Adrian Piper: "The Mythic Being" (1973). image copyright Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper (USA)

"The Mythic Being' was a project which went on for several years. In it, Adrian Piper took on the identity of an African-American man roaming the streets and parks of New York. Piper's aim was to liberate herself from certain aspects of her own subjectivity and explore moments of confrontation, alienation and difference. The video is an excerpt from the film "Other than Art's Sake' by Australian artist Peter Kennedy.

Adrian Piper is a first-generation conceptual artist who started exhibiting her work internationally at the age of twenty and graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1969. She also studied philosophy at Harvard and Heidelberg and began her lifelong exploration of Yoga and the Indian Vedanta philosophy. She introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of conceptual art and explicit political content into minimalism. Through its insistent exploration of subjectivity her early conceptual performances anticipated the feminist maxim "the personal is political'.