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, in keeping with an Instagram publish from her official account.

Her dying 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 buddies of the artist to announce her dying reads partly: “She needed 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 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 had been in useless, and he or she spent over a yr as a fight artist documenting motion on the bottom. Garner overtly mentioned her publicity to Agent Orange, which might have performed a task 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 popularity as a provocateur along with her senior undertaking, Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Automotive) (1969), an automotive prototype depicting a human-car hybrid urinating on a map of Detroit, the centre of navy automobile manufacturing in the course of the Vietnam Conflict. Whereas Kar-Mann might have led to her expulsion from faculty, she finally discovered work in business pictures, with shoppers that included Vogue and Playboy.

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 approach. The undertaking was met with rapid 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 undertaking, 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 through 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 tinkering interventions, a logic she utilized to her personal physique later that decade by using black-market hormones.

“I bear in mind trying within the mirror sooner or later—this was within the 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 motorbike 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 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’d have had the identical angle towards no matter physique I obtained,” Garner advised Frieze in 2023.

Whereas Garner’s creative 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 honest in 2015. A spate of extremely regarded solo reveals adopted, spurring renewed curiosity in her artistic 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 personal 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 artistic outlook—much less narrowly political than personally immune to uniformity—reached each facet of her follow, together with her interviews. “I’m simply having a great time”, she advised Frieze in 2023. “There’s a lot on the market, it’s exhausting to know, however I did what I might with what I had.”