Visual Art
01.17.25
Pippa Garner Aruna D’Souza

From object modification to body modification, a revelatory show of the late artist’s work exhibits consumer culture gone wild.

Pippa Garner: Misc. Pippa, installation view. Courtesy Matthew Brown. Pictured, far left, foreground: Suctionaire Chair, 1989/2024. Center, on wall: Un(tit)led (Blaster Bra), 1982/2024.

Pippa Garner: Misc. Pippa, Matthew Brown Gallery,
390 Broadway, New York City, through January 25, 2025

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Pippa Garner passed away on December 30 at age eighty-two. Her work—drawings, sculptures, and photographs of bizarrely reimagined consumer goods, in which both machines and bodies, especially her own, are subject to DIY hacks—has recently, some might say suddenly, been popping up in museums and galleries around the world. In 2022, the Kunstverein München organized a traveling retrospective, which came to White Columns in 2023. There was another survey at Art Omi that year and a showing in the Hammer’s Made in L.A. show. The most recent Whitney Biennial devoted their whole third-floor space to her. But unlike so many women artists who found fame only at the end of their lives after toiling in relative obscurity for decades, Garner wasn’t some unsung talent—she was a regular on the talk-show circuit (Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, the Today show), a best-selling author (Utopia . . . or Bust! and Better Living Catalog), and a contributor to publications like Vogue, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. Car and Driver, where her illustrations also appeared, ran an obituary.

Pippa Garner: Misc. Pippa, installation view. Courtesy Matthew Brown. Pictured: Subcutaneous Airbag, undated.

Rather, Garner was someone whom the art world—or maybe the world in general—didn’t know what to do with, even as many embraced the humor and incisive wit of her inventive mind. One could call her an illustrator, a sculptor, a performance artist, but even those broad categories seem too constrained. She was a critic of consumer culture not in the sense of “consumer culture is bad,” but in the sense of “if we are so obsessed with consumer objects being extensions of or compensations for the body”—think muscle cars and monster trucks and women’s pink Bic pens and all the weird ways we gender things—“why not just change our bodies?” Starting in the 1980s, she began putting that idea to the test, taking black-market estrogen and getting surgeries as far away as Europe as a form of what she later referred to as “gender hacking.” (The hacking came first; the transition came a few years after.) The result? “My body has gone from a temple to a Winnebago,” Garner once said.

Pippa Garner: Misc. Pippa, installation view at STARS. Courtesy Matthew Brown and STARS. Pictured, left foreground: Kar-mann, 1969/2024.

Misc. Pippa at Matthew Brown is half of a two-part exhibition; the other is on view at STARS in Los Angeles. The Misc. in the title is the bespoke honorific the artist preferred, perfect for someone to whom the standard nomenclature does not apply, someone who understands gender as a consumer technology, a matter of picking and choosing from an array of options, gender binary be damned. The STARS iteration tells a story about how consumer culture opened up new possibilities for thinking about her body and about gender and sexuality, starting with the prototype that got her kicked out of an automotive design program in 1969—Kar-mann, a steel car in the front and a fiberglass man’s bottom half in the back, balls dangling (the original truck nutz?) and one leg raised like a dog mid-pee.

Pippa Garner: Misc. Pippa, installation view. Courtesy Matthew Brown. Pictured: Un(tit)led (Your Waiter Pippa), undated/2024.

The Matthew Brown show, on the other hand, is consumer culture gone wild, pushed to its logical extremes until it’s revealed as a form of madness. It opens with Un(tit)led (Your Waiter Pippa), a photograph depicting the artist, pre-transition, in the guise of a restaurant server—her actual arms carry a tea service while a third, prosthetic one clipped to a bicep carries a tray of cocktails, a neat solution to the fact that the job requires more hands than are generally available on standard (human) models. (Because Garner was not primarily selling her work through art galleries, much of it was destroyed or given away early on, existing now only in the form of the artist’s snapshots or slides. This piece, like many on view here, was made sometime in the 1970s or ’80s; it was printed from a slide in 2024.) A series of undated drawings includes some practical-ish ideas (with an emphasis on the -ish) rendered in a deadpan, industrial design–inspired style. For instance, Quick Fixes proposes using a toilet plunger propped against a tire if your emergency brake isn’t working, wedging cigarettes in the door of your glove compartment to prevent squeaking, or replacing a worn-out gas pedal with a rubber boot heel, while Feature Content imagines filling gas via the rearview mirror so you never have to get out of your car, or being able to open your car trunk in both directions, so your sedan can function like a pickup truck. Other of her conceptions, with their sick humor, veering toward grossness, seem straight out of Mad magazine, like Subcutaneous Airbag, which imagines embedding the safety device right into your forehead, so that you’re protected no matter what you’re riding in (“DISCLAIMER: Manufacturer not liable for ‘stretch marks’ resulting from frequent deployment”). Then there’s Tongue-Texting, which shows a woman behind the wheel using a repurposed harmonica holder to balance her phone while her tongue types out messages.

Pippa Garner: Misc. Pippa, installation view. Courtesy Matthew Brown. Pictured, left: “Life O’ the Party” Lamp, 1983/2024.

A sculpture titled “Life O’ the Party” Lamp (1983/2024) is composed of the top of a suit-clad mannequin with a lampshade in place of its head—all the drunk-uncle shenanigans without the actual drunk uncle. Un(tit)led (Blaster Bra), a photograph of a 1982 sculpture, and Peek-a-Boo by I-C-U Bra, a sculpture from 1983, both made before Garner started modifying her own body, question the purpose of women’s lingerie. The first replaces bra cups with speakers and includes a tape deck hanging from a strap, so that breasts become something you hear rather than see. The second has cutouts revealing the nipples of silicone breast inserts, which are framed by fake eyelashes and Groucho Marx eyebrows, so that you can’t look at them without them staring back. The Suctionaire Chair (1989/2024) is perfect for anyone who has trouble staying at their desk: its back and seat are covered with the terra cotta–colored bulbs of toilet plungers, presumably keeping you sucked into place. It’s hard to avoid the ick factor involved in sitting on a device meant to extract shit—but then again, maybe all work under capitalism is a form of doing just that.

Pippa Garner: Misc. Pippa, installation view. Courtesy Matthew Brown. Pictured: Peek-A-Boo by I-C-U Bra, 1983/2024.

In an interview in the New York Times Magazine, Garner explained her leap from object modification to body modification: “I thought, with all this energy that I was putting into altering consumer appliances from the assembly line, can’t that be adapted to the human body? . . . I already have one, and it’s for me to decide what I want to do with it.” The statement seems particularly poignant now, when bodily autonomy for women and trans folks is emphatically not a given. I’m writing this on January 6, as Trump’s election is being certified by Congress. Especially today, on the eve of ever greater criminalization of trans existence, Garner’s words ring out like a manifesto. Utopia . . . or Bust!, indeed.

Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press this summer.

From object modification to body modification, a revelatory show of the late artist’s work exhibits consumer culture gone wild.
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