Pippa Garner, whose Pop cyborg sculpture won a cult following, has died.
Garner first gained fans in 1969 for Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car), a sculpture in which the front of a slick, silver-painted Volkswagen, scaled down, is fused with the lower half of a naked man in a semi-crouch position. It was a weird vision that sought both to send up the hyper-masculinity and car culture of her adopted Los Angeles, and foregrounded her interest in gender and trans issues.
In 1982 Garner produced the Better Living Catalog, a mock home shopping brochure for the ‘absolute necessities for contemporary survival’ – including a shower in a can, a proto-Tamagotchi and a blender in a backpack. Writing in ArtReview of the work, exhibited again in Garner’s 2024 retrospective at White Columns, New York, Cassie Packard notes how ‘Garner’s mail-order catalogue pleasurably poked fun at American DIY ingenuity while skewering the desire that capitalism manufactures for nonsensical products’. While museums seemed confused by this absurdist gesture, it proved sufficiently beguiling to a wider public to land the artist an appearance on The Tonight Show.
Assigned male at birth, Garner was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1942. Her father worked for an advertising agency focused on the motor industry, and Garner followed a similar path, providing illustrations to the Los Angeles magazine and Car & Driver for many years. She served as a combat artist during the Vietnam War, before falling in with LA luminaries including Ed Ruscha and Chris Burden, though never quite reaching their commercial success. In the mid-1980s, Garner began taking black-market oestrogen, and then prescribed hormones and underwent multiple surgeries, which recent shows at the Hammer Museum, Whitney Biennial, and Art Omi have presented as artistic collaborations.
One of the later works on view at the White Columns exhibition, Un(tit)led (HE 2 SHE) (1995), is a photograph of custom license plate, which reads ‘HE 2 SHE’. In a social media post announcing her death, the artist’s representatives noted: ‘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.’
