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

Returning to my earlier question: if Piper was a regular reader of Artforum, lived in SoHo most of the time that she worked on the Mythic Being project, and showed with and engaged the ideas of her conceptually oriented counterparts who were featured in Artforum and Avalanche, then why did she place the ad-works in The Village Voice rather than in an art magazine? I'd like to propose three possibilities. First, Avalanche might not have been an attractive option because--perhaps due to a combination of age, gender, and race--Piper was not the entrenched member of the SoHo art scene that one might imagine she was. Second, at this phase of her career, the artist, like a great many others, stood against the commercial forces of the art market. Given her resistance to the gallery-museum industrial complex, it seems unlikely that she would place the works in Artforum, which was coming under increasing scrutiny for its commercialism. (36) Finally, and most important, the Voice offered access to a readership that contained both art-world-specific and "nonspecialized" audiences, ones Piper wanted to reach. (37)

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Though current readers might lament the alternative newspaper's commercialism, The Village Voice was, during this period, an organ for leftist and counterculture politics with a circulation of approximately 145,000, eight times that of Artforum and thirty times that of Avalanche. (38) Known for its support of the civil rights and women's rights movements and its condemnation of the Vietnam War, the Voice was widely read by left-leaning individuals, liberal intellectuals, and artists of various stripes. In short, the newspaper offered Piper a way to reach an "educated and intellectual but nonspecialized" audience. (39)

At the same time, the Voice found an especially attentive readership in the New York art community as a result of its weekly distribution: in contrast to the monthly or roughly quarterly publication schedules of Artforum and Avalanche respectively, its articles, advertisements, and columns, such as Perreault's "Art," were up to date. (40) Thus, while the Mythic Being ad-works were seen by a "nonspecialized" audience--and we might see correlations between this audience and the non-art-world audiences that saw Mythic Being performances--they were certain to have been encountered by an art-specialized audience as well. It is safe to assume, then, that a fair number of Piper's target audience of counterparts and colleagues in the art world saw the Mythic Being ad-works, if only inadvertently, as a result of reading articles and exhibition announcements in the Voice.

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The Mythic Being ad-work from the January 3, 1974, issue of the Voice presents an opportunity to consider how the advertisements and the overall project relate to works by other artists working during the period. It features the same photograph of Piper wearing the Mythic Being uniform, but the text is different. It reads "NO MATTER HOW MUCH I ASK MY MOTHER TO STOP BUYING CRACKERS, COOKIES, AND THINGS, SHE DOES ANYWAY, AND SAYS IT'S FOR HER EVEN IF I ALWAYS EAT IT. SO I'VE DECIDED TO FAST. 12-12-64." If the first advertisement that Piper placed in The Village Voice made assessing the Mythic Being's gender difficult, then later examples, such as this, the fourth in the series of seventeen, would only further the confusion. Again, the figure appears to be male, but the passage, written when Piper was sixteen years old, seems to wrestle with the issue of regulating body image through dieting that is typically relegated to women. This ad, like others, consciously plays with gender and racial stereotypes.