Adrian Piper is a philosopher, artist, and yogi. Her work ranges from the textual to the conceptual, minimal, performative, participatory, theatrical, philosophical, and beyond. Piper was the subject of one of NYMoMa’s most extensive single artist retrospectives in history in 2016: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016. In addition to her work as an artist, she has been a professor of philosophy, and she is the author of a two-volume philosophical treatise, Rationality and the Structure of the Self. Published in 2 volumes, RSS traces conceptions of the self in Hume (Vol. I) and Kant (Vol. 2), arguing for a modified Kantian conception of the self over the Humean conception of the self. While I have not read the entirety of this work, it’s worth noting in relation to our own “alter-institutional” status that Chapter 1 of Vol 1 deals primarily with the controversy surrounding Piper’s inability to have her books published by a major philosophy press for reasons she argues are structural to the institutional character of academic philosophy that, in effect, prohibits publication and proper valuations of ideas that step outside its professional conventions. She writes,
“It is because rational philosophical dialogue recognizes no professional hierarchy that other, extra-philosophical or even anti-philosophical measures must be invoked to maintain it under circumstances in which hierarchical status is the surest index of professional survival. … In this traditional hierarchy, with few exceptions, … novices, newcomers, provisional members, and interlopers tend to rank among the lowest subordinates of all. Accordingly, the more they diverge – in thought, appearance or pedigree – from the tradition, the closer to the bottom of the hierarchy they are likely to be found, and the more blatant the exercises of power that keep them there.”
Along with being an influential theorist, philosopher, and artist, Piper is also decidedly a provocateur, even in the realm of analytic philosophy. An example is the memoir of her “Escape to Berlin” after what she describes as a racist, sexist ousting from her position as professor of philosophy at Wellesley, a position she describes elsewhere as, and I think with an acerbic humor we can all identify with, “three full-time jobs.” (Although, in fairness, here it might be Wellesley that is the provocateur.) Another demonstration of such provocation is her 2012 “retirement from being black,” offering that, “my new racial designation will be neither black nor white but rather 6.25% grey, honoring my 1/16th African heritage…Please join me in celebrating this exciting new adventure in pointless administrative precision and futile institutional control!” Piper also refuses to participate in “racially segregated art exhibitions,” such as exhibitions that include only black artists, pointing to the ambivalence inherent in calls for representation that at the same time, Piper seems to be suggesting, reinscribe rigid racial distinctions and hierarchies.
A good picture of Piper’s complicated theoretical character can be seen in two recent publications in Artforum. The first, titled, “Reality Check: Where is Enlightenment? Adrian Piper responds.” (Summer 2018), details what Piper views as the necessary Enlightenment project in the Kantian philosophical sense as the autonomous exercise of our rational faculties meant to overcome mindless authoritarianism. She suggests that when miscegenated with an understanding of illumination she derives from Arjuna in the Baghavad Gita as becoming more able to tolerate the cruel reality suggested by the facts revealed in the shedding of our individual interests and desires we begin to approach something like freedom. “The More of the faces we can tolerate, the more firmly we anchor ourselves in that reality, the more disinterested we become, and the nearer we draw to illumination. That is where Enlightenment is to be found.” The second article, published April 2021, titled, “On the Tuileries Slave Memorial Jury “Impasse” details how the organizing body, CM98, ran an essentially sham competition for the commission of a sculptural memorial in France dedicated to the 200,000 slaves freed in 1848. After Piper was selected as one of the short-list finalists, the competition, she argues, was reduced to no competition at all when it became clear the only acceptable proposal would be CM98’s. She also challenges the aesthetic merits of their proposal, a proposal, she argues, that if implemented would be a disaster because of its resemblance to the Vietnam War Memorial’s minimalist/conceptualist design and that monument’s purpose of honoring fallen American soldiers. “They apply these same symbols, connotations, and formal configurations to slaves who have been trapped, chained, imported, and murdered by the countries that enslaved them — often by soldiers in service to those same countries — would be a travesty, an international embarrassment for the French state and a cultural disaster.”
The works we’re looking at for this episode are Adrian Piper’s early-career publications in Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s short-lived but influential magazine of avant-garde poetry and art 0-9. Published from 1967-1969, 0-9 published anonymous sacred poetry, bootlegged work by modernist avant-gardists like Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein, as well as work by then contemporary artists and poets associated with the neo-avant-garde of New York at the time like Acconci and Mayer themselves, Mayer’s sister Rosemary, Clark Coolidge, Aram Soroyan, Jerome Rothenberg, Hannah Weiner, Kenneth Koch, Yvonne Rainier, Sol Lewitt, and Robert Smithson. Piper has material included in Numbers 5 + 6, along with the supplement, Streetworks, that was included with Number 6. Piper also published one of the few O-9 Books, the very limited book series produced by 0-9 that includes works by Vito Acconci, Aram Saroyan’s Coffee Coffee (1967), Bernadette Mayer’s Story (1968), a flyer for the Streetworks Supplement to Number 6, and Anne Waldman’s contribution to that issue as a sort of broadside. Piper’s piece, Three Untitled Pieces, alternatively Three Untitled Booklets, is also considered her “first solo exhibition.” That her first “exhibition” was a book that was also a piece of mail-art suggests Piper’s early medium-dexterity. Because I have not been able to track down a PDF of Three Untitled Pieces, I’m including some descriptions of what was in that work. Piper’s extensive website is absolutely well worth browsing.
It includes a detourned Wikipedia biography, a detailed chronology, a biography, a personal genealogy, essential readings, links to her work and writing, announcements about upcoming fellows sponsored by her foundation “The APRA Foundation,” and much, much more. The website’s concern with narrative control, and also narrative play, continues Piper’s concern with autobiography and biography that began with her first exhibition and its tightly controlled distribution as a personally sent piece of mail art, way back with 0-9. Her piece, included below, on what art criticism should be is instructive in this regard.
I’m also including Fred Moten’s chapter on Piper, “The Resistant Object: Adrian Piper’s Theatricality,” and some info on the Three Untitled Booklets, .Looking forward to chatting about this work!
Brent