Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions: 1965-2016

(Hardback)

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Adrian Piper has consistently produced groundbreaking work that has profoundly shaped the form and content of conceptual art since the 1960s. Strongly inflected by her longstanding involvement with philosophy and yoga, her pioneering investigations into the political, social, psychological, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art have had an incalculable influence on artists working today. Published in conjunction with the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date, this catalogue presents more than 280 artworks that encompass the full range of Piper's mediums: works on paper, video, multimedia installation, performance, painting, sound, and photo-texts. Essays by curators and scholars examine her extensive research into altered states of consciousness; the introduction of the Mythic Being-her subversive masculine alter-ego; her media and installation works from after 1980, which reveal and challenge stereotypes of race and gender; and the global conditions that illuminate the significance of her art. Previously unpublished texts by the artist lay out significant events in her personal history and her deeply felt ideas about the relationship between viewer and art object. This publication expands our understanding of the Conceptual and post-Conceptual art movements and Piper's pivotal position among her peers and for later generations.

Reviews

A stunning overview of Piper's lifelong engagement with philosophical thinking and art.--Jessica Lanay "Bomb Magazine"
A 50-year survey of an American artist who has taken racism, misogyny and xenophobia as her themes, while refusing to be defined by them, it made the museum feel like a life-engaged place, not the high-polish, content-muting one we've grown used to.--Holland Cotter "New York Times"
Piper's use of the mode of direct address lays a linguistic, textual model over an engagement with much of Piper's work.--Phillip Griffith "Brooklyn Rail"
Surveying the conceptual rigor that Piper applies to her minefield-slash-universe of work gave me a huge dose of critical pleasure.--Lanka Tattersall "Artforum"
The most exquisite moments of Synthesis derive not from the labor or the trauma of racial and gender identity but from the ineffable joy of simply being embodied.--Thomas Chatterton Williams "New York Times Magazine"

Author Bio

Connie Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. David Platzker is a Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at MoMA.