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2 Adrian Piper: the body after conceptualism Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). (Roland Barthes (1972))1 Adrian Piper’s practice is rooted in the foundational definitions of Conceptual Art. She is also a pioneer of the turn in Conceptual Art from autonomous and self-reflexive practice to a context-based, and then a
Adrian Piper’s textual address In part my work stems from a compulsion to embody, transform, and use my experiences as a woman of color in constructive ways, in order not to feel trapped and powerless. Adrian Piper, ‘General Statement about My Work’ (1989)1 An austere visual archive thick with words, the artwork of Adrian Piper demands an encounter with language. Through a wide array of textual materials – typewriter fonts, swathes of paint, stencilled letters, and her own cursive handwriting – Piper works from the premise that language is a material embedded
In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. To illuminate the specific ways in which these artists and writers contribute to the production of a feminist imaginary, Part I charts the correspondences between the artwork of Piper and the writings of Davis. It analyses the artwork she created in the late 1960s and 1970s, when she began using text to create artwork that moves between what Piper identifies as 'the singular reality of the "other."' Davis's writing exposes the fictions animating projections that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies can take visual form. Part II focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss. Part III demonstrates that the maternal femininity thought to naturally inhere in woman is also restricted and muffled, quite efficiently repressing the possibility that women could address each other across maternal femininity's contested terrain.
This book examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas. The book traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics. The central concept is a reversal of the qualitative assessment made by artist and theorist Joseph Kosuth in 1969. The book overviews the 1960s-1970s shift from disciplinary-based Conceptual Art to an interdisciplinary conceptualism, crediting the influence of contemporaneous politics dominated by identity and issue-based politics. It offers a survey of Adrian Piper's early work, her analytic conceptual investigations, and her transition to a synthetic mode of working with explicit political reference. The book explores how Conceptual Art is political art, analysing several works by synthetic proposition artists. It then surveys several key 1980s events and exhibitions before taking in depth the 1993 Whitney Biennial as its central case study for understanding the debates of the 1980s and the 1990s. Examining the ways in which Hans Haacke's work referenced political subject matter, simultaneously changing the conception of the processes and roles of art-making and art, the book argues against critics who regarded his work to be "about" politics. It also looks at the works of Charles Gaines, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, and Andrea Fraser.
risk becoming means of disciplinary control. The Trainee might be read as an extended version of Happenings such as Kaprow’s Fine! , or Lublin’s displacement in Mon fils . An important parallel practice, which helps plot the connections between the works in Beyond the Happening and contemporary interventions, can be found in the performances that Adrian Piper conducted in New York City in the early 1970s, notably her influential Catalysis series. These pieces, which, as Nizan Shaked elucidates, grew out of Piper’s involvement in Conceptual art, saw the
, language, visual systems of signification, the operation of cultural hierarchies, and the formulation of a political sense of being. These artists did not assume the existence of any inherent or essential identity, they instead established identity politics as a mode through which to consolidate political and aesthetic agency. The artists addressed in this book: Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, and Charles Gaines, based their practices
Conclusion Across the arc of this book, I have made the case that the visual and textual manifestations of language were significant parts of art practices aligned with feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. I narrowed in on the work three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – who deployed texts and images of writing to create an address that calls to viewers and asks them to participate in the project of deconstructing the sign woman. I argue that by doing so, these artists identified three crucial mechanisms for keeping that sign ideologically
that endowed artistic language and 115 116 The synthetic proposition strategies with pre-conceived meaning. Analytic in its structural interrogation, their work added the synthetic, referring the viewer to political subject matter outside the realm of self-referential art. Feminism was a major catalyst in this transition. Three artists exemplify this shift. Adrian Piper transitioned from an analysis of the art object as a factor of time and space to the role of cultural forms in formulating gendered and racialised social meaning; Mary Kelly from labor and gender
Introduction: addressing the other woman In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how three artists – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. I became interested in the way women artists engaged with text and writing when I saw WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at MoMA PS1 in New York City in
perceptual or social effects. Consider Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit , in which she photographed herself in a mirror while fasting, reportedly in response to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , an investigation of the limits of the human mind and its access to the world 34 [ Fig. 5.7 ]. It is implicit in Piper’s feminist, philosophically inclined performance that the image of herself nude, photographed in the mirror is not a product of narcissistic or commercial exploitation. Instead, the performer’s gaze, the