Pippa Garner, an artist who poked fun at consumerism in sculptures and performances that gained a cult following, died at 82 in Los Angeles on December 30, 2024. She had been battling leukemia.
The news was announced via Instagram in Garner’s name that is run by friends of the artist, who was legally blind at the time of her passing. A statement accompanying the notice of Garner’s death read: “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.”
Garner’s work is by turns bawdy and incisive. It has much to say about the gender binary, a distinctly American obsession with inventions, and the revolutionary potential of bodily transformation. But her art is also the kind intended to elicit laughter, filled as it is with racy double entendres.
She crafted a car that seemed to drive backward. She produced drawings of “impossible inventions” that had little real-world purpose. And during the mid-1980s, she transitioned, called the act of taking estrogen an “art project” and a form of “gender hacking.”
Across her various bodies of work, Garner kept her viewers on their toes and strove for self-liberation.
“It’s like there are two versions of me: when one starts to get comfortable, the antagonist comes in and stirs things up,” she told Art in America in 2023. “I love that—it’s good to be separated. It’s like when I look in the mirror and think, My body is just an appliance. It’s mine to play with, so I’m going to have some fun with it.”
While Garner has in the past few years built up a sizable following, much of her art was not publicly exhibited until recently. Between 1986 and 2014, she had exactly one solo exhibition.
Shows at Los Angeles’s STARS gallery and JOAN art space and a traveling survey organized by Germany’s Kunstverein München led to appearances in the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA exhibition and the Whitney Biennial in 2023 and 2024, respectively. In 2023, Garner also staged a performance at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and had another survey at Art Omi in Ghent, New York.
She was born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Her mother was a “frustrated housewife,” as she described it. Her father sold ads to car companies, and this instilled in her a long-term fascination with automobiles, whose human-like qualities she prized. “Back then, cars symbolized freedom, and all boys were interested in cars,” she told A.i.A. “Now, they don’t symbolize freedom so much as just transportation.”
During the ’50s, her family relocated to Detroit. In the next decade, she briefly worked on an assembly line at a Chrysler plant. Garner said she received a notice informing her that if she didn’t go to school, she would be drafted to fight in America’s war in Vietnam. That brought her to Los Angeles’s Art Center College of Design.
After less than a year at the school, Garner was drafted as a combat artist, a job that required to her sketch and photograph what she saw. She felt her work was objective: “We were not promoting the war; we were just commenting on it,” she told Cultured. But when she was sent to Hawaii, galleries refused to show the work, leaving her so enraged that she wrote a local publication about it. Much to her surprise, the newspaper printed her letter, and she ended up receiving an army commendation medal.
The war left her with more than just memories. In interviews, she said that exposure to Agent Orange ultimately led to the cancer she faced in her final years.
Upon her return to the US, Garner enrolled in—and dropped out of—the Cleveland Institute of Art. She also re-enrolled at the Art Center in LA, then dropped out of that school, too. She was at an impasse: she’d attended school with the hopes of becoming a designer, but she felt the profession was too corporate and too self-important. That moved her to strike out in a different direction.
While working for a toy company and doing commercial projects for West magazine and the Los Angeles Times, Garner began making her own art. Among her earliest major works was Backwards Car (1974), a ’59 Chevy that she altered so that it appeared to face the wrong way as it moved forward. She later recalled the work as “a spoof on mass production—like, what if the assembly line backfired?”
In 2023, she reprised the piece, this time titling it Haulin’ Ass. For this new work, she outfitted an ’03 Ford Ranger pick-up truck with a pair of faux testicles attached to its bumper.
During the late ’70s and early ’80s, Garner began altering her appearance and clothes. In 1982, she appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson wearing a “half-suit,” for which her shirt and jacket were cut away to provide a glimpse at her chiseled midriff. The unusual garb was a play on styles that were fashionable for women at the time.
Not long afterward, Garner began to transition, purchasing black-market estrogen. During the ’90s, she then underwent gender confirmation surgery.
She viewed her transition as a continuation of her car-related works. “I thought, with all this energy that I was putting into altering consumer appliances from the assembly line, can’t that be adapted to the human body?” she told T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2023. “If I can work with a waffle iron, why not the body?”
In her art, she continued to meditate on similar themes. One 1996 drawing depicts what it advertises as “Products for Personal Promotion,” including a “Primaltrax Body Scent Stamp” that affixes one odor to an object of their choosing. Text beside it reads: “It works for animals, it can work for you!”
Works like these may have initially proved elusive, but they now have found their audience. “We now have language for someone like Garner, terms such as nonbinary, genderqueer, and transgender,” a 2022 Vogue profile noted. “But back in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, Garner’s approach to gender was often misunderstood, resulting in isolation from many of her former peers and supporters, not to mention the art world. A confluence of cultural updates have set the stage for Garner’s recent rediscovery, from the dawning of a new, expansive queer and feminist consciousness to the flattening of distinctions between artistic mediums and fields thanks to the Internet and social media.”
Garner hardly seemed flattered by all that attention, however. In an X-TRA interview, she said she would continue on as she had before.
“I think of my body as art, as a resource, as an object,” she said. “Objectification is supposed to be a bad thing, but I love it.”
The post “Pippa Garner, Inventive Artist Who Satirized Consumerism, Dies at 82” by Alex Greenberger was published on 01/02/2025 by www.artnews.com