“I was using my body as a piece of material and manipulating it.

I think of it as going into the studio and being involved in some activity.

Sometimes it works out that the activity invloves making something, and sometimes the activity itself is the piece.”

Bruce Nauman 1965

Bruce Nauman

Self portrait as a Fountain 1966-7

1989

Chris Burden

Chris Burden

“prelude to 220, or 110”“Fear or Pain – energize the situation”

1971

“Shoot”

«747» January 5, 1973Los Angeles, California, at about 8am at a beach near the Los Angeles International Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.

Chris BurdenStill from Shoot1971

Gina Pane

Born 1939, Biarritz, France.

Died 1990, Paris.

Gina Pane

VITO ACCONCI

In 1969, already a published poet, Vito Acconci made his first visual artworks by combining photographs with texts to document task-oriented activities that he performed specifically for the lens. In Grasp (1969), he acknowledges the archival capabilities of photography—"camera as grasp, photo as storage"—but foregrounds the performative act of picture taking, of physically seizing an image.

Vito Acconci

Vito AcconciSeedbed1972

Schneeman

Carollee Schneemann

Body, Sexuality, Gender

Interior Scroll 1975

“I thought of the vagina in many ways – physically, conceptually: as a sculptural form, an architectural referent, the sources of sacred knowledge, ecstasy, birth passage, transformation.

I saw the vagina as a translucent chamber of which the serpent was an outward model: enlivened by it’s passage from the visible to the invisible, a spiraled coil ringed with the shape of desire and generative mysteries, attributes of both female and male sexual power. This source of interior knowledge would be symbolized as the primary index unifying spirit and flesh in Goddess worship” - cs

Adrian Piper

Born  Sept 20 1948,  Harlem New York,  

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

Get Funky

Mythic Beings

Courtesy the Smart Museum Adrian Piper: The Mythic Being Through December 10. Smart Museum , 773/702-0200. In 1973 conceptual artist Adrian Piper, a woman of mixed black-white racial heritage, created an alternate persona called the Mythic Being. Donning an Afro wig, sunglasses, and a mustache, she documented how she and others responded to the character

Marking her first explorations in spontaneous and unannounced performance, in 1970, Piper embarked on her seminal Catalysis series in which she physically transformed herself into an odd or repulsive person and went out in public to experience the frequently disdainful responses of others. These explorations into xenophobia involved such activities as covering her clothing with sticky, wet paint while shopping at Macy's. Though photographs are all that remain of the Catalysis series, the work itself focused on the interaction between the artist and the public, and more specifically, on the reaction of the individual to Piper's presence.

Courtesy the Smart Museum Adrian Piper: The Mythic Being Through December 10. Smart Museum , 773/702-0200. In 1973 conceptual artist Adrian Piper, a woman of mixed black-white racial heritage, created an alternate persona called the Mythic Being. Donning an Afro wig, sunglasses, and a mustache,

she documented how she and others responded to the character

This work is one of the first examples of "the indexical present," a highly effective (yet commonly criticized as confrontational) technique that Piper uses to situate the work in the immediate present and create a direct relationship to the viewer by the use of words like "I," "You," "Here," and "This," instead of "We," "There," etc

In the late 1960s, Piper was influenced by artists such as Sol LeWitt, Vito Acconci, and Yvonne Rainer, and much of her work was based on Conceptual art

Piper's primary intention was to evoke a spontaneous response from an unknowing audience. For The Mythic Being , Piper took on the persona of a young, black male and went to public sites to experience attitudes and responses toward this socially contested figure, described best in the title of one of the series, I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear (1975

The Mythic Being

Black Box/White Box

1990

cornered

Born in New York, Adrian Piper studied at the city’s School of Visual Arts and later at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., where she received a Ph.D. in philosophy. As a professor of philosophy, Piper has written extensively on racism, xenophobia, and stereotyping. As an artist, she has worked in a variety of idioms, from performance and video to photography and drawing, seeking to effect change in racist attitudes by exposing their deep-rooted sources; “I am interested in truth rather than in beauty,” she has asserted.  27 Vanilla Nightmares #2 is the second of a group of twenty charcoal and crayon drawings that Piper began in 1986 on pages from the New York Times . By choosing this august newspaper as the ground for her series, Piper suggested that advertising and “factual” reportage contain hidden messages that feed prejudice in insidious ways. In this work, she executed two charcoal renderings and handprinted an abbreviated text, in red crayon, over a spread from the newspaper’s June 20, 1986, issue. At the left, sprawled across several articles dealing with apartheid, is a reclining black nude female whose impassive gaze belies her availability, indicated not only by her outstretched limbs but also by the column of type that rises between her open legs. At the right, on a page dedicated to sports, a large, bald head of a black person, its eyes blank and gender undefined, floats beneath the words “SOLUTION––SOLUTION––/THE BLA K/ SPACE.” The phrase “bla[n]k space” underscores the expressionless character of the large head and refers to a discussion, on the opposite page, of a form of official censorship according to which South African newspapers published blank, white spaces where articles or photographs that the government found objectionable should have been. This “solution” inevitably rendered the excised information more powerful than had it been allowed to appear. Nonetheless, such deletions deny real knowledge as well and contribute to the blankness, as seen in face at the right. Piper reiterated her indictment of the suppression of information by erasing the delineation of a muscle on the inner right leg of the nude female, as well as part of her left breast. Piper’s figures, aptly described by art critic Lucy Lippard as “impassive intruders [that] infiltrate and overlay the marching columns of print, emerging from the shadows like slaves whispering behind the plantation house,” are at once haunting and threatening, the stuff of nightmares for those in power.  28 (DAN /MP )26.  Vanilla Nightmares #2 , 1986. Adrian Piper (b. 1948). Charcoal and red crayon, with erasing, on tan wove paper (newsprint); 60 x 70.3 cm (23 5/8 x 27 5/8 in.). Margaret Fisher Endowment (1992.744). << Previous 26 of 29 Next >> Browse by Image |Browse by Artist |"Continuing the Dialogue" Copyright © 1999–2005 The Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved. Questions? technical support: webmaster@artic.edu Photography credits Image Permissions Terms and Conditions

26.  Vanilla Nightmares #2 , 1986. Adrian Piper (b. 1948). Charcoal and red crayon, with erasing, on tan wove paper (newsprint); 60 x 70.3 cm (23 5/8 x 27 5/8 in.). Margaret Fisher Endowment (1992.744).

www.adrianpiper.com/art/gallery.shtml

Orlan – “Carnal Art”A series of nine cosmetic surgical operations were performed as art between 1990 and 1993.

““she has chosen to reconstruct herself using some of the more beautiful images of female beauty from the history of western Art rather than relying on media images of supermodels as sources of inspiration.”

“Instead of making her nose smaller she intends to enlarge it as much as possible”

“Orlan’s art raises many questions regarding current ideals of feminine beauty and the anxieties such ideals impose on men and women alike

As we all current live in a society obsessed with unattainable youth and perfection.”

“Had cheek implants inserted above her temples to create two distinctive bumps that resemble budding horns”