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

I would like to begin that process by traveling back in time momentarily, to the late 1960s and early 1970s, prior to Piper's Mythic Being project, to a time when the artist's work had not yet become a part of the hallowed Conceptual art "hall of fame" and before it had been co-opted as representative of "identity politics" art. (9) Back then, she was a practicing Conceptualist whose work had, by 1969, been shown at the Dwan Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery, two of the leading exhibition spaces for Conceptual art in New York. She had been included in major group exhibitions of Conceptual art, such as 557,087 at the Seattle Art Museum (1969), Plans and Projects as Art at the Kunsthalle Bern (1969), and Information at the Museum of Modern Art (1970). (10) In spite of these early successes, Piper reports that, by the early 1970s, she had been "dropped by the art world" because certain of its representatives learned some of the particulars of her identity: namely, that she is a woman and black. (11) That experience, in conjunction with the social, political, and military upheavals in the world, changed who she was as an artist, student, and person in the world. Piper reconceptualized her practice: the body--that is, her body--figured prominently, and her exploration of subject-object relations was activated. She launched the Catalysis works (1970-71), a series of public performances that radically and humorously brought attention to herself while confronting the audience, and Food for the Spirit (1971), a group of private performances designed to "anchor" the artist "to the physical world" during a period of intense philosophical and metaphysical study. (12) In her next project, The Mythic Being, Piper continued in the street-performance vein, exchanging the Catalysis props, such as the rancid-smelling clothes and freshly painted shirts, for the jeans, turtleneck, sunglasses, Afro wig, and mustache that constitute the Mythic Being male persona. This period marks a shift in the artist's practice in which social and political subject matter is incorporated with formalist concerns.

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Piper's use of The Village Voice as an outlet for parts of the Mythic Being project reflects some of her larger artistic and political interests from that time. For instance, she was concerned about the commercial appropriation of her work: "I don't make concrete, spatiotemporally unique, discrete objects that cannot be multiply reproduced.... I don't rely on discrete, spatially unique art contexts for presentation of the work. I utilize art contexts only in their information-disseminating capacities." In addition, she felt "victimized ... by the recondite and elitist character of contemporary art" and recognized that "the failure of communication between the art-educated and the non-art-educated [is] closely related to the ... socioeconomic discrepancies that exist between rich and poor." Piper's appropriation of the single-panel comic format in the Mythic Being advertisements can be seen, then, as a way to make her work "potentially as accessible as comic books or television." (13) In that respect, placing the ad-works in the Voice is an infiltration of "low," popular art into the commercial space of "high" art. Moreover, the use of the single-panel comic convention, a format known for its serial structure and dispersion, is a sly and erudite nod at the seriality prevalent in art practices of the time.