Pippa Garner, Ingenious Conceptual Tinkerer, Dies at 82

by Admin
Pippa Garner, Ingenious Conceptual Tinkerer, Dies at 82

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 battled with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and vision problems that left her legally blind. She was 82 years old at her death.

“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 post announcing the artist’s death.

Garner is Remembered for her incisive wit, cheeky performances and parodies, and impractical inventions laden with sarcastic commentary. She was born Philip Garner in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, to a father in advertising for McCall’s women’s magazine and a mother who was a homemaker. Garner began drawing and inventing things as a child and was deeply influenced by visits to the print shops with her father.

After a brief stint on an 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 draft in the Vietnam War and pursue a career in automobile design. Garner was ultimately drafted during her studies and spent over a year serving as a combat artist documenting what was happening on the ground. Garner noted in interviews that she was exposed to the deadly chemical herbicide Agent Orange during her time in Vietnam, which might be linked to her diagnosis of lymphocytic leukemia.

When Garner returned to the ArtCenter after her deployment, she received attention with “Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car)” (1969), a satirical prototype designed for her senior project that morphed into the bottom half of a man urinating on the map of Detroit — home of car manufacturing giants like General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, all of which produced military vehicles for the Vietnam War. She was expelled from the 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 supplement West magazine, followed by larger clients like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Playboy.

In 1974, Esquire financed one of Garner’s career-defining projects — her return to the automobile through “Backwards Car” (1974), a used Chevrolet that she altered to appear as if it was driving backward. The project was a sensation that drew international attention after she drove it over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

Car-hacking soon expanded into object-hacking and garment-hacking. In 1982, she published Philip Garner’s Better Living Catalogue, a mock mail-order catalog full of nonsensical hybrid inventions that earned her a guest appearance on the Tonight 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 everyday and fictitious problems — all of which jabbed at the culture of consumerism in the United States.

YouTube video

In the mid-1980s, however, Garner embarked on the ultimate transformation: body-hacking. She began tinkering with doses of black-market hormones after failing to receive a prescription from her doctor.

“In my earlier work, I was always using objects that were consumer goods, things that came off assembly lines,” she explained on the occasion 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 experience with gender and transitioning, noting in her 2019 interview with the Los Angeles-based art 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 end with breast implants and bottom surgery, but expanded into a landscape of suggestive tattoos ranging from a pink brassiere covering her enhanced chest (“Even if I gain 300 pounds, it will still fit,” she said of the piece), to a G-string with the crotch pulled aside and the waistband stuffed with Monopoly bills. Her left leg was surgically reconstructed after a car hit her bike in 2000, so she had it inked with a woodgrain pattern from the knee down.

Despite churning out work for the next 30 years, most notably graphite drawings such as “Gardening” (1996) and a never-ending stream of novelty graphic tees with saucy imagery and wordplay, Garner hardly exhibited between 1986 and 2014. She contributed only to a group exhibition in 1997 before bursting back onto the scene in 2015 through her presentation at the Spring Break art fair in New York. This reignited excitement around her practice and persona yielded multiple solo shows across the country, from Tinker Tantrum (2017) and Immaculate Misconceptions (2021) in Los Angeles to $ell 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. Her traveling exhibition, Act Like You Know Me, was shown at museums and galleries in France, Switzerland, and Germany over the last two years before landing 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,” said Sara O’Keeffe, the senior curator behind Garner’s $ell Your $elf at Art Omi, in a statement to Hyperallergic.

“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 dual presentation of Garner’s solo exhibition Misc. Pippa is currently on view at Matthew Brown Gallery in New York City through January 24 and Stars Gallery in Los Angeles through January 18.



Source Link

You may also like

Leave a Comment

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.