Mother of Invention [VIDEO]

Michael Kurcfeld talks to artist, product designer, tinkerer, and satirist Pippa Garner about her life and career.

By Michael KurcfeldDecember 20, 2024

• Art & Architecture

IN 1969, PIPPA GARNER, a student in the automotive design program at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, submitted as her end-of-year assignment a scaled-down fiberglass replica of a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia that had mutated and grown a pair of humanoid legs. Titled Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car), the work did not go over well; the school—taking Garner or itself too seriously—expelled her. But Garner had found her calling. Over the next five decades, before and after her gender transition in the 1980s and ’90s, she would create an abundant and enduring catalog of delightfully absurd and fantastically imaginative gadgetry, appliances, and vehicles that slyly satirize mass consumerism, L.A. car culture, rigidly defined gender roles, labor-saving devices, and disposability.

Raised in Evanston, Illinois, on the 1950s glossy magazines her father sold ads for, Garner absorbed the idioms of advertising that seduced with promises of a better life. Drawing classes at Cleveland Institute of Art endowed her with a flair for visual brainstorming and for meticulously rendering zany custom cars, household gizmos, and the illustrator-slick humans using them. Much of her vast body of work points back to a postwar faith in the benign power of consumer capitalism to solve life’s challenges. Exposing the fallacy of this myth while reveling in the ingenuity it inspired, Garner deftly balances critique and nostalgia.

Human ingenuity lies at the heart of an exhibition on view through next May at the Los Angeles Public Library, No Prior Art: Illustrations of Inventions, which features several of Garner’s sketches for inventions, along with fabrications newly commissioned for the show. Says Todd Lerew, the exhibition curator and director of special projects at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles:

Pippa describes herself as working in the tradition of Rube Goldberg. There’s a kind of wisdom in the way that [Goldberg’s work] forces you to rethink your relationship to the material world and how we engage with the products in our lives. I think a lot of Pippa’s work uses the same brand of humor to get at a deeper understanding of what it means to be a creative human.

Garner’s own transition was, as she calls it, a “gender hack” that applied her curiosity about reassembling mechanical components to her own anatomy. She thought of her body as another appliance to be reconceived and reconfigured—an act of ultimate agency, rebuilding oneself to one’s own specs. That this occurred in the 1980s, long before transgender people had become a widely visible demographic (not to mention a political third rail), speaks to Garner’s independence of mind and her willingness to venture alone into fraught and uncharted territory.

There’s an anthropological layer to Garner’s work—examining, through parody, the ways that people interact, curate their lifestyles, and embrace new technologies. Creating a car that drives forward while facing backward (Backwards Car, 1973), she compelled us to contemplate the uncanny reality of effortlessly moving through space at inhuman velocity. Concocting apparel that operates with the versatility of a Swiss Army knife, she implicitly poses questions about the vanity and utility of fashion, as well as the blurring of lines between the industrial and the personal.

A conceptual prankster, Garner long lingered on the periphery of critically validated art. But a new generation has discovered depths in her work beyond the wacky inventions, visual gags, and clever wordplay. In 2022–23, a major survey, Act Like You Know Me, traveled to the Kunstverein München; the Kunsthalle Zürich; the Frac Lorraine in Metz, France; and White Columns in New York. A two-part gallery exhibition, Misc. Pippa, has just opened at STARS in Los Angeles and Matthew Brown New York. Garner’s work is also currently on view in Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch (Los Angeles) and in No Prior Art at the L.A. Central Library, where we sat down to discuss her career.

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Pippa Garner is an American artist, illustrator, industrial designer, and writer known for making parody forms of consumer products, as well as custom bicycles and automobiles. Garner authored Better Living Catalog (1982) and Utopia … or Bust!: Products for the Perfect World (1984). Her work has been exhibited internationally at numerous galleries and museums.