Adrian Piper

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  slant April 12, 2021

  On the Tuileries Slave Memorial Jury “Impasse”

  I WAS ONE OF FIVE ARTISTS shortlisted for the competition to create the Memorial in the Tuileries to the Victims of Slavery. I write to correct some of the factual misrepresentations of this process that have recently appeared in the international press.¹ The French Culture Ministry’s Call for Applications for that commission required the following materials from the artist applicants: (1) an artistic document of no more than 15 pages, (2) a portfolio presentation of five recently realized works, (3) a letter of motivation, and (4) a curriculum vitae of no more than two pages.² In this first

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  print Summer 2019

  OKWUI ENWEZOR

  THE EASE WITH WHICH, given the chance, he repeatedly accomplished what in retrospect seemed so obviously right and necessary as to be self-evident may have been received as a gesture of contempt by those who lacked the opportunity or the spine to have taken the initiative before him. But I know he did not intend it that way; he simply saw what needed to be done and did it: noticed that there was no venue for calling attention to the work of postcolonial African artists, and so started an art magazine that did; noticed that so-called international exhibitions were actually self-aggrandizing vanity

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  passages August 17, 2018

  Aretha Franklin (1942–2018)

  WHERE I LIVE NOW, Respekt! is what we say to express surprise, admiration, and, well, respect, for a person’s achievement. In my country of origin, in the 1970s, “Respect” was my infallible litmus test for culling those with whom friendship was possible from those who didn’t know who Aretha Franklin was, or who looked with distaste or condescension on her magisterial achievements, or who openly derided them as “jungle music.” Among those who passed that first test, those with whom friendship was likely had to either move to the beat spontaneously, or at least be willing to learn. That learning

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  print Summer 2018

  REALITY CHECK

  KANT’S ANSWER to the question “What is Enlightenment?” begins with the foundational definition of Enlightenment as the free and autonomous exercise of one’s rational faculties, independent of what one is told, ordered, or required to think or do. By the “autonomous exercise of one’s rational faculties,” he means basically what he meant in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), namely, deliberating in accordance with the same principles of reason he had already critically dissected in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Rational deliberation for Kant covers two overlapping areas.

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  print Summer 2016

  ARTIST’S PROJECT

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  passages December 11, 2014

  Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014)

  ROSEMARY WAS MY CLASSMATE in Mr. Bageris’s drawing course, in my second year at the School of Visual Arts in the fall semester of 1967. We met at its first class meeting. I sat down next to her because I noticed that she was reading Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809) while we were waiting for Mr. Bageris to start the class. She was the only student in the class reading a book. As I had just finished it, I asked her whether she was enjoying it. She said she was finding it a bit dry, and much preferred The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). I hadn’t read Werther, but I wrote down the title, and

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  print September 2010

  Adrian Piper

  IN THE THIRD MEDITATION, Descartes attempts to answer the solipsist’s question as to whether there exists anything external to oneself, by considering whether he has any ideas about the external world that could not have arisen from within his own mind. He distinguishes those properties that are “clearly and distinctly perceived” in his “ideas of corporeal objects, namely

  –magnitude or extension in length, breadth, and depth;
  
  –figure [i.e., shape], which results from the termination of extension;
  
  –situation [i.e., position], which bodies of diverse figures preserve with reference to each other;

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  print October 2003

  FEMINISM & ART: NINE VIEWS

  HOW MIGHT WE ASSESS FEMINISM’S INITIAL IMPACTS ON ART, ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORICIZATION, AND ITS CONTINUING INFLUENCE? ARTFORUM ASKED LINDA NOCHLIN, ANDREA FRASER, AMELIA JONES, DAN CAMERON, COLLIER SCHORR, JAN AVGIKOS, CATHERINE DE ZEGHER, ADRIAN PIPER, AND PEGGY PHELAN TO CONSIDER THIS QUESTION IN AN ONLINE ROUNDTABLE ASSEMBLED IN AUGUST. THEIR RESPONSES—REFINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTED IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES—SUGGEST THAT FEMINISM AND FEMINIST DISCOURSES AS THEY HAVE FOUND EXPRESSION IN CONTEMPORARY ART ARE AMBIVALENT (“IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THAT TERM,” AS PHELAN PUTS IT), MULTIFACETED, AND EVER EVOLVING.

  LINDA NOCHLIN

  As a participant in the women’s art movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, I have decidedly mixed feelings about the historicization of feminism. It is difficult to see lived experience transformed into historical text. Things that seemed open and dynamic are now pinned down and displayed like butterflies in a case. Of course, there is also the tendency to idealize the past, to see the women’s art movement as totally united. This was not the case: Although all of us were for justice, equity, and a fair shake for women artists, critics, and academics, our views were extremely

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  print October 1973

  In Support of Meta-art

  I WOULD LIKE TO MAKE a case for a new occupation for artists. This occupation might exist as part of, alongside, or instead of the art itself. If it existed as part of or alongside the art, it might have the effect of giving the art a perspicuous and viable interpretation, support, or framework, although I don’t see this as its intention. If, on the other hand, it were to replace the art, well and good. We could then add it as a nascent appendage to the field, and spend hours of discussion and many kilocalories deciding upon its status and implications. I will call the occupation I have in mind