The conceptual artwork trailblazer Philippa “Pippa” Venus Garner died on 30 December in Los Angeles from problems of lymphocytic lekeumia at age 82, in response to an Instagram submit from her official account.
Her loss of life was confirmed by Christopher Schwartz of Stars Gallery, the Los Angeles venue representing Garner. The gallery opened a two-part solo present of Garner’s work in November, Misc. Pippa, which stays on view till 18 January; the New York portion of the present, at Matthew Brown Gallery, is on view till 25 January.
The doyene of in-betweenness shall be remembered for her sardonic commentary on American consumerism and witty visible challenges to the mundane. The assertion written by associates of the artist to announce her loss of life reads partly: “She needed a trans president, common healthcare, the tip of testosterone toxicity overload and pet-troll-eum, hormones for all, lusty dwelling to the very finish.”
Garner’s work, which ranged in medium from bracing drawings to cheeky sculptural innovations and outright engineering tasks, forged an irreverent gaze upon the gender normativity and advertising ethos of her cultural milieu. Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Garner grew up with a father who labored in promoting for a ladies’s journal, gleaning inspiration from their journeys to print retailers throughout her childhood.
After a flip engaged on an meeting line in Detroit, Garner studied industrial design on the ArtCenter School of Design in California in an try to keep away from being drafted into the Vietnam Conflict. Her makes an attempt have been in useless, and she or he spent over a yr as a fight artist documenting motion on the bottom. Garner overtly mentioned her publicity to Agent Orange, which may have performed a task in her eventual prognosis of leukemia. She additionally misplaced her sight to glaucoma on the finish of her life.
After her deployment, Garner returned to ArtCenter, the place she cemented her popularity as a provocateur together with her senior mission, Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Automotive) (1969), an automotive prototype depicting a human-car hybrid urinating on a map of Detroit, the centre of army automobile manufacturing throughout the Vietnam Conflict. Whereas Kar-Mann might have led to her expulsion from college, she ultimately discovered work in business images, with purchasers that included Vogue and Playboy.
Pippa Garner’s Haulin’ Ass!, a 2003 Ford Ranger made to appear to be it’s driving backwards and sporting a powerful pair of truck nuts, was a fixture at Frieze Los Angeles 2024 Eric Thayer
In 1974, Esquire financially backed and revealed documentation of Garner’s profession breakthrough, Backwards Automotive, a used Chevrolet she doctored to appear to be it was driving the improper manner. The mission was met with speedy public fascination and catalysed the artist’s subsequent part as an object-hacker, intervening within the mechanical features of mundane objects to weird and nonsensical impact. (A associated mission, Haulin’ Ass! from 2023, was a part of the general public programming eventually yr’s version of Frieze Los Angeles.)
Her 1982 Higher Residing Catalogue, revealed previous to her gender transition within the mid-80s, put her on the map as an arbiter of oddities, in the end resulting in a visitor look on The Tonight Present Starring Johnny Carson during which she wore a cropped swimsuit jacket to debut a wide range of ineffective, tongue-in-cheek devices, like a palm-frond umbrella, a baseball cap for 2 and high-heeled curler skates. Higher Residing made gentle of the absurdities of commercialism by means of tinkering interventions, a logic she utilized to her personal physique later that decade by means of using black-market hormones.
“I keep in mind wanting within the mirror in the future—this was within the Nineteen Eighties—and I believed, ‘Hey, I’m an object, too. I’m simply one other equipment,'” she was quoted recalling within the press launch for a 2023 exhibition at White Columns in New York.
She meant it: after a motorcycle collision with a automobile in 2000, her left leg was surgically reconstructed. She had it tattooed from the knee down with a woodgrain sample, considered one of a number of ink-forward modifications she underwent to enrich extra traditional gender-affirming surgical procedures. Her anarchic, fluid relationship with gender presentation reworked her physique into one of many many instruments she used for self-expression. “I might have had the identical angle towards no matter physique I obtained,” Garner advised Frieze in 2023.
Element of Pippa Garner’s Inventor’s Workplace (2021–24) on the 2024 Whitney Biennial Benjamin Sutton
Whereas Garner’s creative manufacturing, particularly of graphite drawings and graphic tees, by no means slowed, she not often exhibited between 1986 and 2014, bursting again into in style consciousness with a presentation at New York’s Spring Break artwork honest in 2015. A spate of extremely regarded solo exhibits adopted, spurring renewed curiosity in her inventive persona and output. This culminated within the inclusion of her set up Inventor’s Workplace (2021-24) within the Whitney Museum of American Artwork’s 2024 Biennial in New York. Garner additionally participated within the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial in 2023; the exhibition at White Columns additionally traveled to Germany, Switzerland and France. Her return to the highlight was accompanied by the publication of two monographs, Act Like You Know Me (2023) and Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf (2024).
Whereas Garner’s public life was outlined by forthrightness and connections with the likes of Chris Burden, Ed Ruscha, and avant-garde collective Ant Farm, her non-public life proved extra inscrutable. She had a youthful sister from whom she was estranged. Her marriage to Nancy Reese, a painter who was Garner’s conduit to the late Seventies artwork scene, led to divorce.
Garner’s holistic inventive outlook—much less narrowly political than personally proof against uniformity—reached each facet of her observe, together with her interviews. “I’m simply having an excellent time”, she advised Frieze in 2023. “There’s a lot on the market, it’s laborious to know, however I did what I may with what I had.”
