A research project in progress developed by the artist Johanna Viprey: the book narrates the encounter that has led the artist to investigate the personal history of Jeff Perkins, American performer painter and documentary filmmaker, from an anthropological perspective.
The Artist As A Cabdriver is published in conjunction with Die Young or Stay Pretty, a research project in progress developed by the artist Johanna Viprey with the Istituto Svizzero in Milan as part of a cycle titled Artist Laureate.
Over the last two years Viprey has worked on the archives of the American performer painter and documentary filmmaker Jeff Perkins, a “professional outsider”, as Viprey defines him, a self-taught talent who never found space for himself and his artistic practice in that same scene. For twenty years Perkins worked as a taxi driver in New York. From 1990 to 2000 he recorded his conversations with the passengers, after asking them for permission to do so.
In the book Johanna Viprey narrates the encounter that has led her to investigate the personal history of Perkins and his figure from an anthropological perspective. If his work was born outside the contemporary art system, how can this material be inserted in that very circuit? Why would an artist decide to present the work of another artist and to rediscover his archive?
The research for this book was partly written during Johanna Viprey's studies in Haute École d'Art et de Design, Geneva (HEAD), Master of Visual Arts (Work.master).
Johanna Viprey (born 1979 in Besançon, France, lives and works in Geneva) moves forward with research on the modes of transmission of experience and themes connected with the concept of subjectivity, and its translation and mediation through interdisciplinary references and forms. Viprey took a degree in Sociology in France. She then took an MA in Visual Arts at the
HEAD – Genève, with
Lili Reynaud-Dewar. She has participated in events on performance and group shows in public and non-profit spaces (
Le Consortium, Dijon 2013; Forde, Geneva 2012) and private galleries. For her Masters thesis,
L'artiste en chauffeur de taxi, Viprey collected texts, documents and images made traveling with Jeff Perkins, which she presented for the first time at the graduation ceremony at HEAD.
