Pippa Garner, Conceptual Artist and Provocateur, Dies at 82

Pippa Garner, the conceptual artist and designer who reconfigured functional objects and her body in response to American consumerism, died in Los Angeles, California, on 30 December 2024.

Garner, 82, was diagnosed with lymphocytic leukemia—a cancer she attributed to her exposure to the herbicide known as Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, which she documented as a combat artist, drafted into the U.S. army in 1966, at the age of 21.

Born Philip Garner in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, the artist worked briefly at a car assembly line in Detroit before studying automobile design in Pasedina, California, initiated to motor vehicles early on by her father who sold advertisements to car companies.

In 1969, Garner conceived Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car), a small Volkswagen prototype featuring the bottom half of a man urinating on a map of Detroit—home to U.S. automobile giants like General Motors and Ford, who also produced military vehicles for the war in Vietnam.

The project, which got the artist expelled, led to subsequent critiques of American consumerism through the reconfiguration of objects ranging from Barward Car (1973)—a 1959 Chevy modified to face backwards when driven—to household appliances and cropped menswear for the office.

A number of these objects were detailed in Philip Garner’s Better Living Catalog, a mock mail-order catalogue from 1982, listing inventions conceived to deal with real and fictional problems. The latter earned Garner an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

The artist followed with bodily modifications, taking black market hormones in the mid-1980s before undergoing gender-affirming surgery in the 1990s. ‘But I wasn’t thinking about becoming a woman,’ she told art journal X-tra in 2019. ‘It became more of an art project.’

Despite a wide repertoire of work spanning illustration, photography, sculpture, and more, Garner was relatively unknown until the mid-2010s, with only one exhibition listed between 1986 and 2014. Renewed interest in her practice followed with solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles in 2023, and inclusions in the Made in L.A. biennial the same year and the 2024 Whitney Biennial. —[O]

Main image: Pippa Garner. Courtesy the artist and STARS.