Adrian Piper
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is an American conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher. Her work addresses how and why those involved in more than one discipline may experience professional ostracism, otherness, racial passing, and racism by using various traditional and non-traditional media to provoke self-analysis. She uses reflection on her own career as an example.
Piper has been awarded various fellowships and medals and has been described as having "profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art". In 2002, she founded the Adrian Piper Research Archive in Berlin, Germany, the focus of a foundation that was established in 2009.
Life and education
Piper was born on September 20, 1948, in New York City. She was raised in Manhattan in an upper-middle-class Black family and attended a private school with mostly wealthy, white students. She studied art at the School of Visual Arts and was graduated with an associate's degree in 1969. Piper then studied philosophy at the City College of New York and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's in 1974. Piper received a master's in philosophy from Harvard University in 1977 and her doctorate in 1981, supervised by John Rawls. She also studied at the University of Heidelberg. During her philosophical studies, Piper focused on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; this philosophical inspiration pervades her artworks, most specifically Food for the Spirit.During the late 1960s and early 1970s Piper was influenced by Sol LeWitt and Yvonne Rainer. She worked at the Seth Siegelaub Gallery, known for its conceptual art exhibitions, in 1969. In 1970, she exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Information, and began to study philosophy in college. Piper has said that she was kicked out of the art world during this time for her race and sex. Her work started to address ostracism, otherness, and attitudes around racism. In an interview with Maurice Berger, published under the title Critique of Pure Racism, Piper asserted that while she finds analysis of racism praiseworthy, she wants her artwork to help people confront their racist views.
Piper’s work was included in the 1971 exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists held at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the 2022 exhibition 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone also at the Aldrich.
Piper was awarded visual arts fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979 and 1982, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. Piper taught at Wellesley College, Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, Georgetown University, and University of California, San Diego. In 1987, she became the first female African-American philosophy professor to receive academic tenure in the United States. While she was on unpaid leave in Berlin during 2008, Wellesley College terminated her tenured full professorship because of her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a "Suspicious Traveler" on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration Watch List.
Piper is divorced. She currently lives and works in Berlin, where she runs the Adrian Piper Research Archive. In 2015, she was awarded the Golden Lion for best artist in the international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
In 2017, Piper received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University.
Ideology
In 1981 Piper published an essay entitled "Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness", in which she discusses concepts she explores through her art. In her essay, she contemplates notions of human self-examination and belief structures that serve to "individuate oneself from another." These beliefs begin with our early experiences in the world and go unquestioned until they are attacked by new experiences that break the conformity, introducing doubt—the key to self-examination and belief-revision. Piper argues that the beliefs we tend to hold onto the longest, and often avoid exposing to examination, are those that allow us to maintain an understanding that makes sense to us about who we are and how we exist within the world at large. She points out that these "ideologies" often are responsible for "stupid, insensitive, self-serving , usually at the expense of other individuals or groups." Piper concludes the essay by telling readers that if considering the points she brings up makes them self-conscious about their political beliefs in the slightest degree, or causes them to have even "the slightest glimmerings of doubt about the veracity of opinions, then will consider piece a roaring success."Piper's work is largely based on her background in philosophy, including eastern philosophy. Piper started studying and practicing yoga in 1965. Through her education, she gained interest into the eastern yogic traditions of Hindu philosophy. Many of her works either allude to or directly incorporate eastern philosophy in them, for example, Mythic Being: Doing Yoga, The Color Wheel Series, and Mokshamudra Progression. On her website, Piper brings attention to the rise of yoga in the United States, and with it, the decline of its true spiritual meanings. She states, "But my deeper hope is that professional philosophers who visit these pages will eventually take it upon themselves to begin the long, slow process of reintegrating the Eastern philosophical tradition with the Western one, of reminding us what we have lost – by restoring the application of theory to practice as a central measure of philosophical worth; by restoring, too, the more generous conception of the self extending beyond the ego that Western philosophy has forgotten; by restoring to a central place in our thinking the insights of Yoga into the structure of the ego and its relation to change, desire, and acquisitions; and thereby restoring the methods, practices and wisdom of Yoga to its rightful place among the many philosophical traditions that express our capacities for intellectual analysis and spiritual growth."
Career
In June 1968 Piper's work was published in 0 to 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication that experimented with language and meaning-making. The first mention of Piper as an artist in the press was in the Village Voice on March 27, 1969, when she was only 19 years old. It was in response to what also is considered her first solo exhibition, her mail art project entitled, Three Untitled Projects. The people and institutions to whom she sent her stapled booklets that comprised the piece were listed on the last page as the "Exhibit Locations". With this project, Piper succeeded in distributing her work on her own terms to an audience of more than 150 artists, curators, and dealers of her choosing.Street performances (1970s)
In the 1970s, she began a series of street performances under the collective title, Catalysis, which included actions such as painting her clothes with white paint, wearing a sign that read "Wet Paint", and going to Macy's department store to shop for gloves and sunglasses; stuffing a huge white towel into her mouth and riding the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator; and dousing herself in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk, and cod liver oil and then spending a week moving around New York's subway and bookstores. Catalysis VII involved Piper visiting a museum, chewing gum loudly, and holding a purse full of ketchup. The Catalysis performances were meant to catalyze challenges that constituted the order of the social field, "at the level of dress, sanity, and the distinction between public and private acts." day. The word "catalysis" describes a chemical reaction caused by a catalytic agent that remains unchanged, and Piper viewed her audience's reaction as the unaffected agent.Piper's Mythic Being series, started in 1973, saw the artist dressed in a wig and mustache and performing publicly as a "third world, working class, overly hostile male."
In 2013, NYU's Grey Art Gallery played footage from Piper's 1973 work, Mythic Being, in its exhibition entitled, "Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art". Piper rejected the inclusion, and requested that her work be removed from the exhibition because its inclusion further underlined the marginalization of non-White artists and was in direct opposition to the ideals that she fought to inspire in her viewers.
Piper spent the summer of 1971 in her loft in New York City. During this time, she was reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. She would read this book while doing various activities. Such activities consisted of yoga, fasting and writing. However, her experience reading this led to her feeling that she was losing connection to her physical self and was disappearing. She created the work Food for the Spirit to counteract this feeling. To perform the work, she would photograph herself periodically in front of a mirror and would chant parts of the book that led her to this feeling. The works consist of 14 gelatin silver prints as part of a binder.
''Funk Lessons'' (1980s)
Between 1982 and 1984, Piper staged a series of events advertised as Funk Lessons, which invited participants to learn about the dance styles, culture, and history of funk music. Piper located the roots of funk in African tribal music and saw it as integral to the growing presence of black cultural figures in America and the ongoing struggle for equal rights. By exposing diverse audiences to the music of African American counterculture, Piper sought to create a dialogue about the cultural value of dance music and the politics of race and identity.Each "lesson" was advertised on postcards that specifically avoided labeling the event as a work of participatory art. Piper began the lessons by playing samples of music and instructing participants in specific dance moves, while gradually introducing anecdotes of black history and culture into her presentation. Piper acted as a facilitator to discussions that, at times, grew heated as participants strayed from the academic format to engage in active discussion. By engaging audiences in active participation, Piper saw herself as creating an early work of relational aesthetics or what might be described as social practice. As documented in a video by Sam Samore, the experience transcended academic didacticism in favor of social exchange; Piper's mantra for the work was, "Get down and party together."