adrian piper not the pipers son

During the sixties and seventies, before MetroMobilitan, Haacke was interested in the demystification of the romantic concept of art. He explored this terrain with his creation of ‘Real-Time Systems’ inspired by a new understanding of complex systems and conversations developed by critic Jack Burnham, and also with work that relied heavily upon audience participation such as Welle (Wave) (1964), which swung like a pendulum when pushed.


Adrian Piper was also creating pieces that invited the public to handle the work, removing the idea of the untouchable work of art, and destroying its aura, actively involving the viewer. In Adrian Piper’s piece Context #7 (1970), the viewer is a constitutive element of the work of art. Context #7 could not physically or conceptually be realized without the viewer’s thoughts and physical involvement. Context #7 was a mixed media installation for the Museum of Modern Art Information Exhibition in which Piper offered the public seven black vinyl three-ring loose-leaf notebooks, a ballpoint pen, and a request from the artist in the form of a sign mounted on the wall. The request was to document a reaction to the situation of being directly addressed by the artist to realize a physical object in the museum. This piece rejects the notion of art works as complete and unchanging once displayed in a museum, and the action is a resistance to an invisible structure which perpetuates the creation of static, sterile art.