M HKA Ensembles

° 1948

Born in New York City (United States).

Adrian Piper is a first-generation conceptual artist. She has also taught analytic philosophy at several US universities. Presently she is running the APRA Foundation in Berlin.

Since her first appearance in the inner circle of conceptual art in the mid-1960s Piper has played a double game. She has used the conceptual art movement’s strategies to target a blind spot in its critique of minimalism, namely its disregard of gender and colour. Around 1968 Piper started a performance practice examining the opposition between abstract timelessness and the concrete space in which an action is executed and understood. She appears herself, masked behind culturally inscribed images. Her performances make it clear that recourse to any universalist model of the body is fruitless, since bodies are always already culturally interpreted.

Perhaps Piper’s greatest contribution to conceptual art is her radical indication of the exclusions its abstractions create — and that she does this through conceptual art itself. She insists on filling the abstract space of art with contemporary politics, invalidating fantasies of pure form and disinterested contemplation. Piper regularly exhorts her audiences to directly analyse her works, as in the dance class performance Funk Lessons, 1982–1984.

“I started working on the Hypothesis series in 1968 and continued until 1970. In earlier pieces – my ‘pure’ conceptual work – I explored things, words, sounds, and pages of paper as concrete physical objects, that referred both to themselves and also outward, to the world of abstract, symbolic meaning. In the Hypothesis series I was interested in connecting these investigations with the investigation of my own body as equally a concrete physical object that could refer to itself as well as to other objects, and in finding the point of similarity and difference. This series was the crucial link between the earlier conceptual work and the later, more political work I did having to do with race and gender objectification, otherness, identity, and xenophobia.” (Adrian Piper)