What can art really do? I find myself asking this again and again as I see show after show. Occasionally—not as often as I would like—art provides an answer at once simple and profound: At its best, it makes us free.
Pippa Garner, who died at the age of 82 in Los Angeles late in the evening of December 30, was one of those artists whose work made us free. Or, maybe, I should speak for myself here. Garner made me free, taught me one version of what freedom might look like; how the work, the body, and the person behind it all could be playful and inventive—life, a project. Behind the prankishness of her absurd, tricked-out objects—cars with their bodies flipped, so they would appear to drive backwards (she made two); a television with its screen nailed over with wooden boards (Garner was thinking about "screentime" before the smart phone); a boombox brassiere (with speakers atop the cups)—there was a restless yearning for transformation. The whole of her life, in the corporeal vehicle of her body, was a revolutionary artwork.
Garner is important to me, in part, because I identify with where she came from, and because I see how it informs her sensibility. Though she was born a half-century earlier (she came of age in the postwar '50s), her Midwest background is familiar to me. Garner was born in Evanston, Illinois, and worked for several months, in the '60s, at a Chrysler manufacturing plant in Detroit. I was born in Detroit; my father worked at a different Chrysler assembly plant in the city for nearly two decades.
Garner, raised as a boy, was restless and depressed in school, where she was often told what not to do rather than encouraged to explore her interests. Her parents saw her love of art and drawing, but in a middle-class Midwestern logic I recognize, she was encouraged instead to study industrial design, so she headed off to Los Angeles's ArtCenter College of Design. Garner would be kicked out—for making early versions of her satirical objects that lampooned consumer culture and the fantasy of "easy living."
She was an art-world outsider for most of her career, choosing to present her work in popular magazines or on late-night talk shows where hundreds of thousands might see it rather than in conventional venues. The decision entailed a trade-off, one that she accepted, but she felt it more acutely when she socialized with artists (Ed Ruscha was a friend) and dabbled in the art scene, exhibiting work in group shows in the '80s. She sensed that she wouldn’t be taken seriously as an artist without showing regularly, in galleries—though she would do just that, eventually. Her work has been on view often in recent years, including in a pair of linked exhibitions—at Stars in Los Angeles and Matthew Brown in New York—that are in their final days as of this writing. (I reviewed "Misc. Pippa," her New York show, here).
She wasn’t sentimental or attached to the objects she created. After her first backwards car, a 1957 Chevy, was featured in Esquire in 1974, she had it destroyed. (Her second such vehicle, the sculpture Haulin’ Ass!, 2023, shown at Frieze Los Angeles, was a 2003 Ford Ranger pickup truck, accessorized with a massive pair of “truck nuts.” ) On The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, in 1982, the artist, then presenting as a man but already playing with gender, appeared in her midriff-baring "half-suit," while affecting the gosh-shucks demeanor of a small-town inventor. This was the same year she published, as the cover read, Philip Garner's Better Living Catalog, reissued in 2023 by Primary Information. (Also in 2023, Garner’s brilliant Carson appearance played on a monitor for her White Columns solo show “Act Like You Know Me.”)
Garner may be remembered most, at least in this political moment, as a path-breaking transgender artist, outliving trans contemporaries like Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994) and fellow Midwesterner Greer Lankton. (Lankton, born in 1958 in Michigan, became an icon of New York’s Downtown scene and died young, in 1996). In the early ’80s, Garner paid a sex worker on Hollywood Boulevard to tell her about her transition, and the artist learned how to acquire black-market estrogen. Living in what was, by all appearances, the 6-foot-tall body of a muscular white man, she wanted a different experience. She often compared the body to an appliance, a toy, or a car—why not tinker with it too?
She found that estrogen made her move “from sexuality to sensuality.” By the late ’80s, the artist began medically supervised hormone replacement therapy and pursued gender-affirming surgeries. In a 2023 interview with Art in America she said, "I often wonder, what if all the politicians were transgender? Maybe we could blend the best of male and female and avoid some of the negatives. For instance, men have 10 times the testosterone that women have, and that makes them more aggressive.”
It is this radical imagination that I find so inspiring. When Mark Zuckerberg recently praised masculinity and aggression, wanting it to have a more prominent place in corporate culture, when the Trump campaign spent millions of dollars on anti-trans election ads, I think there still is a taboo on critiquing how masculinity operates. In current conflicts, is it not obvious that—from Gaza to Ukraine—it is in part the madness of masculinity that rationalizes the murder of civilians and children? I like to think about Garner drafting up a diagrammatic solution to world peace, as an ad, noting how all these male world leaders, overcome by their hormones, are making us suffer.
Garner died a little more than a week before the recent Los Angeles fires started. She spent time in London, Spain, and New York, but LA was home. She liked it because, it felt like she did, “a little off,” not growing the way anyone planned. She was never comfortable with the idea of a retrospective because she wanted to do new things. But we deserve one now. Garner still has much to teach us about the freedom of transformation.
