Adrian Piper

by Bowles, John P.

• ISBN13: 9780822349204
• ISBN10: 0822349205
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-02-14
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Beginning in 1972, the artist Adrian Piper began periodically dressing as a persona called the Mythic Being, striding the streets of New York in a mustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth. Her Mythic Being performances critically engaged with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class, challenging viewers to accept personal responsibility for xenophobia, discrimination, and the conditions that allowed them to persist. Piperrs"s work confronts viewers and forces them to reconsider assumptions about the social construction of identity.Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and the Artistrs"s Bodyis an in-depth analysis of this groundbreaking artistrs"s work, illustrated with more than ninety images, including twenty-five in color. Over the course of a decade, John P. Bowles and Piper conversed about her art, its meaning, reception, and relation to her scholarship on Kantrs"s philosophy. Drawing on those conversations, Bowles locates Piperrs"s work at the nexus of Conceptual and Feminist art of the late 1960s and 1970s. Piper was the only African American woman associated with the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and one of only a few African Americans to participate in exhibitions of the nascent feminist art movement in the early 1970s. Bowles contends that Piperrs"s work is ultimately about our responsibility for the world in which we live.

Author Biography

John P. Bowles is Associate Professor of African American Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His articles and art criticism have appeared in signs, American Art, Art Journal, Art in America, and Art Papers, among other publications.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Adrian Piper's Performance of Race and the Moral Question of Racism	p. 1
The Paradox of the Black Woman Conceptual Artist 1965-1970
Contingent and Universal: Adrian Piper and the Minimalist Ideal	p. 33
Hypothesis: Modernism and the Woman Artist's Studio	p. 69
Personal Politics and Performance Art 1970-1975
May 1970: Art and Activism	p. 125
Catalysis: Feminist Art and Experience	p. 162
Food for the Spirit: Transcendence and Desire	p. 205
ôActing Like a Manö: The Mythic Being and Black Feminism	p. 229
Conclusion: The Mythic Being and the Aesthetics of Direct Address	p. 257
Notes	p. 263
Bibliography	p. 299
Index	p. 319
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