 |
| Image via elizabethdee.com. © the gallery and the artist(s). |
Adrian
Piper: The Probable Trust Registry
May 3 – May 31, 2014
545 West
20th Street
New York,
NY
Elizabeth
Dee proudly presents The Probable Trust Registry, a new
installation and participatory group performance by Adrian Piper. Piper’s work
stages an environment for the potential of collective exchange in the form of
personal declarations that become part of an enduring and ongoing artwork.
For this exhibition, the main gallery is transformed into three corporate
reception environments drawn from universal work culture. Each reception area
is fully staffed by a volunteer administrator who helps to execute personal
declaration contracts to a self-selecting public. Above each reception desk
exists a different personal declaration affixed in gold to the stereotypical
grey walls. These “Rules of the Game” are mirrored in the corresponding
contract on the desk, each desk/contract respectively with one of the three
rules:
I will
always be too expensive to buy
I will always mean what I say
I will always do what I say I am going to do
Engagement
with Piper’s interactive installation offers the possibility to assess one’s
own philosophical obligations and to reevaluate complicit relationships to
others. The Rules of the Game is an introspective catalyst to
personally audit the question of the declaration’s potential for success or
failure on both a personal and collective level. Piper’s new installation
engages the public with sharp clarity and perception.
Signatories
that sign the Personal Declarations will assist to participate in an ongoing
artwork by Adrian Piper and have the option to contact one another if mutually
agreed. Following the close of the exhibition, the gallery will send The
Probable Trust Registry consisting in bound photocopies of
all personal declarations filed in The Rules of the Game to
all and only its signatories. These documents become part of the APRA
Foundation Berlin confidential inventory and are sealed to the public for 100
years following the closing date of the exhibition.
Since the
late 1960s, Adrian Piper has forged a unique artistic practice that infused
classical Minimal sculptural form with explicit political content and
introduced issues of race, gender and identity politics into the vocabulary of
Conceptual art. She has deployed performance, permutation and seriation—which
at the time that Piper began using them were considered non-traditional
artistic media—as strategies for investigating the infinite variability of
perceptual form and content. In recent years, her artwork has begun to
intersect more explicitly with her philosophical work, resulting in a
reconsideration of space, time, and infinity in defining the limits and
potential permutability of the self as situated on a pre-established grid
defined by social and political variables of race, sex, class conflict, and
social relations.
This is
Adrian Piper’s third solo exhibition with Elizabeth Dee, following the
acclaimed 2010 historical exhibition, Past Time: Selected works
1973-1995, which honored Piper with the CAA (College Art Association)
Award. She has shown extensively for the past five decades in solo and group
contexts and has been the subject of numerous survey exhibitions including
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2003); Generali Foundation, Vienna
(2002); New Museum, New York (2000); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles (2000); Kunstverein München, Munich (1992); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham,
England (1991); and Alternative Museum, New York (1987).
A
forthcoming monograph published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. will feature
essays by Diarmuid Costello, Helmut Draxler, and Jörg Heiser in 2015.
