and control—the men responded as if the artist, by denigrating herself, gave them license to make of her what they want: In one of the early pieces [Catalysis I], I had soaked this set of clothes in a very disgusting mixture, and I just decided to ride the subway and smell all over the place, and I got this very strange reaction from some businessmen on the subway, which I didn’t understand at the time, but my friend explained it to me later on. I’d be wearing all this putridsmelling stuff; I’d coated my arms with codliver oil. I was very passive (just standing there), and they would look at me like they really wanted to fuck me. This friend said that by walking around that way, it seemed that I didn’t have any respect for my body, so why should 178   Chapter 4

Plate 1  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), 1, 1974. One of ten black-and-white

photographs with ink and tempera and felt-tip pen, 5 × 7 in. Collection of Walker Art Center,   Minneapolis, T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1999.

Plate 2  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women #1, 1975. One of three black-and-white

photographs, 8 × 10 in. Photo by James Gutmann. Collection of Eileen Harris Norton.

Plate 3  Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady, 1995. Oil crayon on photograph, 8 × 10 in.

Collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Plate 4  Above

Adrian Piper, Utah-Manhattan Transfer #1, 1968. Collage on paper, 13.5 × 14.5 in. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Below

Adrian Piper, Utah-Manhattan Transfer #2, 1968. Collage on paper, 12.125 × 12 in. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Plate 5  Adrian Piper, Untitled Map/Circle (detail), 1969. Ten-page pagework stored in notebook,

vintage Photostat maps of Lower Manhattan overdrawn with red and black pen, two typescript   texts on bond paper. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Plate 6  Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine Abstract Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (detail), 1969.

Twenty-nine pages of pageworks stored in notebook with ink on maps and typewritten text. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

Plate 7  Adrian Piper, Untitled Map Work from Nine Abstract Space-Time-Infinity Pieces (detail), 1969.

Twenty-nine pages of pageworks stored in notebook with ink on maps and typewritten text. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

Plate 8  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #6 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-

Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper

Plate 9  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #11 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed

1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Plate 10  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #15 (detail), conceived 1969, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams,

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

Plate 11  Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat, 1968. Nine color photographs, each 17 × 17 in.

Collection of the Aomori Museum of Art, Nagashima, Japan.

Plate 12  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #9 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink diagrams,

vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

Plate 13  Eleanor Antin, “Portraits of Eight New York Women,” 1970, recreated 1998 at Ronald Feldman

Fine Arts, New York. Against the wall, from left to right: Naomi Dash, Lynn Traiger, Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, and, in the foreground, Hannah Weiner. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Plate 14  Adrian Piper, Hypothesis: Situation #14 (detail), conceived 1968, executed 1969; essay composed 1969. Graph paper, photographs, hand-drawn ink

diagrams, vintage mimeographed form with typescript text, vintage photo offset two-page essay. Collection of Margaret and Daniel Loeb.

page and bound in a notebook. Collection of Thomas Erben, New York.

Plate 15  Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit (detail), 1971. Two facing pages from the notebook, each with a black-and-white photograph mounted on a black

annotations and a black-and-white photograph mounted on black pages and bound in a notebook. Collection of Thomas Erben, New York.

Plate 16  Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit (detail), 1971. Two facing pages from the notebook; page torn from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with handwritten

anybody else? And he brought to mind something they sometimes do in porno films: the woman sprays herself with whipped cream or honey or something, and the guy licks it off. So, that was something I just hadn’t counted on at all, that somehow there could be sexuality in that really revolting make-up.52 Piper describes her naïveté—a male friend tells her she has acted out a characteristic fantasy of pornographic movies (although Piper does not seem to acknowledge the pleasurable qualities of whipped cream and honey, particularly in comparison with cod liver oil)—and in the interview she applies the lessons of Catalysis I to her self-image as a woman. She also talks about her Aretha Franklin Piece with Serlis, and while she is not surprised at the way men responded, she is frustrated. She says she intended to appear self-absorbed, but men accosted her and were surprised when she confronted them: Men [would] clap or try to pinch me, and that made me very angry. I knew that I brought it on myself, but it seemed to me [that] if a guy had done that, no man or woman would come by and try to pinch him or think that somehow the performance was being done specifically for that person’s benefit. These men would feel justified in responding, and when I’d say something really harsh, they’d get all hurt. “Why are you doing it then?”53 Piper’s account sounds naïve, but some feminists argued women could achieve self-determination only by leaving men to liberate themselves. As Robin Morgan argued in 1970, “It’s up to the ‘brothers’—after all, sexism is their concern, not ours; we’re too busy getting ourselves together to have to deal with their bigotry.”54 This raises the question of audience: was Piper performing in front of others but only for her self? Every time Piper discussed or wrote about Catalysis, she pointed out the deleterious effects of having to recognize that the images other people have of her often bear little resemblance to how she sees herself. This is despite telling Lippard she liked being recognized by her friends while she performed a Catalysis action, and Mayer that she took some pleasure in being found sexy. Piper distinguished her “art” from “quirky personal activity” when she discussed it, but the reactions of her audience seem crucial to her self-image.55 She explains she is happy to meet someone she knows while doing a piece because they recognize that she

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is an artist making art, not insane.56 Similarly, she talks and writes about Catalysis actions to achieve distance from them.57 Piper insists she is not the person she appears to be in performance as protection against viewers’ judgment. Piper and Serlis repeatedly return to Piper’s resultant awareness of how she presents herself in daily life. Whether she feels self-confident or uncomfortable, “deliberately erotic” or like “one of those street crazies who sit there muttering to themselves,” Piper becomes conscious of how she imagines others judge her and this determines the way she presents herself.58 One question male viewers ask when she rebukes them for propositioning her—“Why are you doing it then?”—becomes self-reflexive: is there any way Piper can prevent her objectification? She cannot, but it is important that Piper’s actions ask this question of her audience, placing ultimate responsibility with them. Piper’s feminist analyses of her actions articulate, in very specific terms, the coercive role the judgment of others plays in the formation of a self-image. Even as Piper refuses to accede to her audiences’ insults, she anticipates them, remains aware, and remembers. In Catalysis actions and texts, Piper must come to terms with both the denigrating image she makes of herself in performance and how men respond. For this reason, she must also refuse Lippard’s efforts to define her as someone who suffers for being a black woman—an implication of Lippard’s question about whether Piper is “fighting back” against racists and sexists. By contrast, in later autobiographical essays, Piper describes her refusal to pass for white as both a painful dilemma and a source of moral strength.59 Despite her powerful testimony about how men objectify her in daily life, Piper cannot allow herself to become too closely associated with these denigrating images. To do so—especially within a biographical explanation of her work—is to be objectified again. Instead, Piper embraces ambiguity. In her actions and texts, she is unclear about who she “truly” is in order to force viewers and readers of her work to reflect upon their expectations and, hopefully, reconsider them. For this reason Piper, in her mature philosophical work, argues that the categories according to which we understand our perceptions must be subject to rational redefinition. She explains that Kant was wrong to insist on the immutability of our cognitive categories because to believe otherwise is to naturalize race and gender inequities.60 Piper refuses to see herself in the racist and sexist figures of narcissistic women and ani180   Chapter 4

malistic Africans, Kant articulated and feared, even though it is Kant’s philosophical texts that provided her a way out.61 Catalysis marks the beginning of Piper’s exploration of the potential for rational self-definition in response to the unavoidable awareness of the judgment of others. Performance and Self-Reflection

The term catalysis describes a chemical reaction caused in a given substance by a catalytic agent that is not itself changed by the encounter— in this case referring to the viewer’s reaction to Piper. Piper emphasized this in the Catalysis texts she wrote between August 1970 and January 1971, explaining, “I define the work as the viewer’s reaction to it: to me the strongest, most complex, and most esthetically interesting catalysis is the one that occurs in uncategorised, undefined and non-pragmatic human confrontation.”62 The always “undefined” artwork is completed only momentarily in the interaction of artist and audience, and in retrospect through subsequent self-reflection. Piper’s mere presence begins and sustains a process in which artist and audience cause each other to reconfigure their images of the world and their relationships to it. It is the specific conditions of Piper’s appearance as an art object that will determine how her audience reacts. Piper claimed that each of her actions confronted viewers with a situation both typical of society and unique— what she calls in her Catalysis texts a “paradigm.” Viewers expose themselves by responding: “like everyone else, I am a paradigm of this society. The society’s treatment of me shows me what I am, and in the products of my labor I reveal the nature of the society.”63 As a result of observing how others respond to her, Piper claims to achieve self-consciousness and specifically to “become political[ly] conscious by studying the implications of my societal status and the products of my activity.”64 Viewers might accomplish something similar, particularly if they find Piper is not the person they first took her for. In Catalysis I, for example, Piper says she “saturated a set of clothing in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod liver oil for a week, then wore them on the D train during evening rush hour, then while browsing in the Marboro bookstore on Saturday night.”65 Piper brewed the smelly concoction specifically to imitate the smell of a homeless person.66 The point was not to experience life as a homeless person or be mistaken for one (impossible and condescending experiments). Instead, she created a confusing situation in which viewers encounter a young woman who smells like but does Catalysis  181

not necessary resemble a homeless person. John Paoletti argues that the confrontation Piper describes resulted not from her behavior or persona but from “the aggression [viewers] directed toward the artist.” He credits this to “the passive role which the artist played even though she was the nexus around which all of the emotional, psychological and social responses moved . . . She all but vanished into her own stillness and silence. What each event did was to transfer the locus of action onto the viewer so that s/he is transformed into the aggressor.”67 Paoletti is correct to argue that, faced with Piper’s presence, viewers could not remain passive. Confused by both Piper’s appearance and their reactions to her, they might ponder their behavior and its moral implications. However, Paoletti is wrong to interpret Piper’s presence as if she is one of Morris’s “neutral” objects that activates a situation without drawing attention to itself.68 Rather, Piper’s condition was inextricable from her actions. As Judith Wilson notes, Piper learned from Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City that she did not relinquish subjectivity when presenting herself as an object.69 In Catalysis I, Piper makes it clear that she objectifies herself for viewers’ judgment. Piper refused to provide her audience on the street, one that was almost certainly unaware of contemporary artistic practices, with any immediately recognizable indication that her behavior was art. Rather, she must have appeared distinctly unstable. She explains that she chose to present her actions unannounced and outside of museum and gallery exhibitions to prevent viewers from dismissing them as art. Otherwise, audiences prepared for Piper’s aberrant behavior would not have been vulnerable to the shock she strove to achieve. Piper also avoided a related problem: viewers uninformed about art might feel alienated by anything identified as such. Instead of the supposedly pure aesthetic experience Fried described—which required proper schooling and experience— Piper advocated creating an uncontained and unpredictable situation for a broader public than New York’s museum-going audience.70 It did not matter that viewers of Piper’s actions were unlikely to understand the urgency of her critique of Modernism and the museum. The “audience v. performer separation” she strove to overcome was a moral crisis more than a pragmatic one.71 Because Piper’s texts resituate her actions within the art world, Catalysis retains its capacity to critique Modernism while also participating in it, enacting new confrontations within the particular circumstances of the museum. One result was that her work, 182   Chapter 4

like that of Hans Haacke and others, demonstrated that events outside the museum’s walls bore direct relevance on the art exhibited within. Catalysis III and the Critique of Modernism’s Generalized Viewer

For an example of how Piper presented her Catalysis actions, I focus on her first published description of Catalysis III, one of her best-known actions because it is one of only two she documented with photographs (figs. 42.1–42.3). She first described Catalysis III matter-of-factly, as a set of actions already executed. She did not report viewers’ responses: “I painted a set of clothing with sticky white paint with a sign attached saying ‘WET PAINT,’ then went shopping at Macy’s for some gloves and sunglasses.”72 Her presence became an unexpected and presumably undesirable new element in the world of the Macy’s shopper. Viewers may eventually determine that what they see is some sort of artistic performance, political demonstration, or prank, but they first must come to terms with a woman covered in wet paint. Significantly, Piper describes herself as a monochrome painting (even if she does not look like one in the photos of her action—photos not exhibited or published until 1987).73 Outside the context of museums and galleries, Piper may not have been identified as an artwork by her viewers, but when the description is published in an exhibition catalogue, the fact cannot go unremarked. By defining herself as an “art object” and presenting herself as a painting, Piper establishes a specific relationship between herself and her viewer, which retains fundamental tenets from debates begun by Michael Fried, Robert Morris, and others on the pages of Artforum and Art News in 1966 and 1967, just as she was beginning art school.74 By painting herself, Piper critically engages with Fried’s project of exploring the tension between literalness and illusion in Modernist painting, but without investing the art object with inherent meaning, as Fried had proposed. Because Piper fills the painting’s structure with the literal content of her body and insistently exhibits herself in a department store—feminized counterpart to the manly realm of the art museum—she engages the public forum where meaning and value are democratically produced. This is a space already shot through with politics and ideology, a fact she addresses obliquely. Piper challenges Modernist criticism directly in Catalysis III by making a monochrome painting of herself—one that accosts viewers Catalysis  183

42.1  Adrian Piper,

Catalysis III, 1971. Three 16 × 16 in. black-and-white photographs. Photography by Rosemary Mayer. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

42.2  Adrian Piper,

Catalysis III, 1971. Three 16 × 16 in. black-and-white photographs. Photography by Rosemary Mayer. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

42.3  Adrian Piper,

Catalysis III, 1971. Three 16 × 16 in. black-and-white photographs. Photography by Rosemary Mayer. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

as more than painting. The conditions of the viewer’s encounter with Piper’s work draw attention to their contingency, and her painting actively confronts viewers in such a way that it renders intellectual and visual analysis inadequate. Piper thus presents her work in terms that contradict Fried’s advocacy of what he called painting’s “presentness and instantaneousness.”75 Fried argues that a modernist painting will always contain the particular meaning established by its author at the moment of its completion, a meaning that is more spiritual and universal than sensuous or social. The Modernist painting, for Fried, is always ready to be understood whether or not there is anyone present to pay it any attention. Piper’s Catalysis actions, on the other hand, seem more akin to the work Fried rejected for “theatricality” because it encourages a viewing experience defined in both space and time, in the contingent world of the viewer rather than the supposedly divine and transcendent realm of art.76 One point of Piper’s work was that the artwork was incomplete without the viewer and it appeared that way, so that the viewer would come to self-reflexively understand his or her role in completing it. The artist Martha Rosler argues that the “incomplete” artwork offered femiCatalysis  185

nists an implicitly anti-Modernist critique: “if a work is involved with asking questions, the first thing that has to go is the notion of closure.”77 Fried seems threatened by work that engages its audience sensually to provoke or even entice the viewer to action. He instead advocates disembodied visual analysis over the emotionally invested “complicity” of bodily experience.78 As Fred Moten argues, Fried’s theory of Modernist art’s presentness and absorption is predicated upon the solitary viewer’s “self-absorption,” turned narcissistically inward as if removed from the realm of experience.79 To achieve this, Fried must condemn art that intrudes into the viewer’s space—“not just in his space but in his way,” Fried writes—and that forces a confrontation that unfolds between two bodies in time.80 Piper’s Catalysis actions engaged viewers as participants by inviting them to demonstrate their disgust with her appearance or unease at her unintelligible behavior, and also to ponder the encounter afterward and change their own behavior (rationally and unconsciously). Whether or not Macy’s shoppers saw Piper as artwork, she clearly drew attention to herself as an anomaly. Refusing to pass unnoticed, she insists that viewers take her presence into account. As Moten argues, “Piper is all about fighting what Fried refuses to recognize: . . . the aversion of one’s gaze from objects.”81 Piper arrests the averted gaze, that seemingly deliberate ignorance that characterizes mundane experience. In fact, Piper’s project superseded Fried’s condemnation of theatricality because, as Grant Kester argues, Fried’s theory “implies passivity in the viewer” whom the artwork provokes into action.82 Piper argued in her Catalysis texts that museums encouraged—even required—the viewer’s passivity. To counter this, Piper removed her actions from the “art context” where, she declared, the ideology of the museum would predetermine viewers’ reactions to her work.83 The New York Art Strike argued that art was used by the powerful to distract the public from realities of racism, war, and repression by encouraging passivity. Museums remained open during the strike, countering that if art bore any relationship to social conditions or politics at all, it served as a generally humanistic antidote to them. Piper developed the artists’ critique in her Catalysis texts, condemning museums for sustaining the impression that as Modernist institutions, they operated in isolation from daily life. Piper rejected the collusion of museum and Modernist criticism for

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conspiring to protect the experience of viewing art from the appearance of any relationship to the hierarchical social order they served. Her concern was that museums, in league with Modernist art critics, preserved the status quo that the counterculture, including activist artists in New York, believed they were overturning. Museums, she complained, “refer back to conditions of separateness, order, exclusivity, and the stability of easily-accepted functional identities.”84 She called instead for artworks that enact the contingency of the exhibition itself by making reference to the moral circumstances in which the institution (and the art it exhibits) is invested. In 1971, she criticized both Minimalism and Conceptualism for prescribing that art be concerned exclusively with itself: For me, no art object, however well enclosed in an art context it is, can be only what it purports to be. It can no longer be self-referential in the way the minimal aesthetic demands, nor successfully denotative as the conceptual aesthetic demands. Everythings [sic] seems to suggest a possible non-art counterpart—or vice versa . . . I can no longer see art as separate from everything else.85 Piper’s actions offered an alternative paradigm, as “viable reflections or expressions of what seems to be going on in this society.”86 The important experience for the Minimalist viewer is to recognize how he or she makes sense of the world by establishing him- or herself as its focal point. Morris, for example, had argued that an art object alters the space around it to determine and focus viewers’ perceptions. The relationship between object and viewer becomes one of interrelatedness, of, as he put it, “control . . . and/or cooperation.” In other words, object and viewer negotiate an experience of shared space and time defined by such formal elements as “object, light, space, and body.”87 Through this process, the viewer becomes aware of both the object’s effects on the situation and of his or her own efforts to apprehend it. According to Morris, the art object’s role is simply to enable and reveal this: “One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context.”88 Thus, while Fried understands the artwork as the origin of meaning for its viewer, Morris reverses this formula, identifying the viewer as the source of order in a world created and made meaningful in response to being confronted by the art ob-

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ject. Piper’s performance of herself as Minimalist artwork implied a critique made first by Fried, that the viewer remained powerless before the Minimalist object. The viewer could have no effect upon the immutable objects of Judd, Morris, and LeWitt, for example, but could only change perspective. The absent artist took credit for the work but refused to accept responsibility for the viewer’s experience. Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster argue it is “anachronistic” to claim that either Fried or the Minimalists ignored the “more particularized” and racialized and “gendered body” addressed by artists working after Minimalism.89 Krauss claims that Minimalism was interested only in “a body-in-general within a rather generalized sense of space-at-large.”90 Foster supports Krauss’s position when he notes that Minimalism’s critique was limited because it concerned a body that existed “somehow before or outside history, language, sexuality, and power.”91 Fried, for his part, claims that no other “frontline art critic writing in the 1960s . . . harped on the importance of bodily experience to the extent that [he] did,” but that what he claimed for Modernist art was “something more” than the gendered and racialized body—something spiritual.92 However, Piper defends the universalist ideals of Minimalism and Conceptualism while also condemning the “only-human” subjectivity of those dealers, curators, and critics who disregarded her work because they could only see it as that of a woman or black artist—contested terms in the early 1970s that even some women and black artists rejected for fear of being pigeon-holed and isolated.93 Piper did not introduce race or gender into either public space or the art world. Rather, as activist artists have argued since at least 1968, racism and sexism already define the art world just as they determine the everyday lives of all Americans. This situation renders the exclusivity formalist criticism claims untenable. In her Catalysis texts, Piper describes finding herself assaulted and confronted by social realities that infest the realm of aesthetics. Writing in October 1970, only five months after withdrawing from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects,” she explains she has had to acknowledge her inability to create work that ignores sexism, racism and violence: In my own life, I find my artistic privacy continually and increasingly being impinged upon by the rumblings of the outside world; my very right to that privacy and exclusiveness is being challenged. The world

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has invaded my artistic discreteness in so many ways that I have, despite myself, come to recognize myself as essentially a social being.94 It is for this reason she can present herself as a paradigm. In what seems a particularly feminist exercise, Catalysis III, she inserts herself into public space, breeching standards of etiquette and threatening to reach out and smudge viewers with paint. Unlike the Modernist painting Fried advocated, Piper’s painting is more than optical. Her use of white paint, specifically mentioned in her cursory description of the action, to adorn the body that few art critics thought of as black also seems designed to raise the issue of race ambiguously—whether or not this would have occurred to her Macy’s audience—upon its reintroduction to the art world in the texts. With hindsight, Piper explains her aesthetic concerns as a response to matters that only seemed unrelated. When she made her Catalysis work, she says, “consciously the exploration was formalistic [but] the medium I chose to express those concerns had a lot to do with my emerging sense of my political self as a woman and a black person.”95 (Lippard was first to raise the issue of race with respect to Piper’s practice in March 1972, and Piper did not mention it explicitly until January 1973.)96 Piper’s view of New York’s museums was similar to that articulated by WAR, the AWC, the BECC, and other artists’ groups: museums were compromised by the interests of trustees committed to maintaining class, gender, and racial inequities around the world, and to waging the war in Vietnam as an integral part of that agenda. Understood as bastions of elitism, museums were believed to address a select audience trained to respond in ways that dulled the potential impact of a challenging work of art. This is why Piper executed most of her Catalysis actions in places that were, as Maurice Berger puts it, “irrelevant to the art world.”97 Piper, like many Conceptual artists, attempted to remove her work from the museum’s grasp. As Lippard argued in 1970, the solution was not for artists to make activist art. Rather, “it’s how you give and withhold your art that is political.”98 This was a position expressed variously by other artists at the AWC’s April 1969 Open Hearing at the School of Visual Arts. For example, Seth Siegelaub told the gathered artists that, although he did not agree with the AWC’s call “for a social protest or any other type of action[,] in withdrawing your work or setting tight controls over it, you could achieve the goals that are being sought.”99 Carl Andre called for

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“the elimination of the art world.” Artists should “withdraw” their work from exhibition: “Museums will never be right: they are owned by the wrong people, controlled by the wrong people and staffed by the wrong people.”100 Similarly, Piper recognized she needed an alternative means of exhibition, as she explained in the “26 Contemporary Women Artists” catalogue: Art contexts (galleries, performances) are becoming untenable for me. They are being overwhelmed and infiltrated by pieces of other disintegrating structures; political, social, economic. They preserve the illusion of an identifiable, isolable situation, much as discrete forms do, and thus a prestandardized set of responses. Because of their established functional identities, they prepare the viewer to be catalyzed, thus making actual catalysis impossible.101 Piper regarded the museum as an extension of Fried’s and Greenberg’s formalist Modernist criticism (an attitude different from Lippard’s claims that the AWC was aesthetically “neutral”), comparing the conditions of museum exhibition to the supposedly apolitical, amoral, and “discrete forms” of Modernist art.102 Piper’s writings, like those of other artists at the time, confronted the authority that art critics claimed to speak for artists by questioning whether it’s possible to speak authoritatively at all.103 Neither did Piper claim the critic’s or the museum’s authority for herself. Instead, her phenomenological texts encourage the viewer to read critically and assume responsibility for his or her own experience. She developed the issue as a matter of self-consciousness in Catalysis VIII, a sound installation for “26 Contemporary Women Artists” that promised to hypnotize visitors.104 Piper’s statement in the exhibition catalogue claimed that Catalysis VIII performed “the elimination of the discrete form as art object . . . with its isolated internal relationships and self-determining esthetic standards” (in a later version of the text, she identified the target of her attack as the idea of “a kind of Kantian ‘thing in itself,’ ” a phrase widely associated at the time with the art criticism of Greenberg and Fried).105 The museum refused to allow the work, and while it is unclear how Piper intended to install it, the museum posted a statement that implies the tape was to play continuously in the galleries; unwitting visitors who did not pay close attention risked hypnosis. This work might therefore be regarded as one ironic culmination of Fried’s argument that a modern190   Chapter 4

ist artwork will impose its meaning upon the passively receptive viewer. Catalysis VIII required visitors to make active use of all their senses to resist it, exposing the ideology and inadequacy of opticality that permeated not only the discourse of Modernist art but the museum, as well. As if to confirm that Piper’s critique had hit its intended target, the museum refused to allow the work, explaining that “to hypnotize a person without his consent” was illegal and “a dangerous practice . . . not in the public interest.”106 In response, Piper posted an announcement inviting visitors to take matters into their own hands: “the tape work originally chosen for this exhibit has been declared illegal.” It would instead be available by telephone, at a New York City number, after museum hours.107 Piper also exhibited Catalysis VIII as a solo exhibition at the New York Cultural Center in Midtown Manhattan at the invitation of director Donald Karshan.108 At the Aldrich Museum, Piper exhibited a tape recording of her attempts to whistle along with a Bach harpsichord concerto instead of the banned artwork.109 Perreault, in his review, noted “a faint tape of someone whistling” in the museum’s upstairs galleries110— a subtle and probably unpleasant reminder of the particular sensory circumstances that relentlessly intrude upon what visitors anticipate will be a visual experience. Piper afterward wrote that her tape, a clear performance of her failure to attain mastery according to Modernist ideals of conviction and accomplishment, would be “diffuse and unobtrusive (but hopefully insidious).” Her parenthetical aside suggests it might not have made the issue of institutional control as apparent as intended.111 The Artist as Performance

Piper claimed her Catalysis actions established an uncontained alternative to the museum, displacing the conventional collusion between artwork and institution that manipulates viewers. By rejecting the supposedly hermetic “art context” and the obdurate art object, Piper put both artist and viewer on display. Instead, Piper’s work asked both viewer and museum to take responsibility for the experience. In her texts, Piper marked the same distinction that Minimalism had between artist and artwork, but by reintroducing the figure of the artist in her performances, she gave the impression that she allowed viewers to know who was responsible for the encounter. However, she also disguised herself with “the artifice of the work,” those “artificial and nonfunctional alterations in [her] own bodily presence” (which she also referred to as “artiCatalysis  191

ficially assumed attributes”) that called attention to the difference between her conception of her rational self and the person she appeared to be in performance.112 The point, she argued, was that her work appeared not to present the artist’s “life as art or [her] personality and tastes as art.”113 Instead, every viewer—including the artist—collaborated to determine the outcome. Piper critiqued but also adopted the mantle of the Minimalist artist’s anonymity without resurrecting intention. Piper rendered herself ambiguously simultaneous with the artwork, bearing partial responsibility for the circumstances of the viewer’s encounter in a moment of mutual creation: “Here the entire art making process and end product has the immediacy of being in the same time and space continuum as the viewer. This process/product is in a sense internalized in me, since I exist simultaneously as the artist and the work.”114 The viewer’s encounter with the artist/art object establishes a mutually defining experience. While Piper stands before her viewers, she incorporates their reactions to her and her to them. As a result, artist and viewer develop a reciprocal, if antagonistic relationship for the duration of their interaction. For example, when Piper, dripping with paint, confronts shoppers in New York City, they cannot ignore her because she has placed herself in their space—the same space within which each individual, including Piper, comes to realize his or her own subjectivity. It is important, therefore, that both Piper and her viewers accept responsibility for the interaction. The artist’s vulnerability thus becomes important to Piper’s actions as a way to mitigate what control she wields over her audience. For example, in her interview with Serlis, she described Catalysis VII, her action inside the Met, as a performance in which she made an object of herself that invited viewers to act out: museum guards follow her suggestively dressed figure, ostensibly to protect the art; she turns to speak with a man who has come near her, and it is only once he sees how bubble gum covers her face that he flees. Piper first described Catalysis VII as a disruption, but this account makes her seem more like a flirtatious distraction or a feminist reinterpretation of Vito Acconci’s Room Situation (Proximity) (a performance from 1969 that Piper says she was unaware of at the time).115 Acconci, for his contribution to the Jewish Museum’s “Software” exhibition, lurked among the museum’s galleries, selecting visitors to follow. According to his own description, he approached unsuspecting museum-goers and stood or walked too close to them, delib192   Chapter 4

erately making them uncomfortable by his physical proximity. Piper’s action differs from Acconci’s in several significant ways: first, Acconci appeared as a man dressed in clothing that suggested membership in the counterculture. He also described choosing his victims and persistently tormenting them, perhaps to the brink of violence. Finally, Acconci’s performance was invited by the museum and announced in the exhibition by a wall text and in the catalogue. Acconci described his action afterward, in stylized language, as aggressive and controlling: “Tenacious move (I’m clinging to him, I won’t lose him, he can’t move away)—elastic move (I’m moving with him as he shifts around, bending with him to keep at him)—self-determinative move (my decision is to make my place; he’s incidental, he happens to be in the way).” Acconci even acknowledged that violence was a possible result: “ ‘Get your face out of mine’—‘He shook his fist in my face.’ ”116 Piper’s actions in Catalysis VII are like Acconci’s uninvited aggressions in one respect: both depend upon the artist’s ability to conform temporarily to a sexist caricature of either the invitingly seductive and feminine woman or the aggressively manly man.117 Although Acconci’s actions served to confirm conventional conceptions of manliness, Piper might appear to have demeaned herself and so invites the unwitting viewer to watch or approach her, thereby exposing the viewer’s own desires or attitudes about decorum and sexuality. Furthermore, Piper defeats viewers’ efforts to objectify her by rendering her figure proximate and vulgar, refusing them the distance that both objectivity and objectification require. Art critics eventually recognized the risks inherent in Piper’s Catlaysis actions, but first, between 1971 and 1973, treated them like Acconci’s, as boldly confrontational. Lippard, in her 1971 interview with Piper, called the artist’s actions “very aggressive,” and asked if, as a black woman, Piper was “fighting back”: “What do you think it has to do with being a woman? Or being black? . . . . Do you think you’re getting out some of your aggressions about how women are treated?”118 Piper, in response, denied this was her intention but admitted Lippard might be right. Piper explains that as the product of a society that mistreats black women, her artwork will necessarily address the situation: “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 am a paradigm of what the society is.”119 Piper then attempts to turn the conversation to a new issue: the antagonism she feels from her audience, resulting in Catalysis  193

a crisis of “solipsism”—an inability to see herself as others see her. Perhaps for this reason, Lippard changed her opinion of Piper’s work. Writing about “street works” and “body art” in 1976, she made no mention of aggression and instead acknowledged that Piper’s work exemplifies “the ultimate risks in this sort of public interaction.”120 Despite the variety of Piper’s actions—and the more subtle and innocuous character of those she executed after the summer of 1971— most art critics characterized Piper’s Catalysis actions in three ways, sometimes in combination: as antagonistic and confrontational, as autobiographical, and as a political and specifically feminist protest. In some instances, she is portrayed as domineering, albeit with a peculiar sense of humor, forcing unsuspecting viewers into unpleasant situations from which there is no easy escape. In the most sensational treatment, a newspaper in Rochester, New York, warned readers of Piper’s impending arrival: You’re riding the bus to work and a woman gets on and sits down next to you and . . . Gasp! There’s a horrible stench in the air—something beyond pollution, beyond body odor, beyond description. It’s the woman next to you. What you do next could be part of Memorial Art Gallery’s new exhibit “Art Without Limit.” Because the woman sitting next to you could be artist Adrian Piper, whose art consists of “unannounced confrontations with people in public places.” In short, she’s been known to soak her clothes in milk and cod liver oil for a week, dry them out, don them and venture into public to see what happens. Whatever does happen is Adrian’s “art.” And you can’t hang that in a gallery. So to exhibit in “Art Without Limit” Adrian will be in Rochester next week—and on and off until May 7—doing something, which she will not specify, somewhere, also unspecified, to provoke reaction from unspecified portions of the public—and whatever it is will be her “exhibit” whenever and wherever it happens. And if all this doesn’t sound to you much like the tidy old world where artists painted pictures and chiseled statues to be put in places where people could look at them if they wanted to—you’re probably beginning to grasp the difference between classical and avant garde art.121

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Piper makes art on her own terms, the article suggests, and people will be forced to participate whether they want to or not. The reporter’s jocularity partly disarms Piper’s threat but also exaggerates it. The greatest risk for the good citizens of Rochester is that they will not recognize the artist until it is too late, and even then they still might not distinguish Piper from her artwork or art from public nuisance. Piper’s threat is that she will be confused for the imposing person she appears to be in performance; as a result of this deception, she will compel unsuspecting viewers to react, and by reacting reveal embarrassment or disdain for their fellow citizens. There is a risk for Piper, too, that she will become confused, in her own opinion and in the opinions of others, with the behavior she performs. As Anna Chave demonstrates, art critics were more likely to conflate women than men with their artwork.122 For Piper to simply deny that she behaves in daily life as she does in her Catalysis actions would have been insufficient; it might only have drawn attention to the possibility of her own deception. For example, in her interview with Lippard, Piper admitted to being somewhat confused and uncertain about the distinction between how she imagines her audience responds to her and how they truly regard her. Can art be distinguished from personality? For Piper, the ability to intuit how her audience sees her is a matter of controlling herself and viewers—something she can never fully achieve. While experimenting with solipsism, she reflexively configured her appearance as an “art object,” claiming to define herself autonomously in performance, protected by “the rules [she has] constructed for acting.”123 She refuses to see herself as others do, but she also claims to self-consciously incorporate viewers’ reactions into her self-image. Piper imagined herself in opposition to what becomes the necessary “constitutive outside” for her artistic persona—the figure of the person she is certain she is not but fears she might become—by marking her body as an art object for the duration of her Catalysis actions and, to complete the distinction, presenting herself in her writings as alienated from this adorned exterior.124 The irrational and psychotic persona Piper adopts for her artistic actions becomes the person she cannot be. Piper might also imagine viewers’ confusion, dismissing whatever they think of her as incorrect and inconsequential. Instead, she understood her behavior rationally—as rational behavior—because she knew beforehand the predetermined conditions of her performance. The probCatalysis  195

lem for Piper became convincing others, after the fact, that her actions were art. She did this by presenting the Catalysis series in exhibitions and publications only through accounts she wrote after the fact, with few exceptions. She typically presented her texts as art rather than documentation. It is significant, therefore, that she does not explain her Catalysis actions to those who witnessed them firsthand; that would alert viewers too soon to the artificiality of her appearance, making the kind of experience she sought impossible. Instead, Piper addressed her texts to an audience that was familiar with the discourse of art but that had not seen her actions.125 In the labored and pedantic prose of the intellectualized accounts Piper wrote afterward, her seemingly lunatic actions become consciously premeditated. It is impossible to know whether Piper ever unconsciously incorporated Catalysis actions into her daily behavior. Art critics might have assumed she did if she had not crafted the distinction between herself as artist and as art object. Describing Catalysis III, for example, she does not write that she went shopping at Macy’s and then mention in some offhanded way that her clothing happened to be covered in wet paint. Instead, she cites the performance as an example of premeditated actions designed to appear spontaneous and uncontrolled: Preserving the power and uncategorized nature of the confrontation; not overtly defining myself to viewers as artwork by performing any unusual or theatrical actions of any kind. These actions tend to define the situation in terms of the pre-established categories of “guerilla theatre,” “event,” “happening,” “streetwork,” etc., making viewer disorientation and Catalysis more difficult. E.g. Catalysis III, in which I painted a set of clothing with sticky white paint with a sign attached saying “WET PAINT,” then went shopping at Macy’s for some gloves and sunglasses.126 Piper does not reject theatricality—she rejects its appearance. There are precedents for using shock in the theater. Bertolt Brecht, for example, called for a theater in which the means for making the familiar strange makes itself obvious, setting up daily life—as well as the performance— for critique.127 Piper attempts something very different; by shopping for gloves while covered in wet paint, she presents herself as an anomaly within a familiar setting, rejecting the isolated action or gesture as too theatrical.128 196   Chapter 4

In seeking an alternative to gesture, Piper follows the example of Yvonne Rainer’s oppositional dance of the 1960s, work with which she became familiar from attending all three performances of The Mind Is a Muscle.129 Rainer rejected the conventional dance phrase that always creates a “framed” moment that “becomes the focus of attention,” as in a photograph.130 Instead, as Carrie Lambert argues, Rainer developed choreography of constant motion in which no action can be isolated. As a result, Lambert writes, “each perceived motion is governed by—and signifies—nothing but the presence and action of the physical body itself.”131 Photography, on the other hand, isolates the dancer’s movements, reducing the body’s movement to a sequence of gestures.132 In order to maintain the element of surprise in performance, therefore, Piper waits to distinguish herself from her actions retroactively with texts. As she would learn from the one instance when she allowed a photograph of one of her actions to be published, the performance photograph did not distinguish the artist from her actions. Photography and Documentary Risk

To ensure that she would not be mistaken for the anti-social person she appeared to be in performance, Piper distinguished in her writings between the “art object” she made of her body and her subjectivity as author. The difference is apparent, for example, in her frequent use of the past tense to mark the completion and subsequent evaluation of the actions she describes. Nevertheless, some people did understand Piper’s behavior as representative of who they thought she was. Piper recognized that for most viewers of her actions, “there is very little that separates what [she’s] doing from quirky personal activity.”133 Just as Chris Burden became known as the artist who had himself shot and Vito Acconci acquired a reputation for masturbating in an art gallery, Piper could have become known as the artist who harassed people in the street. Twoand-a-half years after she began Catalysis, she subtitled her collected writings about it, “The Autobiography of an Art Object,” in order to alert readers to this danger. The intellectual rigor of her text represents a concerted effort to wrangle with her self-conception and counter ways she imagined audiences saw her. Piper’s decisions about how to present her Catalysis actions call attention to conventions of documentation that she rejected. For example, her choice not to exhibit or publish photographs of her Catalysis actions, Catalysis  197

with the one exception of Mayer’s article, exerts a degree of control over how they may be represented and understood, denying potential viewers the illusion of knowing precisely what happened. Piper’s ability to shock viewers with her actions depends on her appearance as an anomaly, that is, as something unconventional. Photography, by arresting motion and isolating gesture, has the power to isolate the individual and make her available for classification. To be photographed, as Allan Sekula has argued, is to participate in the archive, and photography’s archival promise is that the individual only has meaning in relation to others already identified. Furthermore, photography subjects its objects to what Sekula calls “two . . . public looks: a look up, at one’s ‘betters,’ and a look down, at one’s ‘inferiors.’ ”134 To be photographed, therefore, is to allow oneself to be judged either exemplary or degenerate, and Piper has been called both by art critics and historians. Such simultaneous elevation and denigration often results from photography’s documentary claims.135 The issue of objectification was a particular concern for African Americans. Fierce public debates surrounding “Harlem on My Mind” demonstrated that an exhibition of photographs meant to be progressive could also become a liability for those it intended to celebrate. For example, some art critics criticized the multi-media exhibition for a lack of authenticity because, as the Village Voice photography critic A. D. Coleman wrote, it lacked “a room devoted to the vermin of Harlem, with still photos, slides, and films of roaches, lice, and rats crawling over babies, adults, food, toothbrushes, to the accompaniment of a tape playing, over and over, the obscene scuffling noises of rodents in the walls.”136 As Steven Dubin has pointed out, even liberal white critics’ expectations— based on stereotype but also on the imagery of such black documentarians as Gordon Parks—could denigrate those they meant to uplift.137 In the early 1970s, when Piper made Catalysis, the issue was further complicated by the Black Power and Black Arts movements, which changed the ways African Americans viewed and represented themselves, but sometimes also emphasized documentary realism and positive imagery to the point that other artforms could be considered not properly black.138 For Piper, who had never publicly associated her work with a history of African American art, documentary photography must have seemed a potential liability. Furthermore, by the time Piper began her Catalysis series, artists

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were generally aware of documentary photography’s deficiencies.139 Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow, Lynda Benglis, Acconci, Rainer, and others who engaged in performative practices had begun to use photography self-consciously to produce photo-based artworks that made their refusal to “document” originary actions apparent.140 The distinction Piper makes between the written account and the photographic record recognizes how each artwork determines the viewer’s experience, but also how it must relinquish its final form and meaning to the conditions of its exhibition, including the viewer’s own predilections, aesthetic, and otherwise. Piper’s use of text and photograph in such earlier works as her Hypothesis series, such contemporaneous works as Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece and Food for the Spirit, and her Mythic Being project, embraces both the art object’s potential to convey information and its inadequacy to contain experience, requiring that the viewer resolve the limits of the unforeseen and unknowable for him- or herself. Likewise, Piper’s reluctance to document Catalysis with photographs demonstrates that she became aware of how viewers were not always capable of making such distinctions. At approximately the same time Piper first presented her Catalysis series as art, Burden documented his own performances in ways that exploited the uncertainty of the photo-document. He embraced the still photograph’s evident incompleteness to reveal the discrepancy between document and event, act and actor, to encourage viewers to reflect on conventions of viewing and interpretation. He thus presents almost all his performances from 1971–1975 by means of a single black-and-white photograph and a very brief written description.141 For example, Burden describes his most notorious piece, Shoot (1971), this way: “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.”142 Unlike most of his other actions, Shoot is represented by more than one published photograph, and these can be organized into what viewers might assume is the correct chronological sequence. But even with several photographs and a very precise, if frustratingly succinct description, the documentation of Burden’s performance seems inadequate.143 Viewers are left aware that the paucity of information prevents the complete reconstruction of the event.144 In an interview from 1993, the artist claimed that this was his intention:

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I used photographic stills. I was very careful not to use film or video to record most of the performances, because I think most people, then, were not sophisticated enough to look at a video or film and necessarily understand that they were not seeing the real thing, so there was a built-in misunderstanding and you could go away from the film with a misrepresentation. Still photographs have been around longer so people understand that they’re only a symbol of what was there, they are more easily able to separate the stills from the reality of the actual event.145 The point is that the viewer can perceive no “original” performance by comparing the document to “the reality of the actual event.” Instead, the viewer becomes aware of the document’s inadequacy, and as a consequence is left to reflect on what he or she does see and how the artist presents it. Just as art critics explained Piper’s actions according to the reputation she acquired for making antagonistic art, Burden’s minimal documentation enables the aggrandizement of his actions. Piper’s and Burden’s approaches, while different, are also both in accord with Allan Kaprow’s efforts to prevent documentation of his Happenings from being perceived as a complete account of some originary event. By 1962, Kaprow had begun refusing to allow photographers to take pictures of his Happenings and instead scripted photography into the works.146 He suggested leaving even more to chance when he stated in 1966 that he wanted each of his Happenings to persist by word-of-mouth rather than through documentation, welcoming the potential for distortion and embellishment through successive retellings. Kaprow published performance scripts and photographs but argued for “discouraging direct evaluation” of Happenings after the fact, preferring that they continue to exist as “the myth of an art that is nearly unknown and . . . unknowable.”147 Partly as a way to refuse some of the artist’s authority to adjudicate and control accounts of participants’ experiences, Kaprow anticipated something different: Instead, [the Happenings] would be measured by the stories that multiply, by the printed scenarios and occasional photographs of works that have passed on forever—and altogether would evoke an aura of something breathing just beyond our immediate grasp rather than a documentary to be judged. In effect, this is calculated rumor, 200   Chapter 4

the purpose of which is to stimulate as much fantasy as possible, so long as it leads away from the artists and their affairs.148 According to this model, a Happening that is realized is never completed, developing organically each time it is discussed. Entering the public realm of the art world as gossip and legend, the work embraces both its reputation and its criticism; while the work may always be associated with the artist, over time it has the potential to become less about Kaprow and more about storytelling and collective memory. Of course, a contradiction inherent in Kaprow’s attitude is that the artist’s reputation may itself become aggrandized in the process. Nevertheless, another possibility is that the viewer becomes self-conscious about the process of viewing, recognizing that the artist’s performance has been superseded by perception. Gossip, as Irit Rogoff has argued, can serve the insecurities of those people who attempt to defend hegemonic histories against queer, feminist, and post-colonial critiques. She offers the example of ways in which sensationalist accounts of Ana Mendieta’s death, possibly at the hands of her husband, Carl Andre, served to marginalize her. Rogoff finds gossip a particularly rich field for the feminist critique of Modernist criticism because it exists just beyond the bounds of acceptable academic and art critical discourse, troubling the authority of each.149 To court gossip about one’s artwork means rendering the viewer’s experience excessively proximate, revealing its particularity. One inadvertent consequence of doing this unsuccessfully, however, might be to create a caricature of oneself. Piper avoids this by developing techniques for documenting her performances that prevent the confusion of artist with artwork. Piper might have found herself in the same bind as Günter Brus, an Austrian artist who had walked the streets of Vienna covered in white paint five years before Catalysis III. Differences between the artists’ presentations of their superficially similar performances are notable. Brus, for his now-legendary Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna Walk) (July 5, 1965) (fig. 43), painted himself white from head to toe with a black stripe running the length of his body. It concluded with the artist’s arrest for “disturbing the peace in a public space” because, a policeman charged, he was “painted with white paint . . . in a manner liable to cause offense.”150 Brus’s arrest is documented in a series of photographs that established his reputation, though they were not published or exhibited outside Europe until years later.151 The action

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43  Günter Brus, Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna Walk), 1965. From a series

of sixteen black-and-white photographs, each 50 × 60 cm. Edition of 35. © The Essl Collection, Klosterneuburg, Vienna.

assumed legendary status in the international art world, like much of the Viennese Actionists’ work, through rumor, hearsay, and the artists’ own publications. As found in the response to his actions, photographic work, and writings, however, the consequences of obscuring the distinction between act and actor appear mixed. Brus and his fellow Actionists, unlike Piper, encouraged the transposition of their work into the realm of fantasy and allowed art historians to imagine that the violence and psychosis they staged was real. As a result, their work has been regarded in extreme terms, as literally revolutionary, pure lunacy, or dangerously nihilistic.152 Although Brus’s work of the 1960s addresses specific conventions of both painting and theater, he has more recently had to point this out to counter assumptions that his work is the result of psychotic compulsions or mental illness. Whereas Piper wrote her texts in an alternately objectivist and philosophical tenor, Brus’s writings of the 1960s embraced the image of sexual sadism and life-threatening violence that some of his photographs and 202   Chapter 4

actions created, enhancing the seeming extremity of his behavior. Calling his work “Self-Mutilation” (Selbstverstümmelung), Brus’s actions until this period consisted primarily of painting himself and others, sometimes naked and other times clothed, in actions privately staged for his collaborators’ cameras.153 Brus’s destination before his arrest in July 1965 was an exhibition that consisted largely of staged performative photographs presented as artworks in themselves. Nevertheless, perhaps due to documentary photography’s ubiquity in the 1960s, Actionist photographs have typically been understood as documents, causing even ardent researchers to believe the violence they see in them (Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s reputed death from severing his own penis with a razor blade—debunked only in 1990—is the most legendary example of this).154 Brus never seriously injured himself or placed himself in mortal danger, but the persona he adopted for his writings was that of a suicidal and murderous psychotic who did not limit himself to working in paints. In an untitled text published the same year as Wiener Spaziergang, Brus described an asylum for the insane in first-person, stream-ofconsciousness form. The artist’s violently misogynist fantasies become those of an uninhibited inmate’s: HOSPITAL—The sex killer drives a panel-pin into his ear-hole—. . . A glass of SPERM has fallen over—Kill the neighbours with an AXE— KNIVES and fingers lying around—The eyelids have been sewn together—the outer ears were removed—A bent galvinised nail looms out of the small navel-shaped hole—Murder—A seam runs along the middle of the skull—. . . The IDIOT strangles himself with BARBED WIRE—SHOCK—The model railway is beneath the cot—The hacked-off foot is in the high-heeled shoe . . .155 In this text, the artist cannot extract himself from his work, investing himself in what Antonin Artaud called “The Theater of Cruelty,” “a kind of unique language halfway between gesture and thought.”156 In Brus’s hands, as in Artaud’s, act and actor are inextricable, each the result of the other in a tableau that destroys objectivity. Identity—that of both actor and spectator—results from metaphysical sensuality, not detached contemplation. The author’s apparent inability to reflect upon his text signals confusion; Brus’s writings serve only to naturalize the artist/ author’s identification with his work. Piper, by adopting the pseudo-scientific conventions of ConceptualCatalysis  203

ism, performing most of her Catalysis actions in situations where denizens of the art world would not witness them and then describing her actions in a voice of objective detachment, appears to have attempted to prevent art critics from attributing her behavior to madness or a yearning for commercial success and publicity. Instead, her street actions precipitate an empirical consciousness that, in her writings, she develops into a rational system of moral behavior. Brus, on the other hand, waited twenty-five years to retell the story of Wiener Spaziergang in the language of circumspect objectivity; his writings of 1965 refuse detachment and so do not make the moral and cognitive leap to which Piper’s texts aspire.157 Piper’s descriptions of the actions she undertook mostly beyond the view of her readers refuse them the coveted perspective of witness. By embracing the typed text and refusing narrative recollection, Piper avoids photography’s pitfalls and the confusion of author and text promised by Brus’s stream-of-consciousness form. Whether the reader stands in the museum with photocopied pages or sits at home with the book or magazine, Piper’s texts call attention to themselves and to the environmental circumstances of reading in space and time. It is precisely the extreme contrast in the work’s empirical qualities that distinguishes the reader—and the author—from both the artist and the witness. The reader is not inadequate in relation to the witness of the original action (assuming the photograph documents an originary event). Instead, whether reading one of Piper’s texts or skirting the artist’s painted form at Macy’s, the reader/viewer is made to recognize that his or her experience of the work is unique.

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​5

Food for the Spirit Transcendence and Desire

Adrian Piper spent the summer of 1971 studying Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in-depth for the first time while fasting and practicing yoga alone in her loft. Enduring a hot New York summer engaged in the solitary pursuit of Kant, yoga, and juice fasts might sound unpleasant, but Piper has repeatedly referred to this experience as one of profound and rewarding selfdiscovery; it seems to have been a source of intellectual pleasure more than of physical discomfort. Piper writes of experiencing an exhilaratingly visceral “fear of losing myself” in transcendent study and meditation, which she countered with “the ‘reality check’ in the mirror”:1 she would interrupt her study of Kant to stand before a full-length mirror, make an audio recording of herself reading the particular passage that had caused her to doubt her material existence, and snap a photograph of her reflected image (plate 15). She took refuge in her bodily senses: “The sight and sound of me, the physically embodied Adrian Piper, repeating passages from Kant reassured me by demarcating the visual, verbal, and aural boundaries of my individual self, and reminded me of the material conditions of my mental state.”2 To withdraw from Kant’s text whenever she feared she had become too involved in it, Piper developed a process that enabled her to stop reading and make a distinct object of her self. The photograph and audio recording, combined with Piper’s handwritten annotations on Kant’s text (plate 16), rep-

resent the artist’s bodily experiences and conscious deliberation—but in such a way as to simultaneously reveal her need to recognize them as her own, analyze them, and repeat the process. Emerging within Food for the Spirit as a rational subject, Piper grounds her claim to the transpersonal universality of Kantian metaphysics in personal experience. However, by emphasizing the need to repeat her attempts to master the material conditions of experience, she poses her claim in the form of a dilemma she cannot resolve conclusively. It is the evidence that her experiences are those of a woman who might or might not be black that signals the feminist politics of her dilemma and her critique of philosophical convention. Piper performs “the ‘reality check’ in the mirror” as a crisis of Kantian subjectivity: how can the social subject Kant describes attain transcendental rationality and truth? Piper presents this question as central to Kant’s conception of the self.3 Judith Butler acknowledges the same paradox and bases her feminist critique of Kant upon it. Butler concludes that the threat that particularlity poses to the universalist project is to reveal their incompatibility such that one requires the negation of the other.4 Ronald Judy similarly argues that Kant’s prejudice against blacks, as the antithesis of good judgment, demonstrates the crisis that perception poses for transcendence.5 These critiques open up the possibility for women and blacks to perform their exclusion from metaphysical discourse as a way of exposing and historicizing the silence it requires of them. Piper presented this as a problem in Food for the Spirit—one she continues to explore in her philosophical work. In 1985, for example, Piper proposed that resolution can only result from a rigorously selfreflexive awareness of conditions under which the subject is “defined by the particular social imperatives, recognized and unrecognized, to which it actively responds.”6 Psychoanalysis assumes that while adherence to norms sometimes seems to come effortlessly, it is at those inevitable moments when social norms appear unattainable that the subject recognizes their effect. Piper makes the case, in Food for the Spirit and since, for additional paths to self-consciousness. In Food for the Spirit, it is not only bodily sensations that interrupt transcendence; it is Piper’s deliberate attempts to embrace them. In other words, Piper appears concerned not only with how experience and the ways in which she has learned to understand it impose upon her study of philosophy and meditation. She also acknowledges that she takes pleasure in the bodily experience and sensory consciousness she is unwilling to relinquish. The photographs 206   Chapter 5

in Food for the Spirit introduce Piper’s experiences into discourse, to be understood by most viewers as a woman’s, and perhaps as a bohemian black woman’s. Did Piper understand her experiences as a black woman’s? The work offers no clear evidence she did; which is to say, she might have. Piper made the work at the time she began “thinking about [her] position as an artist, a woman, and a black.”7 Black women who attempted to address the interrelationships of these identities often found themselves marginalized by artists and by activists in the Black Power and women’s movements. Furthermore, as the black feminist photographer Lorraine O’Grady points out, there was no known precedent for Piper to emulate if she wanted to make nude or almost-nude photographs of herself as a black woman.8 Since the late 1960s, black feminists have sought the means to articulate their sexuality, first by identifying the interrelated problems of invisibility and overexposure: the stereotype of black women’s hypersexuality has served to justify and naturalize their denigration and exploitation. Consequently, black women, with the encouragement of black men, had historically addressed this threat of overexposure by maintaining a proprietary silence about their sexuality. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, black feminists began to reject the resulting invisibility as a debilitating form of denial and disenfranchisement.9 For O’Grady, writing more than two decades later, the nude photographs Piper made of herself are important because they fulfill a need for black women to establish for themselves “a paradigm for the willingness to look, to get past embarrassment and retrieve the mutilated body.”10 Significantly, Piper finds no easy solution. To borrow O’Grady’s terms, it is possible to describe Piper’s process as necessarily simultaneous “auto-expression” and “auto-critique.”11 Furthermore, if Food for the Spirit gives form to black women’s sexuality, it did not do so publicly until the 1980s. Piper calls the work a “private loft performance” and it was not until 1981, a decade after she made the work, that she described it in a brief essay for High Performance, a journal of performance art. She did not exhibit the work until her retrospective at the Alternative Museum in 1987.12 Interpreting Food for the Spirit as Piper’s critical engagement with the discursive figure of her silence requires asking not only how the artwork gives new form to the repressed figure of black women’s sexuality but also how the privacy Piper maintained about it reveals and reiterates certain societal expectations of discretion and respectability. Food for the Spirit  207

Food for the Spirit proposes to imagine a process by which the subject can learn to recognize the norms governing behavior and reconfigure them. Kant calls for the rational subject to recognize the importance of personal responsibility. Every subject, by whom Kant means European men, is rationally capable of defining the moral law for himself. Piper claims that rationality is a “natural phenomenon,” too, but one that unites all humans. This requires that she acknowledge something else Kant cannot: that each culture will establish its own norms for the expression of rationality.13 More importantly, Piper’s critique of Kant reformulates his concept of the Categorical Imperative, the process by which the subject comes to understand experiences by fitting them into pre-existing categories. Piper argues that anomalous experience—encountering information that does not easily fit preexisting categories—has the capacity to force the subject to become aware that preconceptions are somehow insufficient or wrong because they are governed by social norms. The resultant self-awareness renders the categories available for critique. Piper’s reconceptualization of rational self-determination provides a pragmatic solution for which Kant did not allow. This belief is one of the philosophical bases for Piper’s attack on racism as a form of xenophobia, or fear of the unexpected and unfamiliar.14 Piper argues for the importance of rationality, therefore, as the source of “impartiality, intellectual discrimination, foresight, deliberation, prudence, self-reflection [and] self-control”—the qualities required to reconfigure categories of knowledge with an open mind.15 Rationality enables the subject to pursue “clarity and truth as a goal, with patience, persistence, precision, and a nonjudgmental openness to discussion and contention as means.”16 Transcendence is rare, and it is also always momentary.17 Significantly, however, Food for the Spirit does not offer answers. Instead, it presents Piper’s claim to Kantian rationality in the form of a question. If, in 1971, cultural norms silenced any black woman who made a claim to universality, then Piper performed a critical reiteration of the conventions of metaphysical philosophy by claiming the ability to inhabit the transcendence Kant’s text promises. This is precisely the form Butler has since imagined a feminist, queer, or “postcolonialist” critique of rationality must take.18 By acknowledging norms of gender, race, and metaphysical philosophy, Piper simultaneously lays claim to universality while critiquing and historicizing its traditionally imperfect application. This project has its limits, which Piper recognizes. 208   Chapter 5

She argues that the subject, however conscious of norms, does not have direct or unmediated access to them—only to his or her perceptions of them.19 The subject might be aware that behavior is governed by norms without knowing precisely how. Piper’s photographs initiate a process that makes this apparent, to a point. How might Piper’s exploration of her own consciousness initiate a process by which viewers will learn about the norms they find themselves invested in? Self-Control and the Critique of Empiricism

Piper has presented Food for the Spirit in several forms since she created it in the summer of 1971 and the objects that comprise the work vary depending on the exhibition. In 1987, Piper exhibited the work she had made in 1971, comprising fourteen black-and-white snapshots of herself arranged in a notebook among heavily annotated pages torn from her copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Thirteen of the original fourteen snapshots that Piper included in Food for the Spirit were reprinted in a limited edition by the Thomas Erben Gallery in 1997. Enlarged to a size of sixteen-by-sixteen inches, the newer prints are much larger than the original drugstore prints. Thomas Erben and Piper both say that these reflect the artist’s original, unrealized intentions.20 Piper made the photographs to provide herself with proof of the empirical coherence of her embodied conscious and unconscious self. In the essay Piper wrote in 1981 for the work’s first public presentation, she describes how both reason and sensuality threatened to overwhelm her.21 Food for the Spirit became a means to regain self-control. Lost in the reveries of Kant’s metaphysics, Piper was no longer certain of who she was—or even whether she was—until she could match her imagined self-image with the corresponding representation in the mirror, on the audiotape, and in the photograph. The prevailing assumption about Piper’s snapshots is that they are photographs of the artist’s body that offer proof of her agency and selfdetermination, and not, as I will argue, evidence of an unfulfilled desire to see them this way. The uses to which these photographs have been put suggest how fully Piper, like anyone else, is socially invested in the discursive structures of meaning. For example, when a single photograph from the series is reproduced in a coffee-table book dedicated to photographs of women’s breasts, Master Breasts: Objectified, Aestheticized, Fantisized, Eroticized, Feminized by Photography’s Most Titillating Masters . . . , Food for the Spirit  209

Piper’s body appears to be that of a seductively beautiful young woman, perhaps exposing herself for the voyeuristic pleasure of an imagined viewer.22 The title of the book proclaims each photographer’s capacity to control his or her subject matter—to master a woman’s body and its parts through technical and artistic ability. This interpretation of Food for the Spirit is implicit in other instances, too, as when the Whitney Museum exhibited all fourteen photographs in such a way that Piper’s body cannot be seen as anything other than that of a black woman involved in the feminist and civil rights movements.23 The seemingly progressive example from the Whitney Museum offers evidence of the need historians feel to identify the author of Food for the Spirit as a black woman whose work will always represent her as such, and of how this well-meaning impulse can overdetermine interpretations of an artwork that raises more questions about the certainty of identity and experience than it answers. I want to argue that if the photographs Piper included in Food for the Spirit represent the artist’s body, then this is evidence that the artist seeks proof of her existence that photography fails to provide. In other words, I disagree with those historians who have treated Food for the Spirit as a successful attempt at self-affirmation. For example, there is nothing in the work to support Jane Farver’s claim, in one of the first discussions of Food for the Spirit, that by “giving confirmation to her own reality. . . . Adrian Piper’s self-transformations do not . . . hide her, but serve to make her more transparent to us. They reflect her inner convictions and her intentions.”24 Nor is there evidence to support Joanna Frueh’s conclusion that in Food for the Spirit, “Piper distinctly gives the female body a mind.”25 This is not to say that Piper’s work is a failure. At issue for both Farver and Frueh is the matter of self-determination. They understand Piper as having achieved conscious and deliberate control of her body, which Frueh conflates with Piper’s psyche and subjectivity: “Piper makes a point of the black female body speaking for itself. Unclothed in one of the ritually repeated shots, Piper observes herself: she takes her own picture and controls the looking.”26 According to this interpretation, Piper’s work is not critically self-reflexive. Instead, it only questions other artists’ representations of black women’s bodies—a necessary project but not the only one in which Piper is engaged. Amelia Jones offers the most compelling interpretation of Food for the Spirit as an instance of self-determination. Her discussion of Piper comes in the midst of her discussion of how Carolee Schneemann and 210   Chapter 5

Hannah Wilke created performances that locate subjectivity in the tension between embodied subjectivity and social norms, so that the artists “unhinge the gendered oppositions structuring conventional models of art production and interpretation.”27 However, Jones interprets Piper’s work differently. She allows that, like Schneemann and Wilke, Piper engaged critically with conventional representations of women and whiteness and, more importantly, that the subject will always imagine herself in relationship to such images. Jones argues that Schneemann’s and Wilke’s performative self-representations stage the compulsion to identify with conventional and debilitating images of women in order to distance themselves from it, initiating a devastating critique of gender and its performance. Yet she argues that Piper challenges convention simply by presenting herself as she is. Jones assumes that Piper’s photographs provide certain and conclusive evidence of her identity, that she is “a black woman who could pass for white, and a philosopher who doesn’t ‘look like one.’ ”28 According to Jones, the threat Piper presents to convention—that she is not who she appears to be—has nothing to do with the process Piper developed for making the photographs in Food for the Spirit or with the artwork in which they appear. This message is reinforced when Jones illustrates Food for the Spirit with one square photograph that has been cropped to fit the vertical format of her book in a way that transforms it: the cropped reproduction isolates and removes Piper’s image from both the snapshot and the artwork in which she presented it, so that the emphasis is on Piper’s body as it appears in the photograph rather than on the photograph itself.29 In short, Jones argues that Piper’s work is important simply because it exists as a picture of a black woman who “doesn’t ‘look like one.’ ”30 Jones’s use of the photograph counteracts Piper’s own use of it in Food for the Spirit. Certainly, the ability of black women to make self-affirming photographs or portraits is crucial and must be recognized. The black feminist photographer and scholar Carla Williams recounts her own first experiences of making nude photographs of herself at the age of seventeen or eighteen. What is most striking is her recollection of what made her feel self-conscious and what did not: I felt terribly mature and far removed from what I had always been taught about such exposure. I believed that there was an artistic precedent for it . . . It never occurred to me then that there was anything

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extraordinary about the fact that I was black and making such images. Yet, when I think back on it, I realize that I had never seen a nude of another black woman when I began to photograph myself. The experience Williams describes was one of affirmation and she concludes that the knowledge she has since acquired about the history of photographs of the black female nude—of the subject’s rarity, of the “interplay . . . between imposed representation and selfrepresentation”—has empowered her further. She says, “[it provides] a base from which I can begin to define my likeness, as well as my sexuality, in the context of my humanity.” As a critical practice, then, photography provides her with the means to “take control of [her] own representation.” She writes, “I revel in my own skin.”31 However, photography can do more than just this. For example, Kobena Mercer argues that it can be mobilized to reveal and discredit the myth of black hypersexuality, a fundamental fetish of Western racialized discourse that stands in for and serves to justify the supposed absence of black culture. Mercer has demonstrated that this myth can be mobilized ambiguously, to operate “in-and-against such tropes of racial fetishism,” as he puts it, “in order to revalorize that which has historically always been devalorized.” Such a project would simultaneously place the power of the stereotype into question, along with the complex cultural forms through which white supremacy sustains itself.32 Piper organized the materials in Food for the Spirit so that they appear to refute photography’s documentary capacity and its claims of mastery. For example, the repetitive process Piper says she developed in Food for the Spirit implies an unfulfilled desire for self-control. A photograph can only prove the past presence of the object it records, and Piper found this inadequate. Instead, “the ritually repeated shots” cast the body as a field for contested representations, posing itself always as a question to which there can be no definitive answer.33 As a consequence, she explains in a brief, unpublished introductory note she inserted into the Food for the Spirit notebook in the 1980s, “I recorded these attempts to anchor myself . . . These attempts did not succeed, so I eventually abandoned them.”34 The result was a failure of empiricism, resulting in further uncertainty and the need to repeat the process or accept its inadequacy. In Food for the Spirit, Piper’s body cannot be captured by the photograph, giving the artist license to embark on the process of metaphysical transcendence

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her study of Kant’s philosophy promised while simultaneously figuring wariness about the peculiarly silent complicity universality seems to demand of the subject. Transcendence and Desire

Paradoxically, Kant’s First Critique provided Piper with the basis for her dissociation from it. She distinguished her own rational consciousness from Kant’s text by reminding herself “of the material conditions of [her] mental state”: she writes, “the Critique was a book with good ideas in it which I had chosen to study.” In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes that the subject first recognizes an object outside of himor herself through the empirical conditions of a sensuous encounter. For example, Piper says that in the passage of Kant’s book she found most affecting, Kant describes how a person apprehends and recognizes an object. She recognized she was following Kant’s explanation as if it were a set of instructions and began to see the book for itself; Kant’s text became apparent to her as a material object as well as an abstract philosophy.35 It is this self-reflective process that enables the subject to rationally deduce that an object exists. Significantly, the subject comes to know the object not as the object in itself, but as the conditions of an experience anticipated and confirmed by the intellect. In turn, the Kantian subject knows him- or herself through rational understanding of sensations experienced in space and time—a process that requires the subject to represent experiences to him- or herself.36 This thesis sets up one of the problems at the center of Kant’s First Critique: How can the subject, who Kant seems to assume is a man, arrive at an understanding of himself as an autonomous and rational being who can transcend the bodily demands that control animals, women, Africans, and anyone else from whom Kant considered himself different, but who is dependent upon empirical sensuality, nevertheless? Piper’s encounter with Kant’s book as a material object distinct from her embodied self while she also struggled for conscious control of the intellectual experience of studying Kant’s philosophy can be regarded as a practical investigation of Kant’s theory of human consciousness—one that will make it available for critique. Piper’s inability to remove herself from Kant’s text—manifest in her desire to recognize herself in the universal figure he describes as well as in her inability not to see herself in and through Kant’s text—exposes Food for the Spirit  213

the paradox of narcissism inherent in Kant’s exposition, one that leaves Kant unable to transcend his own particularity. The pose of critical objectivity for which Piper strives is the same one Kant assumes by writing in the third-person voice of disembodied authority. Objectivity depends upon a structure of disidentification founded in the subject’s embodied particularity. By writing in the third-person voice, for example, Kant describes himself by means of an identification with an other, the universal subject. Paradoxically, Kant cannot personally identify with that subject and write in the first person because to do so would render his philosophy particular and therefore inapplicable to anyone else. Not only must Kant distinguish himself from those people, including Africans and women, whose experience and intellects he believes are too particularized to identify with his universal figure, but Kant must even distance himself from his representation of ideal subjectivity in order to sustain its universality. In Food for the Spirit, Piper enacts the very tensions that structure Kant’s text, objectifying herself in order to sustain her individuality. The body’s materiality threatens to interrupt the subject’s transcendence; the particular refuses the possibility of the universal. Kant makes this clear, stating that “the elements of our judgments so far as they relate to pleasure or pain . . . do not belong to transcendental philosophy, which is exclusively concerned with pure a priori modes of knowledge.”37 The activity of reason must deny, or at least mediate and defer, the sensuous. In Food for the Spirit, Piper reconfigures this threat as a promise—as a means to reassert her subjectivity in the face of the universal abstraction that Kant’s rationalism required her to inhabit. Each time Piper begins to doubt her bodily existence, therefore, she reaffirms it according to a premeditated process that enables her to refuse to obey Kant’s instructions. She interrupts her reading, glances in the mirror, and fixes her reflected image indexically on film. The index is a physical trait or impression left by the direct imprint of a now-absent object. Piper achieves agency in snapping the shutter and exposing herself to the film because making an object of her body provides her with the image of a coherent self. She seeks the comfort of recognizing herself in the index, identifying with it to prevent ontological uncertainty from developing into pathological insecurity and madness. The index is always insufficient, however. As Rosalind Krauss argues, a “supplemental discourse” is required to associate an object with its 214   Chapter 5

photograph.38 This is because the photograph can only present an image of the past in a historical relationship to the object that made its mark— “ghostly traces of departed objects,” Krauss writes, that mark the desired return of something lost.39 The surface of Piper’s reflection is at hand, but the moment it reflects eludes her. Perhaps to activate this still image, Piper also tape-records herself. Her body and intellect are reduced to mimetic recitation mechanically reproduced. The resulting image and audiotape capture the attempt, but not the attainment, to matter: she inadvertently conceals herself—she is absent, obscured, and fragmented within the singular indices of her past actions as photographer and reader. The danger Piper describes facing was that, while testing the body’s limits through the corporeal meditation of yoga and long-term fasting, she would successfully overcome sensuality and lose herself either to “a transcendent reality of disembodied self-consciousness” or Kant’s text. Ultimately it is the latter that poses the greatest threat, pushing Piper to the brink of sanity: The Critique is the most profound book I have ever read, and my involvement was so great that I thought I was losing my mind, in fact losing my sense of self completely. I would read certain passages that were so intensely affecting and deep that I would literally break into a cold sweat. I could think of nothing else, and became obsessed with Kant’s thought; I read it, talked about it, wrote about it, and even dreamed about it constantly. My friends became seriously alarmed when they would call me up and all I could do was babble incoherently about space, time, and the transcendental self. Often, the effect of Kant’s ideas were so strong that I couldn’t take it anymore. I would have to stop reading in the middle of a sentence, on the verge of hysterics, and go to my mirror and peer at myself to make sure I was still there. . . . It felt as though I was on the verge of abdicating my individual self on every level, becoming Kant’s analysis of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception in the Synthesis of Appearances according to Rules Given by the Understanding for Reflective SelfConsciousness.40 Sweating, Piper begins to lose bodily control to Kant’s text. Manifest in her dreams, Kant begins to occupy her unconscious. When friends call to talk, Piper speaks Kant’s words but without mastery. Her effort Food for the Spirit  215

to prove the reality of her body represents the repression of her identification with Kant’s text (Piper inhabits Kant’s voice momentarily to make the potential for identification clear, “becoming Kant’s analysis”). To establish her objectivity as a reader of Kant, she tries to prove the objective reality of her body. As if drawing conclusions from her experience making Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, she identifies herself as an object in order to realize her subjectivity. Narcissism and Self-Reflection

To borrow a term from Freudian psychoanalysis for the discussion of Kant (an effort that is not entirely ahistorical, given that Piper had read Freud a few years prior to reading Kant),41 Piper’s photographic performance of herself—an effort to assure herself of presence—is distinctly but also critically narcissistic. According to Freud, the subject’s ego continually judges itself against an ideal ego of its own unconscious imagination, striving to close the gap between its assessment of itself and this unattainable goal. The ego ideal represents an identification with an idealized other that the ego desires to become. Difference from this other marks the subject’s failure, and repression results from “the selfrespect of the ego” that feels the shame borne of an inability to embody its ideal self and the fear of revealing its inadequacy to others.42 By striving to see herself objectively—that is, by making an object of herself that she can judge as if from the perspective of another—Piper enacts the Freudian subject’s need to see itself in the judgment of others. She simultaneously refuses the feminine self-infatuation to which both Kant and Freud condemn women, performing her narcissism in such a way that she exposes the patriarchal assumptions of the very schema she negotiates to find self-assurance. Freud models his theory of pathological narcissism on what he regards as typically feminine excess, but describes its normal manifestation in terms of the heterosexual male subject. Man’s identification with his able-bodied ego ideal—a persona replete with phallic authority—is a problem for women in Freud’s theory, partly because it is onto women that a man must displace his inability to fully inhabit the massive and substantial frame of his ideal. In the man’s mind, the woman’s lack of a penis marks her apparent lack of the phallus; in describing this distinction to himself, the man disavows his own lack by displacing it onto the woman.43 Unfortunately, this is the primary role for women in Freud’s 216   Chapter 5

theory—as the symbolic and naturalized site of man’s repressed inadequacy. Freud’s theory of narcissism lays a trap for women: he describes narcissism as morally and developmentally necessary in order for any adult to participate in society, yet he defines women as overly narcissistic to the point of decrepit self-satisfaction. A woman disavows her lack by taking undue interest in her own body, he argues, because she finds in her fulsome self-image what he regards as the illusion of bodily wholeness. The woman is content to identify with her imagined self, in whom she has also become libidinally invested, because she is incapable of recognizing her delusion.44 Women and homosexual men serve Freud primarily as case studies of the potential for libidinal overinvestment in the corporeal self: taken to a near-psychotic extreme, narcissism compels the self-satisfied subject to ignore the (imagined) judgment of others that, in the healthy subject, encourages self-restraint and proper identification. Through the mechanism of narcissism, the normal subject identifies himself with an other whom he recognizes as a sort of “cultural and moral” paradigm to which he aspires. Self-respect, therefore, is the product of detachment, objective self-criticism, and acknowledgment of the “cultural and ethical ideas” through which the subject identifies with his idealized other—abilities Freud attributes to men and does not allow women.45 The Freudian ego is therefore embedded in the social realm, as Elizabeth Grosz has argued, at “a meeting point . . . between the body and the social.” Grosz concludes, however, that it is precisely because the ego is a term of negotiation that the body is not a form given a priori that would condemn the female subject (and not the male) to intractable corporeality.46 Seeking comfort in her body, Piper made Food for the Spirit to take momentary refuge in the ontological promise of the photographic index. After her summer studying Kant, Piper assembled the fourteen photographs of herself into a notebook, along with pages torn from her copy of the Critique of Pure Reason. She did not arrange the photographs in the sequence in which she took them, however. Instead, she put them in descending order from the most clear to the darkest, most underexposed image, so that she seems to disappear gradually.47 Paging through the notebook, the photographs and the pages from Kant stage Piper’s struggle to define herself as a creature of reason who is both embodied and rational. The first page bears the cover of Norman Kemp Smith’s translation of Kant, and on the next two notebook pages, one of Piper’s Food for the Spirit  217

self-portraits faces a page from Kant’s text. Over the next several pages, however, Piper has pasted more pages from Kant’s text than photographs. Further into the notebook, the photographs become very dark and Piper seems nearly to disappear until her self-portraits are completely superseded in the last section by nine uninterrupted pages from Kant’s text. Her later arrangement of the self-portraits demonstrates that she ultimately found them insufficiently reassuring. In the introductory note Piper added to Food for the Spirit, she explains that the process of making the photographs failed to reassure her of her “self-identity”: “I eventually abandoned them, and just studied the Critique.” This does not mean that she felt comfortable with Kant’s text. Rather, she concludes her note by remarking, “I found I could not look at or think about the Critique of Pure Reason for two years afterwards.” Furthermore, her notes in the margins of Kant’s text ask whether his approach allows her to achieve anything more certain than a momentary self-awareness, which implies the ultimate failure of a priori knowledge. If so, then she has uncovered a fundamental error in Kant’s theory (one that she has continued to exploit throughout her career in philosophy).48 Piper also employs the photographic index to disarm Freud’s model of feminine corporeality, refusing to inhabit the fleshy image of security he promises women. She takes advantage of photography’s chemical limitations to bring attention to the inadequacy of representation. The photographs at the end of the notebook are underexposed, but even the relatively clear self-portraits at the beginning cannot sustain the illusion of her body’s enduring presence. The matter of the index cannot make up for the ego’s insecurity. This does not stop Piper from trying to fix her encounter with Kant in time and space; she represents Kant’s ideas with pages torn from her copy of his book, drawing attention to “the material conditions of [her] mental state: that the Critique was a book with good ideas in it which [she] had chosen to study.” The embodied presence Piper achieves is momentary, but, modeled on Kant’s First Critique, it contests the patriarchal matrices in which Piper finds herself.49 The fleeting alignment between Piper’s subjectivity and the image she makes of herself also presents itself as a challenge to Modernist criticism. If the Modernist critic needs to establish objective distance from an artwork, then this is manifest as a distinction between sensory consciousness and the always already analyzed conditions of experience— conditions the critic writes about as if removed from them. Piper’s Food 218   Chapter 5

for the Spirit can therefore serve as an early example of what Jones calls “strategic feminist narcissism,” in which women artists performed the libidinal investment all women are assumed to take in their bodies specifically to make such conventions available for analysis.50 Jones points out how controversial it was in the early 1970s for women artists to use their bodies in their art. As her primary example, she offers the various feminist condemnations of Wilke for what critics took to be her narcissism—a charge that unwittingly reiterated patriarchal gender norms.51 Jones makes a compelling argument that the value of Wilke’s work was the way in which it challenged her critics by making art that refused the distanciation they sought, “collaps[ing] the distinction between the subject and she who is desired, between the art object and the art ‘subject’ (the artist)” and, most importantly, “between the art object/subject and the subject of interpretation.”52 Piper’s project, in Food for the Spirit, accomplishes something similar. Jones argues that the point of Wilke’s self-performances was to demonstrate that rationality and objectivity are untenable because, “without distance, one has no ‘perspective,’ no vantage point from which to construct or reaffirm the borders of the frame—one is emphatically not disinterested but fully and pleasurably implicated in the processes of determining meaning.”53 Piper’s work locates this process in time and space, articulated as the tension between the artist’s personal experiences of fasting, practicing yoga, and reading Kant and the various ways in which discourse determines how she can experience these things at any given moment. Universalist transcendence, which appears to offer a way out, becomes embedded paradoxically in the very conditions from which it promises to release the subject. Piper’s art changed profoundly in 1970, and again in 1971. She had already begun to incorporate her audience into her work by 1968, but primarily in the formal terms of space and time. As I discuss in chapter 4, in 1970 and early 1971, during the months before she made Food for the Spirit, Piper engaged in a number of unannounced street actions in which she undertook such mundane activities as shopping or riding the subway adorned in conspicuously anomalous ways. In the fall of 1971, however, after completing Food for the Spirit, her actions became more innocuous and much less antagonistic, and she stopped dressing up for them. For example, one piece she repeated several times was simply to ask strangers unobtrusive questions—inquiring about the time, for exFood for the Spirit  219

ample—in hopes of sparking a conversation and drawing as much personal information from them as possible without revealing anything about herself. What had changed over the summer of 1971, when she made Food for the Spirit? Writing at the time, Piper explained the actions she performed immediately after making Food for the Spirit as an experiment in how other people—and especially strangers—saw her. She did not ask people their opinions of her. Instead, she achieved a greater self-awareness from the alienating experience of observing the reactions others had to her presence: The works . . . exist for the sake of an external audience, and not without it. Further, my aesthetic concerns remain unspoken: They are totally superceded by the audience’s interpretation of my presence. If I discuss or am asked about these works, it is invariably in terms of the audience’s reaction; and this is as it should be. But one result of doing these works was the experience of complete and intense alienation from my audience. At the same time that I existed in and for that audience, I became aware of the extreme disparity between my inner selfimage and the one they had of me.54 Self-recognition necessarily entails misrecognition, as Piper believes she sees herself being seen (by real or imagined others) differently from how she sees or wants to see herself. For Kant, the subject realizes himself in time and space but only as a figure of his own reason. The Kantian subject knows himself on the basis of intuited relationships to external objects and a moral law that the subject formulates for himself (one that will necessarily ignore social conventions, at least in part, to achieve moral perfection). Freud’s theory of narcissism reverses Kant’s model, so that the subject’s self-image results from his or her awareness—and fear—of being watched and judged by others. In this way, the Freudian subject participates in the social conscience by identifying with appropriate role models and seeking to alienate him- or herself from those deemed degenerate. In Food for the Spirit, Piper’s self-portraits realize an imaginary regime of watching herself being watched. Even as they inscribe the artist within discourse, they also offer her a way out. Piper, the first audience for her work, searches the photographs for evidence of herself. What she finds is not an ontological index of her presence, which would naturalize and fix 220   Chapter 5

the image others had of her. Instead, social convention becomes a process of interpretation and is rendered contingent. The artwork performs the regimes that ground the subject in sensuality and desire, pleasure and pain, representing the subject’s need to pursue the metaphysical question of the self. The photographs, as representation, cannot fix Piper ontologically and they do not need to in order to thwart the disembodied transcendence that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason promises. Instead, they provide evidence of impermanence, alienation, and absence. Like the camera shutter’s reflex, the interruption they produce is only momentary; it must be repeated to thwart the metaphysical transcendence to which Piper fearfully aspires. With each “ ‘reality check’ in the mirror,” Piper enacts the tension between the uncertainty of the flesh and the insecurity of reason, taking pleasure in her ability to unsettle both Kant and Freud, if only for an instant. The Social Subject, Solipsism, and the Moral Law

Piper’s texts and photographs stage the body as the terrain of an inconclusive conflict between who the artist appears to be and who she believes she is. In Piper’s descriptions of her later, untitled performances, published in the final sections of Talking to Myself: The Autobiography of an Art Object, Piper attempts to see both self-conceptions through the imagined judgments of her audience. By presenting her self as representation, she attempts to make it available for analysis. It is partly on the basis of the resulting self-alienation that Piper stakes her claim to universal reason. Michel Foucault has captured the paradox of authorship that seems at once to attest to the author’s presence but only as a subject who emerges at the moment of his own self-effacement, “reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence.”55 The text is the author’s proxy that stands in and for his absence, attesting to mastery at the same time as inadequacy. The result is a subject constituted as a historical event that documents itself as the subject’s body, “a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.”56 Piper’s written descriptions of Catalysis assert their materiality as text to acknowledge and affirm how her disguised and objectified body concealed her self in performance. They also represent a futile attempt to reclaim the body she altered in performance as if readers could see it as anything naturally or properly hers. In a text written in October 1971, as well as in her contemporaneous Food for the Spirit  221

interview with Lucy Lippard, Piper described this as the crisis of solipsism, a condition she says she experienced as a loss of self-control due paradoxically to her need to disregard the scrutiny and criticism of her audience. She explains that she felt increasingly isolated as her actions became less intelligible to her viewers. Piper also identified herself as both author and viewer of her actions, stating, “as an art object, I want simply to look outside myself and see the effect of my existence on the world at large.” The result was an experience of increasing self-alienation as well as “complete and intense alienation from my audience.”57 Was Piper’s solipsistic attitude a case of narcissism or a way to take moral responsibility for her work? In her early Catalysis texts, Piper wrote that she countered her discomforting awareness of how others regarded her in performance with a feeling of satisfaction that she was not the abomination they took her for. Yet, she found herself unable to resolve the differences between how viewers saw her and how she regarded herself. Piper finds solipsism useful as a defensive measure against prying eyes, though her inability to disregard the judgment of viewers renders solipsism impossible. Piper tested her feelings of isolation in two contemporaneous untitled actions that she was still experimenting with when she wrote about them. She does not describe altering her appearance for either action. In the first one, she walks down “busy residential streets” and talks out loud about the people she sees in “a continual monologue” with herself. She tries to do this, she explains, without acknowledging her listeners’ reactions, “while . . . attempting to maintain the same manner of presentation as when the object of the monologue” is herself.58 The second action must have appeared even more innocuous: Attempting to draw as much of a person’s life history, feelings, opinions, etc. out of simple random encounters, e.g. asking transportation directions, time, giving my apologies for bumping into someone or for stepping on their toes or for sticking them with my umbrella, having clerks quote prices while shopping, thanking busdrivers for waiting etc.59 In the first action, Piper attempts to force her judgment upon the people around her while remaining impervious to their attentions or protestations. In the second action, Piper invites people to tell her what they

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think she wants to hear; her own interests as an artist making work remain unspoken. Tellingly, in the version of this essay published in Talking to Myself, Piper added the phrase: “while simultaneously effacing my own personality as much as possible.”60 By creating encounters that only she understands and that remain inscrutable to her audience, Piper performs her attempt to attain solipsism in order to feel she has regained control of the situations she instigates. Piper universalizes her experiences in very particular ways when she writes about them as a matter of solipsism—a term Mel Bochner used to identify a particularly paradoxical way of making an art object’s unique qualities apparent: the consequence of a logical system without function, an appearance of “heightened artificiality” and, quoting Bertolt Brecht, “alienation” from the object.61 The artwork might obscure the artist’s interests or bore the viewer, but “as a system it serves to enforce the boundaries of [the] work as ‘things-in-the-world’ separate from both maker and observer.”62 As a result, explanation according to the conventions of either formalism or biographical interpretation is impossible, he claims. What is left provokes the viewer to recognize the object’s proper qualities (“the object of art in terms of its own material individuality— the thing itself”) but as only one part of the encounter.63 Bochner advocates paradox, so that viewers must acknowledge that the art object cannot exist on its own terms or be seen in isolation. The art object can only be experienced, therefore, in terms of the viewer’s own relationship to his or her encounter of it. Piper, by altering her behavior or appearance, drew attention to herself as one sort of person viewers were not accustomed to meeting in public. In a later section of Talking to Myself, Piper notes that when she is engaged in her actions, people seem either to understand her as insane or incomprehensible. Significantly, Piper’s self-described “transition into solipsism” occurs while executing actions that address specific details of her appearance as a woman. She performs activities conventionally associated with women—checking her face in a mirror, shopping for the sort of groceries one buys when dieting (or when vegetarian, as Piper was)—but violates rules of decorum with mildly outlandish alterations of clothing or behavior: Filling a leather purse with catsup, then adding wallet, comb, keys, etc.; opening and digging out change for bus or subway, a comb for

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my hair in the ladies’ room at Macy’s, a mirror to check my face on the bus etc. Wearing shorts, sandals, and a halter top; covering all exposed parts of my body with cotton and feathers; shopping for vegetables and yogurt at Grand Union, Food Co-op and A & P supermarkets. Wearing very large bulky knit pants and shirt; stuffing them with balloons of different shapes and sizes, and riding the subway during the evening rush hour.64 In the last of these actions, Piper obscures her body as if to conceal it protectively from judging eyes, in a way that might make viewers selfconscious about staring. In all of these actions, she seems obsessed with her appearance yet unable to keep from sabotaging herself. It is difficult to read Piper’s descriptions of her actions and not see this. In her interview with Lippard, Piper acknowledged that “as far as the work goes, I feel it is completely apolitical. But I do think that the work is a product of me as an individual, and the fact that I am a woman surely has a lot to do with it. You know, here I am, or was, ‘violating my body’; I was making it public. I was turning myself into an object.” But, she adds, “in retrospect, all these things seem valid, even though they weren’t considerations when I did the pieces.”65 Piper is aware of debates over the objectification and denigration of women’s bodies and she acknowledges her work participates in these, but she also resists explaining her work as only or intentionally feminist. This might reflect the fact that there was still strong resistance to the idea of feminist art when Lippard interviewed her, but it is more likely that Piper’s answers express doubts about how much control she has over the work. Piper acknowledges that, in performance, she might mistake the way she wants viewers to respond for how they actually do: “you can’t be sure whether what you are seeing is of your own making, or whether it is objectively true.” When Lippard asks if this results from having “almost too much power over the situation,” Piper replies: “Yes. You know you are in control, that you are a force acting on things, and it distorts your perception. The question is whether there is anything left to external devices or chance. How are people when you’re not there?”66 Piper’s selfconsciousness demonstrates her awareness that she might not wield as much control as she imagines and may even create situations that inadvertently encourage people to treat her badly. She articulates this situa-

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tion as self-confidence balanced by an awareness of her vulnerability to the judgment and reactions of her audience. She explains how difficult it is for her to acknowledge her viewers: “It was very hairy. . . . It makes me cringe every time I do it.” Self-awareness about her insecurities resulted, she continues, in “some really heavy personality changes.”67 As an example, Piper describes how she has to acknowledge she needs viewers’ affirmation to feel confident that she is a coherent individual despite her outward appearance: Initially, it was really hard to look people in the eye. I simply couldn’t overcome the sense that if I was going to keep my own composure and maintain my own identity, it was just impossible. I would have to pretend that they weren’t there, even though I needed them. Then something really weird happened; it doesn’t happen all the time. Something I really like. It is almost as if I manage to make contact in spite of how I look, in spite of what I’m doing.68 The exhilaration of this sort of recognition—she gives the simple example of riding the subway with Mickey Mouse balloons stuffed beneath bulky clothes, asking a stranger the time and getting a straightforward answer—is mitigated by Piper’s suspicion that her audience’s reactions are only the product of her imagination.69 She questions the accuracy of her perceptions, but not in order to publicly analyze herself. Instead, self-reflection mitigates the threat of solipsism, or the delusion that she exists untouched—literally and figuratively—in a world of her own making and distinct from her environment. Piper turns readers’ attention from her performances to audience reactions. Making paradoxical use of solipsism insures that introspection appears as a response to interpersonal interactions. Piper’s texts offer testimony that she watched her audience during each Catalysis action. However, before 1972, she only once recounted a viewer’s reaction to a single Catalysis performance.70 Why not offer more examples? To describe viewers’ reactions to her performances would end them implicitly. Instead, she extends the reach of her actions by documenting them in texts that are themselves artworks. In new forms, they become relevant to her readers. Instead of describing the range of reactions she encountered, Piper discussed her actions in terms of her increasing awareness about the ways in which the judgment of others did and did not govern her self-image. Furthermore, Piper recognizes that she cannot determine Food for the Spirit  225

how others will respond to her actions and therefore allows viewers, in achieving self-consciousness, to shape her work’s final form. The value of her work, she writes, “may . . . be measured in terms of the strength of the change [in the viewer], rather than whether the change accords positively or negatively with some aesthetic standard. In this sense, the work as such is non-existent except when it functions as a medium of change between the artist and the viewer.”71 The consequences for Piper include a final alienation from her viewers despite—and because of—her alarmingly physical proximity to them, a closeness conveyed to readers through the introspection and self-reflection that frames Piper’s texts. The Artist as Social Paradigm

Piper describes identity as reciprocally defined, but self-knowledge also requires a conception of psychological isolation. Piper had to acknowledge a difference between herself and how viewers saw her. To most of her unwitting viewers, Piper was not a schooled conceptual artist, but a woman covered in wet paint or chewing gum. Even to a sympathetic and informed viewer like Lippard, Piper is not an artist but a black woman who is also an artist, as Piper’s ambiguous answer to Lippard’s question about whether her art was aggressive because it was made by a black woman demonstrates.72 In the sense that Piper cannot act without taking into account the way others treat her, she is no different from anyone else. Consequently, she described herself as “a paradigm of society”: “society’s treatment of me shows what I am and in the products of my labor I reveal the nature of society.”73 The apparent contradiction in this argument—that Piper can simultaneously disguise herself and embody a social paradigm—articulates an assumption she shared with a number of artists: that apolitical artworks reveal to viewers the political circumstances of their exhibition but nothing intimately personal about the artist. Carl Andre, for example, argued in 1970 that his role as an artist invested in “that burden of meanings which I’ve absorbed through the culture” was to make objects that existed antagonistically at the margins of that culture, as if on their own terms.74 These objects, encountered in the world, would create a particular and unique experience for each viewer that bore no discernible relationship to the artist’s own intentions. The resulting experience encouraged the viewer to reflect self-consciously on the political situation of the exhibition and on his or her perception of it without 226   Chapter 5

instructing the viewer on how to act. Accordingly, Piper wrote of her performances less as an imposition on the audience than as catalysts to each viewer’s critical and constructive self-reflection. Piper’s practice of forcing her audience to participate in her actions may appear unethical, but in statements made at the time, Piper seems conscious of just how little control she actually wielded. Her actions are also consistent with her interest in Kantian ethics and their emphasis on individual responsibility. Piper described the role confrontation plays in social interaction by writing that she, too, felt imposed upon by the judgments of others. Following Kant, who distinguishes a good will from the unpredictable results of its actions,75 she acknowledges that the way she accosted viewers in some instances must have been unsettling, but she argues for the value of a practice that might result in the viewer’s self-consciousness and rational self-determination—necessary steps toward accomplishing good and achieving transcendence. In the final essays of Talking to Myself, Piper outlines a different solution to the same crisis she had earlier attempted to resolve with solipsism. These later texts self-consciously suggest that, faced with discrepancies between her self-image and how she imagined others saw her, Piper had veered into solipsism in an effort to ignore their judgments. However, she appears to have found it impossible to isolate herself, even from those whom she deliberately alienated. She recognized subjectivity as a constant process of negotiation between her conscious rational self and her unconscious self, driven by contradictory feelings of accomplishment and inadequacy. Within the structure of Talking to Myself, Piper’s experiment with solipsism serves as an antithesis to her initial proposal to explore the consequences of social interaction. Achieving selfconsciousness in the final section completes the Hegelian logic of the book’s structure: she maneuvers her rational consciousness to anticipate rather than ignore the judgment of others. Claiming to have “assimilated an ‘other’ into [her] sense of self,” the problem becomes one of achieving “balance between self and other within a single—[her] own— consciousness.”76 The conflict central to Talking to Myself is integral to the discourse of metaphysical philosophy in which the subject emerges as an attempt to comprehend personal experience logically. “In Support of Meta-Art,” the final essay in Talking to Myself, frames this debate in terms of personal responsibility and duty to one’s fellow citizens. Piper proposes a new endeavor for artists: meta-art, a term for Food for the Spirit  227

putting her practice as an artist on display in order to expose not only herself but the greater values of the art world.77 Piper had found a new avocation for artists, she claims, one that acknowledged participation in an art world she and many others had come to regard as compromised by its patrons and their political and financial interests. Piper endeavored to make a new kind of work to expose structures of support and organization that sustained the illusion that art existed in isolation from society. Piper called her new activities meta-art to draw attention to the self-critical perspective she sought, taking into account her own participation in the ideologies of the art world. Piper’s ideas about meta-art serve as a foundation for her Mythic Being project. If Piper’s engagement with matters of sexuality and race seem circumspect in Food for the Spirit and her later, untitled Catalysis actions, she addresses them overtly—yet critically—in her Mythic Being artworks, which she began to conceptualize in 1972 and early 1973. In unannounced performances, texts, and posed and altered photographs, Piper brought black feminists’ questions about the representation of black women’s sexuality into the art world. In the process, Piper articulated her position within the galleries and museums of New York and elsewhere as a question—one that addressed itself to viewers of her work, figuring their culpability for the dilemma in which she appears to have found herself.

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​6

“Acting Like a Man” The Mythic Being and Black Feminism

In September 1973, Adrian Piper began periodically crossdressing as a persona she called the Mythic Being. In costume, Piper strode the streets of New York in mustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth. In posed and retouched photographs, Piper’s slight, fair-skinned figure blurs distinctions of race and gender. Suspended between difference and identification, the Mythic Being becomes, in Piper’s account, a paradoxical figure of liberation. Dressed as a man of uncertain race, the artist could act in ways that, as a black woman, she was expected not to: “My behavior changes,” she wrote, “I swagger, stride, lope, lower my eyebrows, raise my shoulders, sit with my legs wide apart on the subway, so as to accommodate my protruding genitalia.”1 “Drag” cannot be assumed to simply express some unmediated “interior truth.”2 What is performed must always also be understood in terms of what cannot be represented—as the manifestation of certain prohibitions as well as an articulation of identification and desire.3 Piper employs her costume precisely to reveal the consequences of this dilemma. A conceit of the Mythic Being work is that Piper does not already conform to conventional images of women—black or white—yet the apparent ease with which the Mythic Being occupies public space contrasts strikingly with the difficulty black women had at the time

gaining recognition as active participants in either the women’s movement or black activism.4 Piper’s Mythic Being performances, photographs, posters, and texts—in which the artist appears to express her attraction to both men and women in ways that obscure just whose fantasies these are— represent a “queer” practice.5 This is not necessarily to claim that Piper is queer. Rather, I emphasize that it is how she represents sexuality— whether her own, the Mythic Being’s, or the viewer’s—that antagonizes and upsets the normative fantasy of heterosexual order. This is a practice that had specific implications for black women in the 1970s. Audre Lorde and other black lesbian theorists have described how outspoken black women found themselves derided as traitors by both white feminists and black men, as if they were somehow neither women nor black. One response was to self-consciously blur the distinction between being a man or a woman, what Lorde called “acting like a man”: to perform anger as a way of “representing some of myself as a woman that I am reluctant to acknowledge or explore.”6 At the time, Piper wrote that, when disguised, she too found sympathy for certain aspects of black manhood as popularly figured, even as she performed her inability to identify with roles allotted black women. Dressing in the Mythic Being’s guise provided her with the means of accessing “the masculine part” of herself and “the maleness of [her] personality.”7 Like Lorde, Piper also noted that she felt uneasy about recognizing herself in a figure from whom she considered herself different. The day after she first wore the Mythic Being costume, for example, Piper insisted, “I would never dress that way if I were a man; nor would I be attracted to someone who dressed that way.”8 Still, she had to admit, with a humor belying insecurity, “I find myself getting very involved in his mental framework. . . . Perhaps I’m driving myself to schizophrenia.”9 Piper documented her experiences in such a way that she appears to be suspended paradoxically between her inability to become completely identified with the male Mythic Being and the pleasure and liberty she received from sometimes successfully imagining she had become him. Piper’s ambiguous relationship to the Mythic Being is also evident in the photographs she posed for when disguised, in which her costume fits awkwardly, as if she aspires to but never quite achieves either blackness or masculinity. In contrast to the popular image of working-class black machismo circulated by Black Power and the Black Arts Movement, 230   Chapter 6

Piper’s Mythic Being photographs and posters make her look slight and fair-skinned. Furthermore, Piper and others have said that when she was not disguised, people assumed she was white. In the earliest photographs, published as advertisements in the Village Voice, the Mythic Being’s “Afro”10 looks like an enormous unkempt wig, and his mustache is ridiculously bushy. The Mythic Being is the first instance Judith Wilson can find of an African American artist depicting an Afro that is clearly not a sign of essential blackness. The apparent artifice revealed how “the meaning of racial difference is always mediated by other distinctions,” including conventions of gender, sexuality, and class.11 Some black feminists recognized this by the time Piper began her Mythic Being work. For example, Lorde’s poem “Naturally” articulated a similar ambiguity about the effort to make herself “Naturally Black” and “Naturally Beautiful.” Lorde’s narrator evinces doubt: if her fair skin has always seemed “a trifle/Yellow/And plain,” will she be transformed by tanning and letting her hair grow? The narrator sounds unconvinced when she assures herself that she “must be proud/And, naturally,/Black and/Beautiful.” Her hair is like Piper’s costume—it fails to ensure a racialized and revolutionary consciousness. Instead, what Lorde’s poem calls “a summer ocean of naturally wooly hair” seems futile compensation for a feared inadequacy.12 Lorde’s poem and Piper’s Mythic Being identify questions of physiognomy and appearance as central crises of racial identification. Because of the Mythic Being’s fair skin and artificial Afro, some historians have acknowledged his racial ambiguity: Wilson says he appeared “black or Latino”;13 and to Kobena Mercer, he resembles a roadie for the polycultural rock group, Santana.14 In 1976, Piper called the Mythic Being “an anonymous, third-world young boy,”15 an identification that was political more than racial; it acknowledged participation in the coalitions common among liberation movements but not with any single one of them. By the early 1970s, the Afro—or Natural, as it was also called— was no longer only a black hairstyle. It had assumed iconic significance among the world’s youth culture and liberation movements because it had been embraced by black radicals in the late 1960s, including the Black Panthers and Ron Karenga’s US Organization. However, men and women who identified with neither Black Power nor radical politics also wore Afros to denote participation in the broader counterculture. As a consequence, black activists and middle-class intellectuals wondered by the early 1970s whether the appeal of Black Power lay only in the fleeting “Acting Like a Man”  231

fashions of black leather, African clothing, and the Afro. As the novelist Julian Mayfield warned in 1971, the fact that “white girls don Afro wigs and white boys sport dashikis” demonstrates that style was vulnerable to being co-opted and should not be confused with the revolutionary program of Black Power and the Black Aesthetic.16 It was precisely the historical contingency of the Afro that made it appropriate for Piper’s exploration of the intersection of race and gender.17 I want to argue for understanding the Mythic Being as Piper’s performance of her inability to inhabit norms of race or gender. Rather, she articulates these matters with uncertainty, as in January 1973 when, in her first public statement about race, she frames identity as subject to continual self-reflection. Over the previous three years, she wrote, “I did a lot of thinking about my position as an artist, a woman, and a black.”18 Frantz Fanon described the difficulty the subject has either inhabiting or evading the racialized role to which he or she is assigned. Fanon saw no resolution to his own struggle for self-determination and located this insurmountable problem in the fact that the subject exists only through the recognition of others. However, those whose attention the subject requires are predisposed to see him according to racialized and gendered assumptions about who he is, and the subject is only capable of communication that is already inscribed within discourses of racism and sexism. To articulate oneself outside of normative ideology, according to Fanon, is to embrace madness. The norm is effective, therefore, because it supplants every other possible public and private image of blackness. Communication must itself be made strange if it is to be denaturalized and offered for critique.19 Piper’s repeated attempts to embody various racialized and gendered traits dramatize her recognition that she must always see herself in relationship to the unjust image she knows others have of her. Judith Butler describes this negotiation of the conscious and unconscious relationship between the self and socialized norms as the performance of identity. The subject, faced with her ultimate inability to conform to the normative ideal, exists in a state of constant subjectification and melancholia—“only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s ‘own’ being,” Butler concludes.20 Butler’s theory of performative subjectivity imagines the self in constant struggle against imposed identifications. The process is necessary for the creation of a seemingly stable self-image that promises to contain the self completely, wholly, and credibly. It also rep232   Chapter 6

resents the self in critical relationship to the judgment of others, real or imagined.21 When the Mythic Being tells viewers of one of Piper’s 1975 posters “I embody everything you most hate and fear” (fig. 4), the artist has staged herself as an object for inspection, but in a way that ultimately reveals less about the artist than about the viewer’s attitudes toward race, gender, and sexuality. Piper’s Mythic Being performances interrogate the silence surrounding the sexuality of black women at the same time that her project embraces the sometimes-paradoxical possibilities for sexual expression. Some black feminists contested the interrelated discriminations of racism, sexism, class hierarchy, and homophobia, but questions of feminism and sexuality were still regarded by many as distinct from those of race. White feminists largely ignored the interests of black women.22 Black activists and scholars typically dismissed black feminism as a distraction from the more important task of confronting racism. Patricia Hill Collins has pointed, therefore, to the critical perspective black women had to offer as “outsiders within” academic feminism and black studies: black women, by their exclusion, exposed the hypocrisies and unspoken ideologies of each.23 Piper’s Mythic Being operates in precisely this way, marking a rupture at the point where the discourses of feminism and race intersect.24 As Evelynn Hammonds argues, black women had previously created a strategy of silence and propriety surrounding their sexuality in order to counter stereotypes of black hypersexuality; warning of the dangers of black female sexuality—and of lesbianism, in particular—became the only way to address the topic.25 To break the silence and make a claim to the erotic was considered a betrayal because it exposed black women to the debilitating effects of stereotype. Hammonds looks to the 1970s, therefore, as the beginning of a black feminist politics that selfconsciously enacts the castigated role of black lesbian to contest this status as race traitor. For example, she finds in Lorde’s poetry the performance of a black lesbian identity that pointedly refuses the role of culprit in order to reclaim “the despised black female body” as a site of “the erotic, . . . passion and desire”—in short, of agency.26 Piper’s Mythic Being work may be regarded in a similar light, as establishing the conditions under which the artist can take active part in contemporaneous debates around the image of black masculinity while also interrogating acceptable representations of black femininity. In the process, Piper “Acting Like a Man”  233

drew attention to reciprocal ways in which gender and sexuality could be racialized, often to deleterious effect. The Mythic Being and the Black Panthers

Some historians assume that viewers of Piper’s work regard the Mythic Being as a threat, but what fears did he stir? The Mythic Being has typically been described as a black man, although Piper did not call him “a young black male” until 1991.27 In a later interview, she explained the responses she got while dressed as the Mythic Being: “People reacted to me as though I were a black male, and that’s incredibly unpleasant. White women would clutch their purses and go into neighboring cars in the subway—the usual bag of tricks.”28 Most discussions of the Mythic Being have also taken the whiteness of the work’s viewers for granted. For example, Lowery Stokes Sims argues that Piper mobilized “the visual impact of blackness” in a way that must have intimidated her audience: “While black was beautiful for some . . . for most white Americans black was scary . . . This specter of unfettered black expression provokes sexual, political, social, and economic fears that cannot be understated.”29 This approach ignores the variety of attitudes the Mythic Being’s viewers might have had toward blackness. In the 1970s, Piper wrote about the Mythic Being as if people saw him as they needed to—as the embodiment of certain shared anxieties about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Understood as a black man, the Mythic Being represents Piper’s engagement with contemporaneous debates about black masculinity, but would Piper have appeared equally threatening as one of the Black Panther women? Laura Cottingham once asked Piper why, if she wanted to stage an image of confrontational blackness, she had not modeled the Mythic Being on “Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, or one of the other radical black women” identified with the Panthers.30 Piper chose not to answer Cottingham directly, but the question is significant. One reason might be that dressing as a Black Panther—male or female—would have aligned the Mythic Being (or Piper) with the party’s ideology. Such an association was too specific; it would have distracted from Piper’s broader anti-essentialist project. Within and without the Black Panther Party, black feminists considered the Panther leaders’ sexism to be a problem as fundamental as their manly image.31 Historians continue to debate women’s roles in the Black Panther Party and the sexism they experienced. Some women, including Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, and 234   Chapter 6

Elaine Brown, held important positions. Simultaneously, they also faced discrimination and exploitation, as former Panther women, including Cleaver and Brown, attest.32 Some scholars dismiss the matter as no worse than the sexism prevalent in American society and other liberation movements of the era.33 However, black feminists knew sexism pervaded the Black Power movement and called for men as well as women to address the problem with self-reflection.34 If the party can be credited with advancing the feminist cause, it is largely because of how vigilantly Panther women fought sexism among the party’s members.35 Sporadic official denunciations of gender discrimination, misogyny, and homophobia could not counter the authority of the indelibly heterosexual and macho image party leaders cultivated as a self-affirming antidote to the deprecating emasculation black men routinely experienced in America.36 According to Jane Rhodes, the rhetoric of the Black Panther newspaper—the most visible means for disseminating party policy and ideology—asserted “masculine authority and a sexual division of labor.”37 Erika Doss demonstrates that the artwork Emory Douglas created for the newspaper cast black women according to conventional gender roles—even when armed, they bore children on their backs.38 Furthermore, by the time Piper began her Mythic Being work, the Panthers’ importance was waning and the party was weakened by infighting and government infiltration and persecution. What is it about the Mythic Being that Cottingham and others have found reminiscent of the Black Panthers? One answer might be that today, the Afro—the most remarked-upon aspect of his appearance—is again popularly identified with black militancy.39 For example, this is the basis for Sims’s argument that Piper mobilized an intimidating image of blackness. Thus, the Mythic Being appears to embody the threat of Black Power. Between 1968 and Piper’s Mythic Being performances, the Black Power and Black Arts movements established an ideal of black authenticity that cast blackness as masculine, heterosexual, and menial. This was a contested image of what the Panthers and others described as the revolutionary vanguard. Angela Davis describes the appeal of this image—one so powerful it drew her home from graduate studies in Germany to political organizing in Watts. Skeptical of “narrow” black nationalism and engaged with black feminism as a member of SNCC’s Los Angeles chapter, she nevertheless found the new Black style liberating: “I needed to say ‘Black is “Acting Like a Man”  235

44  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Getting Back #2, 1975. One of five black-and-white

photographs, 8 × 10 in. Photo by James Gutmann. Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna.

beautiful’ . . . I needed to explore my African ancestry, to don African garb, and to wear my hair natural.”40 The image of Black Power represented someone middle-class blacks did not want to be compared with as well as someone whites feared meeting. It was effective because it reappropriated a figure of stereotype against whom all blacks are judged. The Mythic Being, as fantasy, establishes a racialized norm for blackness in the American imagination—the naturalized justification for an unspoken racist ideology reappropriated to make it available for critique. The Mythic Being, seen as the performance of a stereotyped blackness, exposed the fear of reciprocal violence and terror at the heart of American racism. In one series of photographs, The Mythic Being: Getting Back of 1975 (fig. 44), Piper appears in disguise, violently throwing a young white man to the ground as if mugging him; her artwork’s title plays on black fantasies of vengeance for the inequities of American racism and white fears of black retribution. When the Mythic Being gawked at women in Harvard Square in a series of three photographs, The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women (1975) (plate 2), he gave form to the fears and fantasies that define the myth of American whiteness, which locates miscegenation as the founding crisis of race conscious-

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ness. He reflected the mainstream media’s image of Black Power as well as black middle-class ideas about the black working class, from Eldridge Cleaver’s incendiary claims to have raped white women out of revenge for white racism to the black Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint’s lament that black men pursued white women as “a special prize,” as “outlets for [their] pent-up aggressions.”41 The Mythic Being represents a black feminist parody of a rambunctious and predatory heterosexual masculinity as well as an attempt to inhabit the liberatory pose of Black Power and Soul style. However, if Angela Davis had once threatened America, the meaning of her image—like that of the Afro—had changed by the time of Piper’s first Mythic Being performance. As Davis has argued, when FBI wanted posters labeled her “armed and dangerous,” and when she was arrested on charges of murder, conspiracy, and kidnapping in October 1970, her Afro and sunglasses signaled radical politics.42 This was soon to change, however, because as a result, the Afro became the figure of Davis and, reciprocally, photographs of Davis became what Davis herself calls “generic images of Black women.”43 As evidence of this change, Davis offers anecdotal evidence that countless black women wearing Afros were “accosted, harassed, and arrested by [the] police, FBI, and immigration agents” who were looking for her.44 However, the officials’ confusion had subversive potential only so long as Davis remained in hiding. The saturated media coverage of Davis’s arrest, trial, and acquittal, and the popularity of her cause among the New Left effectively substituted celebrity for revolutionary politics. Davis’s style came to overshadow the ideology it signified and the fact that Davis and the other Panther women wore clothes and hairstyles fashionable at the time made it possible for the media to portray them according to less threatening—and more widely appealing—conventions of feminine beauty and style.45 The media stopped portraying the Panthers as a revolutionary threat. Instead, the New Journalism sexualized the Panthers, further dissociating their image from radical politics.46 Because the mainstream media, the New Left, and the party itself created a conventionally sexualized image of the Panthers, Piper could not have dressed as one of the Panther women without reiterating the very image her Mythic Being work critiques. Piper’s masculine disguise, for all the images of black femininity it refused, makes the already compromised popular image of the

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liberated black woman available for feminist critique. The Mythic Being inquires instead into the possibilities available to black men and the multiple meanings their image had for black women. Masculinity, Lesbianism, and Radical Black Women

Piper draws upon the virulently macho anger and hypersexuality popularly attributed to black women in the 1970s. The strong black woman was condemned, as Michele Wallace has argued, for being a “superwoman”— she was considered “less of a woman in that she is less ‘feminine’ and helpless,” but also “more of a woman in that she is the embodiment of Mother Earth, the quintessential mother with infinite sexual, lifegiving, and nurturing reserves.”47 Popular conceptions of black women as matriarchal heads of households accused them of having exceeded the bounds of proper femininity, a charge granted authority by the 1965 Moynihan Report on the black family that blamed black women for black poverty. Such “superdominant matriarchs or bitches,” as Barbara Smith characterizes the stereotype, were accused of dominating and emasculating their husbands and sons.48 Black feminists contested the caricature but it held broad appeal for both white Americans and some black men.49 Eldridge Cleaver, for example, argued that black women relinquished their femininity when they sought employment to support their families. He labeled such women “Subfeminine . . . Amazons,” suggesting a combative and macho nature.50 Piper was almost certainly aware that because she was a black woman, men were likely to assume she was aggressive, or that, even if people thought she looked white, what they perceived as her unfeminine aggression marked her as black. She later recalled, for example, that while making her early Mythic Being work and completing a degree in philosophy at the City College of New York, one of her professors—a “(youngish, white male, sensitive, liberal) art history teacher”—asked a friend of hers, “Adrian is always talking in class. Is she black? She’s so aggressive.”51 Piper’s teacher could only understand his student’s active participation in the classroom according to his expectations of how women behave—and of how black women behave, in particular. The Mythic Being’s masculinity appears always excessive and unnatural but it is also inherent to the complex and contradictory image of the black woman as Amazon and matriarch. The popular discourse blamed black women for their failure to conform, and accused them of being too 238   Chapter 6

masculine or too black. Piper’s Mythic Being work can be understood as her response. Her costume self-consciously drew attention to masculine excess while simultaneously staging the denial of her femininity. Like the black lesbian feminist Lorde, Piper embraced conditions of excess, performing them in order to challenge the norms against which she felt judged. Lorde, for example, refused outright to conform to demands made by white feminists that black women ignore racism, or of black men that she put aside complaints about sexism: I speak without concern for the accusations that I am too much or too little woman that I am too black or too white or too much myself.52 Piper began performing as the Mythic Being in 1973, the same year Lorde’s poem was published. Piper’s project, like Lorde’s, is anti-essentialist. Cheryl Clarke argues that women poets of the Black Arts Movement demonstrated blackness by adopting the self-consciously angry tone and violently revolutionary rhetoric they and their male peers considered masculine: black women claimed solidarity with black men by “acting— like a man,” challenging normative femininity, but also reiterating the gendered articulation of blackness.53 Piper’s work questions such conventions by performing both her masculinity and her femininity, denaturalizing each in the process. Piper portrays the Mythic Being specifically to fail at embodying him. Her performance is different from nineteenth-century blackface minstrel shows in which white actors portrayed a caricature that distinguished them from blacks and justified a claim to whiteness. Minstrelsy inscribed a figure of stage and humor onto the black body.54 Instead, Piper endeavors to denaturalize the images she might desire to identify with and those images against which she is judged. Her performance appears pathetic, articulating conflicted desires for contested images of black masculinity and femininity. The Mythic Being’s masculine form figured the confluence of racist and sexist animosity. Piper allowed herself no essential femininity. Instead, she addressed stereotypes of black women when she gave masculine form to what she called her “anger and resentment” in The Mythic Being: I/You (Her) of 1974. As I discuss in the introduction, according to an essay Piper wrote to explain the artwork, the femininity she shares “Acting Like a Man”  239

with a young, white female companion fails to provide camaraderie because her companion has stolen her boyfriend. Piper, as seen by the other woman, becomes the Mythic Being; thought bubbles quote what reads as a bitter breakup letter, rife with feelings of betrayal. Out of contempt, Piper embraces the woman’s fear of black rage. Over a sequence of ten photographs, Piper transforms herself into the image of a man by drawing on the photographs with oil crayon in such a way that the artist renders herself complicit in her own disfigurement, threatening the woman with sexual exploitation: “I might indulge with pleasure in lovemaking fantasies about you. But you will never elicit an emotional commitment from me.”55 Piper expressed the desire for sexualized revenge in a guise Blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s termed the black Bulldagger, a figure Anne Stavney has described as neither male nor female but who unhinges sexuality from essentialist conceptions of gender.56 Refusing to “pass” for either a man or a woman, the cross-dressing Bulldagger exhibits both masculine and feminine behavior in such a way as to become impossible to categorize. Passing, in the political atmosphere of the women’s movement and black activism, meant deceiving oneself— and not necessarily anyone else—in a desperate attempt to assimilate. For example, the black feminist Barbara Smith wrote, “Passing, that is trying to become acceptably white in mind as well as in body, is a painful indication of Black people’s problematic identity in a hostile land.”57 Passing also meant keeping silent, so as not to be noticed. The performativity of Piper’s Mythic Being work—its sometimes subtle, often brazen flaunting of convention and decorum—draws attention to the artist’s refusal to pass unremarked as well as to her inability to inhabit the caricatured image others had of her. Stavney warns that as a radical act, the Bulldagger’s behavior must be continually reiterated; it is an “ongoing (re)construction” of the self, always in process.58 The Bulldagger inhabits a position of inherent instability and alterity, liberation, and selfdeprecation, forever risking censorship. Piper threatens her companion in The Mythic Being: I/You (Her) by embracing these positions, if only for a moment. If the specter of the black lesbian haunted black women as someone they had better not be, this was a position the Mythic Being embraced and in The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), Piper’s angry expression of sexual desire for another woman identified her as the target of what Lorde called 240   Chapter 6

“the red herring of homophobia and lesbian-baiting.”59 Among feminists and black activists, outspoken women could be silenced by accusations of homosexuality that, as Smith warned, “are quite effective for keeping Black women writers who are writing with integrity and strength from any conceivable perspective in line, but especially ones who are actually feminist and lesbian.”60 Smith and Lorde each acted to disarm her critics by proclaiming her own lesbian sexuality, drawing strength from the knowledge that, as Lorde proclaimed, “I am the face of one of your fears.”61 Similarly, in The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), Piper blames her changing appearance on her companion’s racist presumptions. His presence inhabits the American imagination as an impossibility, demarcating society’s limits as the sort of configuration Butler calls the “constitutive outside”—an imaginary figure who lives beyond the limits of normative society and so defines it in the process.62 The Mythic Being inhabits the collective unconscious as someone whose type his viewers think they know, even if they have never met him: “he exists only in the perception of those who read his thoughts,” Piper wrote.63 Piper described the Mythic Being in January 1976, shortly after she had stopped dressing in his guise, as “an abstract, generalized, faintly unholy embodiment of expressed hostility, fear, anxiety, [and] estrangement.”64 The point of performing this character, she explained, was to force viewers to recognize and acknowledge their own fears and desires, and those that they repressed and denied, in particular: It is you whom he confronts and you whom he reproaches. The content of his obsessions are shared by all of us: if they were continually acknowledged and articulated, they would transform our interactions into acts of violence—perhaps eventually transform the world that causes them. Thus he is a permanently hostile object . . . the personification of our subliminal hatreds and dissatisfactions, which blind and enslave us by being subliminal.65 The violence that Piper describes is not revolution but an inevitable and unordered chaos that society—and the individual—must perpetually defer. The Mythic Being expresses anger and hostility in response to his treatment by those around him; and if he seems violent, it is because the viewer, like the rest of American society, is violent. Piper, who must see herself in relationship to the image that she knows others have of her, turns the situation against them. Consequently, in The Mythic Being: “Acting Like a Man”  241

I/You (Her) as in most of the Mythic Being posters, Piper looks not at her companion but out at the person the text addresses: “you,” the viewer. Piper’s performance of identity stages a seemingly irresolvable confrontation between social conventions and the pain they cause in order to make viewers aware of how this occurs in their own lives. The Mythic Being’s anger is important, therefore, not only as integral to the image of the black Bulldagger, but as an immediate reaction of uneasiness at the discrepancies between her experience of racism, sexism, and homophobia and their justification—an intuitive second-guessing of rational consciousness. By means of a double estrangement, Piper alienates herself from her self-image and from her artwork. In the first case, she renders herself available for self-reflection. In the second, the Mythic Being embodies a stereotype drawn from the popular imagination. Piper’s earliest statements about the Mythic Being present him as someone whom she imagines is performing her. He reads excerpts from her adolescent diaries, for example, remembering Piper’s actions as if they were his own. Performing as the Mythic Being enabled Piper to isolate and recognize aspects of herself that she might otherwise deny. Likewise, as an image of the popular imagination, the Mythic Being’s fears and desires also belong to the viewer. Thus, Thelma Golden attributes the “declarative ‘I’” of the Mythic Being’s statement, “I embody everything you most hate and fear,” not to Piper but to “both the speaker and the intended audience.”66 If the Mythic Being looks familiar, then the viewer must acknowledge his or her responsibility for having created him. “If I ’d Had a Cock I Would’ve Surely Had an Erection”

Piper gave sexual expression to her sympathies for her persona in a way that was consistent not only with the figure of the black Bulldagger but also with the popular image of hypersexual working-class black masculinity circulated by both black activists and the popular culture: Piper wrote that she “felt really horny” after her first street performance: “If I’d had a cock I would’ve surely had an erection.”67 Piper gave her pleasure sexualized form as the Mythic Being embraced the liberatory potential that others celebrated in the popular image of black machismo. In the Black Panther newspaper, for example, Huey Newton argues in an extended essay that in Melvin Van Peebles’s film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, it is the sexual prowess of the protagonist, Sweetback, that denotes his promise as a liberator. Such liberation was unattainable for 242   Chapter 6

black women, who instead portray the prostitutes who nurture Sweetback and teach him about sex. The latter event Newton calls “the building of [Sweetback’s] spirit.”68 Sex is for Sweetback “a very sacred rite,” when he is “baptized into his fullness as a man [and] gets his name and his identity,” and it is largely through sex that he metaphorically realizes his destiny.69 Piper’s notes on performing the Mythic Being describe a feminist struggle with such popular conceptions of black sexuality, and it is significant that when Piper wrote about her first experience in disguise, she pays particular attention to her efforts to impute masculine personality to her character: “When I was waiting for the subway, I found myself deliberately aping more ‘masculine’ body movements and behavior to be convincing. I deliberately contemplated a sexploitation film ad for a few minutes.”70 The Mythic Being’s choice of movies is telling because it places his experiences within the realm of popular culture, at a time when the most popular exploitation films were blaxploitation. Nevertheless, Piper’s notes describe her inability to overcome the gendered and eroticized image of black liberation Newton advocates. Ultimately, the personal freedom and self-determination Piper describes escapes her. By imagining that “if I’d had a cock I would’ve surely had an erection,” Piper must acknowledge that she does not have a cock and so cannot have an erection. What interrupts Piper’s fantasies, according to her notes, is not the realization of lack or concern with the myth of black hypersexuality but the fears that accompany an erection, as she imagines them: the Mythic Being suffers from a homophobia that unsettles his confidence. In “Notes on The Mythic Being,” Piper presented the Mythic Being in such a way that it appears to be he who pretends to be her, and not the other way around.71 During his first public appearance, the Mythic Being meditated on a mantra that compelled him to think about an experience from Piper’s adolescence as if it had been his own. The text of the mantra, excerpted from diaries Piper had kept since age twelve, read, “TODAY WAS THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. THE ONLY DECENT BOYS IN MY CLASS ARE ROBBIE & CLYDE. I THINK I LIKE CLYDE.”72 After the performance, Piper notes that she had “thought a lot about Robbie and Clyde. Almost to the point of its being the first day of school again,” and she writes about the experience as if it had contributed to her sexual fantasies.73 Piper later wrote that transforming the words from her diary into the “Acting Like a Man”  243

Mythic Being’s thoughts enabled her to reflect self-consciously on the way gender’s social currency validated certain sexual experiences while prohibiting others. She wondered, How might I be different if the history I chronicled in my journal had happened to a man? My adolescent preoccupations with men would have been infused with guilt; my conflicting feelings and behavior towards my girlfriends would have been viewed with alarm by my parents; my stints as model and discotheque dancer would have schooled me in the subtle arts of transvestitism; my period in a mental hospital would have included attempted reorientation of my adolescent homosexuality; my drug experiences might have been more traumatic and conflict-ridden, perhaps more sexually than mystically oriented.74 Piper attempts to judge herself as she imagines the Mythic Being judges himself for having committed her thoughts and actions. Writing retrospectively, Piper turns her experiences into melodrama, staging them for the consideration of her reader. Piper described the sexual freedom she enjoyed as the Mythic Being, but appears able to experience pleasure only when her fantasies are construed as a heterosexual man’s: My sexual attraction to women flows more freely, uninhibited by my fear of their rejection in case my feelings should show in my face; unencumbered by my usual feminine suspicions of them as ultimately hostile competitors for men. I follow them with my eyes on the street, fantasizing vivid scenes of lovemaking and intimacy.75 This is very different from Piper’s description of her new relationships with men: My sexual attraction to men is complicated and altered by my masculine appearance. I envision the possibility of deep love relationships based on friendship, trust, camaraderie, masculine empathy; but I instinctively suppress expression of my sexual feelings for fear of alienating the comparatively tenuous feelings of kinship with men I now have.76 Moreover, she made the Mythic Being attest his desires publicly: when, during her first performance in disguise, a man she did not know asked the Mythic Being a question, Piper replied with the mantra.77 The Mythic 244   Chapter 6

Being had also already appeared in an advertisement earlier that week in the Village Voice with the dated diary excerpt written in a thought balloon above his head (fig. 45).78 Piper’s eighth-grade social geometry fit the Mythic Being’s smug machismo awkwardly. In contrast to the Mythic Being’s very public gawking at a sexploitation movie poster, the homophobic guilt that Piper imagines for him becomes public humiliation. Her desires become confused and intermingled with the Mythic Being’s, dramatizing the roles that homophobic guilt and repression play in perpetuating normative sexuality. In 1975, Piper developed her critique of heterosexual phobias in a series of altered black-and-white photographs that addressed the viewer’s insecurities directly. In Let’s Have a Talk (figs. 46.1–46.6), comprised of six altered photographs, the Mythic Being appears alone and introspective. He takes a drag on his cigar, feet propped on a desk while gazing out an unseen window. Next, light pours in and he exhales as if struck by a thought. When the Mythic Being speaks, over the course of the next four panels, his isolation implies that he addresses only the viewer, whom he turns to face: “LET’S HAVE A TALK/ TO BRING US CLOSER/ AS CLOSE FRIENDS DO/ COME NEARER; MAY I STROKE YOUR BACK?” In the final panel, Piper has drawn the Mythic Being’s words at the bottom of the composition; he appears smaller and farther away, as if an awkwardly confessed desire has come between him and the viewer, interrupting a moment of friendship and intellectual intimacy that frightens the viewer into retreat. What is startling about Let’s Talk is that, despite the aggressive sexuality the Mythic Being’s macho appearance promises, it is his physical expression of friendship that is most threatening. What insecurities has the Mythic Being touched upon with his invitation? And how does race inflect the viewer’s reaction? The Mythic Being expresses affections for the viewer that seem inconsistent with the violent heterosexual masculinity his style of dress implies, revealing how both his unwanted invitation and his alienating machismo respond to the sexualized conventions of social interaction. Hazel Carby has argued that the “screen of arrogance and disdain” some men assume serves to conceal feelings of vulnerability behind an image of violent homophobia and misogyny.79 According to Lorde, outspoken black feminists often found themselves marginalized by “anti-lesbian hysteria” regardless of whether their solidarity with other women was primarily political or sexual; furthermore, Lorde blames this “rule by “Acting Like a Man”  245

45  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, Cycle I: 9/21/61, 1973, advertisement in the Village Voice

(September 27, 1973). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

46.1  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #1, 1975. Oil crayon drawings on black-

and-white photographs, 10 × 8 in. Collection of the Arco Foundation.

46.2  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #2, 1975. Oil crayon drawings on black-

and-white photographs, 10 × 8 in. Collection of the Arco Foundation.

46.3  Adrian Piper, The

Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #3, 1975. Oil crayon drawings on black-andwhite photographs, 10 × 8 in. Collection of the Arco Foundation.

46.4  Adrian Piper, The

Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #4, 1975. Oil crayon drawings on black-andwhite photographs, 10 × 8 in. Collection of the Arco Foundation.

46.5  Adrian Piper, The

Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #5, 1975. Oil crayon drawings on black-andwhite photographs, 10 × 8 in. Collection of the Arco Foundation.

46.6  Adrian Piper, The

Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk #6, 1975. Oil crayon drawings on black-andwhite photographs, 10 × 8 in. Collection of the Arco Foundation.

47  Adrian Piper, It Doesn’t Matter #1–3, 1975. Three oil crayon drawings on black-and-white

photographs, 10 × 8 in. Collection of the Spencer Art Museum, University of Kansas.

terror” on women as well as men.80 The fact that Piper performed the Mythic Being as a constellation of racial, sexual, and gender ambiguity articulates the double-bind of never being black enough or woman enough at the same time as always being either too black and too much a woman in the eyes of those who might otherwise embrace her in radical solidarity. Piper captured the power relations that result from sexual violence— and from racial violence sexualized—most explicitly in It Doesn’t Matter of 1975 (fig. 47). In this three-part work, the Mythic Being is seated and seen from below, looming larger and taller in each of the altered photographs that comprise the sequence, as if the viewer crawls toward him on hands and knees. Finally, the Mythic Being’s hips are at the viewer’s eye level and his muscular forearms dominate the middle ground. The text above the Mythic Being’s head, spread over the three panels, assumes mutual animosity between speaker and viewer: “IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU ARE/ IF WHAT YOU WANT TO DO TO ME/ IS WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO FOR ME.” Composition and text imply an abusive invitation to fellatio, made more apparent in Piper’s narrative description of the work a year later, in which it is the Mythic Being who moves, bringing the viewer to his or her knees: “I am a nameless, expressionless masculine figure, looking down at you, the viewer. I slowly approach you, loom

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over you, my hips at your centre of vision. Affirming our anonymity, I invite you to use me, thereby allowing me to use you. My hips are so close to your face that you cannot refuse. I look away.”81 In the Mythic Being’s relationships with both men and women, anonymity becomes animosity sexualized. The friendship and intimacy that might overcome such antagonism are precluded by racism and sexual insecurities. It Doesn’t Matter refuses to contain itself and, in Piper’s description, addresses the viewer aggressively. Violating Modernist conventions of the autonomous artwork, it threatens to expose the viewer’s own investment in the unspoken etiquette that sustains normative sexuality. The Mythic Being is clearly not blameless in this scenario, but his behavior is no more demeaning than he assumes the viewer’s to be. The Politics of Invisibility in the Art World

Piper recognizes that the Mythic Being was “an alien presence in the artworld”; despite being “a familiar presence in the rest of the world,” he entered galleries and museums as a disruption.82 Lorde and Smith argue that it was the visibility of black women that made them both vulnerable and a threat in the 1970s: confronting society with an image of what it fears most—the sexually liberated black woman—but only at the risk of sometimes violent censorship. Piper’s Mythic Being performs both of these possibilities: He is a marginal figure whose impossibility defines the limits of normative behavior. His presence on the street demands a self-reflexive response from the viewer. The Mythic Being is also always already punished for his perceived transgressions, a forlorn figure who must repeatedly cast himself out, in retreat, or risk reiterating and conforming to the norms against which he continuously rebels. In 1974, Piper expressed her discomfort with the judgment of art critics, curators, and her colleagues. Asked by Art-Rite magazine to “make a political statement,” she ascribed physical ailments to the effects of a career in art: Power is bad for the lining of the stomach. Financial success causes overweight and heart trouble. Artworld parties are bad for the liver. Galleries cause headaches and bloodsugar attacks. Dealers cause dislocation of the jaw. Critical reviews cause digestive upsets and emphysema. Competition between fellow artists for any of the above is a known carcinogen.83

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Piper’s statement marks the absence of any solidarity among artists, which is notable at a time when many artists, critics, and dealers in New York joined together to form activist organizations like the AWC. Yet this moment was also marked by disagreements over the impact of sexism and racism within the art world, which provoked some black and feminist artists to form dissenting organizations like WAR and Women, Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation. Although Piper says she attended some meetings but never joined any of the artists’ groups, on her first day disguised as the Mythic Being, she described her discomfort with the art world in terms that are clearly gendered and sexualized: “I got really paranoid at times, once when I thought one of the neighborhood men who periodically whistle at me recognized me, once when I saw some familiar faces from the art world.”84 This statement, made in notes not intended for publication, recognizes the difference between being whistled at and being seen by other artists and critics, but it also articulates in feminist terms Piper’s discomfort with being watched and evaluated. If the Mythic Being was Piper’s attempt to embody the kind of person who demeans her daily by whistling at her, and if, as Lowery Stokes Sims has argued, the Mythic Being makes a claim for “women’s right of access to the streets, unharassed and unharmed,”85 does he also figure the discrimination Piper experienced in the art world? Today, the Mythic Being is one of Piper’s best-known projects; but when she made the work, art critics almost entirely neglected it. At first glance, this would seem to be because the work mostly circulated outside conventional art spaces, publications, and institutions. However, the Mythic Being did have a presence within the New York art world: Between September 1973 and February 1975, the Mythic Being appeared once a month among the art gallery advertisements in the Village Voice. Piper says she sometimes attended museum and gallery receptions in disguise;86 and when Piper began dressing as the Mythic Being, she lived in a Lower East Side neighborhood popular with artists, some of whom she encountered while in disguise. Piper also exhibited Mythic Being photographs, posters, advertisements, and texts in several exhibitions in 1974 and 1975, and she published the first part of her “Notes on the Mythic Being” in a special issue of the poetry journal TriQuarterly, edited by John Perreault, a Village Voice art critic.87 During the 1970s, only two feminists wrote about the Mythic Being and neither in terms of race, evidence that many feminists—black and 252   Chapter 6

white—failed to understand how art could raise questions about race and gender simultaneously. By the late 1960s, black feminists began to address the interrelatedness of racism and sexism, although the most important statement of this concept, the Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement,” was not published until 1978 and did not receive widespread attention until 1982.88 Thus, Piper’s project seems to have fit discussions of feminist art only when it was thought to address gender exclusively. Cindy Nemser and Lucy Lippard both interpret Piper’s project simply as her attempt to explore what Lippard calls a “male ego.”89 According to Nemser, the Mythic Being unproblematically illustrated “woman’s archetypal need to incorporate ‘masculine’ as well as ‘feminine’ mind states into her conception of self”; Nemser found no tension between these gendered “mind states.” Racialized identity had no place in this model at all.90 Nemser’s and Lippard’s silence about the matter of race in Piper’s Mythic Being work might have resulted from ideas about the sort of art black women made. This could also explain why Piper was the only artist among the eleven participants in “11 in New York,” an exhibition of work by black women artists held at the Women’s Interart Center in May 1975, whose work Wallace did not discuss in her review of the show. It is difficult to imagine the Mythic Being fitting into an exhibition in which, according to Wallace, “the distinction between fine art and crafts [was] rendered irrelevant” or in which all the work is “pleasant to look at.” Did Wallace find Piper’s work excessively “western,” in that it concealed or questioned her blackness too much?91 Did Piper’s work challenge “the timelessness of black women, the connection between [them] and [their] foremothers in slavery and in Africa,” which Wallace found so important in the work of the exhibition’s organizer, her own mother, Faith Ringgold?92 Although Piper is not certain which of her works was included in the exhibition, she thinks it was likely a three-ring notebook that documented the Village Voice’s refusal, for reasons of decency, to publish one of the seventeen Mythic Being advertisements Piper made for the newspaper. The rejected image resembled the others, with a photograph of Piper seated before a makeshift scrim in disguise, holding a cigar dispassionately to her mouth. A cartoon thought bubble bore the following excerpt from Piper’s diary, dated June 6, 1970: “DON’T FEEL PARTICULARLY HORNY, BUT FEEL I SHOULD MASTURBATE ANYWAY JUST “Acting Like a Man”  253

48  Adrian Piper, unpublished Village Voice newspaper advertisement from the Mythic

Being series: “DON’T FEEL PARTICULARLY HORNY.” 1974. Copy of censored ad, 10 × 8 in. Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin.

BECAUSE I FEEL SO GOOD ABOUT DOING IT” (fig. 48). The Voice instead printed a notice that the intended advertisement could be seen at Jaap Rietman, a SoHo art bookstore.93 Piper’s work engaged feminist calls for women to familiarize themselves with their bodies and liberate their sexuality, but it also broached what feminist literature identified as a taboo of gendered discourse. The topic of masturbation—especially when spoken of so cavalierly by a male figure—remained inflammatory, 254   Chapter 6

even among feminists. Some feminist artists sought to characterize women’s sexuality as actively creative rather than as lack, but still faced the condemnation of those who decried almost any sexualized imagery in their work. Feminist artists and critics regarded the representation of desire as a dilemma for women artists. For example, Barbara Rose recognized the potential for women artists to express their (heterosexual) desires as the means to make a political argument for “sexual equality” with men.94 However, as Rose also warned, erotic art made by women was not necessarily radical. She expressed trepidation that many feminists had turned to the erotic because it was easy: it bore the appearance of radicality but without necessarily requiring an attempt at critical selftransformation. Thus, she writes, the best erotic artwork “is designed to arouse women, but not sexually.”95 Did Wallace, as a black feminist sensitive to stereotypes of black hypersexuality, find Piper’s work offensive? Did she (or Minority Report, the feminist newsweekly for which she reviewed the exhibition) find the implicitly politicized sexual content of Piper’s artwork inappropriate, or was her neglect of Piper a matter of the artist’s choice of medium? Piper has suggested to me that her notebook might have been easily missed because it was probably not the sort of art Wallace was looking for.96 Still, Wallace, like Lippard and Nemser, might have found the questions raised by Piper’s work unsettling for the way these questions address the interrelatedness of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Did she deliberately ignore the work in order to sustain the certainty of her convictions? Piper has since commented on the critical silence around her Mythic Being project, telling an interviewer, “when I first started working on issues of racism and racial identities in the early 1970’s, nobody wanted to touch this stuff. It was strictly verboten, perhaps because we were still too close to the riots and Black Power movements of the 1960’s. At the time, I had no idea how much I was isolating myself by doing this work and declaring my racial identity.”97 If Piper’s work declares her racial identity, it did so in such a self-consciously critical way that it risked alienating its audience. This meant courting invisibility, which was not a matter of a single review; it resulted from the incapacity of New York’s art galleries, museums, and critics to accommodate Piper’s work. As Wallace has argued more recently, the apparent silence of black women is established at the collective or institutional level.98 As if in recognition of this, Piper developed proposals for removing her art from the con“Acting Like a Man”  255

trol of museums and galleries, circulating her Mythic Being work in the Village Voice, on city streets, and in the form of inexpensively produced posters sold for modest prices. “I choose to impose these conditions on my work,” she explained, “because they are—unlike many other social forces which form my attitudes and determine aspects of my work— within my conscious control.”99 Piper’s Mythic Being artwork, in all its forms, represented an attempt to become self-conscious about what it meant to be a black woman artist in the 1970s, displayed in such a way that it might provoke viewers to self-reflexively consider their own assumptions about race and gender. In Piper’s work identity becomes a constant struggle against imposed identifications, which it seems it is the artist’s avowed project to denaturalize.

256   Chapter 6

Conclusion

The Mythic Being and the Aesthetics of Direct Address

Adrian Piper confronts racism, sexism, and xenophobia by directly addressing the viewer with evidence of his or her responsibility for them. This is a method Piper began to explore as early as 1968, when she made artworks revealing the conditions of the viewer’s experience. She developed the practice in Catalysis, embracing performance to reach viewers directly, outside of the gallery or museum where expectations are mediated by discourses of art history and criticism. In 1970, she explained why she made unannounced performances: “The strongest impact that can be received by a person in the passive capacity of viewer is the impact of human confrontation (within oneself or between people). It is the most aggressive and the most threatening, possibly because [it is] the least predictable and the least controllable in its consequences.”1 In her Mythic Being performances, Piper adapted her approach to engage critically with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class, challenging viewers to accept personal responsibility for xenophobia, discrimination, and the conditions that allow them to persist. To accomplish this goal, since 1975, Piper has reprised the Mythic Being to ask viewers whether they bear responsibility for him. In 1987, for example, Piper—dressed as the university professor she had become, in turtleneck and sweater—began a

lecture to the Women’s Caucus for Art with words from her 1975 poster, The Mythic Being: I Embody: I embody the racist’s nightmare, the obscenity of miscegenation, the reminder that segregation has never been a fully functional concept, that sexual desire penetrates social and racial barriers, and reproduces itself. I am the interloper, the alien spy in the perfect disguise, who slipped through the barricades by mistake. I have infiltrated your conventions and your self-presentational styles. I represent the loathsome possibility that all of you are “tainted” by black ancestry. If someone can look and sound like me and still be black, who is safely white?2 In the 1970s, the Mythic Being manifested unconscious fears of miscegenation and black hypersexuality. In 1987, Piper performed the role differently, as evidence of a history of irrepressible interracial desire. Refusing to play the victim, she claimed the role of spy, reprising another aspect of her Mythic Being disguise. Preparatory notes for the Mythic Being record the artist’s plans, in 1973, to wear what she called her “witness disguise” with the specific purpose of becoming a “ghostly spectator, eternally viewing, taking in everything, recording and reflecting on everything” yet remaining “invisible.”3 Like Ralph Ellison’s “invisible man,” Piper would pass unrecognized—as black, not white, unfamiliar even to herself.4 She would be present only in her role as observer and judge, a fantasized “consciousness” from whose perspective she might view herself and others.5 Piper’s disguise supersedes and displaces individuality, presenting her as an object to be observed and evaluated. At the same time, she haunts America, giving form to unspoken fears of miscegenation. As witness, the Mythic Being figures viewers’ self-conscious insecurities—the sort that result from feeling observed and judged as if shameful desires have been laid bare. Jacques Derrida identifies this specter as the perpetual presence of the law: the injunction that enforces and expresses itself as self-censorship, inhibition, and sublimation.6 In other words, the Mythic Being gives form to viewers’ desires, revealing them to be already mired in the fear of racial animosity sexualized. The Mythic Being does not represent any particular person or character. Instead, what makes the costume convincing—what makes it real—is what Piper called its “mythic character.”7 The Mythic Being is “a fictitious or abstract personality that 258   Conclusion

is generally part of a story or folktale used to explain or sanctify social or legal institutions or natural phenomena.”8 Like the specter, he is a condition of possibility and impossibility, determining who viewers strive not to become.9 He demarcates society’s limits and therefore cannot circulate among civilized people. He exists, Piper says, “only in the perception of those who read his thoughts,” as someone whose type his viewers think they know, even if they have never met him.10 The Mythic Being haunts the viewer’s imagination, “the racist’s nightmare.” Racism is universal, Piper says: “It is not an abstract, distanced issue out there that just affects all those other unfortunate people. Racism begins with you and me, here and now, and consists in our tendency to try to eradicate each other’s singularity through stereotyped conceptualization.”11 Racism is not necessarily a matter of intention. Rather, it governs perception unconsciously, before we can act. For this reason, Piper calls it “a visual pathology”—a disorder that disfigures what we see.12 Dressed as the Mythic Being, Piper’s disguise represents our inability to see anyone objectively. In her Women’s Caucus for Art lecture, Piper told the audience she recognized that when people meet her, they see her as if she is disguised, inadvertently exposing their insecurities as they struggle to discern whether she is black or white: Even those who become my friends, upon first meeting, peer closely at my face and figure, listen carefully to my idiolect and habits of speech, searching for the telltale stereotypical feature to reassure them[.] Finding none, they make some up. “Ah,” they say, “but of course your hair is wavy,” or, “perhaps a certain flare of the nostrils,” or, “but the way you dance is unmistakable.”13 Americans need to believe a black woman who might look white must be disguised, whether she claims to be black (but appears inauthentic) or white (and must be hiding something). Piper performs her blackness not simply to demonstrate her dilemma but to reveal to viewers their responsibility for creating it. When viewers recognize their racism in the Mythic Being’s appearance and behavior, the common impulse is to condemn the apparition rather than face it. This is startlingly evident in the response to Piper’s 1987 lecture. An excerpt was published in Women Artists News, accompanied by a reply in which Barbara Barr calls Piper’s lecture “about as racist as anything you can expect to hear these days.”14 She accuses Piper of The Mythic Being  259

being a white woman whose assertion of blackness is “nonsense.”15 Deriding Piper’s approach as a “luxurious” and “fairly dimwitted expiation of white liberal guilt,” Barr diagnoses it as a desperate claim to certain advantages—to be seen as “exotic” and compete with Jewish women for affirmative action jobs.16 Howardena Pindell, Judith Wilson, and others wrote letters to the editor repudiating Barr’s position, each interpreting Piper’s lecture as a performance that calls into question all claims to either whiteness or blackness.17 For example, Josephine Withers argues that Piper uses performance “to examine and reflect back the barriers that surround her and, I would add, surround all of us,” encouraging her audience to question all essentialized identities, including their own.18 Attempts to determine whether Piper is black or white reiterate gendered hierarchies of race. Withers admonished Barr: “Something will change when we can embrace the fears within rather than disowning them” and recommended responding to Piper’s lecture by asking, “what do we do with our racism?”19 Mary Hopkins responded similarly. She describes Piper’s lecture as unsettling and productive: “Piper met us at our darkest places and forced us to share her discomfort. As she finished, the audience burst into nervous chatter, an attempt to release anxiety and guilt.” The experience produced some degree of self-reflexive liberation, spreading infectiously throughout the conference as “participants asked each other, ‘Were you there this morning?’”20 Hopkins demonstrates the phenomenology of Piper’s performance: the Mythic Being stages the artist as an artwork that confronts viewers with physical evidence of their racism. Piper wears no obvious disguise but hopes instead to make viewers aware they see her as if she does. The fact that viewers cannot recognize that they project their expectations onto her suggests how assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality are naturalized. When Piper reveals the disguise fashioned for her, viewers must choose: admit culpability or blame the situation on Piper. Piper’s artwork makes viewers aware of their racism in hopes that they will become self-aware and take responsibility for it. She offers her ability to predict viewers’ behavior as proof that all Americans have unwittingly internalized the pseudoscientific ideology of racism. The point is not to wallow in regret. Rather, her goal is idealistic: “I want my work to contribute to the creation of a society in which racism and sexual stereotyping no longer exist,” Piper explains, calling for a society in which, “the 260   Conclusion

prevailing attitude to cultural and ethnic others would be one, not of tolerance, but of acceptance.”21 Invoking the Mythic Being once again, beneath an illustration of the poster in which her persona thinks, “I EMBODY EVERYTHING YOU MOST HATE AND FEAR,” Piper professed in 1970, “In the society I want to live in . . . there are no subliminal racist hatreds and fears ‘I Embody.’ ”22 Her utopia is not color-blindness, a neoconservative ideal providing moral cover for those who would silence the critical discussion of race.23 Instead, she records the unresolved state of America’s miscegenated culture. Piper engages popular culture to demonstrate Americans’ paradoxical desire for the hated racial other, which is therefore the perfect vehicle for her aesthetic of direct address. For example, she repeatedly offers black popular music and dance as evidence of how typically American interracial desire has become. In her dance-lesson-as-performance-art-piece Funk Lessons (1983–84), she celebrates black music while critiquing its exploitation.24 She also employs disco dancing as “a form of ritualized sexual and political confrontation” because, while it exposes the dancer to the racialized and sexualized projections of others, it also provides a pleasurable venue for flouting normative etiquette.25 She explains in program notes for her performance It’s Just Art (1981): “To succeed in dancing to disco music . . . is to express one’s sexuality, one’s separateness, one’s inner unity with one’s own body; and in a sexually repressive, WASP-dominated culture, this is to express defiance.”26 Piper embraces these “idioms of Black working class culture” because, in her ideal society, “it is unnecessary to give ‘Funk Lessons’”; black expressive cultures will be celebrated, not derided.27 Funk and Soul style represent for Piper more than the fears of her viewers. Piper’s simultaneous expressions of identification and estrangement present popular culture as an important site of contestation, where individuals engage alterity and otherness at the nexus of race, gender, class, and sexuality in order to participate fully in society.

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​N otes

Introduction Portions of this chapter have appeared in different forms as “Adrian Piper as African American Artist,” American Art 20, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 108–17. 1. Hess, “Ways of Seeing Adrian Piper,” 100; Piper, “It’s Not All Black and White,” 6. 2. I quote from the video installation Cornered. Piper’s script has been published as Adrian Piper, “Cornered (Video Installation, 2/88)/Acorraldo,” and Piper, “Cornered: A Video Installation Project by Adrian Piper.” 3. Piper, “Notes on the Mythic Being, II,” 276, 277–78. According to Piper, in The Mythic Being: I/You (Her), “the thought-balloon texts are felt-tip pen; the alterations to the photographic image are ink and tempera.” Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, July 11, 2005. 4. Piper, “Notes on The Mythic Being,” n.p. 5. “Blaxploitation” refers to a subgenre of action films popular with both black and white audiences that arose in the early 1970s as a part of the boom in films featuring black actors, subjects, and, sometimes, directors, producers, writers, and crews. Today, the best-known examples are Gordon Parks’s Shaft and Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, both released in 1971, and films starring Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson. In August 1972, the Committee Against Blaxploitation (CAB), a Los Angeles–based coalition of local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Congress of Racial Equality, coined the term blaxploitation in order to condemn films that traded on familiar stereotypes of both black men and women. The x in blaxploitation made direct and punning reference to the X-rating that a new genre of soft-core “sexploitation” films flirted with but did not earn and it drew attention to the ways in which both new genres took advantage of changing decency standards to profit from the sexual exploitation of women. See Williams, “Filth vs. Lucre,” 98–99; and “Blacks vs. Shaft,” 88.

6. Newton, “He Won’t Bleed Me,” B–C. 7. Lowery Stokes Sims and Judith Wilson have each examined Piper’s Mythic Being as a critique of black masculinity in the 1970s; Sims, Maurice Berger, and Nancy Spector regard the Mythic Being as a self-consciously critical feminist project. See Sims, “Aspects of Performance in the Work of Black American Women Artists,” 208–9; Wilson, “Beauty Rites,” 16–17; Sims, “The Mirror the Other,” 113; Berger, “Black Skin, White Masks,” 101; Spector, “Performing the Body in the 1970s,” 170–71. On conflicting ways Piper’s work addresses black viewers, see Wilson, “In Memory of the News and of Ourselves,” 49–50. 8. Diawara, “The Blackface Stereotype,” 9. 9. Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” 4, 6 (emphasis in the original). 10. On Cornered, see also Wilson, “Optical Illusions,” 104; and Mercer, “Decentering and Recentering,” 48–49. 11. Berger, “The Critique of Pure Racism,” 9. 12. Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Reimagining America, 287–88. 13. On the role of witness and African Americans’ collective memory, see Elizabeth Alexander, “ ‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’” and Berger, “Styles of Radical Will,” 23–24. 14. Phelan, Unmarked, 7–8, 13–14, 98. 15. Breger, “The Critique of Pure Racism,” 9 (emphasis in the original). 16. Piper says she modeled her performance on the calm and dispassionate authority of television news anchors and even auditioned women who looked white for the part before doing it herself. Adrian Piper, personal communication, Champaign, Illinois, October 11, 2003. Maurice Berger argues that viewers respond to Cornered with anger and violence because of the way that Piper deploys personal and autobiographical material as a political gesture. See Berger, “Black Skin, White Masks,” 95, 102–3, 109–10; Mercer, “Decentering and Recentering,” 49; and Storr, Dislocations, 25. For further examples of how Piper puts her audience on display, see Brand, “Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction,” 264–65. 17. Weil, “Art Still Has a Tremendous Political Potential,” 76–77. 18. Piper, e-mail to the author, July 11, 2005. Piper has told parts of the story of her father’s birth certificates to two other interviewers: Lewis, “Images That Get Under the Skin”; Cheng, “More Than an Academic Exercise.” 19. Lorde, “Audre Lorde,” 16. 20. Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxvi. 21. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 10 (emphasis in the original). 22. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 17. 23. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 24. Piper, e-mail to the author, July 11, 2005. Piper tells a version of this story about her father’s wartime service in Shatz, “Black Like Me,” 43. The exhibited copies of her father’s birth certificates are dated March 12, 1965, and July 13, 1953, offering evidence he may sometimes have passed after the war, too. Piper does not know how her father used them.

264   Notes to Introduction



25. Lippard, “Catalysis,” 78. 26. Hess, “Ways of Seeing Adrian Piper,” 100. 27. Piper, “It’s Not All Black and White,” 6. 28. Adrian Piper, “Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists”; and Bowles, “Ever After Whiteness,” n.p. 29. Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxvi. By pitting her own blackness against “the upper-middle-class het WASP male, the pampered only son of doting parents,” Piper demonstrates the performativity of both blackness and whiteness, as well as their interrelatedness. See Storr, foreword, in Piper, Out of Order, xx. 30. I thank Yukie Kamiya and Ozkan Canguven of the New Museum for sending me the checklist and installation photos for “Events: Artists Invite Artists.” 31. The text of Political Self-Portrait #2 (Race) is reprinted as Adrian Piper, “Political Self-Portrait #2,” Heresies 8 (1979): 37–38. See also Wilson, “In Memory of the News and of Ourselves,” 50–52. 32. Piper, “Five Other Features,” 47. 33. Gates, Figures In Black, xxxi (emphasis in the original). 34. Gates, “Editor’s Introduction,” 12. 35. Mercer, “Decentering and Recentering,” 48. 36. Piper, untitled project, 0 to 9 5, 49. 37. Meyer, Minimalism. The eagerness with which many have embraced Meyer’s encyclopedic account of the debates defining Minimalism demonstrates the difficulty of comprehending the so-called movement. The details he leaves out are telling evidence of a certain orthodoxy. I intend this book to serve as one attempt to complicate previous accounts. 38. Chave, “Minimalism and Biography.” 39. Foster, The Return of the Real, 43–44. 40. On race as a visual regime, see Gilroy, Against Race. 41. Alexander Alberro makes a similar argument in reference to other artists in his essay, “Reconsidering Conceptual Art,” xxi. 42. Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxiv. 43. Serlis, “Adrian Piper,” 26. 44. For pertinent reconsiderations of Black Arts Movement artists who addressed race, gender, sexuality, and class critically, see Punday, “The Black Arts Movement and the Genealogy of Multimedia,” and Sell, “The Black Arts Movement.” See also the essays collected in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, edited by Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford. 45. Piper, “Flying,” 20–21. 46. Piper, “The Logic of Modernism,” 58. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid.; Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art.” 49. Piper, “Flying,” 20–21. 50. Ibid., 21.

Notes to Introduction  265

1. Contingent and Universal 1. Piper, “Flying,” 20. 2. Piper, “The Logic of Modernism,” 57–58. Piper first made this argument in Appiah, “Art Beat,” 12. 3. Piper, “Ian Burn’s Conceptualism,” 74–75. 4. Ibid., 75. 5. Lippard, “Escape Attempts.” Piper finds further evidence of this in the investigation of art-world economics carried out by Art & Language, an artist’s collaborative that eventually included Burn, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, Joseph Kosuth, Terry Smith, and others. Piper has also pointed to Hans Haacke’s exploration of art’s deep but often unacknowledged investment in American politics. Piper, “The Logic of Modernism,” 118. I discuss Hans Haacke’s work in chapter 3. 6. Piper, “The Logic of Modernism,” 118. 7. Piper, “Flying,” 19–20. On Piper’s ideas about the role of sexual desire in achieving transcendence, particularly through her yogic practice of brahmacharya, or celibacy, since 1985, see Piper, “The Meaning of Brahmacharya”; and Claudia Cummins, “Life without Sex?” 8. Piper, “The Logic of Modernism,” 58. 9. Michelson, “Robert Morris,” 13. 10. Lambert, “More or Less Minimalism,” 108. 11. Rainer, “Skirting and Aging,” 90. Lambert quotes a shorter version of this passage in Lambert, “More or Less Minimalism,” 108. 12. Piper has retrospectively exhibited examples of each since 1987. 13. She mentions the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, specifically. See Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 187; Montano, “Adrian Piper,” 41; and “Adrian Piper over the Edge: LSD Paintings and Drawings, 1965– 1967,” at http://www.adrianpiper.com (http://www.adrianpiper.com/Over_ the_Edge/splash.html). This Adrian Piper Research Archive website includes images; an essay by Piper’s former assistant, Robert Del Principe; and Matteo Guarnaccia’s 1993 interview with Piper. 14. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 15. Ibid. 16. Chave, “Minimalism and Biography.” 17. Piper adds, “Sherrie, Laurie, Cindy, Jenny, Nancy! Who could have dreamed in those days that major art-world movers and shakers would ever have such names? It would have seemed ridiculous, incongruous, oxymoronic.” Piper, “Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxv. For an important exploration of how another woman artist became aware of the role of her name in determining how viewers interpreted her work, see Wagner, “Krasner’s Fictions,” in her Three Artists (Three Women). 18. Piper has recounted this several times. See Piper, “Flying,” 21; Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists,” 21 n. 9; Adrian Piper, “On Wearing Three

266   Notes to Chapter 1

Hats”; Sirmans, “Fifteen Minutes with Adrian Piper,” 21; Meyers-Kingsley and Piper, “medi(t)ations,” 174. 19. Piper, “My Slave Name,” n.p. This poem is one of a series included in the artworks that compose the series Decide Who You Are, which she exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, in 1992. 20. Ibid. Eng­lish translation by the author. Lippard corroborates this situation with her own experiences as a freelance writer. “I never knew what jobs I didn’t get,” she says, and, as a result, “was never aware of discrimination per se.” Lippard, “From Eccentric to Sensuous Abstraction,” 26. 21. Piper, “Triple Negation,” 21 n. 9. 22. Piper, “Flying,” 20. 23. Ibid. 24. Thomas Erben Gallery, “Adrian Piper: Early Drawings and Other Works,” press release, New York, December 7, 2001. 25. Piper, “Flying,” 21. 26. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2002. 27. Adrian Piper, personal communication, Hyannis, Massachusetts, June 2003. Piper discusses these artworks in her essay “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Place Position Presentation Public, 140–41. 28. Barrow, “Adrian Piper,” 12. 29. Piper, “My Art Education.” Piper dates her awakening to February 1967 based on her recollection of seeing LeWitt’s 46 Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes, which the Dwan Gallery first exhibited, February 3–28, 1968. Exhibition announcement, Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art. As I discuss later in this chapter, she says she met LeWitt because she was mad about Rosalind Krauss’s review of his show and wrote him a letter. Krauss’s first review of any exhibition of LeWitt’s work is her review of 46 Three-Part Variations. Piper also says that after seeing LeWitt’s show she reread his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” but the essay was not published until June 1967. 30. Piper, “My Art Education,” 4. 31. Ibid., 3. 32. Berger, “Critique of Pure Racism,” 8. 33. Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Place Position Presentation Public, 139–40. 34. Ibid., 141. 35. Piper, “A Defense of the ‘Conceptual’ Process in Art,” 3. Piper dates this essay to 1967, but I believe she must have written it in 1968. 36. Brown, “Month in Review,” 53. 37. LeWitt, “Serial Project #1,” n.p. 38. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 83. 39. Piper, “A Defense of the ‘Conceptual’ Process in Art,” 4. 40. Krauss, review LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes, 57 (emphasis in the original). 41. Ibid.

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42. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 125. 43. Krauss, review LeWitt’s 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes, 57. 44. Piper, “My Art Education.” 45. Piper, personal communication with the author, Hyannis, Massachusetts, June 2003; Piper, e-mail to the author, June 16, 2003. See also Withers, “Adrian Piper.” 46. Weber, “Objectivity Otherwise,” 36–37, 44. 47. Piper, “A Defense of the ‘Conceptual’ Process in Art,” 3. 48. Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Place Position Presentation Public, 141. 49. Perreault, “Art: Small Moments of Joy,” 15. 50. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 80. As evidence of how unimportant mathematics was to LeWitt, neither he nor any reviewer noticed that he had not discovered every possible variation for stacking the three different cubes. By the following year, when he drew All Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1969), he could illustrate sixty-eight variations. 51. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 80, unnumbered note. 52. Bochner, “Sol LeWitt,” 61. 53. Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” 21. 54. Lippard, “Rejective Art,” 34. 55. Siegel, “Sol LeWitt,” 57. 56. Perreault, “Art: Small Moments of Joy,” 15; and Lippard, “Rejective Art,” 34. 57. Piper, “The Logic of Modernism,” 118. 58. Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Place Position Presentation Public, 140. 59. Mel Bochner, “Systemic,” Arts Magazine 41 (November 1966): 40. Bochner quotes Stella from Frank Stella and Donald Judd, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” 59. 60. Bochner, “Systemic,” 40. 61. Piper argues that such categorical thinking provides the pseudorational basis for the pseudoscience of racism. Piper, “Higher-Order Discrimination”; Piper, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism”; Piper, “Two Kinds of Discrimination.” 62. Piper, “A Defense of the ‘Conceptual’ Process in Art,” 3. 63. Ibid. 64. Piper, “Flying,” 21. 65. Ibid., 20–21. 66. For the most complete accounts of the Dugway VX accident, see Virginia Brodine, Peter P. Gaspar, and Albert J. Pallmann, “The Wind from Dugway,” Environment 11, no. 1 (January–February 1969): cover, 2–9, 40–45; and Seymour Hersh, “On Uncovering the Great Nerve Gas Coverup,” Ramparts 7, no. 13 (June 1969): cover, 12–18. On the early press coverage, see Brodine, Gaspar, and Pallmann, 5. 67. Brodine, Gaspar, and Pallmann, “The Wind from Dugway,” 5–9, 42; Hersh, “On Uncovering the Great Nerve Gas Coverup,” 13–17; and Seymour M. Hersh, “Chemical and Biological Weapons—The Secret Arsenal,” New York Times Magazine (August 25, 1968): 27. 68. For examples of the fear VX testing would take human lives, see “The Deadly 268   Notes to Chapter 1

Peril When Nerve Gas Escapes,” New York Times, March 31, 1968; “Deadly Snows of Dugway,” Newsweek 71, no. 14 (April 1, 1968): 53; “It Was the Sheep This Time,” Nation 206, no. 19 (May 6, 1968): 588–89; Hersh, “Chemical and Biological Weapons—The Secret Arsenal,” 27; and Brodine, Gaspar, and Pallmann, “The Wind from Dugway,” 45. 69. Barrow identifies Dugway Proving Ground as a nuclear weapons test site, which it was, but is unaware that Dugway was in the news in 1968 for the nerve gas accident. Barrow, “Adrian Piper: Space, Time and Reference,” 13. 70. Hersh, “On Uncovering the Great Nerve Gas Coverup,” 13. 71. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–1969,” 115, 128. 72. Piper, “Flying,” 21. 73. Ibid. See also Barrow, “Adrian Piper: Space, Time and Reference,” 13. 74. Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art”; and Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 75. Barrow, “Adrian Piper: Space, Time and Reference,” 13. 76. Piper, “My Art Education,” 4. 77. Ibid., 4, n. 3. 78. Piper, “My Art Education,” 4, n. 3. Piper quotes LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 80. 79. Piper, “My Art Education,” 4, n. 4. 80. “Army’s Teargas Feared in Denver,” New York Times, August 18, 1968. 81. Hersh, “On Uncovering the Great Nerve Gas Coverup,” 17. 82. I discuss Three Untitled Projects further in chapter 3. 83. John Perreault, “Art: On the Street,” 18. 84. Ibid. 85. Piper says that LeWitt told the director of Dwan Gallery, John Weber, about her work. Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, June 22, 2003. 86. When I asked her, Piper told me she did not intend the circle form to resemble the crosshairs of a gun sight. Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, June 22, 2003. 87. Piper says that someone made the observation to her that Utah-Manhattan Transfer is reminiscent of the way in which Robert Moses was “literally re-drawing the map of NYC in those days.” Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, June 22, 2003. 88. Piper’s project resembles Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates (1973–74). Both monumentalize seemingly valueless spaces, drawing attention to the bureaucratization of value. 89. Piper, “Flying,” 21. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid., 20–21. 92. Lippard and Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” 31. 93. Adrian Piper, preliminary draft for her untitled statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” at the New York Cultural Center, May 1970, included in Context #9: Written Information Elicited from Me during the Period of May 15 to June 15, 1970 (1970). 94. Piper, “Flying,” 20. Notes to Chapter 1  269

95. For Fried, Modernist art seems to have transcended matters of race, gender, and sexuality, which he never discussed. Jones, “The Modernist Paradigm,” 495–99, 515 n. 46, 518; And Jones, “Elation and Anxiety.” 96. Piper, “Flying,” 20–21. 97. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A248–53. I believe Piper began her decades-long attempts to demonstrate that ideas are always contingent and determined by experience, and therefore mutable—a crucial component of her critique of Kant—at the same time she began to explore conceptual abstraction in art. 98. Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” 17, 15. 99. Foster, Return of the Real, 43.

2. Hypothesis 1. Piper, “Logic of Modernism,” 56–58, 118, 136. 2. Adrian Piper, personal communication, April 22, 2002. 3. See Barrow, “Adrian Piper,” 14; Goldstein, “Adrian Piper,” 196; Checklist, in Adrian Piper: Reflections, 1967–1987, special traveling exhibition catalogue, n.p. 4. On “woman artist” as dilettante, see Lippard, “Sexual Politics, Art Style,” 19. 5. Only a month after a group of thirteen artists organized themselves as the Art Workers Coalition, John Perreault, a member, reported that the group was demanding the Museum of Modern Art include “a section of the museum, under the direction of black artists . . . devoted to showing the accomplishments of black artists.” Furthermore, “the museum’s activities should be extended into black, Spanish, and other communities.” Perreault, “Art: Les Levine Month,” 16. As a group, the AWC was more reluctant to support the rights of women artists. 6. Wallace, “To Hell and Back,” 428, 435. See also Wallace, “Memories of a 60s Girlhood,” 14; and Wallace, “Reading 1968,” 195–96. 7. Baraka, “Counter Statement to Whitney Ritz Bros,” 10. 8. Tom Lloyd in Romare Bearden et al., “The Black Artist in America: A Symposium,” 258. 9. Piper has told me Bearden was a friend of her parents when she was a child. Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, January 15, 2008. 10. For example, Juliette Gordon, a member of WAR, explained that one reason for the group’s founding was animosity toward an unnamed organizer of the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, presumably Lucy Lippard, whom Gordon cynically describes as having “held all the male artists in her power since she was an art critic who could build or destroy a reputation.” Gordon, “The History of Our WAR.” Elsewhere in this chapter, I discuss the example of women artists’ reports of the hostility of male artists to their demand that the Whitney Annuals be comprised of 50 percent women artists. 11. WAR, “Dear ‘Fellow’ Artist,” 4. 12. Genauer, “Art and the Artist,” 45. 13. Grace Hartigan, in Nemser, “Forum,” 18. 14. Lee Krasner, in Nemser, “Forum,” 18. 15. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002.

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16. Piper states in her personal chronology that in 1971 she started a “women’s consciousness-raising group with Rosemary Mayer, Donna Denis, Randa Haines (filmmaker), Grace Murphy, others.” More recently, she told me that the group started meeting earlier, in 1969 or 1970. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 189; Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 17. On the importance of consciousness raising for black feminists in the 1960s, see Springer, Living for the Revolution, 45–46, 118–22. 18. Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women), 6. 19. Kelly, “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism,” 98. 20. Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 81 (emphasis in the original). 21. Ibid., 77. 22. Lucy Lippard quoted in Shatz, “Black Like Me,” 45. 23. Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxiv. 24. Ibid. 25. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 26. For details of Piper’s biography, see Piper, “Personal Chronology.” 27. Adrian Piper, telephone conversations with the author, March 1 and April 22, 2002. 28. Rainer, “Skirting,” 444–45. For another example, see Lucy Lippard, “From Eccentric to Sensuous Abstraction,” 26. 29. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 30. Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxiv (emphasis in original). 31. Ibid., xxxv. 32. Ibid. 33. Pindell, The Heart of the Question, 65, 69. 34. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 22, 2002. 35. I quote from the essay “Hypothesis,” which is part of each of the Hypothesis: Situation works. The essay has been reprinted as Piper, “Hypothesis,” in her Out of Order, Out of Sight, 20–21. 36. Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” 51. 37. Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 28; Krauss, “A View of Modernism”; and Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 131–34. 38. Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” 51. 39. Piper describes the Hypothesis series as an exploration of her “sensory consciousness” in the essay “Hypothesis,” which is part of each of the Hypothesis: Situation works. She wrote in 1981 that she read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in the summer of 1971 (Piper, “Food for the Spirit”). She has since clarified that she initially read Kant’s First Critique when writing her “Hypothesis” essay. See Piper, “Flying,” 22; Withers, “Adrian Piper Interviewed by J. Withers,” 36–37; Yancy, “Adrian M.S. Piper,” 54–55; and Piper quoted in Chayat, “Artist Explores Racism from Rare Perspective.” 40. Lippard, LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Robert and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Tom

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Doyle, Eva Hesse, and others lived on the Bowery at the time. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” 18–19. 41. On the artist’s studio as site of the sublime, see Jones, Machine in the Studio, 46–47. 42. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 188. 43. Flint, “An Interview with Raphael Soyer,” 16. 44. Piper, “Hypothesis” essay. The same experience is recorded in Hypothesis: Situation #9, in which the pages from the New York Review of Books have all been photographed at a time identified as “constant.” 45. The graph identifies the first four photographs as views of the stairwell and grocery of Piper’s building on Hester Street, and of Hester Street “running east” and “running west”; the fifth is identified as “exterior, bldg. #58 & 60” on Forsythe Street. Piper pasted the photograph of the grocery store interior fourth and the eastward and westward views of Hester Street second and third, respectively. 46. I quote phrases from the text in the artworks Hypothesis: Situation #16 and Hypothesis: Situation #17. 47. Lippard, “Sexual Politics, Art Style,” 19; and Lippard, “Why a Women’s Art Show?” n.p. 48. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 39. 49. The Women’s Ad Hoc Committee, Women Artists in Revolution, and WSABAL, “To the Viewing Public,” 35. 50. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2002. 51. Piper identifies Meat into Meat as a “found private confrontational performance” in Adrian Piper, Meat into Meat (October 1968), in her Six Early Performances, 1968–71, notebook, Generali Foundation, Vienna, n.p. On Meat into Meat, see also Piper, “Meat into Meat,” 10; and Linda Montano, Sex, Food, Money/Fame, Ritual/Death: Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 419–20. 52. Piper, “Meat into Meat,” 9. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid.; David Rosner, personal communication, New York, N.Y., November 17, 2000. 55. I quote Piper from her essay “Meat into Meat,” 10. Piper told me she sees antagonism in Rosner’s face in the last of the Meat into Meat photographs in a telephone conversation, March 1, 2002. 56. Piper, “Meat into Meat,” 9. I discussed with Piper the ideas she articulated in her essay about Meat into Meat in a telephone conversation, March 1, 2002. 57. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 58. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 147. 59. Donald Judd, Complete Writings: 1959–1975, Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints, The Nova Scotia Series: Source Materials of the Contemporary Arts, edited by Kasper Koenig (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975), 197. 272   Notes to Chapter 2

60. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 61. On Fried’s concept of “conviction,” see Jones, “The Modernist Paradigm,” 495– 99, 515 n. 46, 518; and Jones, “Elation and Anxiety,” 707–10. 62. Lippard, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 63. Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” 49, 51. 64. Foster, The Return of the Real, 43. 65. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation, April 22, 2002. 66. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 37 (emphasis in the original). 67. Ibid., 38. 68. Lippard, “Sexual Politics, Art Style,” 19. 69. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 80. 70. On ways in which Conceptual artwork makes viewers aware of the conditions of its production and existence, see Buchloh, “Conceptual Art,” 105–43. 71. Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” 21; and LeWitt, “The Cube,” 72. 72. Schwartz, “50%—No Joke,” 29. 73. Lippard, untitled essay, in C. 7,500, n.p. 74. Perreault, “Art: Women in the News,” 31; Crichton, “London Letter,” 42, 61; Goldenthal, “Idea is All in ‘c.7500’ Show”; and Taylor, “Women’s Exhibit ‘c. 7500.’ ” Clippings from the Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 75. Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 71. 76. Hypothesis: Situation #9 documents five articles from the November 6, 1969, issue of the New York Review of Books. In the order listed in the artwork, these are: J. M. Cameron, “Bad Times,” review of Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future and Men in Dark Times; Herbert L. Packer, “The Conspiracy Weapon,” review of Jessica Mitford, The Trial of Dr. Spock; Ivan Illich, “Outwitting the ‘Developed’ Countries”; Gilbert Ryle, “If Plato Only Knew,” review of Alan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, Paul Friedländer, Plato: The Dialogues, Second and Third Periods, The Bollingen Series, and Kenneth M. Sayre, Plato’s Analytical Method; and Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Holy War.” New York Review of Books 13, no. 8 (November 6, 1969): 4–30. 77. Eleanor Antin, “Women without Pathos,” 86–87. Antin exhibited “Portraits of Eight New York Women” from November 21 through December 6, 1970, at the Hotel Chelsea, New York. Exhibition announcement, Artists Files, Museum of Modern Art. 78. Ibid., 87. 79. Ibid. 80. On Rosler’s Bringing the War Home series, see Laura Cottingham, “The Inadequacy of Seeing and Believing: The Art of Martha Rosler,” in Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art, in, of, and from the Feminine, edited by M. Catherine de Zegher (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996), 156– 63; Laura Cottingham, “The War Is Always Home: Martha Rosler,” Simon Watson Gallery, catalogue essay, October 1991 (http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/ reviews/cottingham.html); Brian Wallis, “Living Room War,” Art in America 80, no. 2 (February 1992): 104–5, 107; Catherine Caesar, “Martha Rosler’s Critical Notes to Chapter 2  273

Position within Feminist Conceptual Practices,” n. paradoxa (February 14, 2001): 43–51; and Catherine de Zegher, Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, edited by Catherine de Zegher (Birmingham, U.K.: Ikon Gallery, and Vienna, Austria: Generali Foundation, 1999), 295. 81. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation, April 22, 2002. 82. Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxv. 83. Ibid. 84. Lippard, Six Years, 22. 85. Wall, “Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today Paintings,” 135– 56. 86. Regaring Kawara’s apparent aspirations, see Anne Rorimer, “The Date Paintings of On Kawara,” Museum Studies 17 (1991): 120–37, 179–80. 87. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art,” 119. 88. LeWitt, “Serial Project #1,” n.p. 89. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art,” 143. 90. Piper, “Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxv. 91. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 188. 92. Adrian Piper, personal communication, Hyannis, Massachusetts, June 2003. 93. Lippard, “Sexual Politics, Art Style,” 19. 94. Lippard, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 95. On Stella’s theory of the “housepainter’s technique,” see Jones, Machine in the Studio, 121–29, 403 n. 34. 96. Rubin, Frank Stella, 22, 57, 151 n. 22; Rosenblum, Frank Stella, 14–17. Before 1970, Stella’s best-known statement about the “housepainter’s technique”—one Lippard edited for publication—was found in Frank Stella and Donald Judd, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” 58. 97. Castanis, “Speak Out the Arts,” page unknown. 98. Lippard, “A Note on the Politics and Aesthetics of a Women’s Show,” 6. 99. Hannah Weiner, “Hannah Weiner at Her Job,” undated announcement and press release, Gain Ground. Information Exhibition Papers, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Weiner places her “job designing lingerie” within the context of her career as a poet and artist in the poem, “remembered sequel,” in her silent teachers remembered sequel, 69. 100. Hannah Weiner, untitled statement, “Calendar of Events, ‘Street Works IV,’ ” photocopied handout. Information Exhibition Papers, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 101. Rogoff, “Gossip as Testimony,” 63–64. 102. Lippard, “Why a Women’s Art Show?” n.p. 103. On this question, see also Mercer, “Decentering and Recentering,” 47–48. 104. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 105. Siegel, “Why Spiral?” 48. 106. Ibid., 50. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., 68.

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109. Jacob Lawrence and Tom Lloyd in Bearden et al., “The Black Artist in America,” 250. 110. Ringgold, “Being My Own Woman,” 8. 111. The first of these exhibitions that I have found a record of was “Art of the American Negro” (June 27–July 25, 1966) sponsored by the Harlem Cultural Council, for which Romare Bearden served as art director. “Art of the American Negro,” exhibition announcement, Romare Bearden Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 112. “Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 1930s,” exhibition announcement, The Studio Museum in Harlem, postmarked November 25, 1968, Romare Bearden Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. On “Invisible Americans,” see also Dubin, Displays of Power, 28; Chase, AfroAmerican Art and Craft, 133–34; and Ringgold, “Being My Own Woman,” 8. 113. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 187. 114. Hale Woodruff, professor, Department of Art Education, New York University School of Education, letter to John Hightower, executive director, New York State Council on the Arts, April 4, 1967. Schomburg Center Records, Schomburg Center for Black Culture, New York Pubic Library, New York. 115. See Dubin, Displays of Power, 18–63; Dubin, “With the Best Intentions,” 39–46; Schoener, “Introduction to the New Edition,” n.p.; and Nelson, “The Museum on My Mind,” 23–30. 116. “HARLEM ON WHOSE MIND?” handbill, [1969]. Romare Bearden Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 117. Lloyd, in Bearden et al., “The Black Artist in America,” 254–55. 118. The group Black and Puerto Rican Students and Artists for a Black Wing in Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., protested the separation of black artists’ work from that of white participants in MOMA’s memorial exhibition for King. Black and Puerto Rican Students and Artists for a Black Wing in Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “An Open Letter to Today’s Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art,” handbill, April 4, 1969, Lucy R. Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Ironically, John Canaday praised MOMA for bringing black and white artists together for the exhibition. See Canaday, “Art: Modern Museum Honors Dr. King”; and “900 Attend Preview of Show at Modern,” New York Times. 119. Black and Puerto Rican Students and Artists for a Black Wing in Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “An Open Letter to Today’s Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art,” handbill (4 April 1969); and Art Workers Coalition, “Program for Change,” unpublished typescript (October 1970): 3–4; both in the Lucy R. Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 120. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, xxxii. 121. Gibson, “Black Is a Color,” 11–30. 122. Glazer, “Signifying Identity,” 411. 123. Ibid., 424. 124. Ibid., 420.

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125. Rogers, “Ralph Ellison, the Collage of Romare Bearden and Race,” 9–10. 126. Riis, How the Other Half Lives; and Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices. 127. Piper, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism,” 189. 128. Ibid., 194. 129. Piper, “The Meaning of ‘Ought,’ ” 53–54. 130. Peggy Phelan recognizes this more clearly than anyone else has, but she expresses reservations about Piper’s commitment to Kant. However, Phelan bases her critique of Piper’s Kantian vision on the Critique of Judgment, when it is a very different text, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, that has occupied Piper since 1970. Phelan, “Portrait of the Artist,” 8. For an example of Piper’s complaints about “poststructuralism” and “deconstructionists” and her defense of rationalism and Kant—that his texts might be valuable despite his racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and other “embarrassing personal opinions”—see Berger, “Critique of Pure Racism,” 6–8. Amelia Jones points out that Piper’s work seems sympathetic to a poststructuralist approach despite the artist’s protests. Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, 303 n. 43. For a feminist philosopher’s defense of Piper, see Brand, “Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction,” 262–66; and Brand, review of Out of Order, Out of Sight, 405–6. 131. Rumsey, “Re-Visions of Agency in Kant’s Moral Theory,” 132–33. 132. Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Place Position Presentation Public, 139–40. 133. On Kant’s categorization of blacks and the implications for Modernism, see Kevin Bell, Ashes Taken for Fire, 171–72. 134. Piper, “Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxiv. 135. Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid., 7. 138. Ibid.

3. May 1970

1. Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 2. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 187; Montano, “Adrian Piper,” 419. 3. See LeWitt, “Plan for Wall Drawing,” 23. 4. Adrian Piper, artist’s questionnaire, 1970, Information Exhibition Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, N.Y. 5. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 188. 6. Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 7. Piper, “Food for the Spirit,” 34. 8. Piper quoted in Shatz, “Black Like Me,” 45. 9. Piper quoted in Ibid., 46. 10. Adrian Piper, personal communication with the author, Hyannis, Mass., June 2003. 11. Piper sent each book with a copy of the photocopied list of people she mailed the

276   Notes to Chapter 3















books to. The three untitled books were published by 0 to 9 Press in 1969. See Information Exhibition Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives; Adrian Piper, advertisement, Village Voice 14, no. 22 (March 13, 1969): 15; Adrian Piper, advertisement, Village Voice 14, no. 23 (March 20, 1969): 17; and Goldstein, “Adrian Piper,” 196. 12. Perreault, “Art: On the Street,” 18. 13. Adrian Piper, Area Relocation #2, advertisement, Village Voice 14, no. 33 (May 29, 1969): 15. 14. Lippard, “Sexual Politics, Art Style,” 19. I discuss different aspects of Piper’s Three Untitled Projects in chapter one. 15. Piper names John Weber, Acconci, and LeWitt as male friends who supported her career. Cottingham, interview with Adrian Piper, 127. 16. Handwritten notes on file card, research for Six Years. Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2002. 17. Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 18. Adrian Piper to Kynaston McShine, undated postcard, postmarked July 9, 1969. Information Exhibition Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives. Lucy Lippard, handwritten notes on file card, research materials for Six Years. Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 19. Piper quoted in Shatz, “Black Like Me,” 46. 20. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” 3–5. 21. Piper, “On Wearing Three Hats.” In her 1987 essay, “Flying,” Piper pairs her newfound awareness of “others’ responses to [her] perceived social, political, and gender identity” with the events of the spring of 1970. Piper, “Flying,” 21. 22. Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists,” 21 n. 9. See also Cottingham, interview with Adrian Piper, 126. 23. Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” 149–63. 24. Ibid., 154–55. 25. Adrian Piper, “Proposal #1,” n.p. “Street Works II” was organized by Perreault, Acconci, Hannah Weiner, Marjorie Strider, Eduardo Costa, and Bernadette Mayer. Perreault, “Art: Free Art,” 14. “Street Works II” occurred on “April 18 between five and six o’clock on one square block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and 14th and 13th Streets.” Piper, “Proposal #1,” n.p. 26. Perreault, “Art: Free Art,” 14. 27. Perreault spelled Piper’s name correctly in a later review of her Three Untitled Projects. The announcement for “Street Works II,” which Perreault helped organize, lists her name correctly. “Street Works II” announcement (April 18, 1969). Information Exhibition Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives. Piper signed her LSD paintings of 1965–66 “Adrianne,” but it is unlikely Perreault knew this. 28. Piper’s “Artist’s Statement” appears in Meyers-Kingsley and Piper, “MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper’s Videos, Installations, Performances, and Soundworks,” 174. 29. More recently, the recording, entitled Streetwork Streettracks (1969), was included in the retrospective exhibition of Piper’s audio and video work, “MEDI(t)Notes to Chapter 3  277

Ations: Adrian Piper’s Videos, Installations, Performances, and Soundworks, 1968–1992,” but it was played back at the speed at which Piper originally recorded it. Having listened to the recording twice in its entirety, I can conclude that the sheer boredom of listening to two hours of street noises, punctuated by brief and nearly inaudible conversations with Piper’s friends Acconci, Richard Van Buren, and Ed Ruda, does not distract the listener from the circumstances of the recording’s playback. See also Meyers-Kingsley and Piper, “MEDI(t)Ations: Adrian Piper’s Videos, Installations, Performances, and Soundworks,” 178. 30. Piper was not the only woman to participate in “Street Works II.” Lippard, Weiner, Rosemarie Castoro, Madeline Gins, Bobbi Gormley, Katherine Greef, Bernadette and Rosemary Mayer, Lil Picard, Marjorie Strider, and Anne Waldman also took part; Rosemary Mayer, Strider, and Weiner helped organize the event. “Street Works II” announcement (April 18, 1969); Perreault, “Art: Free Art,” 14. 31. “Hannah Weiner/ Presents/ the Saturday Afternoon Show/ at/ Max’s Kansas City/ 213 Park Avenue South/ May 2 2–3 Pm,” announcement, Information Exthibition Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives. 32. Mayer’s photographs of Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City were not published until one appeared in Adrian Piper: Reflections, 1967–1987, 12. 33. Rosemary Mayer to Bernadette Mayer and E. Bowes, postcard, postmarked May 2, 1970. Bernadette Mayer Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, Calif. 34. Piper, e-mail to the author, June 19, 2003. 35. John Perreault, “Art: Only a Dummy,” 16, 18; Kurtz, “Last Call at Max’s,” 26–29. 36. Perreault, “Art: Only a Dummy,” 16. 37. Kurtz, “Last Call at Max’s,” 27. 38. Piper, “Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City,” 27. 39. Ibid. 40. Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” 21. 41. Wilson, “In Memory of the News and of Ourselves,” 44. Fred Moten, in his discussion of Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, misses this important point in Piper’s critique of her performance. Moten, In the Break, 240. 42. See Glueck, “Art Community Here Agrees on Plan to Fight War, Racism and Oppression,” 30; and Baker, “Pickets on Parnassus,” 31. 43. See Adrian Piper, untitled statement, in Lippard, Six Years, 168; and Karshan, Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, 95. 44. Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, May 10, 2003. Piper says that she took part in demonstrations in the early 1960s with her high school chapter of SNCC but that she withdrew from organized politics when she became involved in yoga and the counterculture. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 45. Guerilla Art Action Group, “A Call for the Immediate Resignation of All the Rockefellers from the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art,” photocopied statement, November 10, 1969. Lucy Lippard Papers. 278   Notes to Chapter 3

46. Art Strike, announcement. New York Artists’ Strike Against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War press release, May 1970, Lucy R. Lippard Papers. 47. Wyatt and Abelman, “Museums Target of Protest,” n.p. Strikes by MoMA Union [PASTA] and Protests by Outside Groups, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, N.Y. 48. Glueck, “Art Community Here Agrees on Plan,” 30; Glueck, “Strike Front Keeps Its Cool,” D17. 49. New York Times, “Met Museum Adds Hours In Evening,” 40. 50. See Daily News, “Some Shows Go On,” 20–21; New York Times, “Met Museum Adds Hours In Evening,” 40; Glueck, “500 in Art Strike Sit on Steps of Metropolitan”; Schwartz and Amidon, “On the Steps of the Met,” 19; and Baker, “Pickets on Parnassus,” 32. 51. Schwartz and Amidon, “On the Steps of the Met,” 4. 52. Wyatt and Abelman, “Museums Target of Protest,” 3, 30; Daily News, “Some Shows Go On,” 20–21. 53. Schwartz and Amidon, “On the Steps of the Met,” 19. 54. John Hightower quoted in Wyatt and Abelman, “Museums Target of Protest,” n.p. See also Daily News, “Some Shows Go On,” 20–21. 55. Siegel, “Carl Andre: Artworker,” 175–79. 56. Carl Andre, “A Reasonable and Practical Proposal for Artists Who Wish to Remain Free Men in These Terrible Times,” typescript of statement presented at the Open Hearing, April 10, 1969. Virginia Admiral Papers, Archives of American Art. 57. Kramer, “Artists and the Problem of ‘Relevance.’” 58. Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2002. 62. Robert Morris quoted in Baker, “Pickets on Parnassus,” 32. 63. Piper, untitled statement, in Lippard, Six Years, 168. 64. Piper says, “[I] intended [the museum visitor] to see a blank wall with a small, typed statement. But I heard that Donald Karshan (and/or Joseph [Kosuth, who curated the exhibition]) removed [it] shortly after I posted it. I didn’t check, so I don’t know whether they did or not.” Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, May 10, 2003. The appearance of the Cultural Center’s galleries on May 20, 1970, is described in the diary of Sally Sammartino, wife of Peter Sammartino, the president of Fairleigh Dickinson University. Sally Sammartino was actively engaged in the daily operations of the Cultural Center, which was owned and run by Fairleigh Dickinson University. It is clear from her diary that she opposed the Art Strike. Sammartino, The New York Cultural Center in Association with Fairleigh Dickinson University, 235. 65. Piper, quoted in Shatz, “Black Like Me,” 45–46. 66. Piper, untitled statement in Karshan, Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, 36. Joseph Kosuth, who curated “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects,” had Notes to Chapter 3  279

asked Piper to write an essay for the catalogue. She wrote “Hypothesis,” the essay that accompanies each work in the Hypothesis series. She says she was surprised when Kosuth included only an excerpt in the catalogue and suspects that he felt her work was not conceptual enough. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002; and Piper, “Flying,” 22. The essay is reprinted as Piper, “Hypothesis,” 20–21. 67. Shatz, “Black Like Me,” 45. 68. Piper says the postcards were stolen out of Context #8 while it was displayed in her retrospective, “Reflections, 1967–1987,” at the Alternative Museum in May– June 1987. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2002. 69. Glueck, “Strike Front Keeps Its Cool,” D17. 70. Schwartz and Amidon, “On the Steps of the Met,” 19. 71. Drafts of Piper’s statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” are included in her artwork, Context #9 (1970). 72. Schwartz and Amidon, “On the Steps of the Met,” 3. 73. Robert Morris quoted in Ellwood, “The New York Art Strike,” 100. 74. Ringgold, We Flew Over the Bridge, 176–78. 75. Farrington, Art on Fire, 115, 117–21, 170. 76. Poppy Johnson quoted in Ellwood, “The New York Art Strike,” 70. 77. Marcia Tucker quoted in ibid., 55. 78. Annotated “Price List,” “Language IV,” Dwan Gallery Exhibition Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 79. Ann Goldstein incorrectly implies that the entire project is devoted to Piper’s withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects.” See Goldstein, “Adrian Piper,” 197. 80. Context #9 was included in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey of conceptual art, “Reconsidering the Object of Art.” Piper withdrew it upon learning cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris was the show’s major corporate sponsor. She pointed to her previous work, Ashes to Ashes (1995), which links the cigarette industry to her parents’ deaths. See Los Angeles Times, “Morning Report. Art: Piper Pulls Out of MOCA Show” (November 22, 1995): F2; Carol Vogel, “Inside Art: Philip Morris Loses an Artist,” New York Times (November 24, 1995): C30; Times Union, “Artist Pulls Work from L.A. Exhibit” (Albany, N.Y.) (November 25, 1995): D8; Walter Robinson, “Tobacco Row, Part II,” Art in America 84, no. 1 (January 1996): 126; and Adrian Piper, “Philip Morris’s Artworld Fix,” Drama Review 40, no. 4; T152 (Winter 1996): 5–6. 81. Sandler, American Art of the 1960s, 354. On Morris’s Document and Litanies, see Berger, Labyrinths, 19. 82. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 178. 83. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 197–98. 84. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2002. 85. Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1958). 86. Produced in an age of typewriters and mimeographs, many of the fliers em-

280   Notes to Chapter 3

ploy excessive capitalization and multiple exclamation points to lend their messages urgency and importance. The first two quotations are from a flier by the International Socialists; the third is from an anonymous flier announcing an Emergency Convocation at City College for May 11, 1970; and the last is from a newsletter published by City College students for the duration of the strike in numbered and undated editions (identified by day of the week and time of day), BUM! 14 (Wednesday, May 13, 1970): n.p. “Bums” was Nixon’s epithet for student protesters, which clever City College students transformed into a verb implying active dissent. 87. Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, 26. 88. Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 117. 89. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 66. 90. Ibid., 67. 91. This is a structure outlined by Heidegger, whose argument in “The Origin of the Work of Art” implies that the artist who creates an artwork must assume a new relationship to it after it is completed, one structurally the same as that of any other viewer. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in his Poetry, Language, Thought, edited by J. Glenn Gray, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Martin Heidegger Works (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971), 15–87. 92. Adrian Piper, “INFORMATION PROPOSALS” form (March 28, 1970); Adrian Piper, typed page for exhibition with Context #7 (undated); Adrian Piper, loan agreement (May 28, 1970). Information Exhibition Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives. 93. Baker, “Pickets on Parnassus,” 32. 94. Shapiro, “Mr. Processionary at the Conceptacle,” 60. 95. Comment written in Context #7, volume iii. Adrian Piper, Context #7 (1970), Generali Foundation, Vienna. 96. Ibid., volumes ii, v, vi and iii. 97. Ibid., volumes iii, iv and vi. 98. Ibid., volumes ii, iii, v and vi. 99. Ibid., volumes ii, iv and vi. 100. Ibid., volumes ii and iii. 101. Ibid., volumes ii and v. 102. Ibid., volume iv. 103. Ibid., volume ii. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., volumes i, ii, v and vii. 106. Ibid., volume iv. 107. Piper, “Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxiv. 108. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002.

4. Catalysis 1. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 2. Adrian Piper, personal communication, March 1, 2002.

Notes to Chapter 4  281



3. Serlis, “Adrian Piper,” 26. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. George Trescher, vice-director for public affairs, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, letter to SoHo Artists Association, Art Workers Coalition, A.W.C. Black and Puerto Rican Committee, New York Art Strike, and Women Artists in Revolution, dated October 15, 1970. Virginia Admiral Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. “Before Cortés: Sculpture of Middle America” was on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum from September 30, 1970, until January 3, 1971. 7. Art Workers Coalition, “Program for Change,” October 1970, 4–5. Lucy R. Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art Washington, D.C. 8. I discuss the controversy surrounding “Harlem on My Mind” in chapter 2. 9. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 10. Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, January 15, 2008. 11. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 67–69. 12. My description of the structure of Talking to Myself: The Autobiography of an Art Object is based on comparing all published versions of the texts that comprise it. In 1973 and 1974, Piper presented Talking to Myself: The Autobiography of an Art Object as an artwork in at least four exhibitions and at one art gallery: in “Thought: Structures” at the Pace College Gallery, New York (January 1973); in “Nine New York Artists” at Hartwick College’s Yager Museum in Oneonta, New York (April 1973); in Lucy Lippard’s May 1973 exhibition of work by women conceptual artists, “c. 7,500,” at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California (May 1973; touring the United States and London through June 1974); and in “Word Works” at Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery in Walnut, California (April 1974). The essay was subsequently published as a book in two editions. She also made copies of the typescript of Talking to Myself available at the feminist cooperative, A.I.R. Gallery, New York. See Perreault, “Art: Circles, Lines, and a Legend,” 28; “Yager Exhibited Artists’ Works,” Hilltops (Hartwick College, Oneonta, N.Y.) (April 5, 1973): page unknown (clipping courtesy of the Yager Museum, Hartwick College, Oneonta, N.Y.); Checklist, “Conceptual Art,” Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. Word Works (Walnut, Calif.: Mt. San Antonio College Community Services, 1974): n.p.; Piper, “In Support of Meta-Art,” 81, unnumbered note; Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2002; Piper, Talking to Myself; and Piper, Parlando a me Stressa. 13. The four earliest essays include “Art as Catalysis” (August 1970), “Notes and Qualifications” (September 1970), “Note on ‘Notes and Qualifications’ (Further Qualifications)” (October 1970), and “Concretized Ideas I’ve Been Working Around” (January 1971). Piper, Talking to Myself, 7–15. “Art as Catalysis” was published in slightly different form as the first section of Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 44–45. Piper first published an excerpt from “Concretized Ideas I’ve Been Working Around” in the “26 Contemporary Women Artists” catalogue. This excerpt 282   Notes to Chapter 4

was presented similarly in the January 1972 issue of Domus as part of a section devoted to Conceptual art made by women. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p.; Adrian Piper, untitled text, “L’informazione negata,” 55. A revised version of “Concretized Ideas” was published as the middle section of Piper, “An Ongoing Essay.” Lippard quoted Piper’s descriptions of her Catalysis actions from “An Ongoing Essay” in the introduction to their Drama Review interview. Finally, Lippard reprinted the text of “An Ongoing Essay” in her 1973 anthology of Conceptual art, Six Years. (Although Lippard identifies the text as being from the 26 Contemporary Women Artists catalogue, it more closely resembles the version published in “Two Proposals.”) Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45–46; Lippard, “Catalysis: An Interview,” 76; Piper, “Section of an Ongoing Essay,” 234–35. 14. Piper, Talking to Myself, 15–17. Piper included this section, in slightly different form, in March 1972 as the third and final section of “An Ongoing Essay,” 46. It was also reprinted in 1991 in the catalogue for an exhibition concerning art and politics as Piper, “A Transition into Solipsism,” n.p. 15. Piper dates the final essay, “Moving from Solipsism to Self-Consciousness,” to September 1972. Piper, Talking to Myself, 17–29. Piper had previously published a revised excerpt from “Moving from Solipsism” in Artforum. Piper, “In Support of Meta-Art,” 79–81. Piper wrote the last essay, “An Autobiographical Preface” (January 1973), for the book. Piper, Talking to Myself, 5–7. 16. Lippard, “Introduction,” n.p. 17. On the history and scope of the debate over women’s sensibilities in art, see Gouma-Peterson and Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” 334–38. 18. Lippard, “Introduction,” n.p. 19. Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 20. Lippard, “Introduction,” n.p. 21. Lippard, From the Center, 49. 22. Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 71. 23. Ibid. On the feminist critique of “greatness,” see Duncan, “When Greatness Is a Box of Wheaties”; Gouma-Peterson and Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” 326–29; and Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women), 23–25. 24. Kelly, “Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism,” 94–98. 25. Glueck, “Art Notes,” D20. 26. David L. Shirey, “Lyrical Abstraction Show at Whitney,” New York Times (May 29, 1971): 24; and James R. Mellow, “One Gift Horse They Should Have Neighed,” New York Times (June 21, 1971): D21. 27. Perreault, “Art: Women in the News,” 31. 28. Ibid. 29. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 30. Ibid. 31. Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 32. Ibid., 7. Notes to Chapter 4  283

33. Ibid. 34. Mayer, “Performance & Experience,” 33. 35. Piper states in her personal chronology that she started a “women’s consciousness-raising group with Rosemary Mayer, Donna Denis, Randa Haines (filmmaker), Grace Murphy, others” in 1971. She told me the group started meeting earlier, in 1969 or 1970. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 189; and Adrian Piper, personal communication, April 22, 2002. 36. Mayer, “Performance & Experience,” 36. 37. I discuss Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City in chapter 3. 38. Mayer, “Performance & Experience,” 34–35. 39. Piper quoted from Piper, “Introduction: Some Very FORWARD Remarks,” xxxv; and Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2002. 40. Mayer, “Performance & Experience,” 34. 41. Piper, Talking to Myself, 17. 42. Serlis, “Adrian Piper,” 24. 43. Piper, Talking to Myself, 18. 44. Ibid., 21. 45. Ibid., 18. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 19. 48. Piper’s proposal is dated June 1971. The Biennale ran from September 24 through November 1, 1971. Piper, “Paris Proposal for Biennale et International,” 58. 49. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45; and Piper, Talking to Myself, 15. 50. Piper first describes Catalysis VI in “An Ongoing Essay,” 45. Lippard, “Catalysis: An Interview,” 77. 51. Serlis, “Adrian Piper,” 24. 52. Ibid., 25. 53. Ibid., 24. 54. Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” 503. 55. Lippard, “Catalysis: An Interview,” 78. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Serlis, “Adrian Piper,” 24, 26. 59. Piper describes her refusal to pass for white as both dilemma and source of strength in Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black”; Piper, “A Tale of Avarice and Poverty”; and Piper, “Flying.” 60. Berger, “The Critique of Pure Racism,” 7. 61. Yancy, “Adrian M.S. Piper,” 62–63. 62. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. This passage appears in slightly different form in Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45. 63. Piper, Talking to Myself, 13. 64. Ibid. (emphasis in the original). 65. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45. 66. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, April 22, 2002. 67. Paoletti, “Adrian Piper,” n.p. 284   Notes to Chapter 4

68. Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” 21. 69. Wilson, “In Memory of the News and of Our Selves,” 44. 70. Piper wrote, “there must be something wrong with a system of aesthetic values which can be preserved only in isolation from the rest of society, and only by severely limiting the audience to a highly educated minority.” Piper, Talking to Myself, 13. Fried criticized Minimalism for the same idealistic appeal to the American everyman. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 128, 131, 134. 71. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 72. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45. 73. Piper first exhibited the posed photographs of Catalysis III in 1987, when they were included in her retrospective exhibition at the Alternative Museum but not published in the catalogue. John Weber Gallery, Adrian Piper, n.p. 74. Piper, “An Autobiographical Preface,” 5. 75. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 146. 76. Ibid. 77. Owens, “On Art and Artists,” 21. 78. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 135. 79. Moten, In the Break, 236. 80. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 127 (emphasis in the original). For a helpful critique of Fried’s position, see Jones, “Art History/Art Criticism.” 81. Moten, In the Break, 238. Moten is wrong to conclude that “Piper seems to deny the implications of what is, for Kant, an enabling paradox: the objectivetranscendental ground of humanity seems inseparable from a certain subjective condition of its possibility—the ideality of space-time is always conditioned, made possible, by a specific experience of space-time” (244). Piper explains her work in precisely this way. Moten makes two mistakes. First, he assumes that Piper bases her practice on a simplistic understanding of judgment based on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Moten, In the Break, 243–51) when it is clear from Piper’s writings in both art and philosophy that the Third Critique plays almost no role in how she conceptualizes or explains her project. Rather, the foundation for Piper’s approach to the “indexical present” is a critique of Kant’s theory of the Categorical Imperative, which Kant articulates in the Critique of Pure Reason. Moten’s more fundamental mistake is to assume that Piper is fully identical with her artwork—she is “the artist as art object” (241–42), he writes, “Piper as Piper’s work” (249), but, I argue, she is only ever ambiguously so. To justify his claim that Piper is never more than what Derrida calls “milieu” (249), that Derrida’s theory of “the parergon is . . . problematic for Piper” (The Truth in Painting. 247), Moten ignores how Piper distinguishes herself from the way she appears in performance. He makes the same sort of mistake for which Derrida criticizes Meyer Shapiro (see Derrida on the three “dogmas” of art history, 313–14). As I hope to demonstrate, Piper makes clear in her work that she takes pains to stand out in performance, refusing to remain milieu but instead treading the line between object and artwork, interiority and exteriority. Had she done otherwise, no one would have noticed. Piper refuses to collude with viewers’ avoided gazes and so sets herself apart by means of the parergon. For a clear Notes to Chapter 4  285

example of Piper’s critique of the Kantian Categorical Imperative, see Piper, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism.” 82. Kester, “Transcending Privilege,” 26. 83. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 84. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 85. Piper, Talking to Myself, 14. 86. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 87. Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” 23. 88. Ibid., 21. 89. Foster, The Return of the Real, 43; and Krauss, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop,” 64. 90. Krauss, “Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop,” 63–64. 91. Foster, Return of the Real, 43. 92. Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in his Art and Objecthood, 41–42. 93. Piper, “A Defense of the ‘Conceptual’ Process in Art,” 3. 94. Piper, Talking to Myself, 12. 95. Adrian Piper quoted in Staniszewski, “Race Against Time,” n.p. 96. Lippard, “Catalysis: An Interview,” 77–78; and Adrian Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 97. Berger, “Black Skin, White Masks,” 97. 98. Lippard, “The Art Workers Coalition,” 174. 99. Not all artists agreed with this. Dan Graham told the artists not to withdraw their work from exhibition. Seth Siegelaub, typed transcript of untitled statement; and Dan Graham, “April 10, 1969,” typed transcript of statement. Art Workers Coalition, “An Open Public Hearing on the Subject: What Should Be the Program of the Art Workers Regarding Museum Reform and to Establish the Program of an Open Art Workers Coalition,” April 10, 1969, School of Visual Arts, New York. Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 100. Carl Andre, “A Reasonable and Practical Proposal for Artists Who Wish to Remain Free Men in these Terrible Times,” typed transcript of statement, Art Workers Coalition, “An Open Public Hearing” (emphasis in the original). 101. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 102. Lippard, “The Art Workers Coalition,” 174; and Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. Fried made an emphatic break from Greenberg in the footnotes of two articles published in 1966 and 1967, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings” and “Art and Objecthood,” respectively. Nevertheless, Greenberg and Fried continued to be paired by their critics. Fried, “Shape as Form”; Fried, “Art and Objecthood”; and Fried, “An Introduction to My Criticism,” 11, 33–40. 103. On the changing role of artists as writers, see Owens, “Earthwords.” 104. The only Catalysis works Piper presented as part of an exhibition were Catalysis VII, VIII and possibly II, all for “26 Contemporary Women Artists.” 105. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p.; and Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45. 106. Dorothy Mayhall, “Aldrich Museum Explanation,” undated, “26 Contemporary 286   Notes to Chapter 4

Women Artists” exhibition file, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Conn. The Aldrich Museum’s exhibition file for “26 Contemporary Women Artists” contains a typed announcement by Piper and a typed explanation of the museum’s position, signed by director Dorothy Mayhall. Both appear to have been displayed in the galleries. I thank Jessica Hough, assistant curator, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, for her assistance in locating these documents. 107. Adrian Piper, untitled announcement, 1971, “26 Contemporary Women Artists” exhibition file, Aldrich Museum. 108. Piper’s Catalysis VIII was presented as one in a series of solo exhibitions by young artists, “One Man, One Work,” at the New York Cultural Center. Adrian Piper, e-mails to the author, June 16 and 22, 2003. 109. The exhibited work may have been Catalysis II (“a recording of myself whistling along with a Bach harpsichord concerto”) or Bach Whistled (“an environmental installation in Tomkins Square Park,” presented during the summer of 1970, of an audio recording of “Piper whistl[ing] along to recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach’s [harpsichord] Concertos in D Minor, A Minor, and C Major”). See Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 46; Piper, “Audio Works,” 178; Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, March 1, 2003; and Adrian Piper, e-mail to the author, June 16, 2003. 110. Perreault, “Art: Women in the News,” 31. 111. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 46. 112. Ibid., 45. 113. Piper, untitled statement, 26 Contemporary Women Artists, n.p. 114. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45 (emphasis in the original). 115. Piper, personal communication with the author, Hyannis, Mass., June 2003. 116. Acconci, “Vito Acconci,” 31. 117. Acconci’s performance of masculinity and control in Room Situation (Proximity) is less “pathetic” than Amelia Jones finds his work generally. Jones, Body Art/ Performing the Subject, 104. 118. Lippard, “Catalysis: An Interview,” 77–78. 119. Ibid., 78. 120. Lippard, “The Geography of Street Time,” 187. 121. Hansen, “ ‘Art Without Limit,’ ” 1C. 122. Chave, “Minimalism and Biography.” 123. Piper, Talking to Myself, 17. 124. On the “constitutive outside,” see Butler, Bodies That Matter, 3; and Butler, “Restaging the Universal,” 12. 125. Piper wrote in January 1973 that she wanted to address a broad audience with her writings, one “not immediately in touch with the most recent developments of contemporary art of the last ten years.” Piper, Talking to Myself, 5. It seems highly unlikely that such an audience would ever have read her texts, let alone encountered them in the course of their daily lives; this is a failure common to artists’ book projects of the period. On the rarefied audience for artists’ books, see Drucker, Figuring the Word, 176–80. Notes to Chapter 4  287

126. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45 (emphasis in the original). 127. Griselda Pollock has offered a particularly useful and influential analysis of the potential for Brechtian alienation to effect feminist critique in her “Screening the Seventies: Sexuality and Representation in Feminist Practice—A Brechtian Perspective,” in her Vision and Difference, 212–68. 128. On Brecht’s concept of gesture (and Walter Benjamin’s elucidation of it), see Weber, “Mass Mediauras.” 129. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 188. 130. Yvonne Rainer quoted in Lambert, “Moving Still,” 92–93. 131. Ibid., 97–98. 132. Ibid., 87–94, 112. 133. Lippard, “Catalysis: An Interview,” 78. 134. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 10, 17, 26, 34 (emphasis in the original). 135. Sekula, “Inventing Documentary,” 13. 136. A. D. Coleman, quoted in Dubin, Displays of Power, 46–47. 137. Ibid., 46–49. 138. See Punday, “The Black Arts Movement and the Genealogy of Multimedia”; Collins and Crawford, New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement; Powell, “Racial Imaginaries”; and Murray, “How the Conjure-Man Gets Busy.” 139. On Conceptual artists’ critical approach to photography, see Wall, “ ‘Marks of Indifference.’ ” 140. See Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia”; Jones, “Dis/playing the Phallus”; Jones, “Interpreting Feminist Bodies”; and Ward, “Some Relations between Conceptual and Performance Art.” 141. Anne Ayres, “Relics,” in Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey (Newport Beach, Calif.: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988), 47. 142. Chris Burden, Chris Burden: 71–73 (Los Angeles: Chris Burden), n.p. 143. Burden’s later self-conscious use of video to present a selection of his early performances is a further example of his awareness of these issues. See Chris Burden, Documentation of Selected Works: 1971–1975 (New York: Electronic Arts Intermix, 1975), VHS video. 144. Frazer Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot,” October 95 (Winter 2001): 114–30. 145. Chris Burden, “Chris Burden in Conversation with Jon Bewley,” in Talking Art 1, edited by Adrian Searle, ICA Documents 12 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993), 17. 146. Judith F. Rodenbeck, “Foil: Allan Kaprow Before Photography,” in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Judith F. Rodenbeck, Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts—Events, Objects, Documents (New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 1999), 58–59. 147. Allan Kaprow, “The Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the Happenings!” in his Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 61–62. Originally published 1966. 148. Kaprow, “The Happenings Are Dead,” 62. 149. Rogoff, “Gossip as Testimony.” 150. Green, “Bundespolizeidirektion Wien, Strafvergügung,” 35. Green translates the 288   Notes to Chapter 4

charge: “By being painted with white paint, (you) acted in a manner liable to cause offense, and which you actually did do to passers-by, thus disturbing the peace in a public place.” Brus was fined 80 ATS. 151. Some of Brus’s photographs were published in the United States and Eng­land in the 1960s, but none of Wiener Spaziergang until much later. I have so far found nothing published in Eng­lish about Wiener Spaziergang in the 1960s or early 1970s. Brus distinguishes between “pictures of actions staged with photographic ends in mind,” which he calls “works of art,” and “photos of public appearances,” which he calls “documentation.” Grenier, “Interview with Günter Brus,” 277. 152. Ursprung, “ ‘Catholic Tastes.’ ” 153. Brus’s 1965 exhibition at the Galerie Junge Generation was entitled “Painting— Self-Painting—Self-Mutilation.” 154. The Actionists’ reputed violence was integral to their reputation, one augmented when Rudolf Schwarzkogler committed suicide in 1969. Although Schwarzkogler died from jumping out a window, rumors persisted that he had died from self-mutilations incurred during a performance, and specifically from severing his penis with a razor blade, until 1990, when Kristine Stiles undertook the first thorough research about his death. See Stiles, “Notes on Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s Images of Healing”; Ursprung, “ ‘Catholic Tastes,’ ” 142; and Morgan, “Scwarzkogler.” 155. Brus, “Untitled Text Intended for Das Fieber,” 37. 156. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 89. 157. Brus, “Remarks on Vienna Walk,” 33.

5. Food for the Spirit 1. Piper, “Food for the Spirit,” 34. 2. Piper, “Food for the Spirit,” 34. In 1970, Piper began studying for a bachelors degree in philosophy at the City College of New York, a year after graduating with an AA in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts. She completed her masters in philosophy at CCNY in 1974, then continued on to complete her doctorate at Harvard. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 188–189. Although Piper suggests she read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for the first time during the summer of 1971, she had taken a graduate course on it at the City University of New York that spring, focusing on the Transcendental Deduction. Piper, “Food for the Spirit,” 34; and Yancy, “Adrian Piper,” 55. She also says she first read the Critique of Pure Reason at the suggestion of a friend in 1969, focusing on Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, a section of his Critique of Pure Reason. Piper, “Flying,” 22. See Yancy, “Adrian Piper,” 54–55; and Chayat, “Artist Explores Racism from Rare Perspective,” 25. 3. Piper makes this explicit in her philosophical writings. For an early instance, see Piper, “Two Conceptions,” 186. 4. Butler, “Restaging the Universal,” 23–24. 5. Judy, (Dis)Forming the American Canon, 99–148.

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6. Piper, “Two Conceptions,” 186. 7. Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 8. O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” 155–56. 9. See Hammonds, “Black (W)holes”; and Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality.” I discuss this issue in chapter 6. 10. O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” 156. 11. Ibid., 155. 12. Piper calls Food for the Spirit a “private loft performance” in the brief, unpublished introductory statement she inserted into the notebook in the 1980s. The phrase was first published in the catalogue for her retrospective exhibition at the Alternative Museum in 1987. Alternative Museum, Adrian Piper, 13. Piper’s “Food for the Spirit” essay for High Performance was illustrated by photographs from Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece (1970). In these photographs, Piper always appears clothed. Piper, “Food for the Spirit,” 34. The catalogue for her Alternative Museum retrospective includes a small reproduction of one photograph from Food for the Spirit. The same photograph was reproduced in larger size for the catalogue that accompanied the retrospective’s United States tour of 1987–1990. There is no checklist in the Alternative Museum catalogue, but according to the John Weber Gallery catalogue, the Food for the Spirit notebook was exhibited in its entirety. Alternative Museum, Adrian Piper, 13; and John Weber Gallery, Adrian Piper, n.p. 13. Piper, “Two Conceptions,” 182–83, 191. 14. Piper, “Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism.” 15. Piper, “General Introduction to the Project,” 91. 16. Ibid. 95. 17. See Piper, “The Meaning of Brahmacharya”; and Piper, “General Introduction to the Project,” 98–99. 18. Butler, “Restaging the Universal,” 35–41. 19. Piper, “Two Conceptions,” 181. 20. “Adrian Piper: Food for the Spirit—July 1971” appeared at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, from December 11, 1997, through January 31, 1998. Thomas Erben says that because the last of the fourteen original snapshots is so dark, he could find no satisfactory way to reproduce it and did not include it in the new edition. Thomas Erben, personal communication, New York, N.Y., November 8, 2001. The newly printed photographs, sold both individually and in complete sets, have been reproduced in books and magazines and included in several exhibitions. I have seen a single photograph from the new edition exhibited in the home of two Baltimore art collectors who told me they had purchased it (and not the entire series) from the Thomas Erben Gallery. A tabloid-style article confirms the photographs were available for purchase as a set (for $21,000) or singly (for $1,800 each). Rosetta Stone, “Gallery Yenta: Peek-a-boo,” Artnet.com (28 January 1998), www.artnet.com. Complete sets of the photographs also exist. The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited the entire set from their collection in “The American Century, Part II.” The Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design acquired eleven of the fourteen prints, according to “US 2000 290   Notes to Chapter 5

Museum Acquisitions: The Art Newspaper Survey,” Art Newspaper (16 March 2001), www.theartnewspaper.com. The original notebook is currently in the collection of Thomas Erben. 21. Piper, “Food for the Spirit,” 34. McCarthy explains in the introduction to the spring 1981 issue of High Performance that he asked Piper, Paul Cotton, Valie Export, and Lil Picard “to submit enough material and text for six to eight pages,” and that he selected work by three additional artists who were deceased (Wolfgang Stoerchle, Walt Churchill, and George Maciunas). McCarthy, “Point Out,” 2. Piper’s selection included, in order of appearance (and as identified in the magazine), “Food for the Spirit, July 1971” (essay); Food for the Spirit (four misidentified photographs from Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece [1970]); “It’s Just Art, April 1980” (essay); It’s Just Art (two photographs); “Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness: An Essay, 1981” (essay); and The Mythic Being, Getting Back (one photograph [1975]) in “Point Out,” by McCarthy. Piper’s essay, “Food for the Spirit, July 1971,” was published in 1981 opposite four black-and-white photographs of the artist, clothed and holding a Brownie camera. These photographs resemble those Piper took of herself for Food for the Spirit but are from Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece (1970). The confusion was not deliberate. Piper recalls providing McCarthy with texts and photographs to choose from; she says the final selection and layout were his. Adrian Piper, personal communication, March 1, 2002. 22. Harris and Prose, Master Breasts, 2. 23. “The American Century, Part II,” The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1999. 24. Farver, introduction, in Alternative Museum, Adrian Piper, 3; see also Farver, introduction, in John Weber Gallery, Adrian Piper, n.p. 25. Frueh, “The Body through Women’s Eyes,” 194. 26. Ibid. 27. Jones, Body Art, 152. 28. Ibid., 162. 29. No indication is given in the book that the reproduction is a cropped version of the original photograph, nor is the photograph’s position within Food for the Spirit explained. Ibid., 163. 30. Ibid., 162. For an alternative approach that frames Piper’s use of the visual as a refutation of the real, see Phelan, Unmarked, 7–8, 98. See also my discussion of Phelan in the introduction. 31. Williams, “The Erotic Image Is Naked and Dark,” 133–34. 32. The quotations are from Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism,” 210 (emphasis in the original); see also Mercer and Julien, “True Confessions”; and Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine. 33. The quotation is from Frueh, “The Body through Women’s Eyes,” 194. 34. I date this note to the 1980s because it is printed in the Apple Macintosh font Piper used then. 35. Piper identifies “The Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition,” “The Synthesis Notes to Chapter 5  291

of Reproduction in Imagination,” and “The Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept” collectively as the most affecting passage she read in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (A98–A114). Adrian Piper, personal communication, March 1, 2002. Only four pages from these sections of the Critique of Pure Reason are included in Food for the Spirit. 36. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxl, n. a. 37. Ibid., A801/B829, footnote. 38. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 211. 39. Ibid., 203. 40. Piper, “Food for the Spirit,” 34. 41. In 1964, at the age of sixteen, Piper “reads Sigmund Freud.” She does not specify which texts. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 187. 42. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 93. 43. Kolbowski, “Playing with Dolls,” 151. 44. Paradoxically, Freud describes women’s narcissism as pathological but considers it beneficial to men and necessary for human procreation. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 88–90. 45. Ibid., 93. 46. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 32. 47. Thomas Erben, personal communication, November 8, 2001; and Adrian Piper, personal communication, March 1, 2002. 48. On the final page of the Food for the Spirit notebook, Piper’s annotations highlight Kant’s assertion that “man . . . who knows all the rest of nature solely through the senses, knows himself also through pure apperception; and this, indeed, in acts and inner determinations which he cannot regard as impressions of the senses.” Piper’s marginal annotation points to a contradiction in the language of this translation; she notes that elsewhere, the text says that man “is aware” of but does not “know” himself. Her astute comment is not a quibbling distinction, but lies at the heart of her project in Food for the Spirit. Can she know herself or can she only achieve self-awareness, which implies the ultimate failure of a priori knowledge? Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A546/B574. Emphasis added by Piper. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant argues that the subject recognizes himself primarily in the perception of time’s passage, imagining himself as the effect of his own perceptions. But because the subject can know himself as nothing more than an image—a figure of reason—this intuited self is neither a reliable picture nor a complete one. The subject’s self-critical examination challenges this self-image in what amounts to a rational test of the self as such: based on both intuition and perception, the subject has no proof that he exists a priori, although by means of reasonable deduction, he can expect that he does. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 106–10. Judith Butler is correct to state that Kant must initially assume the existence of the subject’s body, positing that for him, “the psyche would be an epistemic grid through which the body is known,” but she is wrong to conclude that for Kant, “the sense in which the psyche is formative of morphology”—a funda292   Notes to Chapter 5

mental tenet of her psychoanalytic model of the performative subject—“would be lost.” Rather, Kant’s ontological philosophy allows for greater variance of interpretation and experience, and for less certainty, than has lately been recognized. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 66. For a feminist critique of the debate about which exists first, the body or discourse, see Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 69–70. 49. On feminism’s dependence upon the patriarchal structures it contests, see Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 19, 23, 32, 150–52. On the “matrix,” see Butler, Bodies That Matter, 27–55. Joan Copjec articulates some of these issues in terms of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and theories of both Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler in her “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason,” 19–20. On Lacan’s linguistic articulation of this, see Weber, Return to Freud. 50. Jones, Body Art, 181. 51. Ibid., 173. See also Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth,” 75–76. 52. Jones, Body Art, 180–81. 53. Ibid., 182 (emphasis in the original). 54. Piper, Talking to Myself, 17 (emphasis added). 55. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 102–3. 56. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 83. 57. Piper, “A Transition into Solipsism,” 15–17. See also Lippard, “Catalysis,” 77. 58. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 46. 59. Ibid., 46. 60. Piper, Talking to Myself, 16. 61. Bochner, “Serial Art Systems,” 40, 42. 62. Ibid., 42. 63. Ibid., 40. 64. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 46. 65. Lippard, “Catalysis,” 78. 66. Ibid., 77. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Piper, Talking to Myself, 16–17. This section written January 1971. 71. Ibid., 7. This section written August 1970. 72. Lippard, “Catalysis,” 77–78. 73. Piper, Talking to Myself, 13. 74. Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” 59. Andre acknowledged the goal was political: “I have been subject to politics as long as I’ve been alive . . . So I’ve been affected by it and . . . my art must reflect my political experience. I could not possibly separate them. . . . My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalyzed politics of my life.” Siegel, “Carl Andre: Artworker,” 178. 75. Kant, Groundwork, 1–14. 76. Piper, Talking to Myself, 19–20. 77. Piper, letter to the editor, Artforum, 9; Piper, “In Support of Meta-Art”; and Piper, Talking to Myself, 17–29.

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6. “Acting Like a Man” This chapter revises my essay “ ‘Acting Like a Man’: The Mythic Being and Black Feminism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 621–47. 1. Piper, “Notes on The Mythic Being,” n.p. 2. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 234. 3. Phelan, Unmarked, 96–97. 4. Piper began to develop the Mythic Being in 1972. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 189. 5. The claim to “queer” Piper’s Mythic Being might seem anachronistic. Judith Butler and Richard Meyer, for example, have each demonstrated the importance of a historical approach to the reappropriation and “recontextualization” of the term (Butler, Bodies That Matter, 233). However, they agree that, as Meyer put it, “while a public reclamation of the term ‘queer’ may be a product of the early 1990s, the antinormative strategy behind that reclamation most certainly is not” (Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 343 n. 4). Meyer uses the term to describe David Wojnarowicz’s artistic practice, explaining, “I employ the term ‘queer’ in this context to suggest not a specifically homosexual practice but a procedure (in this case pictorial) that undoes secure distinctions between the normative and the non-normative” (Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 254). What is significant for Meyer is how Wojnarowicz represents sexuality, so that “Wojnarowicz pictures the force of sexuality as a disorientation of the visual field, as a queer disturbance of both physical and perceptual relationships” (Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 254). This is precisely how Piper’s Mythic Being operates. 6. Lorde, “Man Child,” 31. 7. Piper, “Notes on the Mythic Being, II,” 275–76. 8. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 104. 9. Ibid. 10. Piper, “Notes on the Mythic Being, II,” 276. 11. Wilson, “Beauty Rites,” 16–17. 12. Lorde, “Naturally,”18. 13. Wilson, “In Memory of the News and of Ourselves,” 47. 14. Mercer, “Decentering and Recentering,” 53. 15. Adrian Piper quoted in Goldberg, “Public Performance,” 22. 16. Mayfield, “You Touch My Black Aesthetic and I’ll Touch Yours,” 26, 30–31. 17. My discussion of the Afro’s historical and political contingency is deeply informed by the following: Mercer, “Black Hair/Style Politics”; Davis, “Afro Images”; and Kelley, “Nap Time.” 18. Piper, Talking to Myself, 6. 19. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. 20. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 28. 21. Ibid., 20–23. 22. See Collins, “The Art of Transformation”; Springer, Living for the Revolution; Mullen, “ ‘Artistic Expression Was Flowing Everywhere’ ”; Anderson-Bricker,

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“ ‘Triple Jeopardy’ ”; Roth, “The Making of the Vanguard Center”; Matthews, “ ‘No One Ever Asks’ ”; and Breines, “Sixties Stories’ Silences.” 23. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 11. See also Morton, Disfigured Images, 113–24. 24. Piper’s performance provides evidence of the diversity of black women’s experiences—something that, as Frances White points out, Patricia Hill Collins deliberately elides. White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies, 61–62. 25. Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality,” 175–78, 181. 26. Hammonds, “Black (W)holes,” 137. Scholars note the near-total absence until the 1980s of African American women artists’ representations of the black female nude for precisely the reasons Hammonds explains. See Collins, The Art of History, 37–63; O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” 155–56; Williams, “The Erotic Image Is Naked and Dark,” 133–34; and Dallow, “Reclaiming Histories,” 79. 27. Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Place, Position, Public, 145. 28. Piper quoted in Shatz, “Black Like Me,” 46. 29. Sims, “The Mirror the Other,” 113. 30. Laura Cottingham in her interview with Adrian Piper, 117. 31. Matthews, “No One Ever Asks,” 290. 32. See Brown, A Taste of Power, 191–92, 194, 201, 357–59, 362–63, 367–68; Linfield, “The Education of Kathleen Neal Cleaver,” 186–87; LeBlanc-Ernest, “‘The Most Qualified Person to Handle the Job,’” 311, 321, 323–24; Williams, “Black Women,” 91; Rhodes, “Black Radicalism in 1960s California,” 346–62; Jennings, “Why I Joined the Party,” 257, 262–63; Matthews, “No One Ever Asks,” 267–303; Davis, “The Making of a Revolutionary,” 1, 3–4; Evans, “The Panthers’ Elaine Brown,” 106; and Lewis, “Wife, Mother and Revolutionary,” D1, D3. 33. See, for example, Cleaver, “Women, Power, and Revolution,” 125–26; Reed, “Activist Elaine Brown,” E4; and Jones and Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype,’” 32–34. 34. Perkins, Autobiography as Activism, 101–30. 35. See White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies, 27, 42; and Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 97–98. 36. See Matthews, “No One Ever Asks”; Jones and Jeffries, “Don’t Believe the Hype,” 32–25; and Ogbar, Black Power, 69–122. 37. Rhodes, “Fanning the Flames of Racial Discord,” 156. 38. Doss, “Imaging the Panthers,” 493, 498. 39. See Kelley, “Nap Time,” 340; and Davis, “Afro Images.” 40. Davis, “Black Nationalism,” 320. 41. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 13–15; and Poussaint, “Sex and the Black Male,” 116. 42. Davis, “Afro Images,” 174. 43. Ibid., 176. 44. Ibid. 45. James, Shadowboxing, 97–110, 205 n. 9; and Davis, “Afro Images,” 171. 46. Staub, “Black Panthers,” 57, 69. 47. Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, 107. 48. Smith, “The Souls of Black Women,” 43.

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49. For example, see ibid.; Springer, Living for the Revolution, 23, 37–44; Roth, “Making of the Vanguard Center,” 78–80; Matthews, “No One Ever Asks,” 275–7; Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 73–74; Morton, Disfigured Images, 114–15, 125; Davis, “Complexity,” 70; Wallace, Black Macho, 110; Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 142; and Clarke, “The Failure to Transform,” 200. 50. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 181 (emphasis in the original). 51. Piper, “Five Other Features that Are a Dead Giveaway,” 47. 52. Lorde, “Prologue,” 43. 53. Clarke, “After Mecca,” 49 (emphasis in the original); and Perkins, Autobiography as Activism, 103. 54. Lott, Love and Theft. 55. The Mythic Being: I/You (Her) was first published with Piper’s essay “Notes on the Mythic Being, II,” 280–89. I discuss this work in the introduction. 56. Stavney, “Cross-Dressing Harlem,” 131, 138. 57. Smith, “Doing Research on Black American Women,” 26. 58. Stavney, “Cross-Dressing Harlem,” 132. 59. Lorde, “Scratching the Surface,” 32. 60. Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 112–13. 61. Audre Lorde, untitled statement, Sinister Wisdom, 13. 62. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 3. 63. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 107. 64. Adrian Piper, “From NOTES ON THE MYTHIC BEING, III,” typed manuscript, January 1976, Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Piper has continued to reconceive the Mythic Being since 1976. 65. Piper, “From NOTES ON THE MYTHIC BEING, III.” 66. Golden, “My Brother,” 26. 67. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 104. 68. Newton, “He Won’t Bleed Me,” B. 69. Ibid., B, C. 70. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 104. 71. Piper, “Notes on The Mythic Being,” n.p. 72. This quote appears in Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, Cycle I: 9/21/61, 1973, advertisement in the Village Voice (September 27, 1973). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 73. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 104. 74. Piper, “Notes on The Mythic Being,” n.p. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 104. 78. On Piper’s Mythic Being advertisements, see also Smith, “Remembering the Audience.” 79. Carby, Race Men, 156. 80. Lorde, “Scratching the Surface,” 31, 32. 81. Piper quoted in Goldberg, “Public Performance,” 23. 296   Notes to Chapter 6

82. Piper quoted in Lippard, “The Geography of Street Time,” 187. 83. Piper, untitled statement, “Make A Political Statement,” 24. 84. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 104. 85. Lowery, “Art as a Verb,” n.p. 86. Berger, “Black Skin, White Masks,” 100. 87. See Piper, “Notes on The Mythic Being,” n.p. The exhibitions were “Women’s Work,” Philadelphia Civic Center; “In Her Own Image,” Fleischer Art Memorial, Philadelphia; “Posters,” Montclair State College; “Bodyworks,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; “Word Works, Too,” San Jose State University Art Gallery; “Eleven in New York,” Women’s Interart Center; and “Lives,” the Fine Arts Building, New York. 88. Smith argues that “political lesbians of color” were the most astute about noticing “the connections between oppressions,” as evinced in the Combahee River Collective’s statement, which she helped write. Smith, “Homophobia,” 99–100. It is curious that the statement ignores homophobia. See Clarke, “After Mecca,” 129–30; and White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies, 46–48. 89. Lippard, “The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth,” 77. 90. Nemser, “In Her Own Image Exhibition Catalog,” 17. 91. Wallace, “Black and Fine,” 9. 92. Wallace, “Black and Fine,” 9. I identify Ringgold as the exhibition’s organizer based on two sources: Pierre-Noel, “Black Women in the Visual Arts,” 14; and Faith Ringgold, letter to Alma Thomas, February 1, 1975, Alma Woodsey Thomas Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 93. Adrian Piper, advertisement, Village Voice 19, no. 26 (June 27, 1974): 37; Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, January 16, 2005. 94. Rose, “Vaginal Iconology,” 59. 95. Ibid. See also Tickner, “The Body Politic.” Cross-dressing is not necessarily radical, either. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 125, 231. 96. Adrian Piper, telephone conversation with the author, January 16, 2005. 97. Weil, “Art Still Has a Tremendous Political Potential,” 75. 98. Wallace, “Negative Images,” 668–69. 99. Piper, “Six Conditions on Art Production,” n.p.

Conclusion 1. Piper, “An Ongoing Essay,” 45. 2. Piper, “From a Paper Delivered at the Politics of Identity Panel,” 6 (emphasis added). 3. Piper, “Preparatory Notes for The Mythic Being,” 100–101, 103. 4. Piper read Ellison in 1963. Piper, “Personal Chronology,” 187. 5. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 100. 6. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4, 6. 7. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 107. 8. Ibid., 108. 9. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4, 65.

Notes to Conclusion  297













10. Piper, “Preparatory Notes,” 107. 11. Piper, untitled statement, in “Conceptual Art Supplement,” 115. 12. Berger, “The Critique of Pure Racism,” 9 (emphasis in the original). 13. Piper, “From a Paper Delivered at the Politics of Identity Panel,” 6. 14. Barr, “Reply to Piper,” 6. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid.; Barr, “Barbara Barr Replies,” Women Artists News 12, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 2, 33; and Barr, “Barbara Barr Replies,” Women Artists News 12, 4–5 (Fall–Winter 1987): 58–60. 17. See Alicia Faxon, May Stevens, and Barbara Barr, letters, Women Artists News 12, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 2, 33. See also Howardena Pindell, Judith Wilson, Josephine Withers, and Barbara Barr, letters, Women Artists News 12, 4–5 (Fall– Winter 1987): 58–60, 64. 18. Josephine Withers, letter, Women Artists News 12, no. 4–5 (Fall–Winter 1987): 58 (emphasis in the original). 19. Withers, letter, 58. 20. Hopkins, “The Politics of Identity, Entering, Changing and Being Changed,” 3–4. 21. Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Reimagining America, Place Position Presentation Public, 286. 22. Ibid. 23. Feagin, Racist America, 93. 24. Piper has presented Funk Lessons in various formats. Piper first used black popular music in an untitled performance sometimes called Aretha Franklin Catalysis (1971–72), in which she danced while imagining she listened to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” a song she danced to again in her performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–76). She has since used “Night People” by the polycultural rock band WAR in her installation Four Intruders Plus Alarm Systems (1980); “Do You Love What You Feel?” by Rufus and Chaka Khan, to which she danced in the performance It’s Just Art (1980–84); and “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, at the end of the videotape in Cornered (1988) and again, in her installation Out of the Corner (1990). 25. Adrian Piper, “IT’S JUST ART, Performance by Adrian Piper, Program Notes, February 26, 1981,” And/Or Gallery, Seattle. And/Or Gallery Records, Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle. See also Goldberg, “Public Performance,” 23. 26. Piper, “IT’S JUST ART.” Piper premiered It’s Just Art on April 23, 1980, at the Allen Memorial Museum, Oberlin College, for the exhibition “The Sense of Self: From Self-Portrait to Autobiography.” She subsequently performed it at The Western Front, Vancouver; And/Or, Seattle; and Artists Space, New York, in 1981. 27. Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” in Reimagining America, 286.

298   Notes to Conclusion

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​Index

Figures in italics. Absence: abstraction and, 65; black artists and, 21, 212, 295 n. 26; in Catalysis, 164; as dilemma, 39–40, 110, 133, 153, 252; in Food for the Spirit, 214–15, 221; in Hypothesis, 78–84, 93, 106, 126–27; of Piper from history, 20, 24, 89, 110; in Piper’s work, 27, 39–40, 65, 133; in statement of withdrawal, 143, 150; as strategy, 24, 110, 153, 188, 221; in Untitled Map Work, 64; women artists and, 89, 110 Abstraction, 27, 39, 55, 59, 65–68, 117; absence and, 65; alienation and, 40; anonymity and, 36–37; Conceptual art and, 34, 37–39, 59, 66–68, 150; desire and, 40, 81, 116; Minimalism and, 36–37, 119. See also Flying and flight Acconci, Vito, 143, 171, 199; as editor of 0 to 9, 21, 39, 130; masculinity in work of, 287 n. 117; Room Situation (Proximity), 192–93, 287 n. 117 Actionists, Viennese, 202–3, 289 n. 154 Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, 72, 89, 146, 169; Lippard and, 72, 270 n. 10. See also Women Artists in Revolution African American art: debates about,

25, 72, 113–16; Piper’s work as, 19–21, 113–14, 117–18; as political, 77. See also Black artists; Black Arts Movement Afro hairstyle, 2, 231–32, 237 A.I.R. Gallery, 282 n. 12 Aldrich, Larry, 169 Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 190–91, 287 n. 106 Alienation, 220–23, 288 n. 127; abstraction and, 40; in Catalysis, 167, 177, 182, 195, 220–27; in Drawings about Paper and Writings about Words, 41; in Hypothesis, 98; in Mythic Being, 242–45, 255; Piper and, 15; in Piper’s work, 10, 15, 23–24, 127; women artists and, 100, 110. See also Flying and flight All Three-­Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (LeWitt), 268 n. 50 Alston, Charles, 115 Anastasi, William, 143 Andre, Carl, 140, 189–90, 201, 226, 293 n. 74 Andrews, Benny, 115 Anger: black feminists and, 230, 239–40; Cornered and, 11, 264 n. 16; as masculine, 7

Angry: blacks as, 7; black women as, 238; Mythic Being as, 7–8, 178, 239–42, 264 n. 16; Piper as, 1, 7–8, 49, 179; viewers as, 11, 178, 264 n. 16 Annual exhibitions, at Whitney Museum of American Art, 96, 169 Anonymity: abstraction and, 36–37; Bearden and, 117; Conceptual art and, 24–25, 27, 40, 69–70, 118; as masculine, 38; Minimalism and, 24, 38, 40, 192; Mythic Being and, 231, 251; Piper and, 24, 70, 81, 118; Piper’s performance of universalism and, 10, 15, 39–40, 98; universalism and, 20, 36, 93; whiteness and, 15 Antin, Eleanor, 74, 98–100, 106, plate 13 Apartheid, 139 Archive, 153, 198 Area Relocation series (Piper), 86, 127– 30, 129, 131 Area Relocation #2, 127–28, 129 Aretha Franklin Catalysis (Piper), 298 n. 24 Aretha Franklin Piece (Piper), 172–76, 179, 298 n. 24 Artaud, Antonin, 203 Art & Language, 266 n. 5 “Art of the American Negro” (exhibit), 275 n. 11 Art Strike. See New York Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War “Art without Limit” (exhibit), 194–95 Art Workers Coalition (AWC), 72, 140, 146, 156; Art Strike and, 138; benefit exhibition of, 125; open hearing by, 163–64, 189–90; Perreault and, 270 n. 5; Piper attends meetings of, 125, 138; support for black artists from, 72, 270 n. 5; women artists and, 72, 89, 96, 270 n. 5 Artistic labor. See Labor Ashes to Ashes (Piper), 280 n. 80 Augusta, Georgia, 139, 145 Autobiography: in Context #8, 152–54; 320   Index

in Cornered, 9–10, 14, 33–34, 180, 264 n. 16; critical approach to, 8–10, 14–18, 24–27, 40; Piper’s work described as, 2, 171–72, 194; risk and, 15–18, 153, 172; in Talking to Myself, 165, 170–72, 197, 283 n. 15 Bach Whistled (Piper), 287 n. 109 Baldwin, James, 115 Baraka, Amiri, 72 Barr, Barbara, 259–60 Bearden, Romare, 25, 72, 113–15, 117, 270 n. 9 Benglis, Lynda, 199 Benjamin, Walter, 153–54 Berger, Maurice, 189 Bhagavad Gita, 90 Biennale de Paris, 176–77, 284 n. 48 Black and Puerto Rican Students and Artists for a Black Wing in Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 116, 275 n. 118 Black artists: absence and, 21, 212, 295 n. 26; Art Workers Coalition’s support for, 72, 270 n. 5; invisibility and, 27, 113–15; Modernism and, 115–16; protests by, 27, 72, 114–16, 164, 198; universalism and, 113, 115–16; visibility and, 77, 114. See also specific individuals, organizations, and exhibits Black Arts Movement, 25, 72, 116, 198; as macho, 230; masculinity and, 230, 235, 239; sexuality and, 25; women poets and, 239 Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), 115, 164, 189 Black feminists: anger and, 230, 239–40; expression of sexuality from, 207, 245; invisibility and, 207, 255; lesbians and, 233, 240–41 “Black Feminist Statement,” 253, 297 n. 88 Black hypersexuality. See Hyper­ sexuality Black lesbian. See Lesbian

Black macho. See Macho Black men, representations of, 7; attitudes toward black women of, 230, 238–39, 242–43, 245; attitudes toward white women of, 236–7; emasculation of, 7, 235, 238; hypersexuality and, 7, 242; as macho, 7, 242–43, 245; masculinity and, 7, 233–35, 237, 239, 242; Mythic Being as critique of representations of, 2, 20; stereotypes of, 263 n. 5 Blackness, 21, 27, 115–16, 239, 253; Conceptual art and, 27; Cornered and, 14; Minimalism and, 27; Mythic Being and, 6, 9, 230–31, 234–36; Piper and, 11, 18, 27, 259–60, 265 n. 29; representation of, 6, 8, 232, 234 Black Panthers, 231; Black Panther newspaper, 7, 234–35, 242–43; black women and, 7, 234–35, 237; emasculation and, 235; as macho, 235, 242–3; masculinity and, 235; Mythic Being and, 234–35, 237; sexism and, 234–5; sexuality and, 7, 237, 242–43 Black Power movement, 120, 198; feminism and, 146, 233; feminist critique of, 146, 230; as macho, 230; masculinity and, 235 Black women, representations of, 7, 238–39, 263 n. 5; as angry, 238; black men’s attitudes toward, 230, 238–39, 242–43, 245; Black Panthers and, 7, 234–35, 237; emasculation and, 7, 238; femininity and, 233, 237–40; hypersexuality and, 207, 233; as macho, 7, 238; masculinity and, 237–40; nude, 207, 211–12, 295 n. 26; perspective and, 233, 241; sexuality of, 228, 233, 242–43; stereotypes of, 207, 233, 236, 238, 255; universalism and, 75, 208; visibility of, 251; women’s movement and, 229–30 Blaxploitation film, 7, 243, 263 n. 5 Bochner, Mel, 23, 51–52, 223 “Bodyworks” (exhibit), 297 n. 87

Bowles, John P., 12–14 Brahmacharya, 266 n. 7 Brecht, Bertolt, 196, 223, 288 n. 127 Bringing the War Home (Rosler), 101–2 Brown, Elaine, 235 Brown, Gordon, 48 Brus, Günter, 201–4, 289 n. 153; Wiener Spaziergang, 201–4, 288–89 nn. 150– 51 Buchloh, Benjamin, 55, 95, 107–8 Bulldagger, 240, 242. See also Lesbian Burden, Chris, 197, 288 n. 143; Shoot, 199–200 Burn, Ian, 35, 266 n. 5 Burton, Scott, 172 Butler, Judith, 208, 232, 241, 294 n. 5; critique of Kant, 292–93 n. 48; critique of Modernism, 89–90, 94; on representation, 89–90, 94, 164 Cambodia, 27, 125, 137, 141, 146 Canaday, John, 275 n. 118 Carby, Hazel, 245 Catalysis (Piper), 25, 28, 126, 141, 162– 65, 181–83; absence and, 164; alienation and, 167, 177, 182, 195, 220–27; audience reaction to, 163, 175, 177–80, 225–26; critical response to, 169–70, 191, 194–95; as critique of Modernist criticism, 167, 183, 186, 190; as critique of Modernist museum, 163–64, 191–92; as feminist critique of modernism, 163, 168, 182–83, 218, 251; objectivity and, 168, 193; perspective and, 164, 204; photographs of, 172, 173–75, 183, 184, 185, 285 n. 73; as protest, 169–70; representation of Piper as paradigm in, 181, 187–89, 193; sexuality and, 163–64, 228; sexuality of the viewer and, 163, 170, 172, 179, 193; universalism and, 167, 221, 223. See also individual works Catalysis I (Piper), 178–79, 181–82 Catalysis II (Piper), 286 n. 104, 287 n. 109 Index  321

Catalysis III (Piper), 183–89, 184, 185, 196, 201, 285 n. 73; as compared with Wiener Spaziergang (Brus), 201–4 Catalysis IV (Piper), 172–77, 173, 174, 175; as compared to proposal for Biennale de Paris (Piper), 177 Catalysis VI (Piper), 177–78, 225–26, 284 n. 50 Catalysis VII (Piper), 162–64, 192–93, 286 n. 104; as compared with Room Situation (Proximity) (Acconci), 192–93 Catalysis VIII (Piper), 190–91, 287 n. 108; at Aldrich Museum, 190–91, 286 n. 104, 287 n. 106; at New York Cultural Center, 191, 287 n. 108 Catalysis IX (Piper), 170 Catalysis texts (Piper), 164–67, 196–97, 282–83 n. 12–15; in “26 Contemporary Women Artists” catalogue, 165–69, 166. See also Talking to Myself: The Autobiography of an Art Object (Piper) Categorical imperative, 68, 119–20, 208; Piper’s critique of, 119–20, 180–81, 208, 285–86 n. 81 Catlett, Elizabeth, 114 Celibacy, 266 n. 7 Chamberlain, John, 135 Chandler, John, 27 Chase-­Riboud, Barbara, 72 Chave, Anna, 23–24, 38, 132, 195 Chicago, Judy, 168 City College of New York (CCNY): Piper as student at, 120, 125–26, 238, 289 n. 2; Piper experiences demonstrations at, 120, 125–26, 130, 141, 146, 281 n. 86 Clark, Cheryl, 239 Cleaver, Eldridge, 237–38 Cleaver, Kathleen, 234 Coleman, A.D., 198 Collection, 100, 151–54 Collins, Patricia Hill, 233, 295 n. 23 Color-­blindness, 261 Colored Women Artists, 15

322   Index

Combahee River Collective, 253, 297 n. 88 Committee Against Blaxploitation, 263 n. 5 Conceptual art: abstraction and, 34, 37–39, 59, 66–68, 150; anonymity and, 24–25, 27, 40, 69–70, 118; blackness and, 27; contingency and, 20, 26–27, 35–36, 119; as critique of art market, 56; critique of formalism and, 35, 49, 66; critique of Modernism and, 49–52, 94; critique of visuality and, 21, 50–52; “Dematerialization of Art,” 27; ethics of, 46; feminist critique of, 78, 106, 120; masculinity and, 106; objectivity and, 25, 46–47, 49, 118; universalism of, 20, 39, 132; viewer of, 26–27, 35, 110, 120; white conceptual artists and, 38–39, 75, 118; white male artist and, 38–39, 106; whiteness and, 38; women and, 74, 96, 106–10, 132, 282–83 nn. 12–13 “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” (exhibit): Art Strike and, 139, 279 n. 64; Piper’s participation in, 39, 279 n. 64, 280 n. 66; Piper’s withdrawal from, 67, 137–38, 142–43, 145–46, 149, 150, 188, 279 n. 64. See also Statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” (Piper) Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece (Piper), 199, 290 n. 12, 291 n. 21 Confrontation, 20, 90, 181, 227, 257 Congress of Racial Equality, 263 n. 5 Consciousness raising, 74, 90; Piper’s group and, 74, 171, 270 n. 16, 284 n. 35 Consumerism, 98–106 Context and contexts, 150–51, 154, 159. See also Indexical present Context (Piper), 141, 143. See also individual works Context #7 (Piper), 154–61, 155, 156, 158, 160 Context #8 (Piper), 28, 138, 141–47, 142,

150–54, 280 n. 68; autobiography and, 152–54; perspective and, 151–54 Context #9 (Piper), 67, 138, 147–50, 148, 149, 153, 280 n. 71, 280 n. 80. See also Statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” (Piper) Conventions of art, 48, 50, 106 Conviction: critique of, 66; Fried and, 66, 92 Cornered (Piper), 1, 9–14, 9, 264 n. 16, 298 n. 24; anger and, 11, 264 n. 16; autobiography and, 9–10, 14, 264 n. 16; blackness and, 14; Phelan on, 11; script of, 263 n. 2; stereotypes and, 11 Cottingham, Laura, 234 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 276 n. 130, 285 n. 81 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 82, 213, 221, 285–86 n. 81, 292–93 n. 48 “c. 7,500” (exhibit), 25, 96, 282 n. 12 Dance, 261. See also Rainer, Yvonne Davis, Angela, 234–37 de Kooning, Willem, 107 “A Defense of the ‘Conceptual’ Process of Art” (Piper), 267 n. 35 Denis, Donna, 270 n. 16 Denver, 57 Derrida, Jacques, 151, 258, 285–86 n. 81 Desire: abstraction and, 40, 81, 116; consumerism and, 98; the erotic and, 233; expression of, 244–45; Food for the Spirit and, 209, 212–13, 221; Hypothesis and, 81; identification and, 229, 239; the index and, 215; Mythic Being and, 239–42, 244–45, 258; narcissism and, 216, 219; race and, 258, 261; subjectivity and, 94, 100, 219, 221; unfulfilled, 209, 212–13, 239; for the universal, 213; viewers’, 20, 159, 193, 219, 242, 258; women artists and, 255. See also Sexual desire

Diawara, Manthia, 8 Dillon, C. Douglas, 138–39 Direct address, 10, 14, 152, 257, 261 Dobson, Tamara, 7, 263 n. 5 Document (Morris), 150 Documentation, 56, 94, 196, 212; documentary claims, 133, 198, 212; methods of, 90 Doss, Erika, 235 Douglas, Aaron, 115 Douglas, Emory, 235 Drag, 229 Drawings about Paper and Writings about Words (Piper), 40–41, 41, 47; alienation and, 41; perspective and, 47 Dubin, Steven, 198 Dugway Proving Ground, 54–55, 57, 269 n. 69. See also Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds (Piper) Dwan Gallery, 143; Piper and, 39, 59, 147, 267 n. 29, 269 n. 85; LeWitt and, 44, 45, 51, 267 n. 29, 269 n. 85 “11 in New York” (exhibit) 253–54, 297 n. 87 Ellison, Ralph, 115, 258 Emasculation, 7, 235, 238; black men and, 235, 238; Black Panthers and, 235; black women and, 7, 238 Erotic, 180, 209, 233, 243, 255 “Events: Artists Invite Artists” (exhibit), 16 Excess, 151, 201; femininity and, 82, 93, 111, 216; masculinity and, 238–39; metaphysical philosophy and, 82 Fanon, Franz, 13, 232 Farrington, Lisa, 146 Farver, Jane, 210 Femininity: black women and, 233, 237– 40; body and, 117, 218; conventions of, 38, 76, 95, 163, 193, 237; critique of, 177, 237, 239; excess of, 82, 93, 111, 216;

Index  323

Femininity (continued) the feminine, 244, 253; narcissism and, 75; stereotypes of, 70, 75; women artists and, 167 Feminist art: debates about, 72–74; Lippard and exhibitions of, 25, 39, 96; Piper and, 29–30, 76, 98, 224; Piper’s work as, 19, 163, 252–53; sexuality and, 167, 255. See also specific individuals, organizations, and exhibits Feminist critique of Modernism, 74, 89–90, 112, 201; Butler’s, 89–90, 94; Catalysis and, 163, 168, 182–83, 218, 251; by Grosz, 81; Hypothesis and, 74–81, 92, 95, 98, 111; by Lippard, 93, 110–11, 167; by Nochlin, 96, 167–68; Piper’s, 74, 153, 218–19; by Rogoff, 201. See also Narcissism; Quality “Five Other Features that Are a Dead Giveaway” (Piper), 18 Five Unrelated Timepieces (Piper), 90–91, 108. See also Meat into Meat (Piper) Flavin, Dan, 135 “Flying” (Piper), 36. See also Flying and flight Flying and flight, 26, 34, 36, 66, 120; in retrospect, 76 Food for the Spirit (Piper), 28–29, 199, 205–21, 228, plate 15, plate 16; absence and, 214–15, 221; desire and, 209, 212–13, 221; exhibition of, 207, 209, 290–91 n. 20; first publication of, 207, 290 n. 12, 291 n. 21; objectivity and, 214–16; photography and, 217–18, 220–21; Piper as paradigm in, 207, 217, 226; Piper reads Kant while making, 205–6, 213–18, 271 n. 39, 289 n. 2, 291–92 n. 35, 292 n. 48; as private loft performance, 207, 290 n. 12; rational consciousness and, 213; sexuality and, 207, 228; transcendence and, 29, 206; universalism and, 29, 33, 206, 208, 219; versions of, 209, 290–91 n. 20 “Food for the Spirit” (Piper), 207, 209, 212, 218, 290 n. 12, 291 n. 21 324   Index

Formalism, 34–36, 188–90, 223; Conceptualist critique of, 35, 49, 66; Minimalist critique of, 26. See also Greenberg, Clement; Fried, Michael 46 Three-­Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes (LeWitt), 42–43, 45, 48–52, 268 n. 50. See also Piper, Adrian: awakening to Conceptual art of Foster, Hal, 24, 68, 93 Foucault, Michel, 14, 221 Four Intruders Plus Alarm Systems (Piper), 298 n. 24 Franklin, Aretha, 172, 175, 298 n. 24 Freud, Sigmund: theory of narcissism by, 216–17, 220, 292 n. 44 Fried, Michael, 81, 92, 156, 182–83, 186– 88; conviction and, 66, 92; on Minimalism, 185–86, 188, 285 n. 70; Modernist criticism and, 190, 270 n. 95, 286 n. 102; on Modernist painting, 189–90; presentness and, 92, 185–86; universalism and, 92, 185 “From a Paper Delivered at the Politics of Identity Panel” (Piper), 257–60 Frueh, Joanna, 210 Funk. See Popular music Funk Lessons (Piper), 261, 298 n. 24 Gain Ground, 112 Gates, Henry Louis, 21 Genauer, Emily, 73 Gibson, Ann, 116 Glazer, Lee Stephens, 117 Glueck, Grace, 169 Golden, Thelma, 242 Goldstein, Ann, 280 n. 79 Gordon, Juliette, 270 n. 10 Gossip, 112, 137, 201 Graham, Dan, 286 n. 99 Greatness. See Quality Greenberg, Clement, 66, 92, 116, 190, 286 n. 102; Piper’s critique of, 34–35 Grier, Pam, 7, 263 n. 5 Grosz, Elizabeth, 81, 217

Guerilla Art Action Group, 138 Guggenheim Museum, 139–40, 143 Haacke, Hans, 157, 266 n. 5 Haber, Ira Joel, 135 Haines, Randa, 270 n. 16 Hammonds, Evelynn, 233, 295 n. 26 Hannah Weiner at Her Job (Weiner), 111–12, 274 n. 99 Harlem Cultural Council, 114 “Harlem on My Mind” (exhibit), 115, 164, 198 Hartigan, Grace, 73 Harvard University, 8, 289 n. 2 Heidegger, Martin, 281 n. 91 Here and Now (Piper), 127 Hess, Elizabeth, 1, 15 Heterosexuality, 216, 235; Mythic Being and, 6–7, 230, 237, 244–45 Hightower, John, 139–40 Homophobia, 233, 235, 241–42, 297 n. 88; Mythic Being and, 243, 245, 255. See also Bulldagger; Lesbian; Lorde: on lesbian-­baiting Hopkins, Mary, 260 Huggins, Ericka, 234 Hunt, Richard, 72 Hypersexuality: black men and, 7, 242; black women and, 207, 233; Mythic Being and, 238, 242, 255, 258; representations of, 212, 233, 243, 255 Hypothesis (Piper), 69–84, 117, 120–21, 126; absence and, 78–84, 93, 106, 126–27; alienation and, 98; desire and, 81; as feminist critique of Modernism, 74–81, 89–98, 111; invisibility and, 81–82, 84, 95, 126; objectivity and, 84–98, 108, 117; photography in, 78–92, 102–6, 117–18; rational consciousness and, 70–75, 81, 89, 92, 98; stereotypes and, 75, 86; transcendence and, 53, 86, 89; universalism and, 82, 84, 118. See also individual works “Hypothesis” (Piper), 78–81, 79–80, 280

n. 66; Piper reads Kant during writing of, 82, 271 n. 39 Hypothesis: Situation #4 (Piper), 86, 87, 88 Hypothesis: Situation #5 (Piper), 79, 80, 102, 103 Hypothesis: Situation #6 (Piper), 70, 71, 86, 89, 272 n. 45, plate 8 Hypothesis: Situation #7 (Piper), 102–6, 104, 105 Hypothesis: Situation #9 (Piper), 96, 97, 272 n. 44, 273 n. 76, plate 12 Hypothesis: Situation #10 (Piper), 98–101, 99, 100 Hypothesis: Situation #11 (Piper), 82–84, 83, plate 9 Hypothesis: Situation #14 (Piper), 108– 10, 109, plate 14 Hypothesis: Situation #15 (Piper), 84–86, 85, 93, plate 10 Hypothesis: Situation #16 (Piper), 86–87 Hypothesis: Situation #17 (Piper), 86–87 Hypothesis: Situation #18 (Piper), 137–38 Index, 150–51, 214–15, 217–18; Krauss on, 151, 214–15 Indexical present, 119, 161, 285 n. 81 “Information,” 154–61 “In Her Own Image,” 297 n. 87 Interrelatedness, 167, 207, 233, 253, 255 “Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 1930s” (exhibition), 114 Invisibility, 36, 258; black artists and, 27, 113–15; black feminists and, 207, 255; Hypothesis and, 81–82, 84, 95, 126; Minimalism and, 40; women artists and, 27, 74, 89 It’s Just Art (Piper), 261, 291 n. 21, 298 n. 24, 298 n. 26 Jaap Rietman, 254 Jackson State University, 125, 139, 145 Jewish Museum, 139, 142, 192 Johnson, Philip, 150 Johnson, Poppy, 146–47 Index  325

Jones, Amelia: on Acconci, 287 n. 117; on Piper, 210–11, 219–21, 276 n. 130 Jones, Earl, 57 Judd, Donald, 92, 135 Kant, Immanuel, 227; Butler’s critique of, 292–93 n. 48; Modernist criticism and, 190; narcissism and, 29, 214, 216, 220; noumena, 68; Piper’s critique of universalism of, 29, 119, 208, 213–14; prejudice against blacks and women and, 120, 206, 213–14; universalism and, 29. See also Piper, Adrian; Categorical imperative; Critique of Judgment (Kant); Critique of Pure Reason (Kant); Noumena Kaprow, Allan, 199–201 Karenga, Ron, 231 Karshan, Donald, 191, 279 n. 64 Kawara, On, 106–7, 144, 157 Kelly, Mary, 74, 169 Kent State University, 125, 139, 145 Kester, Grant, 186 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 116; memorial exhibition for, 116, 275 n. 118. See also Black and Puerto Rican Students and Artists for a Black Wing in Memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Kosuth, Joseph, 39, 279 n. 64, 280 n. 66 Kozloff, Joyce, 177 Kozlov, Christine, 74, 106–8, 113 Kramer, Hilton, 140 Krasner, Lee, 73 Krauss, Rosalind, 92–94, 188; on the index, 151, 214–15; on LeWitt, 49–50, 94, 267 n. 29; as Modernist critic, 66; on perspective, 81–82 Labor, 74, 108–12; artistic labor, 74, 181, 226; feminist approaches to, 74; sexual division of, 70, 106, 235 Lambert, Carrie, 37, 197 “Language III” (exhibit), 39, 59 “Language IV” (exhibit), 39, 147 Lawrence, Jacob, 114–15 326   Index

Lesbian: black feminists and, 233, 240– 41; interrelatedness and, 297 n. 88; Lorde as, 13, 233, 241; Mythic Being as, 7, 233, 240, 244; as race traitor, 230, 233, 240–41, 245–50. See also Bulldagger; Homophobia; Lorde, Audre: on lesbian-­baiting Lewis, Norman, 113–14 LeWitt, Sol, 42–53, 107, 125, 130, 135, 142; All Three-­Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes, 268 n. 50; Art Workers Coalition and, 125; critical response, 48–51; Dwan Gallery and, 44, 45, 267 n. 29, 269 n. 85; 46 Three-­ Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes, 42–43, 45, 48, 49–52, 268 n. 50; Krauss on, 49–50, 94, 267 n. 29; Lippard on, 51; 1968 Dwan Gallery exhibition, 51; Perreault on, 50; Piper on, 42–53, 56–57, 267 n. 29, 277 n. 15; Piper’s friendship with, 69, 102, 125, 267 n. 29, 269 n. 85 Lippard, Lucy, 93, 189–90; Ad Hoc Committee and, 72, 270 n. 10; Chandler and, 27; “Dematerialization of Art,” 27, 56; feminist art exhibitions and, 25, 39, 96; feminist critique of Modernism and, 93, 110–11, 167; interviews Piper, 179–80, 193–95, 221, 224–25; on LeWitt, 51; on Modernism and women artists, 89–90, 110–13, 267 n. 20; “Number 7” and, 130; on Piper, 2, 75, 194, 253; “26 Contemporary Women Artists” and, 163, 167–69 Litanies (Morris), 150 “Lives” (exhibit), 297 n. 87 Livingston, Sandra, 108–10 Lloyd, Tom, 72, 116 Loft. See Studio Lorde, Audre, 13, 230, 233, 239, 251; on acting like a man, 230; on anger, 230; on lesbian-­baiting, 240–41, 245–50; “Naturally,” 231 Lower East Side, 82, 84, 117–18, 271–72 n. 40

LSD Bloodstream (Piper), 37 LSD paintings, 37, 277 n. 27 LSD Self-­Portrait from the Inside Out (Piper), 37 LSD Steven Shomstein (Piper), 37 Macho: artists as, 23, 106–7; black, 7, 230; Black Arts Movement as, 230; black men as, 7, 242–43, 245; Black Panthers as, 235, 242–43; Black Power movement as, 230; black women as, 7, 238; Mythic Being as, 7, 242, 245 Making Space (Piper), 161 Mantra, 243–44 Maps: use of, in art, 55–65, 133 March on Washington, 76 Masculinity: in Acconci’s work, 287 n. 117; anonymity and, 38; authority and, 235; Black Arts Movement and, 230, 235, 239; black men and, 7, 233– 35, 237, 239, 242; Black Panthers and, 235; Black Power movement and, 235; black women and, 237–40; blaxploitation and, 7; Conceptual art and, 106; Context #8 and, 153; excess and, 238–39; feminist critique of, 38, 96, 111, 233, 237, 244; feminist performance of, 239, 263; intellect and, 106; mastery and, 111, 153; Minimalism and, 38; Modernism and, 96, 111, 153; Mythic Being and, 230, 233–34, 237– 39, 264 n. 7; Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter and, 250; Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk and, 245; Mythic Being’s masculine appearance, 242–44; quality and, 96; rationality and, 82; stereotype and, 6–7; women and, 253 Masturbation, 254–55 Mastery, 82, 92, 111, 221; feminist critique of, 90, 111; masculinity and, 111, 153; Piper’s critique of, 98, 153, 159, 191, 212, 215 Materiality, 49, 94 Matta-­Clark, Gordon, 269 n. 88 Max’s Kansas City, 134–36. See also Un-

titled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (Piper) Mayer, Bernadette, 21, 39, 130, 135 Mayer, Rosemary, 19, 84, 134–35, 271 n. 16; photographer of Catalysis III, 184–5; photographer of Catalysis IV, 172, 173–5; photographer of Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City, 134, 134, 136; on Piper, 171–75 Mayfield, Julian, 232 Mayhall, Dorothy, 287 n. 106 McCarthy, Paul, 291 n. 21 McShine, Kynaston, 125, 127 Meat into Meat (Piper), 69, 90–91, 102– 6, 108, 272 n. 51. See also Five Unrelated Timepieces (Piper) Memorial Art Gallery, 194 Mendieta, Ana, 201 Mercer, Kobena, 21, 212, 231 Messer, Thomas, 139 Meta-­art, 227–28 Metaphysical philosophy, 50, 75, 82, 94; excess and, 82; feminist critique of, 89, 93–95; form and matter and, 82, 94; Piper’s critique of, 74, 78, 132, 208–9; in Piper’s work, 82, 92–93, 111, 168, 227 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 115; Art Strike and, 138–40; Catalysis VII, 162– 64; “Harlem on My Mind,” 115, 164, 198; open hearing at, 163–64, 189–90, 286 n. 99 Meyer, James, 23, 265 n. 37 Meyer, Richard, 294 n. 5 Michael Sternschein (Piper), 40 Michelson, Annette, 36 The Mind is a Muscle (Rainer), 197 Minimalism, 23, 36, 46–47, 68; abstraction in, 36–37, 119; anonymity and, 24, 38, 40, 192; blackness and, 27; critique of formalism and, 26; critique of Modernism and, 92; feminist critique of, 70, 78; Fried on, 185–86, 188, 285 n. 70; invisibility and, 40; Lippard on women artists and, 89–90, 110–13, Index  327

Minimalism (continued) 267 n. 20; male artists and, 23, 38, 132; masculinity and, 38; Piper’s critique of, 70, 75, 78, 92–93, 187–89; Rainer on, 37; sexuality and, 68, 188; universalism and, 20, 24, 118; universalist ideal of, 70, 120, 187–89; viewer of, 24, 35, 69, 78, 92, 110; whiteness and, 23, 38; women artists and, 23, 38, 70, 110, 132, 168 Minstrelsy, 239 Miscegenation, 6, 14, 236–37, 258 Modernism: black artists and, 115–16; Conceptual art’s critique of, 49–52, 94; feminist critique of Modernist universalism, 167–68; masculinity and, 96, 111, 153; Minimalist critique of, 92; promise of universalism in, 33, 140; race and, 92, 163; sexuality and, 90, 92, 94, 270 n. 95; universalism and, 33, 92–93, 115–16; women artists and, 94, 89. See also Feminist critique of Modernism, Fried, Michael; Greenberg, Clement; Krauss, Rosalind Modernist criticism, 49–50, 74, 81, 94, 154–55; Catalysis as critique of, 167, 183, 186, 190; conviction and, 66, 92; critiques of, 52, 183–91, 285 n. 70; Fried and, 190, 270 n. 95, 286 n. 102; Kant and, 190; Piper’s critique of, 75, 78, 111, 154–56 Modernist museum, 163 Modernist painting, 41–42, 92, 107; Fried on, 189–90; Piper’s critique of, 183–91 Modernist sculpture, 49 Molesworth, Helen, 74 Morgan, Robin, 179 Morris, Robert, 68, 137, 187–88; Art Strike and, 142, 146–47; Document, 150; Litanies, 150 Morrison, Toni, 13 Moses, Robert, 59 Moten, Fred, 186, 278 n. 41, 285–86 n. 81 Moynihan Report, 238 328   Index

Murphy, Grace, 270 n. 16 Museum, 107 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 116, 125, 127, 150; Art Strike and, 138–40; “Information” exhibit at, 154–61; Martin Luther King Jr. memorial exhibition, 116, 275 n. 118; protests of, 72, 138 Museums: Piper’s critique of, 162–63, 186–87, 189–91, 228, 255–56; sexuality and, 27, 163 “My Slave Name” (Piper), 38–39, 267 n. 19 Mythic Being (Piper): alienation and, 242–45, 255; as angry, 7–8, 178, 239– 42, 264 n. 16; anonymity and, 231, 251; black men and, 2, 20; Black Panthers and, 234–35, 237; blackness and, 6, 9, 230–31, 234–36; desire and, 239–42, 244–45, 258; heterosexuality and, 6–7, 230, 237, 244–55; homophobia and, 243, 245, 255; hypersexuality and, 238, 242, 255, 258; as lesbian, 7, 233, 240, 244; as macho, 7, 242, 245; masculine appearance of, 242–44; masculinity and, 230, 233–34, 237–39, 264 n. 7; perspective in, 258; photography in, 205–7, 230–31; rational consciousness and, 242; sexual exploitation in, 7, 240, 251; sexuality and, 29, 228, 230, 234, 242–46, 251–52, 257; stereotypes and, 1–2, 6–8, 20, 236–60; whiteness and, 6, 236. See also individual works Mythic Being, Cycle I: 9/21/61 (Piper), 245, 246. See also Village Voice Mythic Being: Cruising White Women (Piper), 6, 8, 236, plate 2 Mythic Being: Getting Back (Piper), 8, 236, 236, 291 n. 21 Mythic Being: I Embody (Piper), 6, 233, 242, 258, 261 Mythic Being: It Doesn’t Matter (Piper), 250–51, 250 Mythic Being: I/You (Her) (Piper), 2–8, 3, 4, 5, 239–42, 263 n. 3, 296 n. 55, plate 1

Mythic Being: Let’s Have a Talk (Piper), 245, 247, 248, 249 Narcissism, 75; desire and, 216, 219; femininity and, 75; Freud’s theory of, 216–17, 220, 292 n. 44; Jones on, 219– 21; in Kant, 29, 214, 216, 220; Piper’s critique of, 180–81, 213–22 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 263 n. 5 “Naturally” (Lorde), 231 Nemser, Cindy, 2, 253 New York Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War (Art Strike or New York Art Strike), 120, 137–47, 163–64, 186, 279 n. 64; Art Workers Coalition and, 138; “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” and, 139, 279 n. 64; Metropolitan Museum of Art and, 138–40; Morris and, 142, 146–47; Museum of Modern Art and, 138–40; Piper attends meetings of, 120, 138 New York Cultural Center, 139, 279 n. 64; Piper exhibits at, 39, 137–38, 191, 287 n. 108–9. See also “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” (exhibit) New York University, 137 Newspapers. See Village Voice Newton, Huey, 7, 242–43 Nine Abstract Space-­Time-­Infinity Pieces (Piper). See Untitled Map Work (Piper) “Nine New York Artists” (exhibit), 282 n. 12 Nine-­Part Floating Square (Piper), 42, 44 “The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America” (exhibit), 114 Noble, Joseph, 139 Nochlin, Linda, 96, 167–68 Noland, Kenneth, 135 “Notes on The Mythic Being” (Piper), 243, 252, 296 n. 55 Noumena, 68 Nude representation of women, 84,

207, 211–12, 295 n. 26. See also Black women “Number 7” (exhibit), 39, 130 Objectification: objectivity and, 50; of Piper, 135, 193, 176, 198, 224; Piper’s self-­objectification, 137, 177, 180 Objectivity, 12, 49–50, 93–94, 203–4, 216; Catalysis and, 168, 193; Conceptual art and, 25, 46–47, 49, 118; Food for the Spirit and, 214–16; Here and Now and, 127; Hypothesis and, 84–98, 108, 117; perspective and, 50, 76, 216; Piper and, 73, 76–77, 118–19, 172; as pose, 25, 50, 108, 214; as process, 50; white scholars and, 12, 76; Wilke’s critique of, 219 Octoroon, 11 O’Grady, Lorraine, 207 “One Month” (exhibit), 128 Orangeburg, South Carolina, 139, 145 Out of the Corner (Piper), 298 n. 24 Paoletti, John, 182 Paradigm, 15, 74; Piper as, in Catalysis, 181, 187–89, 193; Piper as, in Food for the Spirit, 207, 217, 226 Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds (Piper), 44, 53–58, 54, 65 Parks, Gordon, 198, 263 n. 5 Passing, 10, 240, 258–60; of Piper, 1, 14–16, 211; Piper on, 10, 14, 180, 258; in Piper’s art, 10, 14, 258; of Piper’s father’s, 11–12, 14; Piper perceived as, 8, 28, 118; Piper’s refusal of, 180, 284 n. 59 “Passing for White, Passing for Black” (Piper), 8 Paula Cooper Gallery, 125, 130 Perception: rational consciousness and, 49, 81; transcendence and, 206; Piper’s critique of, 42–52 Performance, 15, 78 Perreault, John, 135, 169–70, 252; Art Workers Coalition and, 270 n. 5; on Index  329

Perreault, John (continued) LeWitt, 50; on Piper, 127, 133, 135, 169–70, 191 Perspective, 116, 143, 169, 219, 228; artist’s, 47; black woman’s, 233, 241; Catalysis and, 164, 204; in Drawings about Paper and Writings about Words, 47; Grosz on, 81; Krauss on, 81–82, 94; Mythic Being and, 258; objectivity and, 50, 76, 216; privilege and, 75, 120; of viewers, 47, 151, 164. See also Point of view Peyton Place (television show), 102 Phelan, Peggy, 276 n. 130; on Cornered, 11 Philip Morris, 280 n. 80 Photography, 197–212, 218; in Food for the Spirit, 217–18, 220–21; in Hypothesis, 78–92, 102–6, 117–18; in Mythic Being, 205–7, 230–31 Picasso, Pablo, 150 Pindell, Howardena, 16, 77, 260 Piper, Adrian: absence in work of, 27, 39–40, 65, 133; absence from history of, 24, 20, 89, 110; alienation and, 15; alienation in work of, 10, 15, 23–24, 127; as angry, 1, 7–8, 49, 179; anonymity and, 24, 70, 81, 118; at Art Strike meetings, 120, 138; at Art Workers Coalition meetings, 125, 138; awakening to Conceptual art of, 42–46, 267 n. 29; blackness and, 11, 18, 27, 259–60, 265 n. 29; consciousness-­raising group and, 74, 171, 270 n. 16, 284 n. 35; critique of categorical imperative by, 119–20, 180–81, 208, 285–86 n. 81; critique of Greenberg by, 34–5; critique of mastery by, 98, 153, 159, 191, 212, 215; critique of Minimalism by, 75, 187–89; critique of Modernist criticism by, 75, 78, 111, 154–56; critique of Modernist painting by, 183–91; critique of museums by, 162–63, 186–87, 189–91, 228, 255–56; critique of narcissism 330   Index

by, 180–81, 213–22; critique of perception by, 42–52; diaries of, 242–45, 253–54; Dwan Gallery and, 39, 59, 147, 267 n. 29, 269 n. 85; exhibits at New York Cultural Center and, 39, 137–38, 191, 287 n. 108–9; at demonstrations at City College, 120, 125–26, 130, 141, 146, 281 n. 86; father of, 11–12, 14, 264 n. 24; feminist art and, 29–30, 76, 98, 224; feminist critique of Modernism and, 74, 153, 218–19; interview of, by Cottingham, 234; interview of, by Lippard, 179–80, 189, 193–95, 221, 224–25; interview of, by Serlis, 177–79; Jones on, 210–11, 219–21, 276 n. 130; Mayer on, 171–75; modeling of, 37–38; mother of, 125; name of, spelling of, 37–38, 76, 133; objectification of, 135, 193, 176, 198, 224; objectification of herself by, 137, 177, 180; objectivity and, 73, 76–77, 118–19, 172; as paradigm in Catalysis, 181, 187–89, 193; as paradigm in Food for the Spirit, 207, 217, 226; parents of, 270 n. 9; Perreault on, 127, 133, 135, 169–70, 191; political awareness of, 120–26, 130, 141; protest, awareness of, 72–73, 144–47; reading of Kant by, 276 n. 130, 285–86 n. 81; reading of Kant during creation of Food for the Spirit, 205–6, 213–18, 271 n. 39, 289 n. 2, 291– 92 n. 35, 292 n. 48; reading of Kant during writing of “Hypothesis,” 82, 271 n. 39; sexism and, experiences of, 75–77, 118–19; sexist imagery in work of, 70, 96, 193; sexuality and, 242; sexuality and her art, 20, 91, 228; as student at City College, 120, 125–26, 238, 289 n. 2; as student at Harvard, 8, 289 n. 2; as student at School of Visual Arts, 33, 36, 38, 40, 56, 289 n. 2; vegetarianism and, 90, 125; as witness, 10, 120, 258; work of, as African American art, 19–21, 113–14, 117–18; work of, as autobiography, 2, 171–72,

194; work of, as feminist art, 19, 163, 252–53. See also LeWitt, Sol; Lippard, Lucy; Metaphysical philosophy; Paradigm; Passing; Racism; Statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” (Piper); Universalism; Village Voice; White; individual works, writings, and exhibits Point of view, 81–82, 92–93, 127, 151. See also Perspective Political Self-­Portrait #2 (Race) (Piper), 16–18, 18, 265 n. 31 Pollock, Griselda, 288 n. 127 Pollock, Jackson, 116 Popular music, 261, 298 n. 24 “Portraits of Eight New York Women” (Antin), 98–100, 273 n. 77, plate 13 Posters, 256 “Posters” (exhibit), 297 n. 87 Poussaint, Alvin, 237 Preziosi, Donald, 153 Privilege, 11–13, 76, 120; perspective and, 75, 120; race and, 12–13; sexism and, 76; of whiteness, 12–13, 75–76 Propriety, 13, 94, 207, 233 Protest: by artists, 137–43, 144–47, 157, 163–64, 189–90; by black artists, 27, 72, 114–16, 164, 198; Piper’s awareness of, 72–73, 144–47. See also specific individuals, organizations, and exhibits Puerto Rican artists, 116, 275 n. 118 Quality, 95–96, 106, 168 Queer, 230, 294 n. 5 Race: discourse and, 13, 94, 261; Modernism and, 92, 163; as moral issue, 1, 13; “one drop” rule and, 10; privilege and, 12–13; sexuality and, 231, 233–34, 258, 260–61; vision and, 11, 52, 229. See also Interrelatedness; Lesbian, Octoroon; Racism Racism, 236–37; effects of, 8, 10, 46, 76, 252; feminism and, 233, 239; freedom from, 20, 66, 119, 260; Piper’s

experiences of, 1, 10, 75–77, 113–19; in Piper’s work, 8; responsibility for, 10–11, 14, 260; skin privilege and, 11; statement of withdrawal and, 66, 145–46, 150; universalism and, 259; vision and, 11, 24; within Women’s Movement, 230, 233. See also Flying and flight; Interrelatedness; Minstrelsy; New York Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War; Stereotypes; Xenophobia Rainer, Yvonne, 37, 98–100, 197, 199; on feminism, 76; Mind is a Muscle, 197; on Minimalism, 37 Rational consciousness, 47, 66; critique of, 44, 49; evidence of, 81, 106; Food for the Spirit and, 213; Hypothesis and, 70–75, 81, 89, 92, 98; Mythic Being and, 242; perception and, 49, 81; Talking to Myself and, 227 Rauschenberg, Robert, 107 Reality check, 126, 205–6, 221 “Reconsidering the Object of Art” (exhibit), 280 n. 80 Redstockings, 74 Red Stripe Kitchen (Rosler), 101, 101 Reich, Steve, 143 “Respect” (Franklin), 172, 298 n. 24 Rhodes, Jane, 235 Richmond County Jail, 145. See also Augusta, Georgia Riis, Jacob, 118 Ringgold, Faith, 72, 114, 116, 146, 253 Robbe-­Grillet, Alain, 152 Rockefeller, David, 138 Rockefeller, Nelson, 138, 157 Rocky Mountain Arsenal, 57 Rogoff, Irit, 112, 201 Room Situation (Proximity) (Acconci), 192–93, 287 n. 117 Rose, Barbara, 255 Rosenberg, Harold, 116 Rosler, Martha, 74, 106, 185–86; Bringing the War Home, 101–2; Red Stripe Kitchen, 101, 101 Index  331

Rosner, David, 90–91 Rosskam, Edwin, 118 Sammartino, Sally, 279 n. 64 Sandler, Irving, 150 “The Saturday Afternoon Show,” 134–37, 278 n. 31 Schneemann, Carolee, 98–100, 210–11 School of Visual Arts, 177, 189; Piper as student at, 33, 36, 38, 40, 56, 289 n. 2 Schwartz, Therese, 96 Schwarzkogler, Rudolf, 203, 289 n. 154 Sekula, Allan, 153, 198 Self-­Portrait as a Nice White Lady (Piper), 15–16, 19, plate 3 Self-­Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (Piper), 16–19, 17 Serlis, Effie, 177–79 Sexism, 157, 179; Black Panthers and, 234–35; effects of, 76; freedom from, 20, 34, 66; Piper’s experiences of, 75–77, 118–19; privilege and, 76; statement of withdrawal and, 66, 145–46, 150; studio and, 112. See also Flying and flight; Interrelatedness; New York Artists’ Strike against Racism, Sexism, Repression, and War; Stereotypes; Xenophobia Sexist imagery, Piper’s work and, 70, 96, 193 Sexual desire, 36, 240, 255, 266 n. 7; escape and, 36; interracial, 258, 261. See also Desire Sexual division of labor. See Labor Sexual equality, 255 Sexual exploitation, 263 n. 5; Mythic Being and, 7, 240, 251; sexploitation film and, 263 n. 5; violence and, 7, 202, 245–6. See also Blaxploitation film Sexual insecurity, 243–45, 251–52, 258 Sexuality: art and, 16, 67, 81, 164; Black Arts Movement and, 25; black feminists’ expression of, 207, 245; Black Panthers and, 237, 242–43; black women and, 228, 233, 238, 242–43; 332   Index

­ atalysis and, 163–64, 228; dance C and, 261; essentialism and, 240; feminist art and, 167, 255; Food for the Spirit and, 207, 228; gender and, 240, 244–45; liberation and, 7, 212, 233, 237, 241–44, 251, 254, 261; Minimalism and, 68, 188; Modernist discourse and, 90, 92, 94, 270 n. 95; museums and galleries and, 27, 163; Mythic Being and, 29, 228, 230, 234, 242–46, 251–52, 257; normative, 245, 251; of Piper, 242; Piper’s art and, 20, 91, 228; politicized, 255; propriety and, 207, 233, 255; race and, 231, 233–34, 258, 260–61; representation and, 212, 234, 246, 257, 294 n. 5; social negotiation and, 78, 81; stereotype and, 260; women and, 255; of the viewer, 193, 233–34, 261; of the viewer, in Catalysis, 163, 170, 172, 179, 193. See also Bulldagger; Heterosexuality; Homosexuality; Hypersexuality; Interrelatedness; Lesbian; Masturbation; Narcissism; Propriety; Queer Shaft (Parks), 263 n. 5 Shakur, Assata, 234 Shapiro, Miriam, 168 Siegel, Jeanne, 51 Siegelaub, Seth, 107–8, 128, 189; gallery of, 107, 128 Signifyin(g), 21 Sims, Lowery Stokes, 234, 252 Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (Piper), 44, 45, 47, 50–55, 57 Skin privilege, 11 Smith, Barbara, 238, 240–41, 251, 297 n. 88 Smithson, Robert, 51 “Software” (exhibit), 192 Solipsism, 165, 194–95, 222–25, 227 Some Reflective Surfaces (Piper), 298 n. 24 South Africa, 139 South Carolina State College, 139, 145

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 263 n. 5 Southern Christian Leadership Foundation, 116 Soyer, Raphael, 84 Specter, 258–59 Spiral, 113–14 Statement of withdrawal from “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” (Piper), 33, 142–43, 145–46; absence and, 143, 150; drafts, 66, 67, 145–50, 149; racism and, 66, 145–46, 150; sexism and, 66, 145–46, 150 Stavney, Anne, 240 Stella, Frank, 111, 135 Stereotypes: of black women, 207, 233, 236, 238, 255; in Cornered, 11; of femininity, 70, 75; in Hypothesis, 75, 86; of masculinity, 6–7; in Mythic Being, 1–2, 6–8, 20, 236–60; performance of, 9; racist, 8, 52, 198, 212; of women, 86; of women artists, 70. See also Blaxploitation film; Minstrelsy; Racism; Sexism Stiles, Kristine, 289 n. 154 “Street Works II” (exhibit), 132–33, 277 n. 25, 277 n. 27, 278 n. 30 “Street Works IV” (exhibit), 112 Streetworks Streettracks (Piper), 277–78 n. 29 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 76, 235, 278 n. 44 Studio, 84, 89–94, 111–13 Studio Museum in Harlem, 114 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Van Peebles), 7, 242–43, 263 n. 5 Talking to Myself: The Autobiography of an Art Object (Piper), 165, 170–71, 227– 28, 282–83 n. 12–15 Taste, 48, 53, 91–92 Tautology, 52, 65 Text, use of in art, 287 n. 125 Three Untitled Projects (Piper), 58–59, 60, 61, 127–30, 276 n. 11, 277 n. 27

Thomas Erben Gallery, 209, 290–91 n. 20 “Thought: Structures” (exhibit), 282 n. 12 Tomkins Square Park, 287 n. 109 Transcendence: Food for the Spirit and, 29, 206; Hypothesis and, 53, 86, 89; perception and, 206; promise of, 168, 208, 212, 221. See also Brahmacharya; Metaphysical philosophy Tucker, Marcia, 147 “26 Contemporary Women Artists”: critical response to, 169; Lippard and, 163, 167–69; Piper’s participation in, 25, 163, 190; premise of, 163, 167–9. See also Catalysis texts (Piper) Universalism, 29, 82; anonymity and, 20, 36, 93; Bearden and, 113, 117; black artists and, 113, 115–16; black women and, 75, 208; Catalysis and, 167, 221, 223; Conceptual art and, 20, 39, 132; contingency of, 20, 119, 219, 259; desire for the universal and, 213; feminist critique of Modernist and, 167–8; Food for the Spirit and, 29, 33, 206, 208, 219; Fried and, 92, 185; Hypothesis and, 82, 84, 118; of Kant, 29; men and, 70; Minimalism and, 20, 24, 118; Modernism and, 33, 92–93, 115–16; Modernism’s promise of, 33, 140; particularity and, 206, 214; personal experience and, 78, 90–91; Piper’s critique of, 20, 33, 70, 119, 146; Piper’s critique of Kant’s, 29, 119, 208, 213–14; Piper’s performance of anonymity and, 10, 15, 39–40, 98; Piper’s performance of Minimalist and, 70, 75, 78, 92–93, 188; Piper’s performance of particularity and, 29, 73, 92, 118; Piper’s performance of universal viewer’s perspective and, 33, 70, 75, 96, 98, 118; racism and, 259; utopian, 29, 119, 188; whiteness and, 15, 39, 115; women and, 70, 95, 98, 108 Index  333

Untitled, 0 to 9 (July 1969) (Piper), 130, 131 Untitled Constructions (Piper), 41–42, 43 Untitled Map/Circle (Piper), 59–63, 62, 269 n. 86, 269 n. 88, plate 5 Untitled Map Work (Piper), 63–65, 63, 64, plate 6, plate 7 Untitled Performance for Max’s Kansas City (Piper), 134–37, 134, 136, 171, 182, 216, 278 n. 32 Untitled performances described in Talking to Myself (Piper), 219–26 Untitled project for “Street Works II” (Piper), 132–33 Untitled project for 0 to 9 (January 1969) (Piper), 21–23, 22 Untitled proposal for Biennale de Paris (Piper), 176–77, 284 n. 48 Untitled statement in “Make a Political Statement” (Piper), 251–52 Upanishads, 90 Urban League, 114 “Using Walls” (exhibit), 142 US Organization, 231 Utah-­Manhattan Transfer #1 and #2 (Piper), 55–58, 65, 67, 86, 269 n. 87, plates 4.1–4.2 Van Buren, Richard, 278 n. 29 Van Peebles, Melvin, 7, 242–43 Vietnam War, 55, 101, 125, 137, 141 Village Voice, 169, 198; Mythic Being advertisements in, 231, 245, 246, 252; Piper’s advertisements in, 39, 127–30, 129, 256; Piper’s work reviewed in, 39, 58, 127, 133, 135, 170; refusal to publish Mythic Being advertisement in, 253, 254 Weber, Samuel, 50 Weiner, Hannah, 74, 98–100, 106, 111– 13, 134, 274 n. 99 Weiner, Lawrence, 48 White: artists as, 23, 38–39, 275 n. 118; 334   Index

Bowles as, 12–14; conceptual artists as, 38–39, 75, 118; entitlement, 75–76; Lippard describes artists as, 167; museums as, 115–16; paint, 183, 189, 196, 201, 289 n. 150; Perreault describes artists as, 169; Piper describes artists as, 35, 106; Piper perceived as, 231, 238, 258–60; Piper’s work and, 10, 15–16, 18–19; art as, 21, 72; Ringgold describes artists as, 146; scholars and objectivity, 12, 76; “upper-­ middle-­class het WASP male,” 13, 16, 25, 75–77, 120, 159, 265 n. 29. See also Passing Whiteness, 8, 11–15, 116, 211, 265 n. 29; anonymity and, 15; claims to, 8, 11–13, 239, 260; Conceptual art and, 38; Minimalism and, 23, 38; Mythic Being and, 6, 236; privilege of, 12–13, 75–76; universalism and, 15, 39, 115 Whitney Museum of American Art, 96, 114, 139, 142, 156, 169; annual exhibitions at, 96, 169; “The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America,” 114; Piper exhibits Food for the Spirit at, 210, 290–91 n. 20 Wiener Spaziergang (Brus): as compared with Catalysis III (Piper), 201–4 Wilke, Hannah, 210–11, 219 Williams, Carla, 211–12 Wilson, Judith, 137, 231, 260 Wines, James, 56 Withers, Josephine, 260 Witness, 204; Piper as, 10, 120, 258 Wojnarowicz, David, 294 n. 5 Women. See Black women; Femininity; Feminist art; Nude representation of women Women artists: alienation and, 100, 110; Art Workers Coalition and, 72, 89, 96, 270 n. 5; desire as dilemma and, 255; as dilettantes, 110–11; femininity and, 167; invisibility and, 27, 74, 89; Lippard on Modernism and, 89–90, 110– 13, 267 n. 20; Minimalism and, 23, 38,

70, 110, 132, 168; Modernism and, 94, 89; stereotypes of, 70; universalism and, access to, 70, 98; visibility of, 77, 110. See also specific individuals, organizations, and exhibits Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), 72–73, 89, 111; animosity toward the Ad Hoc Committee, 270 n. 10; open hearing at Metropolitan Museum of Art, 163–64 Women Artists News, 259–60 Women’s Interart Center, 253 Women’s Movement, 27, 72, 112, 125, 146–47, 207, 240; black women and, 229–30; racism within, 230, 233

Women’s sensibilities, 167–68 Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation (WSABAL), 72, 89 “Women’s Work” (exhibit), 297 n. 87 Woodruff, Hale, 115 “Word Works” (exhibit), 282 n. 12 “Word Works, Too” (exhibit), 297 n. 87 Wright, Richard, 118 Xenophobia, 47, 119–20, 146, 208, 257 Yoga, 37, 90, 125, 205, 215, 266 n. 7, 278 n. 44 0 to 9, 21, 39, 130

Index  335

John P. Bowles is associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bowles, John Parish, 1968– Adrian Piper : race, gender, and embodiment / John P. Bowles. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-4896-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-4920-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Piper, Adrian, 1948–—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Race in art. 3. Gender identity in art. I. Title. N6537.P5B69 2011 709.2—dc22  2010035880