The sensationalist wisecracks begin upon arrival: parked out front of the PIPPA GARNER: $ELL YOUR $ELF exhibition at Art Omi is Haulin’ Ass! (2023), a bright red pick-up truck sporting a set of flesh-colored super-size truck-testicles that dangle from the back of the vehicle. Enter the building and an array of monotone t-shirts hung above in the style of laundry line indicate lusty and pithy punchlines such as “Bad in Bed” and “I smell MONEY! Is it you?” The proverbial LOL (i.e., laugh out loud) continues throughout this show, and Pippa Garner’s (b. 1942 in Illinois fka Philip Garner) steady dose of defiant humor is a welcomed good time.
The first institutional solo exhibition of her work in New York, this show brings together 100 artworks that reflect her range of creative exploration, including drawings, sculptures, photographs, and installations. For over five decades, Garner has produced a witty, provocative, and downright hilarious body of work that playfully pokes fun at the commercial forces of the post-Fordist American landscape. With her desire to “trip the circuit” of the machinery that comprises the consumer-driven apparatus, Garner’s artworks have also taken the form of mail-order catalogs, classified ads, garments, custom cars, and performances on the streets or on television. This exhibit of Garner’s motley style expresses varying degrees of the pleasure and perversion of mass-produced products that offer a concept of oneself in society.
Among the best gags are Garner’s drawings of exaggerated automobiles including enormous wheels, themed campers, and goofy car details to make one chuckle. With her focus on the automotive industry to interrogate the language of America commerce and machismo, Garner’s training in car design has remained a baseline of her artistic experimentation since she was kicked out of the ArtCenter College of Design’s transportation design program in 1969 for presenting a car morphing into a human body. A contemporary of artists such as Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden, and the Ant Farm collection, Garner began her career in earnest in the 1970s as a performance artist in Los Angeles after serving in Vietnam as a combat artist tasked with documenting the war through sketches and illustrations.
At age 46, Garner began taking black market female hormones and transitioned genders to create disorientation about her position in society and to avoid stereotypes while examining the possibility of her sex-change—or “gendercide”—as a kind of consumer technology. Some of Garner’s drawings and writings on this matter are housed in a vitrine along the wall, and comments such as “gender ambiguity is my comfort zone” disclose her desire to turn heteronormativity upside down. A series of small sketches of female pubic hair shaped in various manicured designs such as “flight attendant,” “cat lover,” and “NFL fan,” for example, highlight the best of Garner’s silliness and bawdy spirit.
Considered a humorist with a penchant for technological satire, Garner’s physical body as raw material is a central gist of this entertaining show. And while the wall didactic spoke of her exploration of the anxiety, alienation, and paranoia of home and office life with artworks aimed at retooling the mounting pressures of productivity, one does not detect this aspect of her work here, rather this exhibition is a clever presentation of her amusing mindset in all its unabashed confidence. This considerate selection of artworks curated by Sara O’Keeffe in collaboration with Guy Weltchek present—and I quote Garner—the “UTOPIA OR BUST” essence of this badass artist: follow the so-called rules with utter defiance and absurdist wit. As Pippa Garner would say, so fucking what?
