Pig Altar (based on cult objects from Neuguinea)

The artist, activist, and musician Padhi Frieberger had a reputation for being unruly and disorganized, but also full of energy and an astute political mind. His oeuvre is closely bound up with his unconventional vision of life; he prized self-realization and self-dramatization. Frieberger documented his surroundings in thousands of photographs, worked on paintings and objects, and built sculptures out of detritus. In his “Pig Altar,” the artist created an ostensible cult object. But what is the cult about? At the center of the material assemblage of wooden planks and straw, overpainted and partly pasted over, appears the pig as the object of veneration—complemented, in blue letters somewhere far down, by the term “art.”

Not on display