Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965-2016 - by Christophe Cherix & Cornelia Butler & David Platzker (Hardcover)

About the Book

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 31-July 22, 2018, traveling to Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, September 30, 2018-January 6, 2019, and Haus der Kunst, Berlin, April 12-September 22, 2019.

Book Synopsis

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 catalog 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 Previously unpublished texts by the artist lay out significant events in her personal history and her deeply felt ideas about the relationship between viewer and art object.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.

Adrian Piper (born 1948) is a first-generation conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She received an AA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in 1969, a BA in Philosophy with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Musicology from the City College of New York in 1974 and a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1981. Piper's artwork is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Generali Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, among others.

Review Quotes

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"