Adrian Piper

Elke Smodics-Kuscher und Nora Sternfeld
trafo.K
Flic Flac* – Feministische Materialien für den Kunstunterricht.

Mit Flic Flac* versuchen Elke Smodics-Kuscher und Nora Sternfeld vom Büro trafo.K sich den Kodierungen, Fallstricken und Widersprüchen zu stellen, die eine Beschäftigung mit Feminismen im Unterricht mit sich bringen. Ziel der Materialien ist es, feministische Ansätze und künstlerischer Strategien im Hinblick auf die Ent­wicklung eigener Handlungsformen vorzustellen. Künstler_innen produzieren Wissens­formen und Handlungsräume, die sich bestehenden Machtverhältnissen und Normierungen widersetzen. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Sprache sowie mit künstlerischen Arbeiten und Strategien wird durch DIY-Vorschläge für den Unterricht ergänzt, die vielleicht Lust machen, selbst zu handeln.

Die feministischen Materialien beinhalten:
• DIY Handlungsanweisungen, die zu einer Beschäftigung mit den künstlerischen Arbeiten und feministischen Strategien einladen.
• ein Glossar, das eine Auseinandersetzung über Sprache und Definitionen ermöglicht (Text: Persson Perry Baumgartinger, Illustrationen: Evi Scheller).
• eine Sammlung künstlerischer Arbeiten mit Fragen für den Unterricht.

* Flic Flac bezeichnet die Akrobatik, die es ermöglicht, die Dinge auf den Kopf zu stellen und wieder auf den Beinen zu landen.

Attitudes towards women as measures of all deviation from societal norms, beginning with the female body in itself, are often situated into the social conscious that justifies their exclusion from political and economic life. For those whose womanhood intersects with other axes of oppression, such as race or queerness, capitalist society has further embedded traditions of abjection and exclusion for what threatens the purity of whiteness and maleness at the core of universal humanism. In examining these historically anchored conceptions of women’s bodies as monstrous and volatile, analyzing these categorizations in the flesh is much more potent, being forced to confront the traumas of their materiality. This paper investigates how many women in performance art have positioned themselves in such a way to showcase the material conditions of being racially, sexually, and/or ‘naturally’ other.


*This paper is published in a conference anthology and is based on the second chapter of my MA thesis.

Adrian Piper's work poignantly frames identity markers as insufficient for capturing the whole self, while also creating openings for viewers to confront their own responsibility in relying upon limiting markers of identity. Drawing from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Piper argues for an understanding of identity that acknowledges its limit to ever capture the full uniqueness of the individual. Politicizing conceptualism, Piper has used painting, performance, institutional critique, photography, dance, video, and drawing to lay bare the mechanisms by which identity is assigned within social systems. In particular, her work Catalysis (1970-71) and The Mythic Being (1973-1975) both demonstrate how identity is limited by the way one can conceive of themselves, making clear the "performance of identity." Adrian Piper, now sixty-nine years old, has utilized methods of conceptual art within her work to demonstrate how ideas, specifically regarding identity, often fail to capture the uniqueness of the individual. Piper is a multidisciplinary artist with an associate's degree from the School of Visual Arts (SVA), granted in 1969, and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard, granted in 1977.

In two very brief texts written for "Oracles", a book edited by Pierre Leguillon with facsimile reprints of numerous artist calling cards, I focus on two such cards produced by Adrian Piper. I analyze what producing and handing out these cards implies from a communicational perspective, concluding that they are passive-aggressive devices. I briefly contextualize them in the context of Adrian Piper's work and (street) harassment. Last but not least, I insist on the indexical dimension of the cards, imagining how their meaning would change if they were used by someone other than Adrian Piper.

Piper’s work is part of a major transition in late-twentieth- century art, from a practice based on object making into one whose unity we are still defining. This essay will consider the continuity between the Catalysis works and her earlier artworks created according to the paradigm of Conceptual art, in light of the debates about the legacies and definitions of conceptualism.

The introduction to my book, published by Duke University Press, 2021

Back cover blurb: In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art, but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode-information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from an artwork with each encounter. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation, as a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the artwork of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld, driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates.

PRAISE:
“Masterfully intertwining aesthetics, information theory, and entropy concepts, Jason A. Hoelscher offers an insightful account of the accelerated transformations of art practices in the 1960s. Art as Information Ecology will open new pathways toward a better understanding of the complexities of periodizing contemporary art at a time when artworlds are in more intense communication with other systems. This ambitious book is bound to create ripple effects.”
— Cristina Albu, author of Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art

“In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher digs deep, looking into contemporary artworks in very different ways than ever before: from the premise that art can be a foundation of information that is like a multilayered cake, impossible to finish. I applaud Hoelscher for his in-depth, intense, and focused look into how art is a base for information systems that carry beyond the work themselves.”
— Sharon Louden, artist, educator advocate for artists, and editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books

THOUGHT IN THE ACT
A series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi

Jason A. Hoelscher is Associate Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Georgia Southern University.

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For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press at a 30% discount, please visit the Duke UP website and enter the coupon code E21HLSR during checkout

This essay discusses “My Calling Cards, Series 1#” by artist and philosopher Adrian Piper. It examines the notion of etiquette in her work more generally, and discusses why the question of xenia and xenophobia remains crucial to Piper’s art as well as to her Kantian aesthetics. The second half of the essay is taken up with the discussion of that aesthetics, and seeks to clarify Piper’s reading of race and aesthetics by means of a reading of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).

There has been much debate in art, and other fields, about the efficacy of identity politics for advancing social justice and change. My contribution considers anti-racism, as a type of social analysis and political strategy, in the context of Leftist debates that also reoccur in relation to sex and gender politics. Pointing to how ideas articulated in art relate to politics, this essay identifies what makes a particular phenomenon a model, when specificities can be generalized, or from which concrete situations we can extrapolate abstractions. If we articulate the universal potential of identity politics, we can base solidarity on the intersection of class with other forms of identity-based, or ascriptive, politics.

The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and the sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the present. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with philosophically abstract ideas, and traces key strategies in contemporary art today to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics, movements that have so far been historicized as mutually exclusive. It demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. Commencing with the early oeuvre of Adrian Piper, a first generation Conceptual artist, this book offers a study of interlocutors that expanded the practice into a broad notion of conceptualism, including Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analyzed the cultural conventions embedded in modes of reference and representation such as language, writing, photography, moving image, or installation and exhibition display.

Beden üzerine düşünmeye başladığımız zaman, birçok disiplinde farklı bağlamlarda ele alınan bir çeşitlilik hali ile karşılaşmak mümkündür. Araştırmanın kurgulandığı zemine bir açıklık getirmek amacıyla doğal olduğu varsayılan bu fenomenin yapay bir olgu olarak, kültür ve toplum katmanının biçimlenmesine dahil edildiği bir konumlanma üzerinden sorgulama gerçekleştirilmiştir. Tarihsel perspektif içerisinde beden; üretilen, düzenlenen ve denetlenen bir kurgu tarafından şekillenmektedir. Bu toplumsal şekillenmenin alanı olan inşa nesnesi, barındırdığı değer ve pratiklerin taşıyıcısı olarak bilgiyi oluşturan görme ve temsil biçimlerinin meskenini oluşturmaktadır. Çok katmanlı bir yapı kurgusu baz alınan beden, toplumsal cinsiyet bağlamında biçimlenmesi üzerinden sorunsallaştırılmıştır.

In November 1969, the American art critic Lucy R. Lippard organized a small exhibition with serial photo-text works in the gallery of the School of Visual Arts in New York. The title she gave it, “Groups,” is a reference to the motif of the approximately twenty works shown: prior to the exhibit, Lippard had asked the artists to take one photograph each day for a week of a group of people in a similar arrangement and to then describe these images in detail. A few months later, in March of 1970, she presented half the works again in the form of a “magazine exhibition” in the British journal Studio International.

Two questions have occupied art historical writing on the post-Conceptual, discursive, politically engaged art practises of the 1970s and after. Art historians have queried, firstly, the development of such committed art from the politically taciturn Conceptual art of the 1960s. Was that development a matter of historical accident—a contingent confluence of late modernism and of ground-shifting political developments of the late 1960s—or was there something intrinsically emancipatory to that moment: an aesthetic revolution, which facilitated the political one? Secondly, once art enters overt political discourse, what role do these practices occupy vis-à-vis 'non-art' political discourse? Do new, emancipatory kinds of rhetoric become available when political debate takes place within the distinct sphere of art making? I revisit these questions through the work of Adrian Piper. I read two bodies of Piper's work alongside one other: her performance-based Conceptual pieces of 1968–1971, and her 1978–1992 anti-racist installation works. Drawing on this analysis and on the socio-political background of what social psychology has described as the rise of 'modern' or 'subtle' racism, I suggest that to assess the rhetorical effectiveness of Conceptual art we need to reconsider the identity of its viewers.

This manifesto, published in the Summer 2016 Artforum, investigates why FUCK YOU is such an indispensable survival strategy for feminist and avant-garde artists. Because, let's face it, we live in a world that's so totally fucked that sometimes the only possible response is to acknowledge it with a response of equivalent animosity. Even if it means having to use the F-word (by which I mean feminist).

Jan Dibbets, Adrian Piper, Daniel Buren und Eleanor Antin schufen zwischen 1966 und 1975 in hoher Auflage gedruckte Anzeigen und Ausstellungsankündigungen. Diese Ephemera – gleichzeitig Kunstwerke, Werbeinstrumente und Dokumentationen für künstlerische Aktionen – stehen exemplarisch für die kommunikationsbasierte, flexible und mobile Praxis der Konzeptkunst.

Das Buch zeigt mit Blick auf die ökonomische Entwicklung der Zeit, wie die KünstlerInnen Formen immaterieller Arbeit exemplarisch vorwegnahmen. Die Ephemera zeugen von einem komplexen Verhältnis zwischen der Kritik an hierarchischen Organisationsstrukturen und der Forderung nach Authentizität und Individualität. Autonomiebestreben und Institutionskritik bilden hierbei keinen Gegensatz zu ökonomischer Innovation. Sie sind Bedingung einer postfordistischen Gegenwart.

Confronting the conventional understanding of conceptual art, the following essay will demonstrate how Adrian Piper’s Untitled Performance at Max’s Kansas City, NYC, 1970 (fig. 1) challenges the hierarchal relationship between idea and object in conceptualism. Using a feminist approach, I will lean on scholars Jayne Wark and Kimberly Lamm to explore how Piper’s use of her body as art medium complicates Sol LeWitt’s claim that “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the [conceptual] work.”1 I will begin first by generating a common understanding of conceptualism, engaging in particular with Lucy Lippard and John Chandler. In providing the fundamental qualities of conceptual art, I hope to expose its limits, demonstrating how the established characteristics of conceptualism risk excluding opportunities for female artists in the movement. Ultimately, I will uncover how Piper’s consolidation of conceptual techniques and artistic identity calls for an expanded discussion of what conceptual art entails.

This title sets out to write new transnational South Asian art histories - to make visible histories of artworks that remain marginalised within the discipline of art history. However, this is done through a deliberate 'productive failure' - specifically, by not upholding the strictly genealogical approach that is regularly assumed for South Asian art histories. For instance, one chapter explores the abstract work of Cy Twombly and Natvar Bhavsar. The author also examines 'whiteness', the invisible ground upon which racialized art histories often pivot, as a fraught yet productive site for writing art history. This book also provides original commentary on how queer theory can deconstruct and provide new approaches for writing art history. Overall, this title provides methods for generating art history that acknowledge the complex web of factors within which art history is produced and the different forms of knowledge-production we might count as art history.

There are performances that have no fixed abode in the Arts. Invisible to the norm, unnamed, these actions of art dwell a nomadic and unsettled condition, disappearing as surplus holes of the situation. Through a subtractive strategy, I argue, these performances render a subversive accumulation of routine and ordinary gestures against Capital nomenclature. The present work aims to present the possible philosophical conceptualization that emerges from a non-spectacular performativity working through subtractive procedures of loss, friction and disappearance. I propose to address these issues through a double conceptual plane, formed by American anthropologist James C. Scott and French philosopher Alain Badiou. The aim of the paper is to show that this homeless Performativity proposes to Philosophy a liminal, radical and unstable script willing to create new territories of speculation by its apparent inexistence.

This paper considers a set of performance art documents from the late 1960s and early 1970s that use the diary format to record specific sets of habits of everyday life. Alison Knowles, in "The Identical Lunch" (1968-71), and Adrian Piper, in "Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece" (1970), both create performance events that are deliberately uneventful. Using straightforward language, non-emotive snapshot photographs, and simple gestures in their performances allows each performer a space of meditation. Eating the same sandwich everyday, consumed with little theatricality, seems to offer no substantial alteration or novelty that would allow it to count as an ‘event’. Likewise, recording the number of times the performer defecates each day and what quantities of soya lecithin she mixes in her drink each morning seems trivial, even in the context of an avant-garde art scene that prized films featuring young New Yorkers sleeping or chatting on a couch.

If the everyday subject matter of these performances challenges the way we understand these performances as events, it does so in large part because of two important conditions – conditions which are likewise characteristic of the way everyday life was understood in the 1960s. First, they pretend impartiality or anonymity in their styles of documentation. Knowles and Piper both exclude personal pronouns as they describe their actions. Piper’s daily self-portrait photographs likewise show the performer with a minimum of emotion. Both are sensitive to technical or mathematical measures of their actions – the cost of a daily sandwich for Knowles; the weight and temperature of the body for Piper. Second, despite documenting in a manner that suggests the anonymity of the performer (part of a broader effort to democratize aesthetic experience for Knowles and an early exploration of embodied subjectivity for Piper), each of these performances is unique in that it is only visible for the performer herself. Documenting is necessary to help constitute the event of performance. The performer as audience allows for the introduction of new subject matter to the realm of performance art. Both Knowles and Piper present everyday information as characterized by anonymity and invisibility. Each artist also proposes a view of everyday life that, while not explicitly feminist, closely examines women’s labor in particular as a subject of everyday life. This talk considers “Everyday Speech” [1959] by Maurice Blanchot, “Doing-cooking” by Luce Giard (in The Practice of Everyday Life, volume II), and the contemporaneous writings of Georges Perec to investigate the problems of anonymity and invisibility at work in these two art performances and their corresponding documents.

Paper for a seminar I convened for the "Poetics (The Next) 25 Years" conference: poeticsthenext25years.wordpress.com/. On one hand, arguing that relative to conceptual writing, American experimental poetries are not in a phase analogous to the art history's post-conceptual phase but rather to that of post-minimalism. On the other hand, introducing the themes of the seminar as follows: Text in/as visual art that disregards distinctions: looking /reading, image / literature, subject / object, concept / percept. If the object-orientation of contemporary culture brackets linguistic material, we haven’t superseded the mediation of text. If “conceptual writing” or “post-internet poetry” leverages the social materials it appropriates, it is also embarrassed by them. With a variety of design platforms for writing and reading comes a new call upon the critical values of existing disciplines. And since writing is now a predominant studio activity for visual, performance and other non-literary artists, even studio objects that contain little or no text can be seen as in some way written.

If documentation is all that remains of performance art from the past, what is at stake in naming such works of art ‘performance’? What implications might such discourse have on our treatment of performance documents? Building on Alain Badiou’s philosophy, this paper argues that understanding performance events requires addressing the circulation of their documents, where the participation of the audience helps to produce the truth of the event and names it as performance. What follows is a brief discussion of two examples of work by Adrian Piper – the "Mythic Being" advertisements in The Village Voice (1973­‐75) and "Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece" (1970).

[Please email me for a copy of this article.]