Octogenarian and self-described “senior slut,” Garner’s lusty practice spans mail-order catalogs, classified ads, garments with cutouts, custom cars, tattoos (a red-and white bra, blue G-string crotch—pushed aside, ready for action—waistband stuffed with Monopoly money), and performances on the streets and on television. From the early aughts to the present, as Garner’s vision has waned, she has maintained a practice of producing a t-shirt a day, using iron-on letters to tinker with popular phrases in ways that reclaim their lusty potential and thumb her nose at assimilationist narratives.

Pippa Garner originally trained as a car designer, but was kicked out of the ArtCenter College of Design’s transportation design program in 1969 for presenting a car morphing into a human body. Undeterred by her expulsion, Garner conceived of her first major car work in 1973, Backwards Car, a 1959 Chevy with its exterior rotated 180 degrees so it appeared to face the wrong way as it drove. In a gesture at once daredevil stunt and conceptual probe, Garner scaled San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in the work. In the mid-eighties, Garner began gender-hacking with hormones—a process that she considers a conceptual artwork—marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Much of her work has been in infiltrating mass media, from classified ads to the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

 

Listen to an old segment where Fiona Duncan (from the video above) brought Pippa Garner on MPR here: 

➚https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/60

And recent conversation between Pippa Garner, Micaela Durand, and Sara O’Keeffe here:

➚https://radio.montezpress.com/#/show/3193

 

 

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