Alix Lambert

In his introduction, Artforum editor-in-chief Tim Griffin calls Alix Lambert a walking tribute to Frank O'Hara's adage "Grace to be born and live variously as possible." And Lambert does live variously, infiltrating subcultures from tattoo artists to boxers to pilots and NASA staff. Works like her well-known photo and document-based "Wedding Series," in which she married and divorced three men and one woman in the space of six months, and like the multimedia debacle that was Platipussy--a fake all-girl band complete with a video, album, T-shirts and tragedy--show viewers how the artist adapts subcultural signs to discern and evaluate the identity markers that define us. For "Male Pattern Baldness" she shaved her head down the middle. This first book to document Lambert's extensive projects is an image-filled compendium covering the decade-and-a-half from 1991 to 2005 with humor, incisive cultural commentary and formal accomplishment. Texts include Griffin's introduction and a discussion of Platipussy by Vice editor Amy Kellner.