Min Chen
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Pippa Garner, the Conceptual artist and designer whose playful inventions hacked consumer culture as much as her self, died on December 30, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. She was 82.
The news was shared by Garner’s official Instagram account, which is run by her friends as the artist was legally blind. “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,” a post announcing her passing reads. “For her, heaven was not in the sky but deep in Mother Earth. She will have a green burial in Marin County.”
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Born Philip Garner in Evanston, Illinois, in 1942, the artist grew up at a time of awakening consumerism, as novel gadgets and appliances flooded the postwar market. These inventions, from electric refrigerators to automobiles, captured her imagination as she sought ways to reinvent and subvert their purposes. “Somebody spent a lot of time to make this thing just the way you wanted it,” she told me in 2023. “And now it’s considered to be junk. I thought, well, maybe I can bring them back to life somehow.”
One of her earliest proposals was for a car that morphed into a human body, titled Kar-Mann, conceived during her short-lived stint at the ArtCenter College of Design’s transportation design program in 1969. The design saw her kicked out of the school. But it also led to her seminal 1973 work, Backwards Car, a 1959 Chevy model with its body flipped 180 degrees so it appeared backwards when being driven. An image of the car traveling across the Golden Gate Bridge debuted in the pages of Esquire, before the one-off vehicle was discarded.
Pippa Garner, Backwards Car (1973–74). Performance documentation on Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff Cohen.
Garner would carry that spirit of play and absurdity into numberless other proposed innovations that further satirized consumerism. Collected in 1982’s Better Living Catalog, they ranged from an escalator-ladder hybrid to a half-suit to a clapping alarm clock (some, like the Add-a-Heel, are now embraced by the fashion industry). “I have devoted my every effort to taming the world’s resources through applied technology,” she wrote, not un-cheekily, in the opening to the 1982 volume.
That technology also went toward challenging the presentation of self. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Garner took out irreverent classified ads, showed up on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson in her half-suit and wielding her palmbrella, and commenced gender transition to “fuck around” with her body. She re-christened herself Philippa Venus Garner.
“I didn’t pick who I am or what I look like—those things were assigned to me,” she told me. “It’s not much different than if I went into a thrift shop and bought somebody’s old vacuum cleaner and decided to make a record player out of it. So why can’t I play with my body? What’s stopping me?”
Pippa Garner, Inventor’s Office (2021–24) at the Whitney Biennial 2024. Photo: Audrey Wang.
The past few years have brought renewed recognition for Garner’s singular practice. Recent shows include 2021’s “The Bowels of the Mind” at Jeffrey Stark, her first New York solo outing; 2022’s “Immaculate Misconceptions” at the Verge Center for the Arts in Sacramento, California; 2023’s retrospectives “Act Like You Know Me” at White Columns and “$ELL YOUR $ELF” at Art Omi, which included a revival of Garner’s celebrated Backwards Car as a 2003 Ford Ranger complete with truck nuts. Garner’s work was also included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.
These latter exhibitions also made available selected t-shirts from Garner’s “Shirtstorm” series, printed with her particular turns of phrase, and evidence of her continued engagement with mass media.
“For more than five decades, Pippa embedded her work in the world, often realizing projects outside the confines of galleries, museums, or the boundaries of what has been strictly defined as art. She insisted that materials are forever at play: tinkering with banal turns of phrase, cheap knick-knacks, muscle cars, and even her own body, no material was relegated to the predicament of being fixed or abandoned,” Sarah O’Keeffe, senior curator at Art Omi who organized “$ELL YOUR $ELF,” told me over email.
“Her project was to tickle something loose in all of us, to remind us that it all 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, demanding we each remake the world on our own terms.”
Pippa Garner, I PAY MY STALKER A LIVING WAGE, from the series “Shirtstorm” (c. 2005–). Courtesy of the artist and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles.
Garner’s latest retrospective “Misc. Pippa” is currently on view in twin shows at Matthew Brown in New York (through January 25) and STARS in Los Angeles (through January 18). Where the former delves into her restless innovative mind and features her 2021 sculpture The Bowels of the Mind, the latter offers a more intimate view of the artist’s journey from her remodeling of cars to her reengineering of her own body. “Misc,” as curator Fiona Alison Duncan pointed out, is Garner’s invented honorific to encompass a self that had “become so multiple.”
“I just want to make sure my body ends up where it belongs when I die,” Garner told Duncan in 2024, “in the junkyard with the appliances I’ve made fun of throughout my career.”
