Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971
“Searching for a better understanding of her own relationship to the art object, the cultural sphere, and to the world in general, Piper also increasingly made herself the subject of her art. Food for the Spirit, a series of fourteen black-and-white self-portraits shot with a Brownie camera, would represent a turning point for the artist. At the time she began working on the piece, she was writing a graduate course paper on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. She became “obsessed” with Kantian thought, fasting, practicing yoga, and isolating herself. Fearful that she was losing tough with the physical world – as if she was, in fact, evaporating into a Kantian state of pure reason – she searched for ways of corporeal reassurance. ‘I rigged up a camera and tape recorder next to [a] mirror,’ Piper has written of the process of creating Food for Spirit, ‘so that every time the fear of losing myself overtook me and drove me to the ‘reality check’ of the mirror, I was able to both record my physical appearance objectively and also record myself on tape repeating the passage in Critique that was currently driving me to self-transcendence.”’
—RISD Museum
