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This chapter takes a close look at Adrian Piper’s transition from Conceptual Art to conceptualism, in the context of Conceptual Art’s canonical interpretations. I observe that her contribution was focused specifically on questions of mediation—the mediation of content by materials, forms, and language—later considering the mediating power of race, gender and other forms of apparent difference. From the application of analytic thinking to the work of art, she extended her enquiries to the dynamic relationship between the various elements of the artwork, such as object, author, body, self, circulation, and audience reception. Piper’s use of the autobiographical tone and the body arrived chronologically after an extended period of preoccupation with the context of the art object, its circulation and reception, and general inquiries into the nature of time and space through a focus on media and mediation. In accordance with this sequence of development, I propose to read her later work in the same way, always first as Conceptual, onto which we can then apply the political question. To enter the work through its analytic base is to read it on the terms of its making, not the subject position of its maker.

Chapter 1 begins by analysing Adrian Piper’s engagement with the textual dimensions of Conceptual Art in the late 1960s and the ways in which it aligned with her work in Kantian philosophy to develop the aesthetic and perceptual conditions that allow for an encounter with what she identifies as the ‘singular reality of the “other.”’ The chapter then turns to the artwork Piper produced after 1970, a year of political upheaval in which she began to work with text and writing to expose the visual pathologies of racism and sexism, which she identifies as ‘defensive rationalizations’. By tracing the transformations of her oeuvre across the 1970s, this chapter demonstrates how Piper’s artwork enacts the ways in which racism and sexism call black women into narrow forms of visibility while also exposing the historically entrenched habits for projecting fears and fantasies on to black women’s bodies. To bring the black feminist stakes of Piper’s artwork into relief, I read it through Hortense Spillers’s (1987) concepts of ‘telegraphing’ – the means by which iconic images of black women have been transmitted across American culture – and ‘ungendering’ – the specific form of abjection inflicted upon black women in the transatlantic slave trade that reverberates into the present..

The introduction addresses two intersecting trajectories in American art between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first-century century. On the one hand, it traces the ways in which disciplinary Conceptual Art, with a capital “C”, expanded into the diverse set of practices that have been characterised generally as conceptualism. On the other hand, it shows how the expansion of a critical conceptualism has been strongly informed by the turbulent rights-based politics of the 1960s. Initially, first generation Conceptual artists responded to preceding art movements within disciplinary boundaries, examining the definition of art itself and engaging abstract concerns. Artists then applied the basic principles of Conceptual Art to address a range of social and political issues. This development reflects the influence of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student movement, the anti-war movement, second wave feminism, and the gay liberation movement. Central in the American context, the multiple identity-based mobilisations that came to be known as “identity politics” were further articulated in the 1970s. The artists addressed in this book: Adrian Piper, Joseph Kosuth, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, and Charles Gaines expanded the propositions of Conceptual Art.

Cheyenne conceptual artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds makes word paintings, abstract paintings, and public art installations. This chapter considers Heap of Birds’s focus on memory, history, and community as central to his self and community-formulation. Through his artwork using image and text, he contributes to the ongoing project of decolonization: making visible a history of Native erasure and appropriating settler-colonial discourses of place and time, first steps in articulating a contemporary, collective, and sovereign Native identity.