Edited by Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler, and David Platzker. With contributions by Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler, David Platzker, and Adrian Piper. Backmatter compiled by Tessa Ferreyros

 

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 290 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 Previously unpublished texts by the artist lay out significant events in her personal history and her deeply felt ideas about the relationship between viewer and art object.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. 352 pp.; 373 illus.