“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) is an artist and author based in Long Beach, California. For over five decades, her work has pushed back against systems of consumerism, marketing, and waste, creating a dense body of work including drawing, performance, sculpture, video, and installation. Her uncompromising approach to life and practice has allowed her to interact with the worlds of illustration, editorial, television, and art without ever quite becoming beholden to them. Her work has been the subject of three recent institutional solo exhibitions: $ell Your $elf at Art Omi, Ghent, New York (2023); Act Like You Know Me at White Columns, New York (2023), Frac Lorraine, Metz, France (2023), Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2023) and Kunstverein Munich, Germany (2022); and Immaculate Misconceptions at Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento (2022) and JOAN, Los Angeles (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Post Scriptum. A museum forgotten by heart at Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2024); Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2024); Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better than the Real Thing; 8th Yokohama Triennale: Wild Grass: Our Lives (2024); and Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.