Revisiting Adrian Piper: What about trust?

Erschienen in King Kong Magazine im März 2018

This is a special moment to consider ‘trust’. As I am writing—shortly after exploratory talks to form the next German government have collapsed, following the country’s fraught elections in September—the term is found everywhere in newspapers. Curiously, though, trust has become inextricable from the perception that it is no longer present. With often bracingly fierce historical comparisons, the media talks about how the lack of trust between dialog partners, renders any stable relationship between both individuals and between individuals, their government, and society at large, impossible. That is, trust, coupled with this perception of its absence, has become a paradoxical condition for functioning in a process that holds accord as its ostensible aim. At the same time, the claim of lacking trust is misappropriated and strategically exploited to kill reasonable discourse by those who invoke it, discrediting any opposing view, and becoming a knock-out argument in any negotiation.

 German sociologist and system theorist Niklas Luhmann understands trust as a “mechanism to reduce social complexity”, comprising both trust in individuals as well as trust in the system. 

 Other definitions find “the basis of every human interaction” in trust. It is the glue of society, the raw material of democracy – a rare asset in that offers a tool for navigating the impenetrable, often-inscrutable jungle of contemporary society. 

The multivalence of the term, its capacity to absorb and collect these and other contradictory ways of describing it, leave no wonder to its appeal to those who harness it for their means. It has become a buzzword loved by marketing departments, banking institutions, politicians, and consultants of any kind, burrowing in rather insidious, psychologically manipulative contexts, to the point that using the term ‘trust’ has become suspicious. 

Someone who does talk about trust nevertheless, and in a most astonishing way, is the artist and philosopher Adrian Piper. “The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3” does not only carry trust in its title but also gives specific instructions on how to improve the status quo, how to rebuild trust and even more importantly, how to strengthen the trustworthiness of individuals. 

For half a century, Adrian Piper has been dealing sensitively with the complex relations between the individual and their social biases. In 2013, she showed “TPTR” in New York for the first time. Two years later, the work was shown in the Okwui Enwezor’s curated pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Arsenale, along with works from Piper’s conceptual installation series, “Everything” (2003-2013), for which she was awarded that Biennale’s ‘Golden Lion’. 

“TPTR” is comprised of three golden desks each with a sentence written in golden letters on the wall above behind, and equipped with friendly staff. It is a beautiful installation to look at, but to be completed, the work needs the active participation of its audience. “TPTR” – as it is the case for many of Piper’s works – anticipates an action to yield the full execution of its concept. Here, Piper invites the visitor to conclude a contract with themselves based on predefined choices. Duration: Forever. Subject matter: a one-line contract chosen among, three. Brief and poignantly relentless, the statements are outlined next to the desks. The first: “I will always be too expensive to buy.” The second: “I will always mean what I say.” The third: “I will always do what I say I am going to do.”

What Piper asks for is nothing less than a 100% unconditional commitment to honesty, to integrity, to trustworthiness. According to Kantian rationalism, in “TPTR” the artist gives the responsibility back to the individual, with all consequences.Through this, “TPTR” becomes a highly politically charged work, an almost utopian claim to conceive of a better society based on the values of peaceful cohabitation. However, demanding absoluteness without exemption is typical for Piper’s oeuvre. The in-your-face-approach of her art does not allow for us to remain passive. 

In one of her rare interviews in the newspaper “Die Welt” Piper explained her intentions: “TPTR offers everybody publicly the opportunity to develop trust in him- or herself, and at the same time to present him- or herself as trustworthy within a community of other trustworthy human beings. The process starts with the individual, spreading to other individuals who build a society, and further on to other societies, who then create an international union. It is a far cry from an encompassing social justice and stability, but TPTR offers everybody a direct and practical way to realize it gradually and long-term. Everybody can contribute to it in any given moment with any action.”[1]

If I were to describe Piper’s art with just one adjective, I would choose to define it as confrontational. “Thepower of art,” she once said, “is unlimited for social change”[2]. With “The Probable Trust Registry” the artist demonstrates how this could work - and fail, since naturally, a contract inherently includes the possibility of breaking it. This possibility, or may I say doubt in the capability of the individual, is already laid out in the title of the work through the added clause “probable”.

“TPTR” is a work with many layers worth reflecting on. It is distinctive for Piper not only from a formal and conceptual viewpoint, but also when you look at its reception history: it reveals the self-determination Piper claims for herself as an artist. Shortly after winning the ‘Golden Lion’ she wrote an email to the director of the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin to convince him to acquire “TPTR”. One of her arguments was: The piece would cost only a fraction of one of Jeff Koon’s balloon dogs. If it was its low price-point that convinced Udo Kittelmann is not delivered, but she was success. Thus, in 2017, Piper reinstalled her golden reception desks in the historic entrance hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin.

Adrian Piper, as an artist and an analytical thinker, holds a special place in the contemporary art world. Her conceptual works from the late 1960s focused on language, space and time and began to turn to more political topics by 1970. In her art, she employs a wide variety of mediums. She works with collage and photography, with video, performance, sound, installation and text, including writing about her own works – and publishing more generalized theory-based art criticism. Piper invented an own genre called Meta-Art. It subsumes profound analyses of her art, writings that oscillate between art criticism and art themselves.

In her adopted hometown Berlin, she founded APRAF, the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin dedicated to her own work. Her work is highly influenced and guided by her profound philosophical knowledge - especially of Immanuel Kant and David Hume - and by her Yoga practice. Piper discusses the most important issues of our time in a way that captivates you through its directness; her work is groundbreaking and visionary; sometimes it’s aggressive, sometimes it’s humorous, oftentimes both.

One can get a sense of the depth of her oeuvre by leafing through the two volumes of “Out of Order, Out of Sight – Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992“, and by browsing her website. It is stunning how relevant and timeless even her decades-old works and writings are. Her analyzes of the conditions of art production and what it entails to be an artist, published on several occasions, for example under the title of “In Support of Meta-Art” in Artforum in 1973, and later in the second volume of “Out of Order, Out of Sight” – is as precise, sharp and bold as her “calling cards” from 1986.

In order to understand the “Calling Cards” designed for dinners and cocktail parties, but also for bars and discos, it is recommended to read how Piper elucidates them in one of her meta-arts in 1990:  “The idea behind this series of performances, which I call reactive guerrilla performances,” she writes, “is intervention in order to prevent co-optation.” Then she continues to explain how presenting these cards would be for her the only way to deal with racism and sexism in specific everyday situations.

Concretely, the first “Calling Card” is handed to individuals, who at an all-white dinner party (apart from the artist herself) make racist remarks. The text on the card describes the experience such remarks and stereotypes cause on her in a subtle but decisive tone. It is its radical subjectivity - embodying the maxim of the second-wave-feminism, that ‘the private is political’ - that lends it its provocative power. 

Her second “Calling Card” is to be used when intrusive men seek her out while alone at a bar, requesting to respect her privacy. “I am not here to pick anyone up, or to be picked up. I am here alone because I want to be here, ALONE.” Both cards could be useful even today, thirty years later. In the middle of the current debate around sexual harassment and the #metoo, this “Calling Card”, as well as the first one, seems to be as much right on topic as ever. It offers itself as a probate means, when confronted by people who are ‘fearing the end of flirting’ – and of course as a sophisticated contribution to the current discourse.

There is something likewise intriguing in an even older series Piper produced in the 1970s. In “Mythic Being” (1972-1975) she created a male alter-ego wearing an afro-wig, sunglasses and a mustache. It started out with spontaneous experiments at home, in order to research and examine typical masculine manners. But Piper moved on to employ her “Mythic Being” as a fictional persona for advertisements and street performances, combining extracts from her diaries and texts written for that purpose with male cliché behavior, exhausting the image of the 'threatening’ black male. Later she extended the idea into photography, drawings and posters, rigorously challenging preconceptions and stereotypes regarding race, gender and class, of random passersby and readers of newspapers but also of the contemporary art audience. 

One of her 1975 posters, boils it down to the essence. A speech balloon of “Mythic Being” tells us: “I embody everything you most hate and fear”. “Mythic Being” is the first distinctly political work of Piper, and in that regard not only game-changing for her own artistic practice, but also for conceptual art as a whole. 

[1]“TPTR bietet jedem öffentlich die Möglichkeit, Vertrauen in sich selbst zu entwickeln und sich gleichzeitig als vertrauenswürdig in einer Gemeinschaft von anderen vertrauenswürdigen Menschen darzustellen. Der Prozess fängt mit dem Individuum an, verbreitet sich zwischen anderen Individuen, die eine Gesellschaft aufbauen, und noch weiter unter anderen Gesellschaften, die gemeinsam einen internationalen Verein aufbauen. Umfassende gesellschaftliche Stabilität und Gerechtigkeit ist das lange noch nicht. Aber TPTR bietet jedem einen konkreten und praktischen Weg, sieallmählich und langfristig zu verwirklichen. Jeder kann dazu beitragen, in jedem Moment und mit jeder Handlung.”

[2]In an interview on the occasion of winning the Golden Lion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m6ylDk9mjM