Pippa Garner, art and gender provocateur, has died, aged 82

The conceptual artwork trailblazer Philippa “Pippa” Venus Garner died on 30 December in Los Angeles from issues of lymphocytic lekeumia at age 82, based on an Instagram publish 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 will likely 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 partially: “She wished a trans president, common healthcare, the top of testosterone toxicity overload and pet-troll-eum, hormones for all, lusty residing to the very finish.”

Garner’s work, which ranged in medium from bracing drawings to cheeky sculptural innovations and outright engineering initiatives, forged an irreverent gaze upon the gender normativity and advertising and marketing 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 outlets throughout her childhood.

After a flip engaged on an meeting line in Detroit, Garner studied industrial design on the ArtCenter Faculty of Design in California in an try to keep away from being drafted into the Vietnam Battle. Her makes an attempt had been in useless, and she or he spent over a 12 months as a fight artist documenting motion on the bottom. Garner brazenly mentioned her publicity to Agent Orange, which might have performed a job in her eventual analysis 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 status as a provocateur along with her senior venture, Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Automobile) (1969), an automotive prototype depicting a human-car hybrid urinating on a map of Detroit, the centre of army automobile manufacturing throughout the Vietnam Battle. Whereas Kar-Mann might have led to her expulsion from college, she ultimately discovered work in business pictures, with purchasers that included Vogue and Playboy.

In 1974, Esquire financially backed and revealed documentation of Garner’s profession breakthrough, Backwards Automobile, a used Chevrolet she doctored to appear to be it was driving the unsuitable means. The venture was met with instant public fascination and catalysed the artist’s subsequent part as an object-hacker, intervening within the mechanical capabilities of mundane objects to weird and nonsensical impact. (A associated venture, Haulin’ Ass! from 2023, was a part of the general public programming ultimately 12 months’s version of Frieze Los Angeles.)

Her 1982 Higher Dwelling 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 Dwelling made mild of the absurdities of commercialism by means of tinkering interventions, a logic she utilized to her personal physique later that decade by means of the usage of black-market hormones.

“I bear in mind wanting within the mirror someday—this was within the Nineteen Eighties—and I assumed, ‘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, one among a number of ink-forward modifications she underwent to enhance extra basic 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 perspective towards no matter physique I received,” Garner instructed Frieze in 2023.

Whereas Garner’s inventive manufacturing, particularly of graphite drawings and graphic tees, by no means slowed, she hardly ever exhibited between 1986 and 2014, bursting again into fashionable consciousness with a presentation at New York’s Spring Break artwork truthful in 2015. A spate of extremely regarded solo reveals 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 Nineteen 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 a great time”, she instructed Frieze in 2023. “There’s a lot on the market, it’s laborious to know, however I did what I might with what I had.”