It’s Pippa’s World

Pippa Garner is taking a nap in a Los Angeles gallery on a fold-out cot during the tail-end of her buzzy opening. My friend inches closer, thinking it is a sculpture. “In a way, it is,” I whisper with a laugh, “but the artist is present.”

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On the wall behind Garner is a black-and-white nude photograph of herself in the hospital from 1997, in which bolts are affixed to her arm post-procedure. A single red rose was placed below her. “She’s pretty punk rock,” a young man observes behind me as I snap a photo of the scene. 

Born in a Chicago suburb, Garner—whose two-part exhibition “Misc. Pippa” is now on view at Los Angeles’ STARS and Matthew Brown in New York until the end of January—has lived many lives. She was a combat artist in Vietnam, a late night talk show regular, an automotive design student, an author, a commercial artist for magazines, a mentor for others transitioning, an inventor, a clothing designer, a multidisciplinary artist. In what she describes as a “gender hack,” the artist began her transition in the ‘80s, fully emerging as Misc. Philippa Venus Garner (aka Pippa) in 1995. She shed her identity as Phillip Garner and made a name for herself as an artist with a biting, satirical wit. Performances, publications, Frankensteined sculptures followed, and soon she was a fixture in the West Coast art scene, but for years institutional attention evaded her.

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While Garner has never stopped making work over the last five decades, her art practice only recently received major art-world acclaim following her debut solo exhibition at New York’s 2015 SPRING/BREAK Art Show, which set off a snowball of projects aimed to set the record straight and include Garner in the cannon one and for all. Her 2022 solo show “Act Like You Know Me” debuted in Munich, Germany before traveling to galleries in Zürich, Switzerland then Metz, France, and finally New York City all in 2023. The following year, "$ell Your $elf," an expansive survey of her work was published, and a drawing of her impossible inventions was featured in the Whitney Biennial. Despite battling serious health issues, the artist is everywhere at once. While many of her sculptures from over her career have been lost, given away, or destroyed, a motley crew of physical objects remains. Her photographs and drawings fill in the blanks. In LA and New York, her works—almost all initially conceived in the ‘70s and ‘80s while the artist was making a name for herself in the Los Angeles art scene—offer another window into her world.

The absurdist inventions on view in Los Angeles include drawings of domestic hacks: a breathing chair where the cushion rises and falls, a bird bra that is just that, a T.V. playing a “fire tape” nestled in a fireplace, an “optical breast enlarger,” and instructions on how to make a cabin, a wall, and a bridge out of women. There is a lamp with a large penis resting atop a small set of baby doll legs, with the word masculine inscribed on its base. Nearby is a chair with a face on its seat, tongue sticking out. On the floor a sculpture of a nude body suspended in motion morphs into a yellow lowrider convertible—aptly titled Kar-mann, 1969, it is billed as Garner’s first intentional artwork.

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In New York, Garner's designs are both pragmatic and impossible—a duality that she has pushed and prodded over her practice. In the photograph Un(tit)led (Your Waiter Pippa), 2024, a suited man holds a tray with a tea-set while a strap-on third arm (no pun intended) holds up a tray of martinis. There are drawings of hacks to add “perceived value” to cars, like a kitchen plunger as an emergency brake, cigarettes as a squeaky glove box solution, an animal suit for a minivan, a butt-air-bag for mechanics, and a T.V.-to-rear-view mirror convertor. In an image of “tongue texting,” a woman clutches a steering wheel with both hands. Her tongue? Poking a phone that is propped up to her mouth with a harmonica holder. “Text, drive…and survive!” The fake ad proclaims (her father was an advertising executive). 

Garner’s sculptures see her ideas realized and abstracted to playful ends. At Matthew Brown, a lampshade rests atop the torso of a mannequin in a suit-jacket and tie: “Life O’ The Party” Lamp, 1983/2024. A mutated office chair is covered in plunger tops in Suctionaire Chair, 1989/2024, and a box is covered in thick, fake hair in Pubic’s Cube, 1982-83/2024. In a 2021 installation, a traffic sign states “Warning the bowels of the mind”—behind it, a sculpture of such bowels materializes in inflatable sacks (blown-up air bags?) rest under a net, breathing and framed by a lightbulb on a pole and traffic cones. The work’s title? The Bowels of the Mind.

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The body is many things for the artist: a technology, a consumer good, an invention, material, and a total work of art. Today, tattoos transform Garner’s body even further: most notably a wooden leg and a pink bikini with Monopoly money sticking out. Her works push the limits of what a body can do—alluding to both cyborg fantasies and medical realities. When she was drafted into the army in 1966, she was exposed to Agent Orange and later developed chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which she works through to this day. When faced with declining eyesight, she transitioned from drawing to designing logos for T-shirts. Health issues be damned, she continues to forge her singular path, adapting as she goes. Everything is material and nothing is what it seems.

Looking at the artist’s early work now evokes a pre-Internet time, when there was still uncharted territory around human-car bodies and riffs on consumerism. Yet today—despite the onslaught of latent commercials, glitchy A.I. renderings, and 24/7 entertainment where zany inventions populate the web in hoards, and every image feels like an attention-grab—Garner’s point of view remains fresh and subversive. Her inventions underscore just how sanitized and censored the images we consume are: no room for nipples or penises online or on billboards. But step into either exhibition, and one thing is true: It’s Pippa’s world, and we’re just living in it.

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“Misc. Pippa” is on view through January 18, 2024 at STARS at 3116 N El Centro Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90028. “Misc. Pippa” is on view through January 25, 2024 at Matthew Brown, New York at 390 Broadway, New York, NY 10013.

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