Conceptual art provocateur Pippa Garner creates radically modified consumer goods, such as a men's half-suit with a belly button exposed and a 1959 Chevrolet with the chassis reversed, that explore gender, body modification, and the American automobile. He provided witty commentary on the boundaries between culture and luxury cars. Art died on December 30th in Los Angeles. She was 82 years old.
Her death was confirmed at a convalescent hospital by her agent, Christopher Schwartz of Stars Gallery in Los Angeles. She had a number of health problems, most notably chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She had undergone a gender transition in the mid-1980s.
Although Ms. Garner's paintings, sculptures, and inventions typically contained satirical elements, they were not driven by political intentions, but rather genuine reflections on herself and the world in which she lived. Driven by curiosity. As a result, they were usually very entertaining. .
Before 2015, when she began mounting an explosive series of exhibitions accompanied by the publication of two books, “Act Like You Know Me” and “Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf,” Ms. Garner called “Philip Garner's Best known for “Better Living.'' Catalog” is a compilation of her fantastical and terribly unnecessary gadgets and accessories. The book was published under her birth name in 1982, before she transitioned.
This volume featured lowrider roller skates, a birdbath Jacuzzi, palm leaf umbrellas, and a device that blew trash out of kitchen windows.
The book went viral, and Garner soon appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” to promote (while still wearing) his “half suit.”
Ms. Garner briefly trained as an industrial designer and served in the U.S. Army as a combat artist during the Vietnam War, before becoming a prolific photographer and sketch artist.
For many years, she made a living by providing magazines such as Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Playboy with accurate, whimsical pictures of inventions such as those featured in the Better Living Catalog. She liked to point out that her work in those venues was seen by hundreds of thousands of people rather than the hundreds visiting art galleries.
“I think it's possible to be a very creative artist in any medium you want, and it could even be a commercial medium,” she said in a 2019 interview.
At the same time, she pursued ambitious art projects focused on automobiles, many of which were lost or destroyed. One, a sculpture of an anthropomorphic car with its feet raised above a map of Detroit, got her expelled from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
The magazine connection sometimes led to her more unconventional work. In 1974, Esquire magazine funded and published a piece she called “Backwards Car.'' In this piece, she removed the chassis of a 1959 Chevrolet sedan, flipped it over, reinstalled it, and when she took the car across the Golden Gate Bridge, she seemed to be driving the wrong way.
Among other car products was the “Naughtymobile”, a car with a yacht-like cockpit. and “the world's most fuel-efficient car,” a 1972 Honda powered by a recumbent bicycle. (Mr. Garner preferred human-powered wheels for everyday transportation and had a patent for a type of push scooter.)
For the past few decades, she has been printing and ironing one-off slogans onto T-shirts in a series she calls “Shirtstorm.” Among them are “Iraq Horror Show”, “Better butter yourself up than make yourself better”, “Nothing exists that wasn't there in the first place”, “These are my ruins” and so on.
Garner began her gender transition in 1986. Her doctor refused to prescribe hormones without a therapist's guidance, so she ended up taking illegally obtained estrogen. In 1988, she sold prints by artist Ed Ruscha to help pay for breast implants. She then got tattoos on her bra and panties.
She spoke candidly, if not always consistently, about her transition, occasionally recalling her discomfort with all aspects of the identity she was born into, including white and middle class. Mostly, she described the process as just a creative experiment.
“When you transition, you make a visual statement,” she said.
She says that framing her transition this way, at least initially, alienated other artists and transgender people alike. But it also anticipates contemporary questions about what counts as art and how we think about gender, and encapsulates her overall approach to life.
“Her body, her life, everything is a source material,” Schwartz said in an interview. “She lived it. That's true.”
Or, as Ms. Garner herself put it in a 2023 New York Times Magazine interview, “We put all this energy into converting consumer electronics off the assembly line, and yet we don't put it into humans.” I wondered if it was possible to adapt the body? If I can work on a waffle iron, why can't I work on my body too? I already have one, so it's up to me to decide what to do with it. ”
Ms. Garner, whose middle name is Venus, was born on May 22, 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, to Richard and Mary (Hubbard) Garner. Her father was an advertising executive at McCall's magazine. Her mother oversaw the house for a while and then earned a master's degree in English.
Garner had a younger sister, but it appears she was estranged from him. Garner's marriage to Nancy Reese, the artist who introduced him to the art scene in the late 1970s, ended in divorce. No information on survivors was available.
Garner's family moved around the Midwest when she was a child, constantly drawing and tinkering, but she struggled in school. She eventually passed through several art schools and was drafted into the Army in 1965. As an adult, I lived in Los Angeles, London, the Bay Area, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Long Beach, California. He interacted with artists like Ruscha and Chris Burden. He collaborated with Bay Area avant-garde group Ant Farm.
Her work began to receive widespread attention in 2015 when it appeared at the Spring/Break Art Show at New York's Moynihan Station. In 2017 and 2018, he had subsequent solo exhibitions at Redring Gallery in Los Angeles. Her first organized solo exhibition in Europe, “Act Like You Know Me,'' opened at the Munich Museum in 2022 and then traveled to Zurich. Metz, France. And New York. Her first solo American art museum, Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf, opened in 2023 at Art Omi in upstate New York's Hudson Valley.
Ms. Garner also participated in the Hammer Museum Biennial in Los Angeles in 2023 and the Whitney Museum Biennial in New York in 2024. “Pippa” is his second solo work at Stars Gallery, which opened in November.
She was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia around 2010. The condition was associated with exposure to the herbicide Orange defoliant used by the U.S. military in Vietnam. Over the past 10 years or so, she has also lost her eyesight to glaucoma.
The interview, like everything else, was a creative opportunity for Ms. Garner, but her statements might not have been as memorable without the ring of truth. When asked last year what advice she would give to young artists who look up to her, she answered, “I tried to set an example that no one else could follow.”
