''Food for the Spirit'' (1971) is a

performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...

piece and

self-portrait A self-portrait is a representation of an artist that is drawn, painted, photographed, or sculpted by that artist. Although self-portraits have been made since the earliest times, it is not until the Early Renaissance in the mid-15th century tha ...

series by American

conceptual art Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...

ist

Adrian Piper Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (born September 20, 1948) is an American conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher. Her work addresses how and why those involved in more than one discipline may experience professional ostracism, otherness, racial ...

, which was conducted, performed and documented in the summer of 1971 in her New York loft as she isolated herself and entered a

dissociative Dissociatives, colloquially dissos, are a subclass of hallucinogens which distort perception of sight and sound and produce feelings of detachment – dissociation – from the environment and/or self. Although many kinds of drugs are capable of ...

phase influenced by her constant reading of

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...

's '' Critique of Pure Reason''.

Outline

Piper had begun ''Food for the Spirit'' out of a temporary isolated lifestyle that she took upon in her New York loft, including doing yoga, reading, writing, and fasting. However, most integral to the piece was

metaphysical Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...

work, the '' Critique of Pure Reason'', which she became so intensely engaged with that, by her intention, she began to disassociate and question her material existence. Around the end of this period, where she started to lose all sense of being, intentionally strictly influenced by Kant's perspective on ''

Being In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

'' and obsessed with

Kantian Kantianism is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The term ''Kantianism'' or ''Kantian'' is sometimes also used to describe contemporary positions in philosophy of mind, ...

thought, she finalized the piece by ritualistically taking photographs of herself in the mirror, undressed in various ways, as she chanted key phrases from Kant's text that made her feel existentially questioned. ''Food for the Spirit'' is an essential piece of artwork in the contribution to the development of conceptual art.

"I rigged up a camera and tape recorder next to mirror, 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."

References

{{Performance art 1971 works Performances Performance art in New York City Works about philosophy