Adrian Piper,
The Mythic Being
, 1973
Adrian Piper
The Mythic Being
Adrian Piper (*1948, USA, Germany) is a first-generation Conceptual artist who started exhibiting her work internationally at the age of twenty. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. She also studied philosophy at Harvard and Heidelberg after beginning her lifelong exploration of Yoga and the Indian Vedanta philosophy. She introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual Art and explicit political content into Minimalism. Through her insistent exploration of subjectivity, her early conceptual performances anticipated the feminist maxim “the personal is political”.
Adrian Piper Foundation website:
www.adrianpiper.com
The Mythic Being
was a project which went on for several years. In it, Adrian Piper adopted the identity of an African-American man roaming the streets and parks of New York. Piper’s aim was to liberate herself from certain aspects of her own subjectivity and explore moments of confrontation, alienation and difference. Using a mathematical formula, she arranged 12 passages from her journal in chronological order and attributed these one by one to the M.B. (Mythic Being). Adrian Piper invested a great amount of time and effort preparing for her public performances, meditating and repeating each journal passage like a mantra for a month prior to each performance. This video is an excerpt from the film
Other than Art’s Sake
by Australian artist Peter Kennedy.
Copyright & Courtesy Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin
Document media
Video, b&w, sound, 8:00 min
Issue date
1973
To be seen in
Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, 7 October 2011 – 15 January 2012
Relations
Laura Cottingham (COT 1)
Tags
be-coming
,
de/construct identities
,
normativity
,
racism
,
resistance
,
roleplay
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abstraction
activism
aggression
aging
appropriation
authorship
be-coming
beauty
body control
body object relation
cabaret
capitalism
childhood
collectivity
conflict
consumerism
craft
dance/choreography
de/construct identities
death
desire
destruction
dis/ability
dis/appearance
dreamscapes
durational performance
exhaustion
extended body
failure
fashion/glamour
femininity
flesh
fluxus
fragmentation
gaze
happening
health/illness
his/herstory
housework/carework
human/non-human animals
in/visibility
inscription
institutional critique
intimacy
labour
language
laughter/humorous
lecture performance
manifesto
masculinity
masquerade
mass media
maternity
measuring
metamorphosis
migration
military
music
mythology
nationalism
nature
networks/affiliations
normativity
pain
painting/drawing
participation
patriarchy
pleasure
pop
post-communism
precarity
private/public
public space
queer
queer/drag
racism
re-enactment
repetition/seriality
resistance
ritual
roleplay
score
sexual violence
sexualities
skin
sound
state oppression
stereotypes
the common
therapy
torture
touch
trash
violence
voice
voyeurism
vulnerability