+ ADRIAN PIPER +

HUMOR HAS ALWAYS BEEN A KEY INGREDIENT IN THE WORK OF PERFORMANCE ARTIST ADRIAN PIPER. SHE KNEW DECADES AGO THAT THE WAY TO GET PEOPLE THINKING ABOUT RACE, SEX, MISOGYNY, AND BIAS WAS TO GET THEM LAUGHING FIRST

Text Aimee Walleston

A beautiful intruder in the predominantly white-male world of American conceptual art in the late ’60s and ’70s, Adrian Piper used her physicality, visage, and kinetic, uncompromising intellect to pose trenchant questions about race, gender, and identity. Before artists like Chris Burden became renowned for creating performances that used the self and corporeality to produce shocking, explicit, and sometimes violent artworks, New York–born Piper was dousing herself in wet paint and walking through Macy’s department store, or riding the D train while drenched in fetid eggs, milk, vinegar, and fish oil. Piper used her being as a lightning rod for on-the-spot audience engagement. Her works often seemed to explore her own discomfort with society’s view of her as a light-skinned Black woman by reversing this uneasiness and putting viewers in the crosshairs. But, however confrontational these works may be, they’re equally possessed of a wry, energized vitality that employs humor to test the boundaries of her audience’s internalized racism and misogyny.

V magazine

Image © Adrian Piper Research Archive, Berlin