Feminist Artist

Adrian Piper: The Artist Formerly Known as African American

 

            Adrian Margaret Smith Piper was born on Septermber 20, 1948 to Olive Xavier Smith Piper and Daniel Robert Piper in New York City. In her work Out of Order, Out of Sight (1996) a section titled “Passing for White, Passing for Black” Piper describes her early years of childhood growing up in a Harlem neighborhood. Being a light-skinned black child in the early 50’s was not a much desired position to be in and Piper recalls the situation in this particular section of her book: “My family was one of the very last middle class, light skinned black families left in our Harlem neighborhood after most had fled to the suburbs; visibly black working class kids my age yanked my braids and called me Paleface. Many of them thought I was white and treated me accordingly,” (Piper 276). It wasn’t until her teenage years when her family moved to Cape Cod and later in her college years that Piper felt comfortable with her peers and they equally as comfortable with her. She notes that “Until my family moved out of Harlem when I was fourteen, my social contacts were almost exclusively with upper middle class white schoolmates and working class black neighborhood playmates, both of who made me feel equally alienated from both races, “ (Piper 278), a fact that most definitely played a role in her art career later in life.

Piper had attended Riverside Church and the New Lincoln School throughout grammar school and high school while also attending the Art Students’ League of New York. In her mind, Piper’s true art education began with her second semester at the School of Visual Arts in February of 1968. She has been drawing and painting since she around 4 years old, yet she admits to knowing very little about the actual subject as her exposure to different artists, ideas, and history was nonexistent until her enrollment in the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her knowledge of contemporary trends in art was also “nil until February, when I for some unknown reason finally allowed myself to really look at and begin to understand what is currently going on in art,” (Piper 3). She began to exhibit her art internally when she was 20 years old and graduated the School of Visual Arts in 1969. Piper later received her B.A. in Philosophy and a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974 and eventually earned her M.A. and Ph. D. in Philosophy at Harvard University under renowned thinker John Rawls.

LSD Paintings (1965-67) were among the earliest works that Piper has been recognized for, although they were exhibited for the first time in 2002 at Galleria Emi Fontana in Milan, Italy.

Piper was influenced early on by the work of Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) while she attended the School of Visual Arts, especially by his 46 Variations of Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1967) shown at the Dwan Gallery. It was through him that Piper adopted a Conceptual art mentality which affords highest priority to the actual concept or idea that generates a piece of work rather than the medium on which it is created on or the object(s) being depicted. Therefore for a Conceptual artist such as Piper the different forms of media, whether it is sculpture, drawing, painting, performance, video, etc. , held equal merit as instruments of realizing the original concept. This can be easily seen throughout Piper’s career as she uses various forms of media to present her ideas, one very influential example being her 1970 performance Catalysis and 1973 performance Mythic Being.

In the former, Piper staged “a series of unannounced performance events in the streets, subways, elevators and other public places of New York City. The events were intended as catalysts for non-specific changes in the social environment Piper moved through,” (Broude, Garrard 161). These ranged from inserting a bath towel into her own mouth with the end hanging out of her enlarged cheeks (and entering busses and elevators) to attaching helium filled balloons to her ears, nose, teeth, and hair and proceeding to ride the subway during rush hour and walk through Central Park. Piper viewed this particular act as a way to make public that she was violating her body and thus made it an object to be viewed. In an interview with Lucy Lippard, Piper is asked whether the performances were meant to repel her audience; instead of attracting them to the figure of a woman as most artists do, was she trying to fight back. Piper answered that she hadn’t considered this idea at the time, but I feel this exemplifies many of the actions taken by feminist artists during the 70’s.

In Mythic Being Piper walked the streets of Cambridge, Mass. dressed as what some interpret as the symbol of the “threatening” black male with a swaggering walk and large afro wig and mustache. All the while Piper is repeating manta-like phrases.

Self-determination and self-actualization were two important methods of removing the female body from patriarchal authority, and depicting the female body in ways that had not been done before was one method of doing so. In Piper’s later work Food for the Spirit (1971) the artist photographer herself in a mirror in order to counter fear of self-loss. “To see oneself embodied is one way to know that one exists,” (Broude, Garrard 194). This performance followed Piper’s 2 month juice and water fast, during which she studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and avidly practiced yoga. In this particular piece, Piper seized embodiment by choosing “the reality check of the mirror and recorded physical reality for posterity,” (Broude, Garrard 194). This represents Piper giving the female body a mind, demonstrating a choice women are forced to make by society between intelligence and beauty, many of which would choose beauty. Piper signifies a beautiful African-American woman who intellectually is not only extremely competent, but also confidant.

 

Discussion Questions:

1) In what ways do you think Piper’s situation growing up influenced her art in the 70’s?

2) From LeWitt’s 46 Variations of Three Different Kinds of Cubes (seen below) can you gather what interested Piper in the Conceptual ideal of art?

 

3) Do you think Piper’s LSD Paintings should have been recognized and exhibited earlier than 2002? Why or why not?

4) What effects did Piper’s Catalysis series produce in the feminist movement?

5) Do you feel that Food for the Spirit strongly embodies feminist art of the time or does it depict the female body in a similar fashion to the mainstream art that was being produced?

 

References

Broude, Norma, and Mary D. Garrard. The Power of Feminist Art: The American          Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994.   Print.

“Conceptual Art.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Elisabeth Schellekens, 7 June          2007. Web. 10 Mar. 2013. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conceptual-art/&gt;

Piper, Adrian. Out of Order, out of Sight. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996. Print.

Piper, Adrian. “APRAF Berlin: Biography.” APRAF Berlin: Biography. Adrian Piper      Research Archive, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2013. <http://www.adrianpiper.com/biography.shtml&gt;