art post 3

Adrian Piper

Ashes to Ashes, 1995

Explanation of The Big Four Oh

The Big Four Oh exhibit

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper, known as Adrian Piper, was born in New York on September 20, 1948. She studied art while in high school. Her earliest works transpired from the conceptual art tradition, and she has a background in sculpture and philosophy. Since both her parents were of mixed race, she began to notably address that side of her in her works. The artist published an essay about concepts in her art titled Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness. In the essay she writes about dealing with confrontations of self to self, self to others, exposing distances between people and personal, political, and emotional alienation that exists in her life.

I decided to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. On the sixth floor of the MoMA, was Adrian Piper’s exhibition which is called Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Institutions, 1965-2016. This exhibition included early works that were inspired by the use of LSD, racist and sexist tendencies and more.

One of the projects at the exhibition in the MoMA is titled Food for the Spirit. It consists of fourteen black and white self-portraits. This artwork was done in the summer of 1971. At this time, she sequestered herself in her New York loft located on Hester Street. In that loft, she spent her time reading and studying Immanuel Kant’s text Critique of Pure Reason. Her deep mental involvement with Kant’s reading resulted in her sensing that she was losing touch with the personal world. She snapped pictures and recorded her body periodically while reciting excerpts of the text. In her pictures, she is holding a camera to a mirror and this signifies that she controls her images and confirms her existence in the world. Since the tape recording was destroyed by accident, the only thing left was the images and marginal writing from her paperback copy of Kant’s text.

The second project I chose is titled Ashes to Ashes. The 1995 piece presents the viewers with a typed story about how Piper’s parents died of lung cancer, as well as three photographs of her parents when they were young. The story is heartbreaking. Both of her parents smoked, but when her mother’s boss died of cancer, she decided to stop smoking. She was diagnosed with emphysema and her doctor warned both, her and her husband, that the smoke would kill her. However, the father kept on smoking and every time he did, she would have to leave the room. She started to feel like her husband loved cigarettes more than her, even though he tried everything to stop, he wasn’t able to. The mother was so short of breath that she couldn’t do anything, so the father started to help out by going to get the mail, going to the supermarket, and running her errands. Cancer slowly ate away his throat, mouth, and pharynx and the mother was left alone. The mother started to be more exhausted, so she prayed for it to be over. When she barely had any breath left, she looked at the picture of her and her husband and smiled.

During her works around the 1970s, “Piper projected a sense of self onto the rational and serial forms of conceptual art, constituting a radical break with its characteristic detachment” (Art Basel, paragraph 1). She wanted to show how her repeated self-confrontation marks an effort to ground her understanding of Kantian excellence. Piper doesn’t only show repeated self-confrontation but introduces political identity topics into her art. Racism is seen in her works so she could make people confront racist views, as she herself, was raised in an upper-middle-class black family and attended a private school with wealthy, white students.

The artist is showing the museum audience her life thoughts and experiences. Her works were inspired by racism and LSD, which were a part of her life. She presented these different types of themes to show the world that her life was not easy. “We are in an era where impressions matter, and where reputation is both an asset and a liability” (Finkelstein, 122) is a quote from the book The Art of Self Invention. This quote can relate to Piper because we live in a world where whatever someone does is important to everyone. Piper’s first impression mattered, but she just shows off who she really is by making videos of herself dancing for 47 minutes like in her work The Big Four Oh from 1988. Some of Piper’s pieces receive different reactions depending on how the person takes it, and this could relate to the quote “Such interpretations are variously convincing, amusing, irrelevant, or misleading” (Finkelstein, 210). Piper’s pieces represent different stages and/or events that occurred throughout her life, so people might take it one way, but she is the only one that knows the meaning behind her piece.

Works Cited

Blumberg, Naomi. “Adrian Piper.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 28 Nov. 2016, www.britannica.com/biography/Adrian-Piper.

“Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016.” Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016 | MoMA, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3924?locale=en.

Flux. “Histories and Theories of Intermedia.” Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness, Adrian Piper, 1 Jan. 1970, umintermediai501.blogspot.com/2008/01/ideology-confrontation-and-political.html.

Art Basel. “Adrian Piper | Food for the Spirit.” Art Basel, www.artbasel.com/catalog/artwork/55861/Adrian-Piper-Food-for-the-Spirit.