Pippa Garner, a conceptual artwork provocateur whose radically modified client items — like a midriff-baring males’s “Half Swimsuit” and a ’59 Chevy with its chassis reversed — provided witty commentary on gender, physique modification, American automotive tradition and the boundaries of tremendous artwork, died on Dec. 30 in Los Angeles. She was 82.
Her loss of life, at a convalescent hospital, was confirmed by Christopher Schwartz of Stars Gallery in Los Angeles, which represented her. She had a variety of well being issues, most notably persistent lymphocytic leukemia, he mentioned. She had gone by gender transitioning within the mid-Nineteen Eighties.
Although Ms. Garner’s drawings, sculptures and innovations usually had a satirical chunk, they have been pushed not by any political agenda a lot as by her sheer curiosity about herself and the world she lived in. In consequence, they have been, usually, very entertaining.
Earlier than 2015, when she started an explosive run of exhibitions accompanied by the publication of two monographs — “Act Like You Know Me” and “Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf” — Ms. Garner was greatest identified for “Philip Garner’s Higher Residing Catalog,” a compilation of her fantastical, flagrantly pointless devices and equipment. It was printed in 1982, beneath her start identify, earlier than she transitioned.
The amount showcased, amongst different issues, lowrider curler skates, a birdbath Jacuzzi, a palm-frond umbrella and a tool for capturing rubbish out your kitchen window.
The ebook made a splash, and Ms. Garner quickly appeared on “The Tonight Present Starring Johnny Carson” to advertise the “Half-Swimsuit” (whereas carrying it).
Ms. Garner briefly educated as an industrial designer and served within the U.S. Military as a fight artist through the Vietnam Conflict earlier than turning into a prolific photographer and sketch artist.
For years she made a dwelling offering exact, whimsical drawings of innovations, like these within the “Higher Residing Catalog,” for magazines, together with Rolling Stone, Esquire and Playboy. She favored to level out that her work in these venues was seen by lots of of 1000’s of individuals slightly than the few hundred who would possibly go to an artwork gallery.
“I believe it’s attainable to be a extremely inventive artist in any medium you need, and it may be a industrial medium,” she mentioned in a 2019 interview.
On the similar time, she pursued bold, typically automobile-focused artwork tasks, a lot of which have been misplaced or destroyed. One — a sculpture of an anthropomorphic automotive elevating its leg over a map of Detroit — bought her expelled from the ArtCenter Faculty of Design in Pasadena, Calif.
Typically her journal connections converged together with her extra unconventional work. In 1974, Esquire journal funded, after which printed an article about, a piece she known as “Backwards Automotive,” for which she eliminated, reversed and reattached the chassis of a 1959 Chevrolet sedan in order that, when she took it out over the Golden Gate Bridge, it appeared like she was driving backward.
Amongst different automotive creations have been a “nauti-mobile,” a automotive with a yacht-like cockpit; and “The World’s Most Gas-Environment friendly Automotive,” a 1972 Honda powered by recumbent bicycles. (For her personal on a regular basis transportation, Ms. Garner most well-liked human-powered wheels, and he or she held a patent on a sort of push scooter.)
In latest a long time, in a collection she known as “Shirtstorm,” she labored with T-shirts, printing one-off slogans on them, or ironing them on; amongst them, “Iraqi Horror Image Present,” “I’d slightly Butter myself than Higher myself,” “Nothing Exists That Wasn’t There in The First Place” and “These Are My Stays.”
Ms. Garner started her gender transition in 1986 after medical doctors refused to prescribe hormones to her with out a therapist’s be aware, main her to take doses of estrogen obtained illicitly. In 1988, she bought a print by the artist Ed Ruscha, an acquaintance, to pay for breast implants. Later, she had a bra and panties tattooed on her physique.
She spoke forthrightly, if not all the time constantly, about her transition, generally recalling her discomfort with each facet of the identification she was born into, white and middle-class included. Most frequently she described the method as simply one other inventive experiment.
“With a intercourse change,” she mentioned, “you’re making a visible assertion.”
In her telling, this framing of her transition alienated different artists and trans folks alike, at the very least initially. But it surely additionally anticipated modern questions on what counts as artwork and the way we take into consideration gender — and it encapsulated her total way of living.
“Her physique, her life — it’s all supply materials,” Mr. Schwartz mentioned in an interview. “She lived it. It’s actual.”
Or as Ms. Garner herself put it in an interview in The New York Occasions Journal in 2023: “I believed, with all this power that I used to be placing into altering client home equipment from the meeting line, can’t that be tailored to the human physique? If I can work with a waffle iron, why not the physique? I have already got one, and it’s for me to resolve what I need to do with it.”
Ms. Garner, who took the center identify Venus, was born in Evanston, Unwell., on Might 22, 1942, to Richard and Mary (Hubbard) Garner. Her father was an promoting government with McCall’s journal. Her mom earned a grasp’s diploma in English after overseeing the house for a while.
Ms. Garner had a youthful sister from whom she was apparently estranged. A wedding to the painter Nancy Reese, who launched Ms. Garner to the artwork scene within the late Nineteen Seventies, resulted in divorce. No info on survivors was out there.
Ms. Garner’s household moved across the Midwest when she was a toddler, and although she drew and tinkered continually, she struggled at school. She ultimately handed by a number of artwork colleges earlier than being drafted into the Military in 1965. As an grownup, she lived in Los Angeles, London, the Bay Space, Santa Fe, N.M., and Lengthy Seaside, Calif.; socialized with artists like Mr. Ruscha and Chris Burden; and labored with the Bay Space avant-garde collective Ant Farm.
Her work started getting wider consideration in 2015, when it appeared on the Spring/Break Artwork Present at Moynihan Station in New York. Solo exhibitions at Redling Gallery in Los Angeles adopted, in 2017 and 2018. Her first institutional solo present in Europe, “Act Like You Know Me,” opened on the Kunstverein Munich in 2022 earlier than touring to Zurich; Metz, France; and New York. Her first American museum solo, “Pippa Garner: $ell Your $elf,” opened at Artwork Omi, within the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, in 2023.
Ms. Garner additionally participated within the Hammer Museum’s biennial in Los Angeles in 2023 and the Whitney Museum of American Artwork’s biennial in New York in 2024. A present present, “Misc. Pippa,” her second solo at Stars Gallery, opened in November.
She was identified with persistent lymphocytic leukemia in about 2010. The situation was linked to publicity to Agent Orange, an herbicide utilized by the American navy in Vietnam. During the last decade or so she additionally misplaced her sight to glaucoma.
Interviews, like every little thing, have been inventive alternatives for Ms. Garner, however her bons mots would have been far much less hanging with out their ring of fact. Requested final yr what recommendation she would give to a younger artist who appeared as much as her, she replied, “I attempted to set an instance that no person else can comply with.”
