Piper after Kuspit
Notes on the tradition of polemical letter writing
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Piper after Kuspit
Illustration accompanying review of Real Life Magazine Anthology published in Modern Painters.
I’ve been thinking about the history of response letters. Adrian Piper’s famous rebuke to Donald Kuspit came to mind: not necessarily for form, subject or context, but rather as an example of how letter writing is its own distinct form of discourse.
There is more writing than ever about art, and it seems to only be growing (My lates piece On Prescriptiveness tackled certain tendancies around this). But the response letter is a rarer beast, although it can often be the most fruitful – outlining a clear distinction of perspective, laying bare the stakes of any particular time.
Through various research projects, I’ve often found the ‘letters to the editors’ section more insightful than the main content, and oddly overlooked as a reference point.
I wrote a short text about Piper’s open letter – a text that is weirder, more forceful and experimental than is often acknowledge – which I am sharing below.
An Open Letter to Donald Kuspit is a layered text. Donald Kuspit was originally commissioned to write the catalogue essay for a major retrospective of Adrian Piper at The Alternative Museum, a show which took place in 1987. Piper, dissatisfied with the text, ditched it, but Kuspit persisted by publishing it in Art Criticism, the journal he edited at the time.
This staggered publication schedule helps explain the elaborate form of Piper’s letter – the text is busy, fragmented and experimental in its own right, and could likely only have been published by an artist magazine such as Real Life. She presents snippets from the original draft, along with her feedback, and then an additional layer of feedback, contrasting the original commission with the edited version he published, as well as fresh analysis of the text and references to subsequent phone calls.
It’s an extraordinary moment in art history, exploring a classic dynamic between an artist and a critic; and a shift from Kuspit’s authoritative psychoanalytic analysis to Piper’s rigorous feminist rebuke.
The letter begins with context. She outlines her ‘astonishment’ at his decision to proceed with the text and, right from the outset, she brings a humour that is both hilarious and cutting. ‘As you know, I do not think it’s one of your better efforts.’ The issue is not that he was critical of her work — though such an approach is odd for a catalogue essay – but that he accepted none of her feedback and repeated several basic factual errors she had corrected.
The first error is a basic factual one. He confuses the timelines from her interviews with those in which she wrote about her own work. ‘I’m afraid you’re still not thinking clearly about this.’ The lack of attention to such details contrasts sharply with his focus on her supposed psychological state. Kuspit repeatedly analyses Piper’s inner motivations, her ‘tortured self-awareness,’ and ascribes an agenda to her work that contradicts her own writing on the subject. ‘This type of armchair psychology is beneath you,’ she writes.
She recounts a phone call they had when Kuspit first provided the draft. He asked her not to take anything personally and explained that, to maintain his ‘critical integrity,’ he had to get behind how ‘smart and articulate’ she was. The strategy Kuspit employs then, according to Piper, is to ascribe the motivations behind her writing and performance to mental illness, and to suggest both activities are driven by a kind of trauma-informed narcissism.
Piper flips the script and questions Kuspit’s motivations. When he writes, ‘Each of her performances reads like a case history. In each she appears as the representative female, her problem-filled life a microcosm of the female problematic, an exemplary symptom of a larger sickness unto female death,’ she responds forcefully: ‘Donald, I'm afraid this is really gothically bizarre.’
‘Donald, I'm afraid this is really gothically bizarre.’
Later, when Kuspit suggests that Piper ‘cannot escape the labyrinth of her spoiled self’ and describes how she ‘tightens the noose of anxious ambiguity around her psychic neck,’ Piper describes this as a ‘distasteful and embarrassing display.’ She draws our attention to the gendered violence of his analysis: ‘Your decision to vent your strangulation fantasies about me in public displays ugly and buffoonish impulses. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
What’s at stake here is not simply how a particular artist’s work is discussed, but the grounds from which a critic might build their argument, and where they should take it. Piper suggests, too, that Kuspit’s desire to put her down seems rooted in an insecurity about his own position as a critic in the face of an artist who writes — as his concern about ‘critical integrity’ seems to suggest. Why should the artist’s own ‘thoughts about her work [be] experienced as a source of oppression and control, rather than of information and insight’?
Race doesn’t escape Kuspit’s projections on Piper. In a footnote for the version published in Art Criticism, he writes: ‘For me, the political aspects of Piper's art, admirable as they are... are secondary to, and grow out of, her self-interpretation, which includes the sociopolitical interpretation and demonstration of her blackness.’ Piper is confused. If demonstration might mean to exhibit or prove something, how — or perhaps more importantly, why — does she show or prove that she is black? She responds: ‘This is a novel idea.’
As the piece comes to a close, Piper ends by recounting their second phone call. Kuspit was angry about Piper’s claims regarding his motivations in her feedback, particularly the suggestions about his fear of women and intellectual insecurity. ‘I was surprised at your anger,’ she recounts, ‘since your essay does exactly the same to me.’ This moment of tension between them offers further insights — that Kuspit never sought meaningful feedback, only praise, and ironically regards his own writing as beyond critical discussion.