Conceptual artist and author Philippa “Pippa” Venus Garner died on Monday, December 30 in Los Angeles, as reported on the Artist’s Instagram account managed by her friends. In recent years, the artist has struggled with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and eyesight problems that left her legally blind. She was 82 years old at her death.
“She wanted a trans president, universal healthcare, an end to testosterone overload and troll-eum, hormones for everyone, a lustful life until the end,” says the Instagram post announcing the artist’s death.
Garner is remembered for her sharp wit, cheeky performances and parodies, and impractical inventions laden with sarcastic commentary. She was born Philip Garner in Evanston, Illinois, in 1942, the son of a father who advertised McCalls women’s magazine and a mother who was a housewife. Garner started drawing and inventing things as a child and was deeply influenced by visits to the printing works with her father.
After a brief stint on the assembly line at a Chrysler plant in Detroit, Garner studied Industrial Design at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, in an effort to defer her Vietnam War design career and pursue a career in automotive design to strive for. Garner was eventually drafted while in college and spent more than a year as a martial artist documenting what was happening on the ground. Garner commented job interviews that she had been exposed to the deadly chemical herbicide Agent Orange during her time in Vietnam, which may be related to her diagnosis of lymphocytic leukemia.
When Garner returned to the ArtCenter after her deployment, she gained attention with “Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car)” (1969), a satirical prototype designed for her senior project that turned into the lower half of a man appearing on the map urinated. of Detroit – home to automakers such as General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, all of which produced military vehicles for the Vietnam War. She was expelled from school after the stunt but remained in the Los Angeles area, finding work at a toy design company and doing commercial photography projects for the Los Angeles Times Sunday addition West magazine, followed by larger clients such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue, And Playboy.
In 1974, Esquire financed one of Garner’s career-defining projects: her return to the car through ‘Backwards Car’ (1974), a used Chevrolet that she modified to look like it was driving in reverse. The project was a sensation that attracted international attention after she drove it over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Car hacking soon expanded to object hacking and clothing hacking. She published in 1982 Philip Garner’s Better Living cataloguea mock mail-order catalog full of nonsensical hybrid inventions that landed her a cameo appearance Tonight’s show starring Johnny Carson that same year. She brought down the house by donning a ‘Half-Suit’ and debuting her ‘Palm-brella’: high-heeled roller skates, a baseball cap retrofitted to accommodate two heads, a shower-in- a can and a variety of other prototypes that offer satirical solutions to both mundane and fictional issues problems – all of which are affecting the culture of consumerism in the United States.
In the mid-1980s, however, Garner embarked on the ultimate transformation: body hacking. She started tinkering with doses of hormones on the black market after failing to get a prescription from her doctor.
“In my previous work I always used objects that were consumer goods, things that came off the assembly line,” she explained on the occasion of her 2023 solo exhibition in New York. 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 device. ”
Garner had a fluid experience with gender and transition, she noted in her 2019 interview with the Los Angeles-based art magazine X-tra that “after five years of taking hormones, I realized I would never adopt the male endocrine profile again – but I wasn’t thinking about becoming a woman.”
“When I decided to go through with gender reassignment surgery, as they called it then, it became more of an art project,” Garner continued. “I was always very body impulsive or body obsessive.”
Garner’s body hacking didn’t end with breast implants and butt surgery, but expanded to a landscape of suggestive tattoos ranging from a pink bra covering her enhanced chest (“Even if I gain 300 pounds, it’ll still fit,” she says said of the piece), into a G-string with the crotch pulled to the side and the waistband filled with Monopoly bills. Her left leg was surgically reconstructed after a car hit her bicycle in 2000, so she had it colored from the knee down with a wood grain pattern.
Even though there is work to be done for the next 30 years, especially graphite drawings such as “Gardening” (1996) and an endless stream of new graphic T-shirts with provocative images and punsGarner hardly exhibited between 1986 and 2014. She only contributed a group exhibition in 1997 before returning to the scene in 2015 through her presentation at the Spring Break art fair in New York. This renewed excitement around her practice and personality yielded multiple solo shows across the country Tinker tantrum (2017) and Impeccable misconceptions (2021) in Los Angeles to $el your $elf (2023) at Art Omi in Ghent, New York. Garner’s installation “Inventor’s Office” (2021–24) was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. traveling exhibition, Pretend you know mewas shown in museums and galleries in France, Switzerland and Germany over the past two years before ending up at White Columns.
“Pippa insisted that materials always play a role: by tinkering with banal turns of phrase, cheap trinkets, muscle cars and even her own body, no material was relegated to the predicament of being repaired or abandoned,” said Sara O’Keeffe, the senior curator behind Garner’s $el your $elf at Art Omi, in a statement to Hyperallergic.
“Pippa revived materials with their lustful potential, turning her nose up at assimilationist narratives,” O’Keeffe continued. “Her project was to unleash something in all of us, to remind us that everything is up for grabs, that it can still be brought back to life. 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 double presentation of Garner’s solo exhibition Miscellaneous Pippa is currently on display at Matthew Brown Gallery in New York City through January 24 and Star Gallery in Los Angeles through January 18.
