REVERIES OF A SOLITARY DANCER

THIS SUMMER, in a spell of mildly toxic certitude and against all good advice, I decided to initiate a check-in with some of our best thinkers about the status of the Enlightenment. I wanted to pose an open question—one that was not just ontological (What is Enlightenment?) but temporal (When . . .), spatial (Where . . .), etc.—departing from the usual suspects like Kant, architect of some of the universalist thinking that subtends our fatigued and fatiguing world order (“in the West,” I initially appended the query, before realizing that the whole idea of a “world order” is more or less an invention of the hegemony some of us still call “the West”), and Foucault, whose assault on universal and transhistorical systems remains to my mind one of the most remarkable feats of intellectual activism ever. Departing from them but, through that departure, honoring them. I thought the boys might have been on to something.

Did I really expect that, amid the plethora of calculated unreason, something as slow as thinking could be weaponized against power in the race to see who can most quickly decimate the planet? I’m hopeless still, indoctrinated as much as anyone to believe in human rights and a universal “we” formed of beings who should nonetheless never be made to stand up for something as immaterial as the universal. But just because I am so naive as to believe doesn’t mean that I don’t also understand that we’re at war, and war is about the strategic deployment of the best tools available. If only we could figure out what those tools are.

Enter Adrian Piper like a comet, signifying wildly.

From March through July, some lucky thousands in New York could experience the perihelion of one of our most noble projects. “A Synthesis of Intuitions,” Piper’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the largest the museum has ever devoted to a living artist, brought together work from 1965 to 2016, the latter date representing the cusp of the latest national crisis. Organized by Christophe Cherix and David Platzker at MoMA, along with Connie Butler at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where a version of the show opens on October 7,¹ the exhibition collected the works of a genius who has given herself to a relentless, life-affirming engagement—in philosophy, in art—with the fundamental operations of xenophobia. It contained records of the investigation of certain tools (dance, reason, confrontation, aggressive politesse, dance) to understand and target and then transform the mechanisms that divide people into groups and distribute resources according to unjust criteria.

I puzzled over the show’s title. Intuition is, loosely, a Kantian term for the raw material of the world; synthesis is how the mind unifies such material, building order from chaos and thus forging the unity of the self. Without this operation, no “I,” and no “world.” Piper, who earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University, graduating at the top of her class, and who was the first woman of acknowledged African descent to receive a tenured philosophy professorship in this country, has extensively analyzed the ways in which Kantian metaphysics deals with anomalies, the ways the mind rationalizes stereotypes by refusing to synthesize inconvenient facts that eventually pullulate into xenophobic distortions: racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, etc. In her contribution to the catalogue, “The Real Thing Strange,” she reflects on the interaction between her work in philosophy and her work in art.² Until recently, she refused to articulate a direct line between the two, but here she argues that art is how she attends to those phenomena that resist synthesis, those materials not immediately (if ever) available to comprehension. (She makes the case here for something like a Kantian unconscious.) Her argument leaves open the possibility that the show itself (and perhaps the written material commissioned around it) is a synthesis—emphasis on the indefiniteness of the article: a synthesis, one of many possibilities. The show will disappear; the work will persist.

The first gallery opened with a wall devoted to Piper’s accomplished “LSD” drawings and paintings of 1965–66, works she made before she even began as a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. These self-portraits, done in a psychedelic style reminiscent of popular concert posters of the time,³ render her epiphanies in the wake of her experiments with then newly popular (and still legal) lysergic acid dietylamide and her immersions in the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Yoga Sutra. “I view all of my work from that period as signposts that point the way to a deeper reality that by definition can’t be depicted or described.”⁴ The surface/depth spatialization recurs throughout her work and was made tangible by the curators here, since you had to move around the wall to see the rest of the show.

Seven of the works displayed are signed “Adrianne”; Piper briefly adopted the feminized spelling in defiance of her parents’ refusal to explain why they assigned her the masculine version. (She reassumed the birth spelling when she lost her virginity.) The signature is an early demonstration of Piper’s impulse to grapple with the ambiguities of identity and with the continual obligation to decide whether to “disclose” some truth about herself. The double-edged “privilege” of being able to pass has significant consequences.

For there’s little doubt that “Adrianne Piper” would not have made much headway in the swashbuckling, male-dominated field of 1960s and ’70s New York art. “Adrian” was a passport—on paper she looked like a man. In February 1968, Piper encountered Sol LeWitt’s installation 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967, at Dwan Gallery in New York. She reached out to LeWitt, twenty years her senior and, like her, a Virgo; when they met, he expressed surprise that the “Adrian Piper” with whom he had corresponded was a woman. He quickly became an ardent friend, mentor, and champion.⁵ Around this time, the still- teenage Piper was making Minimalist and conceptualist works such as Nine-Part Floating Square, 1967, a grid of nine canvases with pencil lines drawn across and onto the wall, and Seriation #1: Lecture, a 1968 audio work that recorded the time, in ten-second intervals, as announced by the mechanical, feminine voice of an international operator. A further twist of the screw: The art here makes a plausible argument that, if she were a white male, her career and (immediate) success might have resembled those of peers like Donald Judd or Carl Andre.

But she was not and it did not. Instead, marginalized by a racist, misogynist art world, she applied to her own experience the exceptional formal tools she had developed during her experiments in Minimal and conceptual art.⁶ She turned toward performance, her first such work being Meat into Meat, 1968, documented by eight photos showing a pound of raw hamburger that she prepared and cooked and that was finally eaten by her then-boyfriend, David Rosner. “I thought I was performing an abstract metaphysical investigation into the nature of space and time”—the original title was Five Unrelated Time Pieces—“but the subtext was my relationship with David.”⁷ He was a Marxist and she was a blooming feminist vegetarian, and she perceived him as condescending to her “weirdo” art. “I retaliated with my own running commentary about what it meant to be on the one hand a committed Marxist and on the other hand to be consuming enough meat to feed a small third-world country for a month.”

For Piper, intellect is rarely sundered from its handmaiden, humor, as frequently evidenced in the “Catalysis” series and the inventive “Mythic Being” works, for which Piper appeared in various (usually public) places dressed in drag, wearing sunglasses, a drawn-on mustache, and an Afro wig—committing espionage in the citadel of male privilege, performing an experiment in the precarity of black masculinity, offering a proposition about the projections of supernatural traits onto others. All that and more. If you want to be inspired and exasperated by her relentless cogitation, listen to Phillip Zohn Catalysis, 1972, an eighty-six-minute recording of one side (guess which?) of a phone conversation with her best friend. “A central noncommitment? Oh no man, you’re wrong!” she says, laughing, to Zohn, who, in 1969, turned her on to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, setting her on a path she would follow for the rest of her life, one that recently culminated in the publication of her two-part philosophical treatise, Rationality and the Structure of the Self (2013).

It all came together to come apart in the sixth gallery, where larger-than-life documentation of a University of California, Berkeley, iteration of her masterpiece Funk Lessons was projected against a wall surrounded by ephemera. Funk Lessons comprises a series of performances involving up to sixty participants each between 1983 and 1984, during which Piper would lead seminars in funk music and culture. I don’t pretend that Funk Lessons is the bedrock of her work; there are as many ways into Piper’s art as there are paths to the sun. But I can say that it was the touchstone for me, the place around which all the intuitions began to swirl.

I ALWAYS PICTURE HER DANCING. Like she describes herself in the opening to her gorgeous 1987 essay “Flying”: “I spring from the ground, executing high leaps, tour jetés, turns, somersaults, twists, and twirls. I float effortlessly through these figures, can stay suspended in the air for as long as I like. My ballet and modern dance teacher, Miss Copland, watches, transfixed.”⁸

She likes fixing us, by being both subject and object. There’s the Piper who, in 1965, works as a go-go dancer at a seamy Upper East Side discotheque. She and her cohorts step things up and choreograph a more polished routine. A decade later, during her 1975 performance Some Reflective Surfaces, she describes this process: “Voluntary self-objectification, of the kind that occurs in dancing, in performance of any kind, in modeling, or in permitting oneself to be looked at or done to sexually can be an act of political defiance, a gesture of brazen shamelessness, a celebration of self that absolutely crushes and makes ridiculous any attempt at devaluation or disapproval.”⁹

There’s the Piper I make up in my mind, because no photo exists, of her playing Aretha Franklin’s version of “Respect” in her mind as she dances in places that people are not supposed to dance (Aretha Franklin Catalysis, 1971–72). And two years later, in the wake of her having moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work on her Ph.D., there are those fourteen vivid black-and-white photographs of her dancing (to Franklin?) in her apartment as the Mythic Being.

Thinking and dancing are synergistic in Piper’s world. I think of the Piper who, in April 1968, attended all three evenings of Yvonne Rainer’sThe Mind Is a Muscle at New York’s Anderson Theater, which contained Rainer’s away-face masterpiece Trio A, 1966 (more reflective surfaces). And there’s the Piper who, twenty years later, surrounded by baseballs and plastic armor and bottles filled with blood, sweat, tears, piss, and vinegar, danced with her back to us for three-quarters of an hour in The Big Four Oh, 1988. Nearly twenty years after that, in 2007, Piper danced joyously in Alexanderplatz, mostly facing the camera, for Adrian Moves to Berlin. And if you want to know why she moved to Berlin, and why she might have cause for celebration, there’s her brilliant and harrowing Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir (2018). I also picture Piper escaping, which, if you read “Flying” closely, you understand is not so far from dancing.

I first encountered her dancing in March 1999, at a lecture she gave at my college. It was a baptism, my first time seeing an artist talk. I remember few concrete details but the impression is strong: Piper discussing her “calling cards” and showing documentation of Funk Lessons to the students at my mostly white school, inciting in my mind a riot of thoughts about what art could be, about what education could be, about the stories different bodies tell about their conditioning, how some bodies aspire to the music’s transcendental terms and how others seem estranged. About the way you could divine from these bodies and their responses residual effects of ancient and not-so-ancient forces of violence and colonization and desire. How you could both be skeptical of the aims of assimilation or appropriation (Piper herself complains of the disproportionate rewards granted to white artists cribbing from black music) and also sense the urgency in her confrontation of the roots of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and all the other traps of the mind in which a person, faced with the anomalousness of another being, rationalizes and projects the stereotypes they inherit and reproduce, even as the individual stands there in resolute defiance.

Piper, as this magazine knows, is someone who believes in the facts.

I did too, so long as I could feel them. The year I saw Piper’s lecture, I was getting good at dancing. I would read all day and into the night and then when I couldn’t read anymore I would go out and find a club, one where people actually danced, and watch the best dancer there, attempting to do what that person did, standing in the corner and trying things out while no one watched, embellishing until the movement was my own and I was maybe worth watching. I remember thinking it was crazy and wonderful that someone would make art about teaching people how to dance, and I remember wondering what other impulses besides the heuristic one animated the work.

Funk Lessons seemed mostly scored as a black/white thing, though Piper had long ago, at least as early as her Political Self-Portrait #2 (Race), 1978, begun to articulate something she called the “Gray experience,” which felt useful to me. I was certainly unclear where I was on any of these spectrums. Not that I didn’t care. It’s just that there wasn’t a single category that fit. I was lucky I could pass as sanguinely “ethnic,” which only incurred occasional obvious racism, plus frequent microaggressions, but anyway homophobia was a more virulent and potentially deadly force in my life and so got more stuck in my accumulated attitudes. Race and its gamifications were merely a delimiting factor. I often got to choose how to answer when people asked what I “was.”

Funk Lessons is a moving self-portrait, a felicitous forcing-together of two racially inflected idioms—“Funk” (working-class black music) and “Lessons” (bourgeois white pedagogy). The impingement is something Piper knows how to work in her art. The force of their collision is part of what gives the piece such an intensity across time; its vulgar optimism, the sense of the participants’ commitment and joy, is what makes it so inviting, again and again, to viewers of all kinds and generations.

Recently, inspired by Funk Lessons, I began to pay more attention to how I was moving, observing the unobservable, wondering how I arrived at certain spontaneous gestures as I danced. I thought about the lawlike constancy of the four-four rhythm, how it gave me just enough time to anticipate and slide into the next beat, how the complex syncopations offered just enough predictable inconstancy for me to adjust and find new spaces inside the divisions, how the melody radiating out through the meter would prompt me to lift or sink and how my hands or head would work with or against it. It was that implausible place of proprioception, where the mind and the raw, unsynthesized material of the universe meet in the body, whose responses enact a kind of synthesis. The art historian Diarmuid Costello recently took this point to its logical conclusion, arguing that, for Piper, via Kant, rhythmic dance “has the mediating role of bringing together our intellectual and sensual natures. [. . .] Piper’s gamble may be that the experience of dance can realign, so to speak, our empirical conceptions and the judgments that accompany them.”¹⁰

But synthesis, learning how to inhabit the beat, was just the first step. Then you could make decisions to work against it, and of course that was where things got interesting, where, for me, dancing began: that decision to be with or against the law’s seductive and sadistic regularity.

That “decision” is different for each body part in each moment. When I really get going, whoever is watching shouldn’t be able to focus on one thing. Maybe for a few seconds I’ll offer something to look at—a finger, or, if my neck isn’t messed up, the shaking of my head will quicken—but that’s just a distraction, eventually swept away with a jump or a spin. In Funk Lessons lingo, my movement is “polyrhythmic”: Everything moves to the beat, but in contrast, each body part using another as a point of departure, a way to decide where not to go. At no point should you be able to apprehend the body; it will rarely if ever present a predictable, sensible unity. That is part of the point of dancing at clubs; this is why, though it’s such a movingly group activity, it is also an escape.

“Funk is dead. Funk is something you can learn in school,” reads a quote attributed to Morris Day printed in gold leaf atop the 1983 Funk Lessons Direct Mail Advertisement. A friend argues that this quote evinces the work’s sardonic intention, that Piper is making fun of the situation, of all these enthusiastic people trying to dance. I observe a similar line—“You can’t transmit Soul through academic analysis”—used by Piper in her indispensable essay “Notes on Funk I–IV” as an example of one of the “negative responses” elicited inside the performance.¹¹ The reaction is already mobilized by the work’s strategic operations, as all the reactions, negative or positive, “invariably heighten the energy and intensity of our contact, lower inhibitions, loosen muscles, and enable the magic of this music to work.” Funk Lessons becomes a dialectical machine for producing and exorcising the excess energies of xenophobia and sexual repression. The point, as she says, is to GET DOWN AND PARTY. TOGETHER.

How far is this from Piper’s elaboration of Kant’s Achtung (Respect) near the beginning of her Rationality and the Structure of the Self? “The goal of the enterprise,” she writes, “is to inspire both of us with the force of the ideas we are examining, not to make either of us feel unequal to considering them, or smug for having introduced them.”¹² I wonder what it would mean to shift the goal from synthesis to the shared intensity of figuring this shit out. In dance, once you’re inside the music, for and against are not really oppositional; they’re just ways of keeping moving. Unity isn’t a way forward; it’s a way of pressing pause. What we’re going for is the perpetual stimulation of xenophilia.

AT MoMA, the show moved swiftly from optimism to brutality. Like the with and against of dance, it embodied a generative formalism. Past the gallery containing Funk Lessons, past such indelible installations as Cornered, 1988, and The Big Four Oh, at the far end of a large gallery appeared a touching, seemingly sentimental work. Completed soon after her mother’s death, I Am Some Body, The Body of My Friends #1–18, 1992–95, is a grid of casually intimate eight-by-twelve-inch photographs. Each of the images depicts Piper with a different person (Henry Louis Gates Jr., the gallerist Paula Cooper, artists Lorna Simpson and Raymond Saunders, among others). They testify to the community around her. But poignancy has a shelf life. To reach the next gallery, you had to pass through The Humming Room, a 2012 installation in which you were commanded to hum a tune—any tune—as you approached the guard, who would hum in return. (Whether one was cheered or chilled by the performance probably depended on one’s degree of skepticism toward authority and one’s suspicion of the frequent use of black or brown people to enact that authority.) And that was where you found the earliest “Everything” pieces, part of a devastating series begun in 2003 amid Piper’s dispute with Wellesley College, where she taught for fifteen years. “I learned that there was no one to whom my wellbeing mattered,” she writes of that time in Escape to Berlin. “This was a very useful lesson.”¹³ She commemorated this realization by making black-and-white photocopies of certain of the I Am Some Body photographs on graph paper, sandpapering away the faces, and then overprinting the text everything will be taken away in a typewriter font. “It was important to erase the image of myself alongside of the image of the person I had considered a friend. Both of our self-images had been taken away, along with the representations of mutual trust, connection, and friendship.”¹⁴

Escape to Berlin shows Piper seemingly alone in recent years, abandoned because, she suggests, she is anomalous, an affront to the coherence of American melanin clubs. She’s hung up on the truth; her very existence offends caste cognition. She takes Socrates as a historical muse. She eventually “gets” suicide, though abandons the idea, because who would take care of her cats? Yet by the end of the book she does not seem sad. She counts herself lucky, suggesting that this withdrawal is part of the process known in Sanskrit as djugupsa, the precondition for spiritual liberation, a facing of “the reality that in fact one has been alone, hurtling through empty space all along.”¹⁵

In September 2012, Piper announced her retirement from being black in a work titled Thwarted Projects, Dashed Hopes, A Moment of Embarrassment, which features a self-portrait showing the artist’s skin darkened to a purplish hue; the photo evokes her 1981 drawing Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features. In a witty reference to another genius, she states: “For professional utility, you may wish to refer to her as The Artist Formerly Known as African-American.” I don’t think her retirement is intended as categorical. It’s a joke and a provocation, one that might seem perversely luxurious to those who can’t pass. But do we really think she doesn’t know that? The only way forward is to continually pressure the absurdities of our most cherished irrationalities. Disbelief in race is not the same as disbelief in racism; it is the opposite, in fact.

Just to the right of the exit was Never Forget, 2016, a map of Piper’s paternal genealogy next to a copy of her official termination letter from Wellesley, across which was printed the words of the title. The association with such collective traumas as the Holocaust and 9/11 at once blows out of proportion the college’s misdeeds and foregrounds the way that personal trauma is often experienced with the same intensity as collective pain, and maybe with more intensity, because collectives are constitutively inadequate to addressing or commemorating individual suffering. Or better: The juxtaposition of these elements suggests that such pain is deeply imbricated in the histories and structures of the institutions to which we aspire, how we got there, how they got us.

In 2005, fearing for her life and sick of the American caste system’s habituation to antiquated, anti-scientific racial categories, she packed up her belongings and fled. She has not returned to the US since 2006, when she discovered her name on the “suspicious travelers” list.

It’s so literal it’s hilarious: After all of this, you emerged into the airy vestibule across from the sixth floor’s escalator. Above, Piper was projected large, bleached by daylight, untouchable. Adrian Moves to Berlin, her dispatch from Germany, documents her dancing for one hour, on March 26, 2007, to postmillennial Berlin house music: The work is an endurance piece that celebrates her escape to the “city of reunification, in which two formerly segregated societies are finding intelligent ways to come together. In Berlin, dance spaces have been one of those ways since the Fall of the Wall in 1989.” The solitary dancer goes her own way. I want to be infected by her optimism. I recite the mantra:

Get down and party. Together.

But then, together sounds like a very long time.

I LIKE TO THINK that Piper read all this with amusement. In 2017, a year out from the retrospective’s purview, she formed the Order of Celestial Laughter, comprising “individuals selected for the rare capacity to laugh at themselves.” Membership, of course, is secret, and invitation-only. Funny to consider the possibility that Piper may be the only member. Can we take the joke?

At last, I think, a club where no one can question whether Piper belongs.

David Velasco is the editor of Artforum.

NOTES

1. At the Hammer it assumes a different title: “Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965–2016.” The show also contains slightly fewer works; MoMA featured more than 290; the Hammer will show roughly 260. I suspect that only an institution of MoMA's size and resources could attempt something as heroic as a “synthesis.”

2. Piper, “The Real Thing Strange,” in Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions: 1965–2016 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018)

3. David Platzker and Jörg Heiser discuss at greater length this work’s stylistic connections to mostly San Francisco-based artists such as Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, and Victor Moscoso. Here as elsewhere, Piper was simultaneously of her time and beyond it. Platzker, “Adrian Piper: Unities,” in Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions: 1965–2016, 31; Jörg Heiser, “Adventures in Reasonland,” in Adrian Piper: A Reader (New York: The Museum of Modern Art), 15.

4. Adrian Piper, interview by Matteo Guarnaccia, Alias (il Manifesto), April 5, 2003.

5. Adrian Piper pays explicit homage to 46 Three-Part Variations in Out of the Corner, a 1990 update of her installation Cornered, not installed at MoMA.

6. A succinct and useful description of her creative habits appears in her memoir: “I notice that my first response to pain, rejection, betrayal, or abandonment is always to objectify and externalize it in some thing whose meaning I can then contemplate from a removed distance.” Adrian Piper, Escape to Berlin: A Travel Memoir (Berlin: Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation, 2018), 201.

7. Adrian Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present II,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, vol. 1, Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 261.

8. Piper, “Flying,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight,vol. 1, Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, 223.

9. Piper, “Some Reflective Surfaces I,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 1:151–54.

10. Diarmuid Costello, “Xenophobia, Stereotypes, and Empirical Acculturation: Neo-Kantianism in Adrian Piper’s Performance-Based Conceptual Art,” in Adrian Piper: A Reader, 204.

11. Piper, “Notes on Funk I–IV,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight, 1:195–216.

12. Adrian Piper, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, vol. 1, The Humean Conception, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation, 2013), 9.

13. Piper, Escape to Berlin, 189.

14. Ibid., 191.

15. Ibid., 193.