Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol. II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism 1967-1992

by Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper joins the ranks of writer-artists who have provided much of the basic and most reliable literature on modern and contemporary art. Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectual autobiography and an (occasionally scathing) commentary on mainstream art, art criticism, and American culture of the last twenty-five years.Piper is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and the only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s. The writings in Out of Order, Out of Sight trace the development of her thinking about her artwork and the art world, and her evolving awareness of herself as a creative, racial, and gendered subject situated in an often limiting and always absurd cultural and social context.

Hardcover

First published November 15, 1996

About the author

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (born September 20, 1948) is a first-generation Conceptual artist and analytic philosopher who was born in New York City. Since 2005 she has lived and worked in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin and edits The Berlin Journal of Philosophy.

Reviews

[Tim Haslett · Rating 5 out of 5]

To describe the extraordinary influence Adrian Piper has exerted on *me*, allow to signify on that old racist statement, "Once you go black, you can never go back". You all know it's a favorite saying of whiteboys with a chronic case of jungle fever, whether gay or straight.

But, once you are exposed to the mind of Adrian Piper there *is no* going back. Her art and her writing are impossible to forget and the way she has steered through the muddy waters of American racial politics is exemplary, as is her refusal to make easy identifications and alliances with any given ideology.

She fully admires Descartes, and this has gotten her in trouble with some Black feminists.

Her visual work has remained controversial, but not necessarily in a way that has helped her navigate the artworld she has been in since the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As a meta-ethical philosopher, her commitment to certain black ways of thought and rigorous, ethical thinking has displeased almost everyone at one time or another.

Piper has truly been marginalized by all sorts of people and institutions--Wellesley for example, whom she is suing over the college's charge that her very real illness was merely malingering on her part.

The second volume is very dense, philosophical work on ethics, and can be hard going at times, but is ultimately so worthwhile.

Please read this and its companion volume. You'll never go back!

[Jana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adrian Piper is one of my favorite intellectuals because she speaks from personal experience without limiting herself to personalized reactions or watered down ideas.

As as African-American artist and academic who broke through barriers in the art world, she exposes the structures for what they are. For instance, in this book she wonders, Why is it when women and ethnic minorities finally start having a voice within cultural institutions... why is it then... that the "subjective" becomes so reviled? Why is it no longer tolerated to tell our stories in first person? Why this demand for the "objective"? And if we call something "objective," might there be a universal (dominant) "I" implied?

I'm paraphrasing here because I can't find the actual quotes, but this is the strongest message I got from this book. Of course, there's a lot more to her writing than this.