ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the American artist, Adrian Piper, as a performance philosopher—giving particular attention to her 1971 work, Food for the Spirit in which the artist read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as part of a private performance for one—herself. The chapter proposes that, from the late 1960s through to the present, Piper’s performance practice serves as a necessary site through which the artist can process philosophical problems that are difficult to resolve in the twinned worlds of contemporary art and academia—from the Kantian notion of the transcendental aesthetic, to the ways that certain bodies are read in public space. It argues that her performance practice takes up the politics of philosophy, with Piper’s subjectivity and embodiment—as an artist of colour, and as a woman—serving to stage confrontations that are often sympathetic and ambivalent to her so-called objects of critique.
