Adrian Piper

RACE, GENDER, AND EMBODIMENTBy John P. Bowles

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4896-2

Contents

Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………..viiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………xiINTRODUCTION Adrian Piper’s Performance of Race and the Moral Question of Racism…………………11. Contingent and Universal: Adrian Piper and the Minimalist Ideal………………………………332. Hypothesis: Modernism and the Woman Artist’s Studio…………………………………………693. May 1970: Art and Activism……………………………………………………………….1254. Catalysis: Feminist Art and Experience…………………………………………………….1625. Food for the Spirit: Transcendence and Desire………………………………………………2056. “Acting Like a Man”: The Mythic Being and Black Feminism…………………………………….229CONCLUSION The Mythic Being and the Aesthetics of Direct Address……………………………….257Notes…………………………………………………………………………………….263Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………299Index…………………………………………………………………………………….319

Chapter One

Contingent 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.” 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, 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.

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.” 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 self-reflection. 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.

By the end of the 1960s, Conceptualism’s emphasis on the contingent and the return of information as content made art politically relevant again. 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.” 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 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].” 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. 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. 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 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.” 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.” 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.

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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.”

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. 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.

In a telling example, Piper recalls in the poem one first-time visitor to her loft complaining in German (thinking Piper would not understand), “Aber sie ist doch nur ein Mädchen!” (But she is just a girl!). 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. 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 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. 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. 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.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Adrian Piperby John P. Bowles Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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