ADRIAN PIPER: A SYNTHESIS OF INTUITIONS 1965-2016
[Retrospective Catalogue]
Edited by Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler, and David Platzker. With texts by Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler, David Platzker, and Adrian Piper. Backmatter compiled by Tessa Ferreyros.
Published 2018 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
ISBN #978-1-63345-049-3. $65.00.
Hardcover, 352 pages. 373 illustrations. Features the full range of Piper’s work through more than 300 illustrations, and essays by the exhibition curators that examine Piper’s extensive research into altered states of consciousness; the introduction of the Mythic Being – her subversive masculine alter-ego; her media and installation works produced after 1980; and the global conditions that illuminate the significance of her art. Previously unpublished texts by Piper lay out significant events in her personal history and her deeply felt ideas about the relationship between viewer and art object.

ADRIAN PIPER: A READER
Edited by Cornelia Butler and David Platzker. With texts by Diarmuid Costello, Jörg Heiser, Kobena Mercer, Nizan Shaked, Vid Simoniti, and Elvan Zabunyan.
Published 2018 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
ISBN # 978-1-63345-033-2. $45.00
Paperback, 280 pages. 127 illustrations. Presents a volume of new critical essays that investigate previously unexplored dimensions of Piper’s practice. Focused texts assess themes such as the Kantian framework that emerges from Piper’s philosophical studies; her contributions to first-generation Conceptual art; her turn from object works and works on paper to performance in the early 1970s; the work’s connection to her yoga practice; her ongoing exposure of and challenges to xenophobia and misogyny; and the relation between prevailing interpretations of her work and the viewers who engender them.

Escape to Berlin
A Travel Memoir
2018; Bilingual English/German.
ISBN #978-3-9813763-4-0. £25.00.
Hardcover, 328 pages. 110 full-color images.
In 2005 Adrian Piper secretly emigrated from the United States. Several months passed before anyone realized she had disappeared. She resurfaced in Berlin and has lived there ever since. Piper has consistently and firmly refused to return to the U.S. or explain why she left. Many assume it was because she discovered her name on the U.S. Department of Transportation Security’s Suspicious Travelers Watch List. Others point to Wellesley College’s forcible termination of her tenured Full Professorship. Yet others speculate that George W. Bush’s presidency, or American racism, or the invasion of Iraq compelled her to leave. All of these conjectures are groundless. ESCAPE TO BERLIN: A Travel Memoir is a gripping autobiographical narrative that provides a full account of the facts.

Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception
2008; Second Edition 2013, with a new Preface to the Second Edition
ISBN #978-3-9813763-2-6. OPEN ACCESS
The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean conception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work? Free download here.

Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: Kantian Conception
2008; Second Edition 2013, with a new Preface to the Second Edition
ISBN #978-3-9813763-3-3. OPEN ACCESS
Adrian Piper argues that the Humean conception can be made to work only if it is placed in the context of a wider and genuinely universal conception of the self, whose origins are to be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This conception comprises the basic canons of classical logic, which provide both a model of motivation and a model of rationality. They also supply necessary conditions both for the coherence and integrity of the self and also for unified agency. The Kantian conception solves certain intractable problems in decision theory by integrating it into classical predicate logic, and provides answer to longstanding controversies in metaethics concerning moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification that the Humean conception engenders. In addition, it sheds light on certain kinds of moral behavior – for example, the whistleblower – that the Humean conception is at a loss to explain. Free download here.

Forthcoming

ADRIAN PIPER: Complete Works.
The Catalogue Raisonné of a body of artwork that “since the late 1960s has profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art”* and “has had an incalculable influence on generations of younger artists.”** A comprehensive and detailed survey of work in all media since 1963, from the best known to individual works and series from various periods that have never been exhibited. Includes a full inventory of reproductions, special edition rolled posters, and full-length original critical essays. With a complete bibliography, personal chronology, overview and subject index. Forthcoming

*2012 CAA Artist’s Award for a Distinguished Body of Work
**The New York Times

The APRA Foundation Berlin is pleased to announce a forthcoming series of print editions of texts by Adrian Piper, In the Margins Behind the Lines: Collected Writings. The volumes organize and present Piper’s writings in chronological order from 1967 to the present, with texts from all of the areas in which she has contributed – in art, philosophy, yoga and autobiography – placed side by side. This makes salient lines of influence, correspondence, cross-pollination and simultaneous development among these various fields, regardless of the institutional mores that often separate them. The volumes collect both previously published texts and illustrations, and also many that have never been published before. This definitive edition of Piper’s writings offers a new approach to her work, and to the large range of issues and themes with which it has been engaged for almost fifty years.

In the Margins Behind the Lines. Collected Writings, Volume I.
Meta-Art, Art Criticism, Philosophy 1967-1976.
ISBN#978-3-9813763-4-0. €20.00
Adrian Piper began to write meta-art about her own artwork in 1967 to make sense of her artistic activity. She began to write art criticism at the same time because no one else was writing about the issues her artwork engaged. She began to study Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to make sense of those issues; and this led her to return to university for more intensive philosophical study. This volume gathers together texts, almost half of which are previously unpublished, from and about the first decade of her professional involvement as an artist and philosopher. Forthcoming

In the Margins Behind the Lines. Collected Writings, Volume II.
Meta-Art, Ripostes, Art Criticism, Autobiography 1978-1992.
ISBN#978-3-9813763-5-7. €20.00
Piper’s thinking about her artwork and the art world was deeply influenced by the graduate study in moral and political philosophy she undertook at Harvard from 1974 to 1979. This influence can be traced in the social and political preoccupations that surface in her meta-art and art criticism texts of this period. Critical responses to her first retrospective in 1987 elicit ripostes that also show her application to the art context of the Socratic method of argumentation common in academic philosophy. Yet her experience of academia also provoked deeper, autobiographical examination of her anomalous race and gender status in that field. Forthcoming

In the Margins Behind the Lines. Collected Writings, Volume III.
Philosophy 1981.
A New Model of Rationality (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University)
ISBN#978-3-9813763-6-4. €20.00
Adrian Piper wrote her dissertation under the supervision of John Rawls, and her approach to the subject of rationality was influenced by his, as well as by his Theory of Justice. Discovering fertile areas of disagreement with his metaethical views of reason and the self instinctively motivated her to formulate alternatives. The dissertation roughs out the basic foundations of the metaethical theory she subsequently developed in a series of articles and finally published in 2008 in Rationality and the Structure of the Self. Forthcoming

In the Margins Behind the Lines. Collected Writings, Volume IV.
Philosophy 1978-1992.
ISBN#978-3-9813763-7-1. €20.00
Piper’s academic employers, up to the last, were high performing research-oriented departments that encouraged a strong and primary commitment to research productivity. Her substantial track record of philosophical publications during this period reveals a process by which the thematic groundwork laid in her dissertation was gradually refined, sharpened, and extended into metaethics, normative ethics, game theory, the history of ethics and applied ethics – including the philosophy of art. Forthcoming

In the Margins Behind the Lines. Collected Writings, Volume V.
Meta-Art, Art Criticism, Philosophy, Autobiography 1993-2001.
ISBN#978-3-9813763-8-8. €20.00
Although Piper’s productivity in all areas declined during her years at Wellesley College, her writing also developed key themes and concerns in new directions. The politics of the art world, the social world and academia; the dynamics of American racism; and the spiritual foundations of her artwork in her yoga practice are continuing meta-art and autobiographical preoccupations. At the same time, she began to write art criticism about other artists using the approach she had advocated for her own work, delved more deeply into Kant exegesis, and further developed her multi-volume project on rationality and the self. Forthcoming

In the Margins Behind the Lines. Collected Writings, Volume VI.
Meta-Art, Ripostes, Art Criticism, Philosophy, Autobiography 2002-2012.
ISBN#978-3-9813763-9-5. €20.00
These writings span the period immediately preceding and subsequent to Piper’s emigration to Germany in 2005. Earlier texts focus on political and spiritual strategies of self-defense in the art world and in her personal life, whereas later ones pursue her in-depth analysis of Kant’s texts, her investigation of the deep self in her artwork, and her attention to the work of other artists. Ripostes to art critics extend and explore more deeply the critical reception of her own artwork in the US, as well as the complex, institutionally inflected relationship between artists and critics in general. Forthcoming

All proceeds from the sale, rental, exhibition, publication or production of work by Adrian Piper support the APRA Foundation Berlin (APRA), a research archive and website at adrianpiper.com established for the benefit of those students, scholars, curators, collectors, writers, and members of the general public who have a constructive curiosity or scholarly or professional interest in Piper's work in art, philosophy and yoga. APRA aims to contribute over the long term to a more balanced comprehension of the conditions of production of Piper’s entire body of work as a unified whole, by funding research that exemplifies, models, analyzes and/or theorizes the creative multi-disciplinary expressions of the self encouraged by globalization and cross-cultural journeying.