ADRIAN PIPER

The first appearance of what became The Mythic Being was in 1972 when Piper, as a spontaneous experiment at home, dressed up and’performed’ the role of a man, walking around, smoking cigarettes andappropriating the manners of masculinity. She took photographs of thisactivity and published them (in her phrase ‘dispersed them’) as paidadvertisements in the Village Voice. At the beginning the characterspoke words from personal journals Piper had kept from 1961 through1972, published in chronological order at the rate of one year permonth, or one ‘advertisement’ per month (62/Jan., 63/Feb. etc.). The useof her own autobiography pegged The Mythic Being as her creation, as less real than her. This was to be the logic for the run ofthe extended ‘piece,’ with the character taking on a life of his own atthe end, as a result of the sheer volume of personal information Piperhad poured into him. After a year, however, she began to writespecifically for him, speeding up the process.

I / You (Her) from 1974 is a series of 10 altered photographs with drawn speech ‘balloons’, charting the transformation ofa single photograph of Piper as it gradually takes on the features of The Mythic Being. The accompanying balloons are filled with a text/monologue expressingdisappointment with and an increasing hardness and very personal angertowards an unnamed betrayer. In this piece, the ‘character’ of The Mythic Being escapes his beginnings as an idea of Adrian Piper and becomes a fully and psychologically independent figure.

The other works in this show refer to the later independent life of The Being as he goes about his way as a young black man living a life parallel toPiper’s. At this time Piper was attending Harvard. So does The Being. Pieces include: The Mythic Being Cruising White Women; The Mythic Being Getting Back (a documentation of a mugging) as well as the character’s philosophical musings about Kant, friendship, and altruism.

The project concerning The Mythic Being is Piper’s first overtly political work. Before this point she was known primarily as aconceptualist. But the new works come directly out of the older. Herfirst conceptually based question: What is masculinity? became the morepersonal: What is masculinity to me? which became What is blackmasculinity to me? until The Mythic Being, as a being instead of an idea, was born. At this point the intellectual, the personal, thepolitical, and the esthetic joined together in some of Adrian Piper’smost powerful and important work.