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Re-member the audience: Adrian Piper's Mythic Being advertisements
Art Journal, Spring, 2007 by Cherise Smith
On page fifty-six of the September 27, 1973, issue of The Village Voice, one finds a sea of advertisements arranged in vertical columns by size and visual "weight." Scanning the page, one sees that John Fitzgibbon of the Open Eye group offers acting lessons for beginners, the Jean Cocteau Theatre is playing Medea, Waiting for Godot, and The Lesson, and Steven Baker presents All Male Revue. The advertisement containing a photograph of a figure with a big, curly Afro, mustache, and dark sunglasses might be overlooked, were it not for the bulbous-eyed, Mr. Heat Miser-looking mask of the neighboring ad that draws attention to this portion of the page. The head and shoulders of the figure appear in the lower left quadrant of the frame. He stands in front of a plain, light-colored backdrop, wearing sunglasses and a black turtleneck and holding a cigar to his mouth. To the right of the figure are bubbles that increase in size and lead toward a thought balloon. Rather than announcing auditions, lessons, or an upcoming play in the demanding, impersonal tone of advertisement-language, the hand-written text, reading "TODAY WAS THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. THE ONLY DECENT BOYS IN MY CLASS ARE ROBBIE & CLYDE. I THINK I LIKE CLYDE. 9/21/61," is oddly personal and anachronistic.
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This single-panel object is not an advertisement in the usual, commercial sense: it doesn't seem to sell anything. Rather, it is one piece in a series that is, in turn, part of a larger project, titled The Mythic Being, that the artist Adrian Piper worked on from 1973 through 1975. She began work on The Mythic Being when she was twenty-four, bringing to life the fictional male persona, pictured in this advertisement, by dressing in "drag" and wearing an Afro wig, mustache, sunglasses, and "working class" clothes. (1) During the two years that Piper adopted the male form, the Mythic Being performed on the street in public environments, roaming around Manhattan and Cambridge, Massachusetts, riding the subway, and attending concerts and movies. Once, he even (fake-) mugged another man. He appeared in a film as well as in private performances that are documented in still photographs. (2) The resultant products are diverse and manifold, yet together they demonstrate that "dispersing" The Mythic Being was a major thrust of the project. (3)
To distribute the fictional persona, Piper devised a complex mathematical structure, like those she employed in earlier works, through which she would "isolate" and mine 144 passages from her diary, mount the same number of performances, then "publicize" and circulate the same number of two-dimensional works through a "widely distributed newspaper." (4) The artist did not follow through with the strict numerical component of the project. However, sixteen more single-panel, comiclike works were published, and all of them are anchored by the same photograph. The first advertisement appeared in the "Theatre" section of the Voice; the remainder were published in the "Gallery" section roughly once a month from October 25, 1973, until February 2, 1975. (5)
The use of alternative exhibition venues, such as newspapers, magazines, and public spaces, and untraditional methods of distribution, including mail and mass-communication systems, are, as historians as diverse as Lucy Lippard and Benjamin Buchloh have pointed out, among the standard strategies Conceptual artists employed to critique the gallery-museum system and the commercial art market it supports. (6) The Mythic Being project participates in that history, and this essay explores how Piper used The Village Voice as an alternative space and mode to exhibit and deliver the Mythic Being advertisement-works. It considers the formal strategies Piper employed in the making and dissemination of the Mythic Being advertisements and compares them to publicity vehicles used by other artists during that time. In publishing the ad-works in the Voice, Piper used strategies that approximate contemporary marketing practices as a way to subvert and critique commercial institutionalization of her art. (7) The artist's implementation of mass-media and marketing tactics had another effect as well: it increased her artistic capital. My goal is to remember or, at the very least, better understand both the real audience that encountered the ad-works and the imaginary audience that might discover them, because the advertisement-works testify to Piper's interest in engaging the public or, more to the point, a specific public.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Methodologically speaking, conjuring up the reactions of naive and uninformed viewers who, no doubt, happened upon this and the other sixteen Mythic Being ad-works that Piper placed in The Village Voice from the two-year period is tricky: it is difficult for twenty-first-century historians, for whom the Mythic Being series is a well-known if enigmatic project, to ascertain whether these works grabbed attention, to imagine how reader-viewers responded to them, to contemplate whether their seriality was recognized, to hypothesize about whether they garnered a devoted readership or following, to speculate about how the symbols signifying the figure's gender, race, and class might have been interpreted, and to determine if (art-world) viewer-readers knew that Piper's identity was cloaked by that of this mysterious figure. Trying to reconstitute the audience is slippery because the Mythic Being performances, for example, were generally mounted in the space of a non-art-world public that, one must assume, did not know it was witnessing performance art, which, subsequently, resulted in the lack of recorded accounts and responses. The Village Voice advertisement-works present a unique opportunity to flesh out Piper's and Mythic Being's audience. (8)
