Re-member the audience: Adrian Piper's Mythic Being advertisements

10. In addition, Piper withdrew her work from Conceptual Art and Conceptual Practices at the New York Cultural Center in protest to the invasion of Cambodia and in response to the Kent State massacre (1970).

11. Interview with the artist, November 9, 2006.

12. Piper, 55.

13. Ibid., 120-21, 122, and 122.

14. Ibid., 103, 103, 109, and 112.

15. Ibid., 147, 263, and 147.

16. Ibid., 108-09 and 108-09.

17. Ibid., 138.

18. The phrase "cruising white women" comes from a group of photographs--titled The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women (1975)--in the series. I use the word "mugging" (my term, not Piper's) to describe the action that appears to take place in the photographs of The Mythic Being: Getting Back (1975), in which the Mythic Being appears to overtake another man. These photographs were taken by James Gutman, a photographer in Cambridge. E-mail interview with author, February 2004.

19. Piper continued to use aspects of mass media in her later work. See, among other examples. Art for Art World Surface Pattern (1976), in which the artist reproduced photographs and pages relating to poverty, war, and torture from The New York Times; the Vanilla Nightmares series (1987), in which she produced charcoal drawings on pages of The New York Times; Cornered (1988), in which she adopts the medium and manner of the broadcast-news anchor; and Black Box, White Box (1992), in which she appropriated George Holliday's recording of the Rodney King beating.

20. Dictionary of Business, ed. Graham Bannock, Evan Davis, Paul Trott, and Mark Uncles (Princeton: Bloomsberg Press, 2003), 214 and 366.

21. The 4 Ps were devised E. Jerome McCarthy and first articulated in his Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach (Homewood, IL: R, D. Irwin, 1960). They have since become standards for the field; see Dictionary of Business, 218.

22. I'm indicating here a contradiction that other commentators have pointed out. Conceptual art was then and has continued to be institutionalized, so that even ephemeral works are collected by private and public collections.

23. Pamela Franks provides an excellent and thorough analysis of the mail-art exhibition in her dissertation, "Mythic Is as Mythic Does: The Making of Adrian Piper, 1967-1975" (University of Texas at Austin, 2000).

24. E-mail interview with the author, February I, 2006.

25. Though Piper leverages contemporary marketing techniques in a sophisticated manner, she also violates some rules of marketing. For example, traditionally, marketers would raise brand recognition by using broad-reach vehicles, such as newspapers, before targeting consumers with direct mail pieces.

26. One might say that her action had its desired effect: Perreault discusses Piper's mail-art exhibition in his column in the March 25, 1969, issue of The Village Voice, which means that she reached an even larger and more diverse audience than her initial art-world-specific target. John Perreault, "Art," The Village Voice, March 27, 1969, 18.