Lasting between one and two hours and including dialogue with the audience, Piper speaks to current topics of interest in her work and in the art world in a presentation including images, video and sound. This may include screening new or recent video work and relating it to earlier work in a variety of media; focusing on one particular period of her work retrospectively and placing it in the context of contemporary concerns; organizing a multi-media presentation of her work around a particular theme or topic; or incorporating performative and/or participatory elements into the presentation itself.

Equipment needs depend on the particular presentation and venue, but frequently required items include

Lavallier microphone
Slide projector
80-slide carousel
Color video monitor or projection screen
VHS cassette tape deck that can be controlled from stage
DVD player that can be controlled from stage
Audio cassette player with two decks that can be controlled from stage
CD player that can be controlled from the stage
Chair
Reading light
MacIntosh G4 Powerbook (for Power Point presentations)

Recent art lectures have included the following topics:

What "the Indexical Present" Really Is: Piper has often used the concept of the "indexical present" to describe a decision-making strategy in her work by which the viewer is brought into direct and immediate relation to the art object.* Through such devices as mimicry of rationalization; naming, depiction, or confrontation of troubling realities; the use of indexical language such as "here," "now," "I," "you," "this;" representational, life-size human images posed frontally and making eye-contact with the viewer, Piper has sought to peel away the layers of self-deceptive conceptualization that mediate and obscure our relation to "Others" and prevent recognition of our common humanity. In fact these strategies are rooted in Piper's decades-long practice of yoga and Advaita Vedanta, which she began in 1965. In this talk she contextualizes her art practice within its actual framework of Ashtanga Yoga, with particular reference to the concepts of satya (truth), svadyaya (self-scrutiny), dharana (entering into focused relation to an object), dhyana (penetrating through to the essence of the object), and purusha (transpersonal consciousness of mental activity). Piper can't be accused of "preaching to the converted" in this talk! (Duration one to two hours)

Where Are We Going? Hot Tips for Adjusting to the Second Millenium: Government and corporate funding for the arts are drying up. Collectors and institutions are less adventurous than they used to be. Since these developments are not the effect of a faltering economy, they are not likely to improve any time soon. How can we adapt to this new environment with both our creativity and our integrity intact? Piper offers an analysis of current and long-term conditions and some suggestions for surviving and prospering in spite of them, through survey and candid self-criticism of her own professional trajectory in the art world. (Duration approximately one to two hours)

Talking Pictures: Piper's art work makes unusual demands on its audience. Quite aside from its provocative content, it frequently involves simultaneous expression or communication in a number of different languages: of words, of form, of music, of lyrics, of the body. It thus requires its audience either to compute on several channels at once, or to spend much more time on a particular work than the average seven seconds per painting or sculpture given by most art viewers. Piper's work is particularly demanding in its frequent use of extended written, spoken, or lyrical text. This lecture surveys and analyzes those works of the last few decades notable for their extended and various uses of language: as object, as tool, as weapon, as instrument of control; as scalpel, spotlight, vacuum cleaner, or ladder finally to be kicked away. (Duration one to two hours)

The Color Wheel Series: Part of Piper's new body of work – her first since 1992 – premiered at the Paula Cooper Gallery in November 2000. Afterwards she continued to produce sections of it in media as different as prints, postcards, slide, web site works, mixed media installations, page works, videotapes, video installations, and sound works until the series was completed in 2004 with her video, Shiva Dances with the Art Institute of Chicago. Some have described this series as a complete departure from the earlier work and concerns for which she is known. Others have not known how to describe its imagery, referents, or formal and substantive concerns. While Piper invites individual viewers to decide some of these questions for themselves in the viewing experience, she surveys and analyzes others within an autobiographical, artistic and cultural context. (Duration one to two hours)

Dokumente aus den Staaten: Piper platziert ihre Arbeit im Kontext einer Gesellschaft, – der amerikanischen Gesellschaft – deren Struktur und Geschichte von der Verleugnung, von der Disassoziierung und von der Rationalisierung des sie bestimmenden Rassismus geprägt sind. Sie sieht in diesem Punkt bedeutende Unterschiede zwischen Amerika und Deutschland. Piper betrachtet ihre künstlerische Arbeit als Symptom und als Ausdruck dieser Gesellschaft. Vor diesem Hintergrund beschreibt Piper ihre eigene künstlerische Entwicklung von einer “reinen” Ästhetik des Minimalismus hin zu einer politischen künstlerischen Arbeit, die gegen die spezifisch amerikanischen Ausprägungen des Rassismus kämpfte. [auf Deutsch gehalten und diskutiert]

Critiques should be of no shorter duration than 15 minutes each, and no longer than one hour each. Critiques should be scheduled in blocks of two hours with a one-hour break between each block. No more than six hours of critiques - i.e. three 2-hour blocks - should be scheduled per day.

Topics are geared to student concerns and include: How one conceptualizes visual or otherwise nonverbal work; what compromises one must make in order to survive professionally; "making it" in the artworld; racism and sexism in the artworld; one's relation to art history vs. one's relation to one's community of origin; political content in art; freedom of expression and professional self-censorship; the concept of the Sunday painter; the artist as Other vs. the artist as player; etc. Maximum Limit: 20 students (Duration: two hours)

PLEASE NOTE: These seminars presuppose knowledge of Piper's art work and may follow one of her art talks.

Lasting between one and two hours and including dialogue with the audience, Piper addresses topics in political philosophy, applied ethics and philosophical psychology that are derived from her philosophical research and are of interest to a general intellectual audience. These may or may not include a multi-media presentation and/or hand-outs that aid in following the presentation.

Equipment needs depend on the particular presentation and venue.

Recent philosophy public lectures have included the following topics:

Why is America’s caste system so intractable? Using video and film clips from her own art work and from little-known Hollywood movies, Piper offers an explanation excerpted from her manuscript in progress, Recognition and Responsibility: The Presence of the Past in Germany, Australia and the United States. This manuscript applies the theory of rationality developed in Rationality and the Structure of the Self (see below) to real-world conditions. (Duration one hour media presentation, one-half hour reading from manuscript)

Equipment:	Microphone
	Podium
	Chair or Stool
	Projection Screen
	DVD Player

How could nationalist and racist ideology turn longstanding friends, relatives, and spouses into lethal enemies in the former Yugoslavia? or in Nazi Germany? The intimacy of xenophobia is not explained by the prevailing Marxist view, which analyzes it as a fear of outsiders who compete for and deplete a community's scarce economic and social resources. Piper critiques this view and offers an alternative, Kantian analysis of xenophobia as (1) an innate, universal human response that is necessary to preserving the coherence of the individual self; (2) found not only in relations between different racial, ethnic or social groups but also in interpersonal relationships; and (3) corrigible and controllable only to the extent that it is the object of explicit and public self-consciousness. Piper's analysis explains not only racism and anti-Semitism but nationalism, sexism, and homophobia as well. (Duration one hour)

Equipment:	Microphone
	Podium
	Chair or Stool

This hour-long question-and-answer session is designed to follow either of the above two lectures, and offers a selected group of students an opportunity to delve more deeply into the issues discussed in it. Maximum limit: 30 students.

These are technical papers in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of Western philosophy. Available are topics in metaethics, the history of ethics, action theory and Kant exegesis. These papers are usually excerpted from current research, and are intended for delivery to philosophy department faculty and students. They take between 45 and 60 minutes to read or deliver, are frequently accompanied by printed hand-outs that aid in following the argument, and are followed by an hour of questions and discussion.

Philosophy papers are available from the following projects:

Rationality and the Structure of the Self:Research talks are excerpted from particular chapters of this recently completed two-volume project:

Volume I. The Humean Conception argues that the utility-maximization model of rationality and the belief-desire model of motivation that are jointly constitutive of the Humean conception are internally inconsistent and that the Humean conception of the self generates insoluble problems of moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification for metaethical foundationalists such as Rawls, Nagel, Brandt, Gewirth, Williams, Frankfurt, Baier, and others.

Volume II. A Kantian Conception articulates and defends a contemporary version of Kant’s own conception of the self as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason, against Humean and anti-rationalist objections. It argues that the explanatory and metaethical pitfalls of the Humean conception can be avoided by subsuming it as a special case of the Kantian conception.

Kant’s Metaethics: First Critique Foundations: This manuscript in progress is a study in Kant exegesis that argues that The Critique of Pure Reason provides the metaethical models of rationality, motivation and the self that Kant’s normative moral theory in the Groundwork and second Critique presupposes. Research talks are excerpted from particular chapters and always include printed hand-outs quoting the relevant texts which enable non-Kant scholars to follow the argument and participate in the discussion.