Adrian Piper - Contributions in Art

Contributions in Art

Adrian Piper’s early LSD Paintings of 1965–67, some of which were executed while she was still in high school, were discovered and curated by Robert del Principe, exhibited for the first time in 2002 at Galeria Emi Fontana in Milan, and quickly entered the international canon of psychedelic art. Influenced by the work of Sol LeWitt in 1967, Piper then embraced the principle of Conceptual art that accords highest priority to the idea or concept that generates a work, and regards different art media – painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, video, installation, soundworks, photo-documentation, etc. – as equally available and valuable instruments for realizing it. Since then, she has maintained this approach to materials in all of her work.

From 1967 to 1970, her early work as a first-generation Conceptual artist brought to bear the techniques and resources of yoga and meditation – what she called the "indexical present," acquired through her personal practice, on the exploration of consciousness, perception, and infinite permutation using maps, diagrams, photographs and descriptive language. Her Hypothesis: Situation series (1968–1970) forged a connection between passive contemplation of objects and the dynamic character of self-conscious agency navigating through time that then led her briefly into unannounced street performance. In the 1970s, Piper introduced issues of xenophobia, race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art with her Catalysis (1970–72) and Mythic Being (1973–75) performance series. She then introduced explicit political content into Minimalism with her mixed media constructed environment Art for the Art World Surface Pattern (1976).

In the 1980s, Piper sharpened the focus of her artwork, by applying her meditational concept of the indexical present to the interpersonal dynamics of racism and racial stereotyping. Works that explore these themes and strategies include her pencil drawing Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features (1981); her collective performance and video Funk Lessons (1982-4); her unannounced Calling Card interactive performances (1986–1990); her mixed media installation Close to Home (1987); her video installation Cornered (1988); and Vanilla Nightmares (1986–1989), her series of racially and sexually transgressive charcoal drawings on pages of the New York Times. Her first retrospective in 1987 at the Alternative Museum in New York, Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967–1987, reintroduced the art public and a new generation of viewers to the media, strategies and preoccupations of first-generation Conceptual art. Her mixed media video installation, The Big Four-Oh (1988), won the New York Dance & Performance Award (the Bessie) for Installation & New Media in 2001.

The 1990s saw Piper extend many of the same concepts and preoccupations to several large-scale, commissioned multi-media works and video installations in the formal tradition of Serial Minimalism. Among these were Vote/Emote (1990), Out of the Corner (1990), What It’s Like, What It Is #1 – 3 (1991-2), and Black Box/ White Box (1992). Piper’s multi-panel photo-text collage series Decide Who You Are (1991–92) combined appropriated photographic imagery with silk-screened drawing and poetically compressed texts, in a sequence of formal permutations on the themes of political self-deception and disingenuity. Her photo-text oil crayon drawing, Self-Portrait as a Nice White Lady (1995), continues to shock, outrage and amuse its viewers. Also in 1995, Piper withdrew her work from an important museum exhibition survey of early Conceptual art, in protest against its funding by the Philip Morris Tobacco Company. To replace it, she created Ashes to Ashes (1995), a photo-text work narrating both of her parents’ deaths from smoking-related diseases. This work exists in both English and Italian versions.

Piper further expanded the vocabulary of Conceptual art to include Vedic philosophical imagery and concepts in 2000, with her silk-screened graphic permutational Color Wheel Series, which combined Sanskrit text with drawing, photography, and representations of a Vedic divinity. Since then she has extended these concepts into an introspective investigation of loss, desire, detachment and self-transcendence in her video YOU/STOP/WATCH (2002), her open-ended multi-media series Everything (2003- ), her videotaped lecture/performance Shiva Dances with the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), and her PacMan Trilogy (2005-8), a series of three video animations that schematize certain essential human dynamics using PacMan imagery. Her most recent Vanishing Point series (2009- ) consisting in sculptural installations, drawings and collective performance, further sharpens the focus of her investigation into the nature, structure and boundaries of the ego-self.

Adrian Piper’s artwork is in many important collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Generali Foundation, Vienna; and the Aomori Museum of Art, Japan. Her sixth traveling retrospective, Adrian Piper since 1965, closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona in 2004. Her two-volume collection, OUT OF ORDER, OUT OF SIGHT: Selected Writings in Meta-Art and Art Criticism 1967–1992 (MIT Press, 1996), is available in paperback.