“Artists are spectators with sticky fingers, messing around with creation and making some mistakes—and that’s how evolution occurs.”
—Pippa Garner in conversation, October 2024
“I just want to make sure my body ends up where it belongs when I die: in the junkyard with the appliances I’ve made fun of throughout my career.”
—Pippa Garner in conversation, October 2024
With Pippa Garner, things are always—at least—double. The present, for her, is a bridge between the past and the future. Humans are animals and machines. To gender hack is to re-engineer the male/female binary. Now, STARS and Matthew Brown have teamed up to present a double solo exhibition of the recently rediscovered, radical octogenarian artist’s work at their respective galleries in Los Angeles and New York.
In Los Angeles at STARS, Misc. Pippa is intimate, tracing a genealogy from Garner’s first intentional work of art—Kar-mann, a half-human, half-car sculpture completed in 1969—to what many consider her ultimate artwork: her own body.
In the mid-1980s, Garner began experimenting with hormones and surgery to alter her internal and external body just as she had once modified cars and appliances. By the early 1990s, the artist formerly known as Philip Garner—once a late night talk show regular and bestselling author celebrated for his satirical consumer inventions—had reinvented herself as Philippa Venus Garner, or Pippa for short.
“I did it for art,” Garner wrote of her “sex-change” in 1995. “My body has gone from a temple to a Winnebago. I can identify with characters from mythology like centaurs and minotaurs. Duality becomes a daily convention […] Sex-change is a 20th century invention just as [sic] computers, electric can openers, polyester pants, 800 numbers and the rest of it.” She had taken her hero, Marcel Duchamp’s feminine alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy to the assembly line’s natural conclusion and become so multiple in the process, she had to invent a new honorific for herself. Not Mr. or Mrs., not Masc or Miss, but Misc.
Misc. Pippa continues at Matthew Brown in New York where the selection of works on view reflects the artist’s hustle. The artist as inventor, as salesperson, as server. A countercultural figure obsessed with the mainstream, this Garner can’t stop making and making and making things. A radio bra. A chain grill. A Pubic’s Cube. A “trike” by Porsche and Harley-Davidson…
Both shows consist of drawings, photographs, and sculptures, most of which were first conceived, if not produced, in the 1970s and 1980s. One notable exception is Garner’s 2021 sculpture The Bowels of the Mind on view in New York. Representing a brainstorm—where the artist’s ideas come from—Garner’s Bowels breathe, trapped in netting, much like her hand was once trapped in plastic and photographed against a wall of verdant leaves.
There’s pleasure in the hustle, Garner seems to suggest, and it’s a trap. You need a third arm to wait tables. The TV has too many channels. Her “Life o’ the Party” lamp demands to be plugged in, forcing a party animal to become a wallflower. She’s made a chair from things that suck: vacuum cleaner hoses and toilet plungers. It’s a desk chair assembled from objects meant to discard human excrement. (Our production, our consumption, begets waste.)
If Misc. Pippa in Los Angeles is a biography of sorts, or a personal ad—more feminine, sensual, and flirtatious—Misc. Pippa in New York is a business card; masculine, crass, and desperate. They are two sides of the same person, two sides of the same nation. Equally funny, equally sexy.
—Fiona Alison Duncan, 2024
Garner would like to acknowledge Nick Rodrigues and Leah Dixon for their support with the fabrication.
Misc. Pippa at STARS is presented in partnership with PST ART: Art & Science Collide.
Pippa Garner (b. 1942, Evanston, Illinois) lives and works in Long Beach, CA.
She studied Industrial and Product Design at the ArtCenter College of Design in 1970, and also took life drawing classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Select solo exhibitions include Act Like You Know Me, curated by Fiona Alison Duncan, White Columns, New York (2023); $ell Your $elf, Art Omi, curated by Sara O’Keeffe, Ghent, NY (2023); Immaculate Misconceptions, Verge Center for the Art, Sacramento (2022); The Bowels of the Mind, Jeffrey Stark, New York (2021); A Shadow of My Future Self, curated by Scott Cameron Weaver, O-Town House, Los Angeles (2019); Autonomy N’ Stuff (Garnerrhea), Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (2018); Tinker Tantrum, Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles (2017); and Vroom, Vroom!, Outlet, New York (2015).
Select group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); Post Human, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2024) Post Scriptum. A museum forgotten by heart, curated by Luca Lo Pinto, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome, Italy (2024); For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability, curated by Jill Dawsey and Isabel Caso, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla (2024); Grow It, Show It!: A look at hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok, curated by Miriam Bettin and Thomas Seelig, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2024); No Prior Art: Illustrations of Invention, curated by Todd Lerew, Library Foundation Los Angeles and Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles (2024); Are You Joking?: Women & Humor, The Church, Sag Harbor, New York (2024); American Art Furniture: 1980-Present, Superhouse, New York (2024); Hollywood Dream Bubble: Ed Ruscha’s Influence in Los Angeles and Beyond, The Hole, Los Angeles (2024); 8th Yokohama Triennale, Wild Grass: Our Lives, curated by Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan (2024); Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023); Public Structures, Kunsthal Charlottenborg Biennale, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2023); Origin Story, Gordon Robichaux, New York (2023); Works On Paper On Fridges, Harkawik, New York (2022); Comedy of Erros, organized by Fiona Alison Duncan, STARS, Los Angeles (2021), and Hello Again, curated by Susan Subtle, Oakland Museum, Oakland (1997).