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

42. Moira Roth, interview with author, April 2003.

43. Piper claims to have been unaware of the narrative performances that were taking place on the West Coast. E-mail interview with the author, February 2004. Suzanne Lacy, Moira Roth, and Josephine Withers have argued that because California feminist performance was quite theater-oriented, it was different from the more Minimalist-based performance art of New York that was practiced by Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, and Laurie Anderson. See Moira Roth, "A Conversation with Suzanne Lacy," Artforum 19, no. 3 (November 1980): 42; and Josephine Withers, "Feminist Performance Art: Performing, Discovering, Transforming Ourselves," in The Power of Feminist Art, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Abrams, 1994), 161.

44. For accounts of Montano's, Antin's, and Hershman's characters, see The Amazing Decade: Woman and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980, ed. Moira Roth (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 65, 65, and 102, respectively.

45. Roth, "A Conversation with Suzanne Lacy," 42-43.

46. The announcement of Judy Chicago's exhibition was financed by the artist and her agent; Susannah E. Rodee, executive director of Through the Flower, phone conversation with the author December 11, 2006. I am not certain whether the other advertisements were paid by the artists' respective galleries. Susan Richmond discusses these materials in relation to Benglis's work in "Put-Ons and Take-Offs: Lynda Benglis, Feminism, and Representations of the Body, 1967-1977" (dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2002).

47. While I am not certain, I assume that the fees for these advertisements were paid by the artists. Here, I use Benglis as an example: she was required by the Artforum editorial board to pay twice the regular fee for the advertisement because several of its members found the photograph offensive. See Meyer, "Bone of Contention," 73-74, 249-50; and Susan Richmond, "The Artforum Controversy of 1974," in "Put-Ons and Take-Offs," 7-20.

48. One could argue that Piper's colleagues were also playing with racial conventions and stereotypes.

49. Piper did not sell her work at this time, nor did she have gallery representation to pay the fees.

50. It is worth noting that the politics of portraying a nude, young, black female body were, and continue to be, different than those of portraying a young, nude, white female body. The significance of this distinction seems not to have been lost on Piper. By this point, she had mounted the private performances of Food for the Spirit (1970-71), during which she recorded her largely nude body photographically. While her text about Food for the Spirit was published in High Performance 4, no. I (Spring 1981), she did not distribute the photographs publicly until 1997, when they were printed by the Thomas Erben Gallery. Franks, 111 and 209.

51. See, for examples, Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 79-83; and Robert Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," Artforum 8, no. I (September 1969): 28 33, reproduced on page 43 of this issue of Art Journal. Interestingly, Piper borrowed money from LeWitt to undertake the advertising arm of the Mythic Being project. Piper, 102.

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