Becoming Adrian Piper

The entry for the year 1957 in Adrian Piper’s self-authored ‘Personal Chronology’, published in the catalogue for her 2018 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, enigmatically notes: ‘reads Lewis Carroll, becomes Alice in Wonderland (through 1979)’.1 Becoming Carroll’s character is not an unreasonable thing for a nine-year-old to imagine. But why place the shedding of this adopted identity so precisely in 1979? In his contribution to the accompanying volume, Adrian Piper: A Reader, Jörg Heiser explains that 1979 marked both the completion of Piper’s Political Self-Portrait series, in which the artist addresses her social position in terms of race, gender, and class, and her appointment as an assistant professor in philosophy, which is to say her entry into a field rife with discrimination.2 In Heiser’s estimation, then, 1979 represents the culmination of ‘successive confrontations with disillusion’, which led to Piper ‘being bereft of a dream, being thrown out of Wonderland, or at least out of the forest “where things have no names”’.3