OPEN ACCESS FOR ABOLITION :: AUTONOMY, LIMINAL LAB, and BEYOND THE BOOK-OBJECT
An Open Letter to the Operating System community
“I want to consider a certain class of answers to the question, ‘What do you do?’”
- Adrian Piper, in To Art (reg.intrans. v.) // 1975
Dear Collaborators, Friends, Comrades:
Whether you consider yourself to be involved in the “arts” or not, you may find yourself asking Adrian Piper’s question above these days: “What do you do”? In 1975, when she posed it, Piper is explicitly seeking to unpack the quotidian, grasping act of making from its performative and/or named, legible aspects — for the artist/maker, and those both within and beyond the arts “world.” But I know that for myself, and for someone largely responsible for an “organization,” this question these days is far more than that: it is the question of reclaiming the role of the self in the world beyond the logics and power structures that have conditioned us for so long.
I believe deeply that this larger question is in fact always central to the more specific question Piper was asking: that to art in any of its forms (ideally) is to commit to a lifelong practice of asking who we are and…
