self-driven
a few words on Adrian Piper, Catherine Christer Hennix & Katrina Burch
Cher reader,
How is it going, how’s the end of 2024? Sending positive thoughts. Thanks for joining me here again. Without further due, let’s begin this post with a short, existential intro.
For most of us, art-making prompts or enhances in ourselves an equal amount of escapism (from the practical, emotional, relational matters, etc.) and a wide broadening + deep intimacy in our experience of life. By making art, we learn to bridge the two ends: escapism and insightfulness. In the same way, we learn to conciliate the outer, superficial, and repeated (mis)understandings with the profound, rare inner realizations we may have — until we accept both are one and the same and serve the same aim: unveiling our selves, little by little.
In that sense, coming across the works or minds of composers/artists/thinkers Catherine Christer Hennix, Adrian Piper, and Katrina Burch was a shock in my system. They all showed (/ reminded) me that a) one has permission (and the right) to live with a radical kind of alignment between gravity and lightness, courage and humor; b) art can be an infinitely declinable means to this end.
So, here is a dedicated (merely introductory) post to these highly gifted, highly distinctive, highly multifaceted artists — so multifaceted that they sometimes feel like a continuation of each other. Above all, I hope this post will inspire you to delve deeper into their works [see footnotes for resources]. This post might also enhance the rather obvious connection between the giftedness1 of these three women, the depth of their artistic processes (recalling the many forms of overexcitability2 gifted people tend to manifest), and how greatly misunderstood they felt/were at times, particularly in the conventional academic and/or artistic field(s). There might be a topic there, something to think and talk about.
Allez, c’est ti-par, buckle up cause we’re delving into it, heads on.
Adrian Piper
Adriaaan, Adrian, Adrian. Born in NYC, Adrian Piper is an artist, philosopher, teacher, yoga practitioner, and funk dance connoisseur living in Berlin since 2005. She studied both visual arts and philosophy, expanding the realm of conceptual art and minimalism as a tool for social critique and self-examination. As a result, Piper truly did unveil her self further and further as time passed, and by doing so, added more and more layers of significance in her pieces. The latter reflects issues of race, sex, class, and ethics while incorporating two main branches of philosophies Piper committed for life (and put to the test): Hindu philosophies and Immanuel Kant’s philosophy (+to a certain degree David Hume’s). This commitment led her to write and self-publish the impressive 2-volume Rationality and the Structure of Self, which she introduces in the interview below, with outstanding clarity.
Be it in her writings or art, experiencing Piper’s work is conducive to experiencing one’s self — what Kant conceives in his Critique of Pure Reason as a precondition for experience itself, a unifying force that enables us to connect various representations into a subjective grasp of reality3. In Piper’s pieces, one may see their self in action and inaction, its beauty and contradictions/blind spots, its intangibility and fleeting embodiment, the uncertainty of its appearance(s) and certainty of its disappearance, its concurrent motions of revolt and joy.
For all these reasons, perhaps even more acutely than other artists, studying Piper’s artistic trajectory limpidly teaches us about the ‘chronology’ of her self. This chronology could be captured as the following arch: an intense dive into abstraction, leading to a form of dissociation and diffusion into the collective, and a return to an even more complete integration and elevation.
During the first stage of her artistic practice, Piper recognizes having been drunk on abstraction, which she described with a poetic and surgical precision. For those in love with abstraction, her experience may be very relatable. In her words, abstraction is “a framework organizing increasingly comprehensive concepts into a coherent tapestry, an intellectual act of ascending to higher conceptual levels”; “a dizzying object of contemplation the details of which stun one into panic by their connectedness, significance, and vividness.” At the same time, abstraction is freedom from “the immediate spatio-temporal constraints of the moment; […] the immediate boundaries of concrete subjectivity, […] the socially prescribed and consensually accepted; […] a solitary journey through the conceptual universe, with no anchors, no cues, no signposts, no maps, no foundations to cling to.”4
By being so ‘high’ on abstraction, Piper admitted having “traumatized herself”, leading to burn out and a withdrawal from the artworld, back into the external political/collective world where she lead for instance her Funk Lessons in the early 80s.
Later on, her philosophical training helped Piper to “purify the imagery in [her] artwork of excess theoretical baggage and [offering her] a new kind of reflective conceptual tool” — one that shed light on her experiences of fear, fantasy, mistrust, suspicion, anger, confusion, ignorance. To Piper, the latter obstruct her “self-transcendence, [her] ability to lose [herself] temporarily in the other, in the world, in abstract ideas. These are the barriers [her] art practice reflects, because they are the ones that keep [her] grounded.”
Perhaps, by accepting these barriers, acknowledging and embracing their existence, Piper grew more accepting of her self and of the respect she rightfully deserved. After decades teaching philosophy in the US, Adrian eventually relocated in Berlin in 2005. From her writings, although this relocation was filled with an audacious sense of renewal, this choice was also a result of a gradual process of ostracisation she experienced as a philosophy teacher in the US. For those who would be interested, this equally absurd, painful and empowering experience is portrayed at the end of her very up-to-date essay Passing for White, passing for Black.5 [ As the title suggests, the essay actually casts a much broader net — it is truly a must-read ].
Adrian received the Golden Lion Award in 2015 for her 40 years of art-making, performance and theory. During her participation in the Venice Biennale, she presented The Probable Trust Registry, a piece where visitors are asked to sign contracts with themselves adhering to statements such as: ‘I will always mean what I say’, ‘I will always do what I say I am going to do’, or ‘I will always be too expensive to buy’. Why not keeping all those as resolutions from 2025 onwards. I’ll leave it there with one last quote of hers: “My art practice is a reflecting mirror of light and darkness, a high sunny window that holds out to me the promise of release into the night.”6
Catherine Christer Hennix
Not sure where to begin with the Norwegian composer, musician, poet, artist, mathematician, philosopher, Catherine Christer Hennix. Understanding her work asks for dedication: a wish to dive (and get lost) into the numerous expansions of her mind and modalities of existence. Before her music and writings were made finally accessible to a larger public on Blank Forms Editions7, a few outstanding musicians/artists— like Katrina Burch, Marcus Pal, and Amedeo Maria Schwaller — have dedicated some years in their 20s to work with CCH. They would surely be more apt to talk about her legacy than me, and give a more complete account of Hennix’s complex character. So, keeping this in mind, I’ll just share my experience of her work, which was no less than a tidal wave in my music and life.
To begin with, let’s listen to her music.
Hennix’s work results from an assemblage of various artistic practices (jazz, raga, maqam, blues, poetry, noh theater), and teachings (mathematics, logic, buddhism, muskim sufism) — and this is probably only the top of a much broader iceberg. To me, her body of works represents and the epitome of "transdisciplinarism", one which may be more specifically described as attempts to wed mathematical formalism and introspective states of mind. Logic and numbers are not only tools to model her music, for instance when considering her way of composing using Just Intonation. Rather, it feels like CCH’s relation to mathematics is existential — a medium for the mind to reflect on its own functioning.
In fact, Hennix's work is permeated by intuitionism, a radically novel —and controversial — conception of mathematics and mathematical creativity consisting of a mathematical theory of introspection, founded by the mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer around the early 1900s. As a philosophical position, intuitionism puts the "creative subject" and its psyche at the centre of the mathematical activity, where it can be understood as the fruit of internal acts of thinking. Because reasoning is always attached to a specific mathematical context and the creative subject, intuitionists acknowledge mathematical notions have only a provisional, relative existence. In Hennix's music, the role of the composer and performer are inspired from the Brouwerian "creative subject," and this emphasises putting one’s intuitions at the center of a rigorous creative process. Thus similar to the Brouwerian mathematical activity, the musical activity, is interpreted as the result of internal or introspective states of mind; it is highly subjective and revisable, offering transitory solutions to a musical inquiry.
As much as my mind allows it, my experience of CCH’s music revolves around ‘perceiving’, a state akin to direct and immediate knowledge (VS knowledge produced by inference, deduction or reasoning). Put differently, CCH’s music invites a listener to experience glimpses of their mind’s essence—as clear cognition or a luminous state. For some of us, experiencing such clear states of mind is no less than a revolution and a revolt from/against our common narrow-mindedness. [ btw, isn’t astonishing what music can do? ]
So, differently from Piper, CCH’s primary companion was maybe less abstraction per se but luminosity. That being said, with her push & pull relationship to academic /artistic institutions and her numerous relocalizations, CCH’s trajectory echoes to Piper’s. Hennix taught Logic and Mathematics in various prestigious institutions in the US and Europe, before moving to Turkey to study Sufism and maqam. But her music and art certainly didn’t get the success they deserved before Blank Forms Editions stepped in a few years ago. That is: CCH struggled to have her pieces performed and heard for most of her life. This is another example that sometimes, things in life don’t make much sense. And they don’t need to.
Before her recent passing in 2023, I’ve dreamt of CCH, several times actually, which is strange for someone I have never met IRL. In one of these dreams, we were dancing and laughing. Between jokes and stories, she invited me to study maqam together in Turkey (I wish). In another dream, I was the one inviting her, this time to give a lecture in a big concert hall in the Netherlands. She was again incredibly bright, with the same spicy sense of humor, and this half-smile and sparkle in her eyes that said: ‘there is nothing to take seriously, ever’. Interestingly, before giving her lecture, she had entered the hall on her wheelchair. As she began her presentation (about the relationship between mathematics and her music), she stood up and walked to center stage in room packed with people, making them laugh and think all at once. So, for what it is worth, this is my understanding of Hennix: she was so bright that she could overcome the limitations of her frail body, stand up and invite others to experience glimpses of clarity with her.
Katrina Burch
Katrina Burch’s works show yet another declination of a highly gifted person’s artistic path. I met Katrina during my first year at the Institute of Sonology in the Hague in 2016, and I had never met anyone like her before. She was so clever, rebellious, free, transparent, and kind. Back then, Katrina had a MA in Anthropology, was studying in the Sonology MA program while doing an MSc in Archeology. Shortly after, she left to Canada where she enrolled in a PhD program in Anthropology at McGill University, combining community-driven research and artistic practice through sensory ethnography. This uncompromising academic trajectory is worth celebrating but too reductive to portray Katrina — who is also a photographer, musician/composer, poet, yogi, activist, a mother, and much more.
As briefly mentioned before, Katrina studied together with Catherine Christer Hennix. To me, the lineage is clear, not because Katrina and CCH’s aesthetics or philosophical frameworks would be similar, but precisely because they are so distinct, unique and holistic in their own ways. Katrina’s work has a primal and cosmological dimension, one that touches more closely on ‘the feminine’, desires, rituals and ecology. When she was in the Netherlands, Katrina was invested in algorithmic and electronic sets as Yoneda Lemma, which she developed sometimes in collaboration with her partner (another exceptional artist, Donatas Tubutis).
Following her entry into parenthood, Katrina/Yoneda Lemma became ICA-RINA. In these most recent pieces — at least in the way I see it, it feels like Katrina simply brings love to the foreground, with a kind of rare intensity, accompanied with very profound descriptions and research around her works.
Katrina’s Anthropology current research is also at a fascinating intersection. Her doctorate “explores the ephemeral poetics of timing and place in the intricacies of rotational farming practices in northern Thailand and the resurgence of this traditional livelihood for Indigenous Karen in the face of cryptocolonial conservation laws. In this context, Katrina is led by women's economies of care looking at food sovereignty from a maternal-medicinal perspective, while sharing a personal interest in ancestral grieving/healing at the nexus/interface of body, spirits and land. Through this work, Katrina is developing sensory ethnography as a form of art, wherein hope, beauty, grief and pleasure can nourish philosophical insight with/in the emotional politics of everyday life. Katrina is guided by listening as a practice of cosmological attunement that moves with and beyond the human.” Nothing to add. Synthesizing of all these different yet interdependent topics into one comprehensive research is an accomplishment, in and of itself. I look forward to reading her PhD, and to seeing how Katrina will continue to strive over the years, in or under the radar.
One last personal memory, back in 2016-7. As students at the Institute of Sonology, we have so-called ‘colloquium’, a 30/40min presentation to discuss our respective research with ± every other students and staff members. From memory, Katrina shared in her colloquium how her research was integrating the poetics of eroticism and media archaeology into her algorithmic approach to music-making and voice synthesis. These very topics and their mixture were terrifying for some male students/staff members, who composed ±93% of the Institute back the, but especially exciting for the remaining ±7% female/non-binary students. As a result, Katrina’s research raised some serious discomfort among some members of the Sonology community, and even anger. Although Katrina managed to elegantly ignore or transform these incidents, she was not protected by anyone/anything from these kinds of aggressive interactions back then. [NB: this Sonology context has changed since 2016-7]. All this to say that Katrina’s guts, integrity, strength and sense of humor remained even more deeply imprinted in my memory. She planted a seed, paving the way for other students to ‘dare’ conducting their research because it was deeply meaningful to them, and to decisively refuse to bare anyone else’s uneasiness. That’s actual empathy.
A brief conclusion
Adrian Piper, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Katrina Burch have all understood, in their own ways, how to direct their respective intelligence to keep growing positively, and by doing so, allowing others to grow with them. They were/are never subjugated by their own intelligence, beauty, talents, or altruism, and rather continuously transformed themselves with less and less ‘artifice’. Their trajectories may illustrate what some members of the gifted/neurodivergent community call ’positive desintegration’. At least to me, they show what being self-driven may look like: moving on and with the world around you, and sometimes finding grace in provocation.
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Voooooilà for tonight. I somehow haven’t shared much about sound/music, so next time, we might do some music-bookworming together.
Thanks for reading, and always feel free to respond
good night or good day, and good hug
ps: are these posts too long? i’m curious and have no idea
ps2: i’ll update a resource section here with every post published
NB: overexcitabilities are also manifest in other neurodivergent people.
L. Adrien & C. Bukuts, Adrian Piper: Who, Me?, Portikus, Exhibition description, Frankfurt, see e-flux announcement.
A.Piper, Reflections, 1967- 1987, Alternative Museum 1987 Exhibition booklet.
A.Piper, Passing for White, Passing for Black, In Transition, No. 58, 1992, Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
A.Piper, Reflections, 1967- 1987, Alternative Museum 1987 Exhibition booklet.
Books on Catherine Christer Hennix’s work are all published on Blank Forms Editions. See this excerpt for instance.