Pippa Garner, “Un(tit)led (Self-Portrait in Hospital)” (1997/2024), scanned Kodachrome slide, ink-jet print, 39 3/8 x 26 3/8 inches (100 x 67 cm), version one in every of 5, 2 AP (picture courtesy Stars Gallery)
Conceptual artist and creator Philippa “Pippa” Venus Garner died on Monday, December 30, in Los Angeles as reported on the artist’s Instagram account managed by her pals. Lately, the artist battled with persistent lymphocytic leukemia and imaginative and prescient issues that left her legally blind. She was 82 years outdated at her loss of life.
“She wanted a trans president, universal healthcare, the end of testosterone toxicity overload and pet-troll-eum, hormones for all, lusty living to the very end,” says the Instagram publish asserting the artist’s loss of life.
Garner is Remembered for her incisive wit, cheeky performances and parodies, and impractical innovations laden with sarcastic commentary. She was born Philip Garner in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, to a father in promoting for McCall’s ladies’s journal and a mom who was a homemaker. Garner started drawing and inventing issues as a baby and was deeply influenced by visits to the print outlets together with her father.
A view of Pippa Garner’s “Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car)” (1969), which led to her expulsion from ArtCenter in 1969 (picture courtesy Artwork Omi)
After a quick stint on an meeting line at a Chrysler plant in Detroit, Garner studied Industrial Design on the ArtCenter School of Design in Pasadena, California, in an effort to defer her draft within the Vietnam Warfare and pursue a profession in car design. Garner was in the end drafted throughout her research and spent over a 12 months serving as a fight artist documenting what was occurring on the bottom. Garner famous in interviews that she was uncovered to the lethal chemical herbicide Agent Orange throughout her time in Vietnam, which may be linked to her prognosis of lymphocytic leukemia.
When Garner returned to the ArtCenter after her deployment, she acquired consideration with “Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car)” (1969), a satirical prototype designed for her senior challenge that morphed into the underside half of a person urinating on the map of Detroit — dwelling of automobile manufacturing giants like Normal Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, all of which produced army autos for the Vietnam Warfare. She was expelled from the varsity after the stunt however remained within the Los Angeles space, discovering work at a toy design firm and doing industrial images initiatives for the Los Angeles Instances Sunday complement West journal, adopted by bigger shoppers like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Playboy.
Pippa Garner, Backwards Automobile (1973–74), efficiency documentation on Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco (photograph by Jeff Cohen, courtesy the artist and Stars Gallery)
In 1974, Esquire financed one in every of Garner’s career-defining initiatives — her return to the car by means of “Backwards Car” (1974), a used Chevrolet that she altered to seem as if it was driving backward. The challenge was a sensation that drew worldwide consideration after she drove it over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
Automobile-hacking quickly expanded into object-hacking and garment-hacking. In 1982, she revealed Philip Garner’s Higher Dwelling Catalogue, a mock mail-order catalog stuffed with nonsensical hybrid innovations that earned her a visitor look on the Tonight Present Starring Johnny Carson that very same 12 months. She introduced down the home by donning a “Half-Suit” and debuting her “Palm-brella,” high-heeled curler skates, a baseball cap retrofitted to accommodate two heads, a shower-in-a-can, and quite a lot of different prototypes that provide satirical options to each on a regular basis and fictitious issues — all of which jabbed on the tradition of consumerism in the US.
Within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, nevertheless, Garner launched into the last word transformation: body-hacking. She started tinkering with doses of black-market hormones after failing to obtain a prescription from her physician.
“In my earlier work, I was always using objects that were consumer goods, things that came off assembly lines,” she defined on the event of her 2023 solo exhibition at New York’s White Columns. “I remember looking in the mirror one day — this was in the ’80s — and I thought, ‘Hey, I’m an object, too. I’m just another appliance.’”
Garner had a fluid expertise with gender and transitioning, noting in her 2019 interview with the Los Angeles-based artwork journal X-tra that “after five years of taking hormones, I realized I was never going to go back and assume the male endocrine profile — but I wasn’t thinking about becoming a woman.”
“When I decided to go through with sex reassignment surgery, as they called it then, it became more of an art project,” Garner continued. “I was always really body impulsive or body obsessive.”
Garner’s body-hacking didn’t finish with breast implants and backside surgical procedure, however expanded right into a panorama of suggestive tattoos starting from a pink brassiere protecting her enhanced chest (“Even if I gain 300 pounds, it will still fit,” she mentioned of the piece), to a G-string with the crotch pulled apart and the waistband full of Monopoly payments. Her left leg was surgically reconstructed after a automobile hit her bike in 2000, so she had it inked with a woodgrain sample from the knee down.
An instance of one in every of Pippa Garner’s myriad graphic tees (picture courtesy the artist and Artwork Omi)
Regardless of churning out work for the subsequent 30 years, most notably graphite drawings resembling “Gardening” (1996) and a unending stream of novelty graphic tees with saucy imagery and wordplay, Garner hardly exhibited between 1986 and 2014. She contributed solely to a bunch exhibition in 1997 earlier than bursting again onto the scene in 2015 by means of her presentation on the Spring Break artwork truthful in New York. This reignited pleasure round her apply and persona yielded a number of solo exhibits throughout the nation, from Tinker Tantrum (2017) and Immaculate Misconceptions (2021) in Los Angeles to $ell Your $elf (2023) at Artwork Omi in Ghent, New York. Garner’s set up “Inventor’s Office” (2021–24) was included within the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Her touring exhibition, Act Like You Know Me, was proven at museums and galleries in France, Switzerland, and Germany over the past two years earlier than touchdown at White Columns.
“Pippa insisted that materials are forever at play: tinkering with banal turns of phrase, cheap knick-knacks, muscle cars, and even her own body, no material was relegated to the predicament of being fixed or abandoned,” mentioned Sara O’Keeffe, the senior curator behind Garner’s $ell Your $elf at Artwork Omi, in a press release to Hyperallergic.
Set up views of Pippa Garner’s solo exhibition $ell Your $elf (2023) at Artwork Omi in Ghent, New York (photographs by Gregory Carideo, courtesy Artwork Omi)
“Pippa revived materials with their lusty potential, thumbing her nose at assimilationist narratives,” O’Keeffe continued. “Her project was to tickle something loose in all of us, to remind us that everything is up for grabs, that it can be resuscitated yet. Defiant and filled with mischief to the bitter end, Pippa refused to accept the world as we know it; she invited us all to remake the world on our own terms.”
A twin presentation of Garner’s solo exhibition Misc. Pippa is at present on view at Matthew Brown Gallery in New York Metropolis by means of January 24 and Stars Gallery in Los Angeles by means of January 18.
