March 31 to July 22, 2018
11 West 53rd Street (between 5th and 6th avenues)
New York City, moma.org

The intuition in Adrian Piper’s work is evident everywhere. The curators had good reasons for titling this grand, inclusive retrospective of her art A Synthesis of Intuitions.

But which way do you want to take that word? In ordinary English it refers to immediate thought, what comes out of you without preparation as if because it has always been in there. Emerson speaking of the human instinct, as opposed to what schools provide, says, “We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.”

On the other hand Kant, whom this title phrase alludes to directly (and who was one of the subjects of Piper’s Ph.D. thesis at Harvard), pictures intuitions as the raw material of experience. The understanding brings formless sensory input together, using concepts to construct what we call experience in the act of synthesis. “Concepts without intuitions are empty,” Kant says, as if intuition filled our thinking, as if from outside. So the exhibition’s title is telling us that we’ll be looking at Adrian Piper’s efforts to organize what had come upon her from outer sources and shape it into her art – unless (because we can’t just forget the ordinary meaning of the word) it describes the synthesis that is this show at MoMA, organizing the various outpourings of Piper’s instincts.

It’s a good confusion to start with, between the wellspring of inner life and its independently grasped truths and what comes to that inwardness in the rush of experience, uncontrolled and often unwanted. As this survey ranges from minimalism and concept to political observation and comment, with news from the frontlines as well as from the artist’s backstory, it shows her persistently negotiating the interplay between what we know as inner and outer. Everyone thinks about what elements of their experience originate in their own minds as opposed to entering from elsewhere; but artists especially, and in another way especially philosophers. This exhibition, highly conscious of Piper as someone trained and practiced in both philosophy and art, keeps your mind on her meditations on mind.

The richly documented early work, when Piper was studying at the School for Visual Arts and then at City College, shows both Sol LeWitt’s influence and her own first inquiries into consciousness. At twenty, and in her early twenties, Piper worked at minimalist constructions, stringent observations of experience, and a range of performances, including the alter ego she called “The Mythic Being.” The “Situation” pieces map what is external or given in an incident (a walk down the stairs and to the grocery store around Hester and Forsythe Streets), to imply the inarticulable additional element that is the self to whom these experiences are given. To map the space in which an experience comes to be is to legitimate, without having captured and reduced, the consciousness that experiences in that space. “Reality adds to mind inductively; mind adds to reality deductively,” as one of her early writings says.

Not only the physical world is outside, because outside is also where you find the social world with all its expectations. The Mythic Being dances to music that no one else hears or speaks phrases whose context and justification are known only to that being. The mental, previously knowing itself afloat within time and space, now increasingly strategizes the grounds for its integrity among surrounding mentalities. Alongside the problem of the external world we have the problem of other minds.

So what is it that other minds see or know when the engagement takes place amid differences in race, sex, and class? Then the very general social expectations that the Mythic Being faces take a pointed and violent form. A recurring panel in the “Decide What You Are” triptychs (1992) overwhelms its human figure, the photograph of a black girl, with repeating texts of language that denies her understanding of things, from the bland initial sentences “It’s fine” and “I didn’t notice anything wrong” into the territory of “You’re the one with the problem,” “You’re being irrational.” For the girl to learn to speak, when this is the language around her, is to acquire proficiency at doubting her own experience. In another context Kant calls the loss of trust in empirical knowledge “the scandal of philosophy.” “Decide What You Are” imagines the concrete loss of trust in one’s own knowledge, not the fate of all rational minds but the path followed by a few insofar as they are barred from the status of rational minds; call this the scandal of social existence.

The expectations of a social world become the beliefs of the art’s audience when the black man on the video screens in “What It’s Like, What It Is” (1991) has to say in every direction of the compass, to everyone seated around that minimalist amphitheater: “I’m not lazy. I’m not horny. I’m not vulgar.” Just to appear to the audience that is a theatricalizing society, he has to identify and disavow, preemptively, the adjectives that that audience comes prepared to attribute to him. The situation allows for only a compromised liberation, given that every sentence out of the man’s mouth has to be negative, not “what it is” despite the piece’s title but what he isn’t. The final burden of entering a conversation about you that has already settled on the words to be used is that you can only join in the conversation by disrupting it, or refusing to go on with the dialogue.

I ran into versions of the same stumbling block with other pieces from the late 1980s and 1990s. Piper expands her attention from the lone subjectivity seeking to know its own integrity, to the beliefs and behaviors of the surrounding audience. She often posits or declares what the audience is thinking, her spiritual exercises having become exorcisms of the watching others who come to her art.

Second-guessing the audience hits home in a piece like “Cornered” (1988). It is a well-known monologue by Piper, the video of her behind a table on a screen that has appropriately been backed into a corner. What does she say she is: black or white? She imagines the objections to either answer, then asks the white people watching why they don’t call themselves black too. Does black culture put them off? Would they rather not know about their African ancestry?

The premise (that one chooses racial identity) might sound dated thirty years later. The provocation is not. Racial identification has cornered Piper, and she’s showing her non-black audience what it might feel like to inhabit a corner. Consider the possibility that you will blunder and contradict yourself when explaining why you call yourself white. Consider whiteness as racial identification not a self-evident fact.

Viewers may deny having the motivations that Piper ascribes to them. But even then the denial of those motives engages the viewers in the act of thinking through identity that Piper invites her audience to join her in. If you come up with different reasons for your position on identity you will still be coming up with some reasons; and now racial identification has come in for newfound thinking.

An essay of Piper’s, “Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness,” uses a similar technique on its readers. There Piper itemizes the “mechanisms” by which people escape self-examination. To read that essay is to enter a fitting room of rationalizations, putting on one after another in order to figure out exactly how you’re putting yourself on.

Elsewhere Piper’s effort to get the jump on her audience works against her. I commented on the limitation to “What It’s Like, What It Is” built into the speaker’s script, as it were, having been generated by an audience antecedently configured as biased. Another difficult case, “Safe #1-4” (1990), displays four photographs of black people in groups with text that says “We are among you”; “We are around you”; “We are within you”; “You are safe.” The captions almost fit the paintings. It is more accurate to say that they offer one reading of the photographs they caption – for example that an image of a family around the dinner table, almost a stereotype of wholesome tradition when the family is white, in this instance invites interpretations about cultural encroachment.

Meanwhile however what sounds like Piper’s voice speaks from above criticizing the installation (“too militant”; “too explicit”). The critical voice contradicts itself, unsure whether to condemn the installation for being obvious or for being indirect. What follows from the criticism’s self-defeat? That this installation can demonstrate its own value by refuting all negative judgments about it? That if it leaves you unmoved you must subscribe to everything this particular hostile voice is saying? One might worry that pre-empting actual voices from outside with a constructed outside voice is unfair to critics; but the unfairness doesn’t even matter as much as the sight of an anxiety behind this process, of a sort that does not usually take over Piper’s work. I don’t say that she should trust her audience. But in such moments, uncharacteristically, she gives the impression of fearing it. The putative external voice seems less to destabilize the viewing experience than to over-stabilize it, allowing the work to play to its own ears.

That Piper can recreate a distinct subjectivity without projecting words onto other people ought to go without saying. Her parents’ smoking habits and deaths provide the subject for one tender and affecting example, “Ashes to Ashes” (1995). She lets Rodney King and George H. W. Bush speak in “Black Box/White Box” (1992) without adding a comment. Descended in their different ways from Piper’s early “Situation” works, these presentations dwell on fact letting her audience’s mind add to the reality deductively.

In one of the last series in this retrospective, the “Everything” pieces of 2010-2013, Piper moves beyond thoughts of her audience and their judgments. “Everything will be taken away.” The sentence appears on photographs or by itself. In one room, four blackboards show the sentence written in chalk, 25 times per blackboard, and increasingly erased away as one advances from the first to the fourth board. Do children in school still have to write something on the board a hundred times? I can’t think of a more economical depiction of a life-lesson: Stoicism on the wall. Heroes are killed, possessions decay, health is soon gone. Then the admonitory words themselves begin to fade. Standing in that room, I couldn’t decide, and I was glad not to be able to decide, whether the fading of the words meant that people go through their lives forgetting that essential Stoic maxim, denying its truth; or that what you might think you still have after all the anguishing experiences of loss, namely the consciousness with integrity that remains and knows the essential nature of loss – that too will go. Even the strategy of reminding yourself of life’s difficulties is a temporary and half-effective strategy. Sorry about that.

Suppose you imagined yourself bringing chalk to those boards to rewrite what has been erased. You make it a full one hundred sentences. Did you just make things better (restoring the intuition’s outward articulation) or worse (insisting on the unwanted news pressing inward with its moral)? These were the kinds of questions that I found the “Everything” series provoking me to ask, even while asserting nothing and promising only Nothing. Down to the end, which is the present, the retrospective sustains its restlessness of thought, the synthesis work still never done, regardless of where you want to locate the origins of its intuitions.

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March 9 to June 24, 2017
Olympic Tower, 645 Fifth Avenue at 51st Street
New York City, onassisusa.org

Here is another superbly realized exhibition at the Onassis Center. The gallery space of the Center is not large, but (as we’ve seen with other events there) it has been filled with pieces so well chosen as to make the show feel comprehensive.

In one way it is easy to put together an exhibition on emotions. Everything human expresses some emotion, or displays an emotion, or registers the touch of an emotion. And that theme would have been enough to carry this show, especially for the visitors who come in still picturing “Greek art” as cool, distant, and too elegant for feelings: the white-marble world that scholars fantasized about in the eighteenth century.

There is white marble in this exhibition, but not much of it that aspires to the cool remove and rationality of those old stereotypes. Instead this collection testifies to the Greeks’ smiling presentation and their erotic longings; to their gratitude when a god saved them from disease and grief when the gods took away someone they loved. Emotions from home and battlefield; unruly emotions, and emotions that conflict with one another; the wild emotions of that extreme exemplary figure Medea: everything is here for compiling a profile of ancient psychology. Pottery and marble statuary dominate, but the scrupulously inclusive curators also give us lead curse tablets, public announcements of gratitude for local benefactors, gold funeral masks, ostraka for ostracizing, notes to the oracle of Zeus at Dodona, coins for all purposes.

In all this evidence about how people thought and felt it is interesting to see where antiquity speaks to the present and where it fails to. The inscription on one stone pays tribute to an eighteen-year-old daughter who died giving birth to a stillborn child. Now her parents have no one to succeed them, and their public words on the funeral stele announce that fact. Translating the words gets the point across without the need for further explanation.

We find more amateurish inscriptions on the lead curse tablets. For a thousand years, across the Mediterranean world, people wrote curses on slips of lead and threw them down a well, or buried them near the headstone of someone who had recently died, preferably a violent death (because the unquiet ghost would still be wandering around the grave, and could pick up the message and deliver it to the divinities below). “I bind his tongue,” such tablets said, or “May the jury find his charges unjust.” The inscription doesn’t cut deep into the lead, but after thousands of years we still feel the frustration in the slanting saw-toothed handwriting that specifies what should happen to this enemy.

Facial expressions sometimes communicate with great directness across the centuries, sometimes less clearly so. The dreamy archaic smile of the kouros and kore does not register in the joyous way that later sculptured facial expressions do. Then there is the grimace of the Gorgon that shows both the delight those monsters felt and the fear they inspired in their victims. It was evidently important to have the Gorgons grimacing straight at their viewer, because they were always shown full-face. Maybe it’s not enough for you to know they’re smiling: they want to aim that smile in your direction.

On vases the faces often look impassive, so that we have to read a figure’s body language. Achilles seems to be beating Ajax – proverbially the second-best of the Achaean heroes – in a board game they have sat down to play. There were moments of leisure even during the Trojan War; but this isn’t just a fun game. Ajax’s hands and posture betray his resentment at losing to Achilles. Will he always be the number-two man at Troy no matter how hard he fights? His face is harder to read. For that matter it’s hard to read the face of Ajax on another vase that shows him about to kill himself. By comparison the arms and torso are eloquent. Maybe we expect a warrior like that to show how he feels with his whole body instead of with a wailing face.

If you follow the counterclockwise circuit through the exhibition, the final stage belongs to Medea. There too it’s not so much the facial expressions that show what’s going on inside. Medea on one vase is about to stab her son to death while Jason watches aghast and passive. We read the events and the characters’ bodies. Of course it is remarkable that we can read Medea at all: a tribute to the powers of this vase’s painter, who humanizes the non-male, non-Greek sorceress whom classical Greece would have made the ultimate Other.

The vase paintings are not emotionally ambiguous. Their original audiences would have identified the states of mind at work without a moment’s hesitancy. We figure the situations out pretty quickly ourselves. Only we don’t do it from facial expressions but from the mythic contexts depicted. We remember that this is Jason with his new bride dead and both sons dying and Medea flying away; or that this is Ganymede being flown up to heaven to gratify a besotted Zeus. Iphigenia just realized she is going to be sacrificed, and her father covers his face in shame at ordering her death.

* * *

As memorable as these items are, and as broad a sample as they define of ancient Greek emotional life, the exhibition does not exist only to display that emotional life. If these vases and sculptures had supplied all we know about Greek emotions, they could have had an effect like butterflies mounted under glass, providing their evidence unknowingly and despite themselves. What adds a dimension to these signs of emotion is our awareness of the discourse in Greek culture that analyzed and theorized emotion. Epic poetry and tragedy immersed their heroes in frightful situations and captured the strong feelings that those situations aroused in them. More surprisingly, the abstract prose writing of classical and later eras sought to understand the causes and the trajectories of the passions.

The dominant prose author may be Plato, whom this exhibition cites more than once. Plato’s Republic accounts for human emotions with a depth psychology that divides up what we might experience as a unitary self. Sexual desire and grief come out of a part of the soul (as the Republic puts it) that is distinct from one’s reasoning faculty. The reasoning faculty is even alienated from this part and seeks to be free of its influence. Meanwhile the emotional states appropriate to politics and warfare – indignation, daring, revenge – are motivated by a third faculty in the soul that can control desire but that nevertheless differs from reason. From the Republic’s perspective these drives distinct from reason are not the real you, although some of them are capable of being trained while the others have to be tamped down.

Aristotle’s ethical works, but also Book 2 of his Rhetoric, come at human passions from a perspective often opposed to Plato’s, but it is still an ethically informed one. Aristotle analyzes emotional motives to discover their healthy and their excessive manifestations. Cowards feel too much fear, the reckless not enough; courageous people feel the right amount.

Thucydides the historian weighs in alongside the philosophers. One scene in his history of the Peloponnesian War exposes the desperation in a weak city that begs Athens not to invade – and the self-satisfaction with which Athens shrugs off the arguments for merciful treatment. Things look different for Athens later in the history, when its expedition to conquer Sicily has failed; at that point Thucydides labors to make his reader understand what drove the Athenians to take on such a doomed enterprise in the first place.

The works in verse and prose both come to mind as you look around the exhibition. That touching epitaph from the parents to their eighteen-year-old daughter recalls the Republic’s cautions against excessive mourning. Medea evokes the great tragedy by Euripides that shows its sympathy for her, but also the later philosophical tradition that criticized Medea for her overheated sexuality and uncontrolled vengeful fury. Especially with the rise of Stoicism, Medea became a synonym for impermissible anger. You do not find such anger in a Stoic and especially not in a Stoic man.

Here is where the great depth of this exhibition reveals itself. As long as the vase paintings and the accouterments of ancient magic illustrate what we know about Greek religion and myth, and the literary works that draw on those sources, the effect is an interesting multi-media presentation of a coherent civilization. But thinking about the analytical discourses that were emerging in prose from (roughly) 420 to 320, and then flowered into scholarly and philosophical traditions, we contemplate the edgy relationship between a moralizing and intellectualizing discourse about emotions, and those same emotions as they had been imagined and depicted.

It is erotic longing that makes Zeus kidnap Ganymede and fly the boy up to heaven for the king god’s sexual pleasure. But Plato, who alludes to that story, refrains from endorsing it. What a shameful display that would be from the god who most ought to be setting a good example! Erotic longing ought to lift human beings to heaven in another way (Plato’s Phaedrus says), by being sublimated rather than through direct sexual expression; by moving the soul to heaven not the body; by inspiring philosophical conversation not rape.

The philosophers’ voices mix with the images in this show to evoke a civilization at odds with itself, the display and frank acknowledgment of emotions playing against a vigorous counterpoint that judges and often condemns the aberrations of thought we like to call emotion. Greek culture then looks incapable of making up its mind, or of settling on a single coherent discourse of the soul. In the world of emotions we get at the Onassis Center, philosophers stand opposed to drinkers at a symposium; men opposed to women; warriors to moralists.

To my mind, this is where the real communication happens between antiquity and modernity. It kept me repeating circuits of the exhibition after I thought I’d finished seeing it. We feel more at home looking back on a civilization that couldn’t decide what emotions ought to be, and that contained (despite the exhibition’s title) more than a single world of emotions.

Nickolas Pappas, whose most recent book is The philosopher’s new clothes. The Theaete­tus, the Academy, and philosophy’s turn against fashion (Routledge, 2016), teaches philosophy at the City University of New York.

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