High-heeled roller skates, palm-leaf umbrellas, and canned showers are just a few of Pippa Garner’s hundreds of inventions. For the past 50 years, artists have satirized US consumption habits with designs that weren’t always entirely helpful. From her car to her own body, few things escape her restless and imaginative tinkering. In her words, she’s “gender hacking,” which she started in the mid-1980s. That’s why art authorities have long treated the 81-year-old Garner as her fringe, a reckless inventor, rather than a conceptual artist in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Maybe.
But this year, things seem to be changing for Garner. art omiThe exhibition includes a recreation of Garner’s 1974 sculpture and performance “Backwards Car.” In this piece, Garner lifted his ’59 Chevrolet chassis, flipped it over, and seemed to be going the wrong way as he drove over the Golden Gate Bridge. He has meticulous pencil and ink drawings of unrealized inventions that satirize magazine advertisements. (Some of her most ambitious works were commissioned by actual publications such as Esquire and Rolling Stone..) T-shirts printed with Garner’s sarcastic primordial meme images and slogans, including one featuring actor Gary Busey and the words “I will pay my stalker a living wage” in all caps. It contains. They are displayed alongside the midriff-baring cropped blazer suit Garner wore during his 1982 appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” just before he transitioned. .
Garner’s work will also be featured in the fall. Made in LA It is held every other year at the Hammer Museum, not far from her home in Los Angeles. (Over the years, she has been seen traversing the neighborhood in one of the few four-wheeled pedal cars she designed and built.) will be held concurrently with the US itinerary of the Traveling Career Research Exhibition. And by publishing a book in October, Garner has become a key figure in parallel with other West Coast artists who criticized post-war consumerism, mass media, and car culture, such as Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden, and Ant Farm. I will try to reconfigure. .
Born in 1942 in Naperville, Illinois, Garner recalls feeling alienated from the normative culture of the suburbs at an early age. After her father, who sold magazine ads to automobile companies, moved the family to Gross Point, a suburb of Detroit, in the late 1950s, she asked her artistic son to apply his creativity to automobile design. recommended to do so. What excites her most is that she thinks there is still animism in the anthropomorphic quality of her cars and what she represents: various consumer goods. “All the cars back then had really distinctive faces, and the headlights were the eyes,” she says. “The Buick had a tooth grille that looked like a big mockery. The Seneca had a kind of rocket nose.” created the sculpture ‘Karman (half man, half car)’, a small replica of the Volkswagen Karmann Ghia with two human-like hind legs cast in . . She believes her school misinterpreted her work as a joke and she was expelled. Rather than reverse her course, Garner concluded that her teachers, and most others, were taking themselves too seriously.
Over the next two decades, Garner’s biggest projects involved scrapped or reconfigured automobiles. In 1976, West Her Magazine commissioned her to build her facsimile house using scrap car parts, complete with chrome her windows made of bonnet her roof and fenders. Her 1986 sculpture “Long Time No Sea” embeds a speedboat cockpit in the roof of her 68 Buick LeSabre, creating what she calls the world’s first “Naughtymobile.” These projects were produced in parallel with Garner’s modified appliances (such as 1982’s “Escudder”). escalator steps), and the early environmental movements brought new attention to the environmental impact of automotive culture and mass consumption. “Pippa likes this idea of preserving these old consumer objects and reviving them for a second life because she was overwhelmed by planned obsolescence,” he said. Fiona Alison Duncan, co-curator of Garner’s touring exhibition and author of an upcoming monograph. Such efforts are early, imaginative efforts aimed at reuse and recycling on an industrial scale.
Garner’s resistance to gender dualism was similarly ahead of its time. “I wondered if we put so much energy into modifying consumer electronics on the assembly line, but how could we adapt it to the human body?” she says. “If I can work with a waffle iron, why can’t I use my body too?” I decide. In the mid-1980s, Garner obtained black market estrogen with the help of transsex workers he met on Hollywood Boulevard, and in 1991 underwent a radical operation, but remained a man for the next two years.Impressive photographs from this era grace the opening of the 1992 exhibition catalog Posthuman. By curator and art dealer Jeffrey Deich: In it, Garner wears a pinstriped suit with cutouts that reveal her new breasts (or “boobs,” as she likes to call them) and wears a sly smile. is looking back at the camera with a smile on her face.
It’s never too early for Garner to get renewed attention from the art world. Last year, she was diagnosed with leukemia, which she believes was caused by contamination with defoliants during a short U.S. military service in Vietnam. Although she’s been riding her bike in Los Angeles less frequently, she wants to see how her work will be received by younger generations. Duncan believes they have a lot to learn from her. “Pippa is like a millennial freelancer,” she says. “She lived on the brink, as almost a whole generation does today. It also shows that you can get the pleasure of By living with grace and plenty of humor without running away from the devastation of America. ”
